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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

A lot of that stuff can be compact if you don't get focused on 'stuff.' Let's assume you have clothing, computer, and

aka all hiking/ backpacking gear for a world tour can easily fit into a single backpack or fill a trailer.

Photography, 1 decent camera is really enough.

A single bike is actually fairly small. Start getting into road bikes, touring bikes, etc and they start taking up a lot of space.

DIY can take endless space, but you can get far with a single tool box. 'extra' is often more about saving time than really necessary.

PS: I good rule of thumb is if you have not used it in 2 years it's wasting space. But, IMO even better is if you have used it less than 3 times in a year it's fluff.

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>Photography, 1 decent camera is really enough.

Bahahahahaahhahahah... no.

1 decent camera is enough if you are not a photographer, just a person who likes taking pictures.

As a very amateur photographer, I do in fact only own one camera. The rest of the two bags is accessories for that one camera and several lenses, each of which serve a unique and useful purpose. Good camera equipment is dammed expensive. If I could buy less of it and still do everything I want to do, you better believe I would! I don't even do very complicated photography. I shoot exclusively outdoors in relatively bright surroundings. There is a whole other realm of lighting equipment that I haven't even entered into yet.

And just for some perspective, it is not at all unusual for professional photographers to carry two cameras at the same time. (With different lenses, since it takes several seconds to swap a lens.)

And that doesn't get into specialty equipment like medium/full format.

My two small bags of equipment is nothing compared to the amount of gear that an experience professional photographer is likely to acquire over the course of a decade or two.

"Photography, 1 decent camera is really enough."

If only. I have several lenses for a variety of situations. A lighting rig for indoor shoots which includes bounces, tripods, umbrellas, cords and rigging. Then there's the tripod, plus a back pack for the smaller stuff. Not to mention backdrop equipment.

There's a big difference between casual hobby and serious hobby.

Your confusing flexibility with necessity. You can get really serious about say photographing bugs with a single camera. It's not going to be as widely useful, but trying to do everything is a great way to fail.

Consider, nobody says you need an electron microscope to get serious about photography, but they can take some amazing photos even without using photons...

You're confusing your idea of what a photographer does with "photography" as a subject. Photography is an incredibly diverse hobby and profession. Yes, it is possible to only buy one small subset of equipment that lets you photograph a single very specific things well, but I've never met a photographer with such narrow interests.

Even professional photographers that only do a specific kind of photography professional nearly always have amateur interests in other photographic subjects that require different gear.

Far from it, you can also have video games as a hobby and use a 5 year old laptop. A teen that can only afford one camera is not necessarily less into there hobby.

I have even known someone to go the other way and sell off there kit for a point and shoot. They where into candid photos so always having a camera was more important than fiddling with a massive beast.

Granted, camera's are cheap to most of the HN crowd, even blowing 30k over 20 years is just not a big deal. But, just because gear is 'cheap' and 'better' does not make it necessary.

From the equipment list provided, it sounds like portraiture is the goal--not photographing bugs. I don't see where it is implied that the poster is trying to boil the ocean with regard to their photographic pursuits.

Images from electron microscopes aren't photos. They're micrographs.

A single lens camera is as limiting as only owning one size of screwdriver, or one knife.

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