Gear doesn't matter, until it does

Maybe you DO need that new thing, after all.

Every. Single. Time.

I can still remember the first time I had a desire to hold a camera in my hand, and I have my daughter to thank for it.

She was doing her GCSEs in Art, and part of the curriculum was photography. The deep deep rabbit hole I find myself in these days, was just a flat piece of wasteland at that point. She had been taking photos in her classroom, then bought the photos home to show us, her very proud parents. I remember one photo, which was really just a pile of pebbles on a desk. But the background? Ohhhh the background was all blurry and dreamlike, and I remember thinking how cool it was that my daughter could take a ‘professional’ photo like that.

I stared at that photo, and a little seed was dropped into the soil of my heart. I was hooked. I wanted to do THAT. I wanted to take THAT photo. So, as poor as we were back then, I somehow managed to cobble together enough money to buy a cheap, used Canon 600D, with a gorgeous 50mm F1.4 lens. I spent the new few months shooting everything I could with blurry backgrounds

Red berries growing out of a wall,
Things in the kitchen,
The dog,
The wife,
The kids,
Other things in other rooms…

Fast forward a few years and Fuji came into my life. I had started following a few photographers and they were all shooting street photography. All the cool kids were either shooting film with 35mm cameras, or using digital cameras which looked like they were shooting film with 35mm cameras.

The rabbit hole now had an entry point and I had tunnelled down a few feet.

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Some time later I bought my first ever Fuji camera which, incidentally, was the first mirrorless camera I had ever owned (please bear in mind that, at this point, this is now the SECOND camera I’ve ever owned, so the bar was quite low!). This little X100 had a 23mm F2 lens, built on top of a crop sensor, and gave me a 35mm field of view, and I could shoot in black and white. It was like a bag of spanners when it came to autofocus, and manual focus was about a fast as the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Still, I bloody loved that camera. I still regret selling it to this day. It was painfully slow, quirky-but-not-in-a-good-way, and just beaten to within an inch of it’s life. But, like a good cockroach, it just kept going. and I loved it.

Over the years, I’ve owned 5 different Fuji cameras - two right now. I’ve owned Canons, and sitting on the tv unit behind me in my office is a small olympus digital, an Olympus Trip MD, A Yashica Electro 35 GT, and a Fuji Instax. (I’ve never shot a roll of film in any of them. Don’t ask!)

I’ve bought, owned and sold more lenses than I can think of, and currently own 2 lenses for my Fuji X-T3.

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Gear won’t make you a better photographer!
Literally everyone

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I think I’ve lost count as to the amount of times I’ve heard this. Over the years, when I’ve excitedly announced a new lens, or a new camera body, there will invariably be someone or a few people quote this to me, like some piece of ancient wisdom passed down from father to son, throughout the generations. Youtube is awash with this warning, whilst also simultaneously being awash with gear reviews, and videos on the ‘5 things every photographer is doing wrong’, or this ‘1 thing you can do right now to level up your photography game’. Nope, the general consensus is that gear will NOT make you a better photographer.

And it’s true!

Until it’s not.

At some point in history, someone said this for the first time, and I totally get what they were trying to say here. If, as a photographer, you have to rely on functions and gimmicks and all the other trinkets that camera manufacturers stuff into an already-burgeoning camera body, or if you have to rely on the next new lens to be a better photographer and make the kind of images your favourite photographer makes, then you’re probably always going to come up disappointed.

And I think we’re all a little guilty of it. I know I am.

Aside from the regret I feel about selling that little original X100, I absolutely regret selling my Fuji 55-200 telephoto lens. When I first bought the lens, it was cheap as chips. I looked again recently and, MAN-A-FRICKIN-LIVE it’s gone up in price. No thanks Mr Fuji camera man, you can keep it. For now. Until I decide I need to buy it again. So, sure, I understand what the OG sage was trying to get at. But I also think that it’s an unhelpful piece of advice for creatives. And I’m only really learning this as I get older.

Within our creative DNA lies the desire to try things, new things, different things. We get our little spark of creativity from seeing something new, or seeing the same thing in a new way. This is one of the reasons why we go away to far-flung countries, and also why I love foggy scenes so much. Fog changes the scene from one thing to something entirely different. And so it goes with everything we do as creatives.

We want to be, well, creative!

New gear can be a really good catalyst for sparking something new and imaginative in us. A new lens, or different kind of paint brush or, dare I say it, a new pen and notebook can set us alight in a different way. We get that little creative rush back, and then we’re trying new things. New gear can be a flippin’ great thing for creatives, whatever that gear might be.

I would even go so far as to say, we NEED new gear to keep us afresh with surprising and exciting ideas. Do we need to buy it on a weekly basis? Of course not. That would be ridiculous. But maybe we’re talking a new lens or a new fountain pen once a year (do people still use fountain pens? I genuinely don’t know!). Maybe our new thing will be just what we need for a season, a particular piece of writing, or a photography project. Then you put it away, or sell it on, and try something else.

I could bang on and on here, but this is my takeaway point. We have to determine for ourselves what the rules are. If buying gear has become a crutch for you, then new gear will not help. It’ll probably exacerbate a problem. But if buying gear is a genuine catalyst for something new and exciting, creatively, then drop some cash on it. Nothing is set in stone. The thing you buy today does not have to live with you for the rest of your life. It can be helpful for a season, before you move onto something else. But you get to determine when that is, and what that looks like.

For me, at this stage, new gear will absolutely make me a better photographer because it’ll help me to experiment and try new things. I’ll be exercising creative muscles I’ve never worked before, and that’ll all be to my benefit. I’ll be a better, stronger, faster creative than I was before. I’ll get to make new things and be excited about what I’m doing with my art.

By now, my rabbit hole seems to have no end point. It just keeps going down and down and down. But I don’t mind, really. I know why I own this stuff and what I want to do with them (apart from the film cameras. Don’t ask!).

So, creative, go create something.

Photograph something in a different way
Write something new
Paint something beautiful
Sculpt something fun

And if you need a bit of gear to do it, and if it brings you joy?

Well…why not indeed!

(Also, whilst writing this, I’ve consumed a rather large pack of double chocolate cookies, and a bag of ‘salt and pepper almonds and cashews’. I should not have done this, and somewhere down the line I need to find a better way of staying focussed as I’m writing stuff. Any suggestions, please throw them my way. I don’t feel great now. I feel a little queasy!)

You have yourself a good day now, y’hear?

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Oh, sorry - one more thing…

I finally learned how to do blurry backgrounds!

Yes. I finally learned how to do blurry backgrounds, like all of those ‘professional’ photographers you read about in magazines and on the interwebs.

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