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Stockpiling is a valuable technique to limit/defer the risk of being deprived of (whatever you're stockpiling,) while incurring a different set of costs (the time, energy, storage space, and inevitable degradation of the good you've stockpiled.) Set limits on these costs, e.g, "I'll stockpile no more than I can fit in my spare closet" and you can rationally stockpile within those limits to your heart's content.

There is an environmental cost that you are not paying alone.

The problem is that it usually takes me a while to realize that something is good. Not least because I like durable things and ... well, it takes time to determine if something is durable.

I bought my favorite jacket 12 years ago in Tokyo. A very neutral/timeless thing. After 3 years the jacket still looked like new. Although I had worn it almost every day for 3 years. I searched for it online and found one for sale. On eBay. Used. And the wrong size. If I had known the jacket was that good I would have bought 2-3 more.

I still use it. It still looks almost new. Fantastic garment.

I use a lot of 30-50 year old camera lenses. Stuff was just built better back then. None of all this plastic jiggly crap.

Funny because 30 years ago (1994) we used to say the same thing about stuff built in the 50s :)

Really? Photography changed a lot from 1950 to 2000. I'd be very surprised if anyone would've preferred the 1950 grayscale and gigantic photography equipment over the 90s-2000 variants

Well, when it comes to lenses there is actually some old equipment that is still desirable. You can get lenses that are optically decent for very little money if you can live with manual focus or lack of modern coatings etc. I have several lenses from the 70s and 80s that I like a lot - though they’re a bit more work to use.

Then there’s lenses that provide interesting distortions or have interesting faults. Like old Soviet-era Helios lenses. In fact some old lens designs have been revived for modern cameras. Like the Petzval lenses (which I also own).

Good modern lenses are great. Optically fantastic, robust, easy to use etc. But that can be a bit … well, sterile and boring.

Which is why several of the vintage lenses I own have been used in movies. They make for a unique look. (There are companies that re-house lenses for use with modern movie cameras).

Note the scene with the emperor in the garden in the second Dune movie for instance.

There are lots of vintage lenses to lust after. And some of them can be quite expensive.

(Then there’s the whole medium format world. Where you can get digital backs and build cameras that cost more than your car)

You should see the garbage FD-mount stuff I had when I was a starving teenager. Hell, the camera's aperture arm only worked about 30% of the time.

The stuff from then that has survived til today is the survivorship bias.

Compared to other stuff of its time (Contax-Zeiss, Nikkor Ai-S, MD, even some M42 lenses), FD was indeed poor build quality, but it is still far, far superior to any of the trash in the more "modern" Canon EF line. Have you ever held a EF 50/1.4? It feels like a disposable toy. Back when I had one, it didn't even survive being tossed in a backpack for a city walk. Even a bunch of the EF "L" lenses are made of plastic.

Also, apertures in FD lenses are far easier to repair than EF lenses. They're just usually a lever or something that has slipped off its channel. In EF lenses it's often a fractured plastic part.

There were a lot of amazing advancements from 1950 to 1980. After 1990 and autofocus the build quality of lenses started going downhill. The plastic focusing mechanisms negated a lot of the otherwise good optics.

The affordable category of lenses today also don't gave good optics. While there are good modern optics used in higher-end lenses, it's easier to get better used old optics that outperforms shitty modern optics at the same price point.

There are some nice lenses made today but they are extremely costly. A Sony GM 300/2.8 costs $6000. I got my late 70s Canon SSC Fluorite 300/2.8 for $400 and it's tack sharp corner to corner, and considering I paid only $400 for it, I'm not too worried about taking it everyhwere.

A Sony GM 50/1.2 costs $1900. I paid $300 for my Nikkor early 80's 50/1.2. For f/1.2 portraits sharpness isn't the thing you're usually after, and mine gives absolutely spectacular results.

Back in the 50s-80s almost every lens was built like a tank and they are now available used at a fraction of the price of modern equivalents. If you don't give a crap about autofocus (studio portrait, macro, landscape, product photographers all don't need autofocus), it's a very good deal. Plastic started to show up in the 90s and killed everything.

(If you're shooting sports and wildlife, yeah, prioritize autofocus, but that's not what I do.)

So counter opinion. Current lenses just seem to be a way batter optically than in the past. Sony are super expensive lenses but even if you go Sigma, Laowa, Samyang… it is not cool but some of the lenses are just better and you wont pay that much more.

I used to have Canon DSLR woth some of the better lenses for that system. Recently i got Sony and to my surprise there is pretty noticeable difference. Like i have some manual focus LAOWA and it just destroys comparable (much more expensive) canon lens from 15 years ago in terms of image quality and sharpness.

Yeah Laowa makes some good stuff. 7Artisans and TTArtisans is very hit or miss, good build quality but mediocre optics. Samyang I've found to be mostly on par with top of the line Nikkor manual lenses.

Voigtlander has some /really/ good optics for modern lenses, especially their Apochromatic lenses and the Aspheric Noktons. They are also a couple hundred years old so they know a thing or two about making quality lenses.

Zeiss has always had a lot of good stuff and a lot of it inherits from their history of manual lenses, but they seem to be quitting the industry.

OEM modern lenses almost all suck. Either shitty build quality OR too expensive.

Do you know of any manufacturers that still make (or have) interesting lenses for F-mount?

No. But Nikon made so many good Ai-S lenses that you can find lots of them on eBay and other secondary markets.

Note that for old lenses, price and lens quality don't correlate well. There are lots of fantastic old lenses that are cheap because they were produced in large numbers, and there are also a lot of optically shitty lenses that are expensive because they were rare or produced in smaller numbers and have collector value.

I have been following the advice of others more knowledgeable than me when buying AI-S lenses off of eBay, and I have to say that even on the D850, all of them have performed surprisingly well.

However, I'd really like more "arty" lenses with AF. MF causes me to lose a lot of shots I wish I'd nailed.

There are some products that turn MF lenses into AF, primarily targeted for video shooters. I haven't tried them though.

https://www.pdmovie.com/products/liveair3smart

You said it better than me.

As for lack of autofocus, I’ve actually done action shots with a Petzval and various vintage manual focus lenses. Yes, it is tricky and you will miss a lot, but when you nail focus the result is glorious.

Same, but I don't consider it a problem.

If I find that I love a product, I'll buy a spare. If it turns out that I think the successor product is better, I'll buy that and simply sell my spare to someone with the opposite opinion.

I do this too. I buy two of anything I like and save it in a “timecapsule” for the next decade when it is not available. It also lets me treat my possessions for use and not inconvenient preservation. if i really beat on it, i get a third so i have a replacement available.

See if there is a Repair Cafe in your area and maybe they can fix it for free. If in NC go to http://repaircafenc.org

This only seems like a problem if you struggle to afford these purchases, or lack space for the spares. Otherwise, it's mildly eccentric but sensible.

Hi fellow traveller - I do that, too. Can’t say I agree that I think of it as a problem, though: it’s mostly paid off for me.

We’re surrounded by so much complexity - anything that helps to defray the cost of learning how to use a new bit of kit is appreciated. Most recently, I’ve been unable to resist the siren call of N100 mini PCs for a Proxmox cluster, but another example would be my teles: having 3 tvs all running the same OS (now long-unplugged from the internet) is just a massive timesaver. One practically needs a PhD and a lifelong Digital Foundry subscription to get the darn things set up just right - why spread that across two different brands or models.

Same philosophy with cars - although clearly that’s an area where most of us don’t own more than one. In my case, I chose the car with the best-established record of long-term reliability, and plan to never sell it. Read the docs, spelunk the forums, learn its quirks, then just live with it.

Buy one good thing - along with a few identical backups, if possible - then use it for ages. Then go outside and touch grass.

I do this with shoes. I won’t need a new pair for decades!

I did this with shoes. Bought 4 pairs of the shoes I liked. Right on schedule, they discontinued them, and I was so happy I'd done so!

And then when after about 5 years I said "hey, these shoes are getting pretty worn, time to move on to the next pair", I was 43 years old, and lo and behold ... my feet had widened and I couldn't even get my feet into the brand-new shoes. I had to put them in an expanding last for almost two MONTHS before they would fit.

Next time don’t store the old shoes - rotate wearing them so at the end of (shoe_lifetime * number_of_pairs) years you’ll have a number of pairs of evenly-worn shoes :)

I actually did this not too long ago and observed an interesting phenomenon that I had kind of noticed over the years, but never really tested.

I found a pair of shoes that I liked, but they wore out quickly with daily use (3-4 months). I bought 3 more pairs and rotated them and those three lasted for like 2 years.

As silly as it sounds, I wonder if there is something about giving shoes a "rest" that makes them last longer.

Yes. This has been well known in the running community for decades.

The foam midsole gets beaten down in a days wear, so resting gives it time to spring back. Additionally, the uppers get to dry out which inhibits bacteria & such and stops moisture from attacking the adhesives and stitching.

I still regret not stockpiling a pair of shoes I got 14 years ago. My favorite pair of shoes ever. I went looking for them a year later, and of course they had been discontinued. So yeah, I've started doing this.

They might contain materials like rubber that degrade anyway with time.

Unfortunately, some items are inherently ephemeral.