They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does

A bit like buying really good monitors for audio production before you really trained your hearing so you won't hear any difference between standard and really high quality monitors.

The "return on investment" for sharpening the basic skills in the beginning when learning a new subject is much more important than getting the latest and greatest gear, as that won't give you as much knowledge and experience since you won't really know why it is the greatest gear, and how to fully leverage it.

That's why people say "Gear doesn't matter", because in the beginning, it mostly doesn't. Just like "Premature optimizations is the root of all evil" doesn't mean absolutely all upfront optimizations are indeed evil. If you're sufficiently experienced, you'd recognize when it's premature vs not, when it's worth upfront investment vs not. But for a beginner, it's easier to remember a simple dogma, and let them figure out that it does matter a little bit, once you get better at your subject.

People very often ask me what camera I used to take a photo. When they do, it's usually the Pixel! Maybe 80% of the time it's a phone camera shot.

Of course highly specific gear matters for sports shooting (as he mentions) or wildlife shooting (telephoto), but otherwise limitations don't matter too much. Blurry or lower dpi photos are OK. Quick editing on your phone is OK. Finding the right photo in the world is still what matters most.

One of the reasons I love the Leica Q2, with its fixed 28mm lens (no zooming, no changing lenses), is that it forces you to find these photos. You're not thinking about gear, about what to bring or how to start. Instead you spend your energy just seeing and moving (zoom with your feet only) and I think this makes you a better photographer than one with a bigger gear loadout. It's also why I think I can seamlessly switch between my 'real' camera and my phone when thinking about what to point at, since I'm married to just a single focal length.

Since I always have my phone, I get more shots on my phone, and maybe to the audience those are the most impressive shots, so they ask, and they find out I'm using a phone camera. The gear definitely doesn't matter that much.

As an extreme example, if you want to take high resolution pictures of distant planets, you are going to need a telescope.

You are going to have more flexibility with gear choice if you are flexible with the photos you want to take.

If I stuck to kit lens and no photoshop, I may have given up on photography pretty soon.

Needless to say, specialist stuff requires specialist gear (e.g. underwater photography, fast sports shots, long-distance animal documentary filming).

For a lot of application scenarios, today´s mobile phone cameras are amazing for what they can do, how small and affordable they are. More often than not, one's best shots are spontaneous, and the only camera around will be the one in one's smartphone.

In contrast, in many sports (not chess, perhaps!), e.g. a better table-tennis bat matters enormously. As they say, a match won is attributed to one's technique, a match lost is blamed on the bat (never heard a photographer blame anything on their camera or wideangle lense!).

In software engineering and writing, a good laptop matters enormously. Among the properties { keyboard, screen, battery, RAM, CPU, SSD }, keyboard and battery life are the most crucial elements to me, followed by RAM and SSD size followed by screen and CPU. In the past, ¨faster CPU¨ would have been higher up on the list, but even today's slowest machines are already very fast!

Whatever you do, new/better gear make it more fun! So if you want your kids to enjoy the new school year, buy them new colors or a new school bag.

Except that some things are only worth taking a picture of if you have the right gear. (Yeah, the subsequent paragraphs kinda agree with this, but I do think it’s worth spelling out that for some sorts of photos, “the camera you have with you” may well be sufficiently unsuitable as to be useless.)

I mean c'mon, look at Golang. It is not a good language[0][1]. And yet, folks built k8s with it, and many other things.

It's like that with photographic gear too. Just like the best camera is the one you have, the best language is the one that all your domain experts can use. And if they're good at knowledge and design, but shitty at programming, golang it will be.

But it's also worth noting that k8s was not written in C++. Tools matter.

[0] https://yager.io/programming/go.html [1] https://xetera.dev/thoughts-on-go/

Phase detect autofocus is amazing stuff. I never had autofocus problems after that.

The latter take better photos, generally. But as soon as they get money, they buy the gear they need and make even better photos. Professional photographers tend to really obsess about their gear.

I got myself a canon dslr about 12 years ago. Nothing special. Just the entry level model (550D). I used it until about 2020 and I replaced it with a Fuji XT-30. Also an entry level camera. Does it take better photos? Yes and no. It's certainly more capable in low light situations. And the photos have a bit less noise and more dynamic range, which is nice. But neither of those things were much of an issue with the Canon in daylight situations. And I'm still the same person with the same amateur skills. So, there hasn't been a massive improvement in the quality of the photos I take. I do shoot a bit more at night now. Because I can with this thing.

But what I do appreciate most with Fuji is the controls. I mostly shoot manual now because this is very easy with this camera and was very fiddly with the Canon. I have one dial for aperture on the lens, one dedicated dial for shutter speed and I control the iso with one of the programmable dials. As it turns out, forcing yourself to shoot manual all the time puts you on a learning curve where you start analyzing what you shoot and how to set the shot up correctly. Shooting in half automated mode with the Canon was easier but you get lazy about it as well. I mostly shot in AV mode with that and thus ended up with a lot of shots that were either not well exposed, noisy (high iso), or with the wrong aperture for the situation.

Fuji makes some fantastically expensive cameras that cost thousands of dollars that you typically pair with lenses that are even more expensive. Clearly way out of my budget. Would I like owning one. Oh yes. But would it probably wouldn't make a huge difference.

You can't even cook a chicken breast without a $250 sous vide, bespoke cast iron pan, and then slice it up with a $149 Santoku knife.

Do you need an IDE to write, for example, Java or C#? No. But it sure is nice! And you can do some pretty cool code analysis and refactoring with some good tools.

Do you need a jointer, a planer, a bandsaw, a CNC router, a … as a hobby woodworker? No. But it sure is nice to have the right tool for the job.

I’ve seen some pretty clever hacks by people to work around not owning a specific tool. They work great for a one-off. But you really need to learn your workflow and identify real bottlenecks and address them.

This post is a great reminder not just photography, but to a lot of things in life. :)

Photographer's partner burst out laughing and said "that's what everyone has said no matter what they took the picture with"

I think the sentence describe it perfectly.

Gear won't take good photos. But it sure makes it easier if you know what you are doing. And it also opens new possibilities.

It is all good, IF you know how to use it. Probably the best advice I got when I started was to settle on a simple piece of gear, fairly constrained, and learn how to use it creatively. I settled on a Fuji X100s which is prime, non interchangeable lens. I learned everything about it for the next year and I am probably better photographer for it. When you learn everything about your fairly simple camera you can start learning how to use it creatively. The camera itself becomes your tool and you learn to predict what is going to happen and what is/not going to work in a particular situation. Those skills, for some reason, transfer when you change to other cameras.

Give my full frame with my expensive lenses to my wife and the pictures are worse than she would do on a phone. It is just too complicated for her to be thinking about the photo, not that she pays a lot of attention to the composition anyway.

So what is the application?

Whatever you do, try to understand different aspects of your craft and maybe figure out which of those aspects you are underutilising and how you could force yourself to learn them better.

For example, as a developer, decades ago, I was thrown on a project that required me to write a lot of code in a very constrained environment (embedded C, low memory, etc.) without being able to compile and run it. I was able to run my code once a week.

I probably learned more about programming working for 3 years on this project than I learned over the rest of my career before and after. I learned that compile/run/fix loop is a crutch that most people never wean themselves of because it is just so damn convenient. I learned that you can teach yourself to write code for days and then get it to work correctly on the first try (most of the time). I learned it gives you superpowers.

I can now barely stand watching people who can't predict what their code does, it feels so amateurish. I know I did the same and I know it was a chance that I learned it, but still.

It also makes your code much, much more bug free and reliable. Because QA/QC/code reviews, etc. only find certain types of problems that manifest themselves fairly easily. To reduce other types of bugs you have to create less bugs in your initial version because nobody will ever find them and fix them for you. Those bugs are still there and will manifest themselves in those rare occasions or when you refactor the software a bit. It also means when you are done coding the application is pretty much production ready -- there is no QA/QC phase where bugs are getting fixed.