Talking about the Tools

 

 What do you think about this photo? Sharp enough? Color okay? Any visible noise artifacts? It was made at a wedding in 2018 with a Fuji X-T20 and the 16-50 f3.5-5.6 kit lens at ISO 800. 

Unlike many photo-bloggers, I don't talk much about equipment. In fact, I have been advised that I would have more readers if I did! But at this point in my life I'm a minimalist, and happily so. I have only three lenses for my Fuji system, and they are among the least expensive. I do currently have four bodies, but two of them are for sale. Most photographers would consider me severely under-equipped.

I've owned a lot of equipment in the past -- for instance, when I unloaded my Olympus gear in 1992 to switch to Canon for the auto-focus feature, I sold off four bodies and 13 lenses. And as long as I had a studio I also owned medium and large format cameras and lenses.

 

The photo at the top of this post is a very small section cropped from this one -- about a 200% crop. Yet the picture was made with one of Fuji's cheapest lenses.

But the truth is, you don't need a lot of equipment, or expensive equipment, to make photographs that will please you. As Picasso said“Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance.”

Unfortunately, Gear Acquisition Syndrome seems endemic among photographers, many of whom have bought into the marketing lie that more/better cameras and lenses will result in better photographs. GAS can be a lot of fun if you can afford it, but it's not really photography. The great photographs from the past that you have seen and admired were made with cameras that were probably inferior to the one you now own.

A pair of Pileated Woodpeckers on a tree in the woods a few yards from my kitchen window. This is an approximately 200 percent crop from the picture below.

I once read an article about the travel photographer Gerald Brimacombe, who at that time was working with a pair of digital cameras that most professionals and advanced amateurs would consider far too limited for serious work. Yet, he chose to work within the limitations of those cameras and concentrate on what they could do, rather than what they could not do.

I think it is something like this that made so many rangefinder shooters great: since using a Leica or other rangefinder and just a few lenses doesn’t make for a lot of options, they learned to photograph the things that could be photographed with their limited equipment and let the rest of the world go by.

The rest of the picture from above. Made with Fuji's inexpensive but very sharp 50-230 4.5-6.7 telephoto zoom. Shooting hand-held from my kitchen window at a slow shutter speed proved the effectiveness of the image stabilization system.

 I realize some people need the sharpest and fastest lenses available for the work they do. But I believe that in many cases the striving for bigger, faster, and more expensive is a sidetrack; a diversion from what photography is all about, which is simply making pictures.

Reasonably good equipment, reasonably good technique, and a reasonably good idea of what you're trying to accomplish can add up to some pretty good photography.

Photographs and text copyright 2021, David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo

For the glory of God alone