Gear first, photography second

Not too long ago, I was on my way home from a second hand camera store when I began to think more about what photography means to me, or rather should mean. I thought about GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) and its implications on the quality of work we as photographers produce in the digital age. You look at some of the most iconic images, and they had been taken with camera technology which is considered obsolete by today’s standard (of course, excluding images from fields like sport where clearly a digital 30fps burst has it’s advantages). I frequently look at portraiture work from the last decades of film and can't help but think that often they tell a deeper than surface story than many of the top images I see today on Instagram or even in printed materials.

I almost avoid photography discussions in forums because of how irrelevant to photography they seem to have become. They discuss all the tech and how it does or doesn’t fit into their workflow, but never discuss the actual images they produce. What happened to discussions about light, composition, the process behind the image, the networking and socializing? Now granted, I started with photography in 2010 and remember film only from occasional snapshots on our point-and-shoot, but did people in the past really care whether you had a Canon F-1 or an AE-1? And if they did, how much did it matter both back then and now? Perhaps collectors and enthusiasts might have a favorite today, but I’d be hard pressed to believe that they would make a claim that one camera would allow you to capture an image the other wouldn’t (certainly not if you know your way around a camera).

Two months ago I was very fortunate to discover the works of Vivian Maier and Fan Ho. Both were active photographers in the 50s and 60s and shot many of their best images on a TLR camera. I’m sure someone will make the argument saying that their work would certainly be better if it was shot on a modern pro-body, but I’m not convinced. After all, many of their images were shot on 120 film which captures a tremendous amount of detail due to its size. But also, we know about Maier only because we found her negatives after she had passed. Had she shot on digital, her hard drives would likely not have been checked and her work would be lost.

Work of Fan Ho

Most importantly however, I believe that at some point both had understood that they had reached a level of mastery in the craft. From my experience, worki

ng professionals don’t seem to spend much time in the community forums and comment sections talking about gear because to them their camera is a tool to make a living. And if the client won’t notice the difference then the ROI is not in their favor. Anecdotally, James Popsys once recollected how he shot an entire day's work for a client at ISO 1600 on his MTF camera and despite the images being horrendously noisy the client didn’t seem to mind or even bother mention it.

There is no doubt that in certain fields the technology improvements have been instrumental to the success of the photographer. Wedding photographers for example hardly ever now opt for a camera that doesn’t have two card slots for obvious reasons (yes, some photogs will tell you they never had an SD card fail on them, my colleague even said he put his through the washing machine by accident several times. But others will tell you horrific stories). Olympic photographers certainly benefit from the high fps rates and faster cards and faster AF performance. But for the average avid photographer who takes images for his own enjoyment, is the R5 really going to make our images that better? Is anyone really going to notice whether we use the EF 50mm f1.4 or the RF 50mm f1.2, especially when most of our images end up compressed and on the web and Instagram? By no means am I a luddite but I think that sooner or later, we all realize that better gear will only take you so far before we understand that it’s not our gear that’s holding us back, but our skills.