Ian Furniss Photography » Blog Archive » Gear

Gear – Is It Worth It?

Ok, at the moment this is probably as much about me trying to convince myself as it is about anything else! Far too many shiny things in the shops these days!! When the gear bug bites it’s a hard thing to ignore and the thought of a new piece of kit can be more than mortal man or woman can bear. Why the serpent wasted time on Eve with an apple I don’t know .. If he’d just slapped a nice L series prime lens down in front of her it would have been ‘game over’ much quicker and without all the messing about!

Anyway, there’s a lot of thoughts and theories around about the importance of gear to the photographer and personally i’m a firm believer that it rates around a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10. I mean, I get the idea that vision is all-important, of that there’s no doubt for me, I get the idea also that the best camera is the one you have with you, but I also know that it’s not the best camera available and that under most circumstances a picture taken @ 2 or 3 MP is going to get laughed at when you submit it to Alamy or Getty, no matter how pretty it is.

So, where’s the happy medium? When I started out in photography I was hit by the gear lust pretty much every day. In my first year alone I went through 3 different cameras trying to find something that did what I wanted it to. The first picture I had published? That was taken on a cheap Fuji bridge camera that lasted me about 3 months before it was traded in for ‘something better’. In retrospect, i’m not entirely sure that was the best move since the camera itself had obviously proved itself capable of producing images that were suitable for use in a magazine and even there I was punching above my weight. What had made my mind up for me at the time was that I submitted some images for stock use and they got rejected outright due to the lack of quality. I’d submitted them to a proper stock agency rather than one of the ’10 images for a $’ bargain-basement kind and when I reviewed their comments alogside the images I could see they were dead right. I’ll be honest, they sucked. The quality just wasn’t there. It was trade-in time if I wanted to progress.

The story goes on in much the same way, right up until the time I bought my first L series lens. It was the 70-200 F4L and if I tell you that it’s sharp, I mean this thing is sharper than a razor blade dipped in lemon zest! You can do a full size crop, pop it up on the web, and it’ll look as good as if you’d taken the shot full frame. It made me realise there’s no substitute for quality and if you want quality, then you’re going to have to pay for it. In the case of the F4L it’s a bargain so you don’t have to pay too much, but it’s a noticeable step up that you look at the results from it and think ‘Yep, that was money well spent!’.

Nowadays i’m a lot more conservative in my approach and it’s from there that i’m coming from with this. Each camera and lens I traded in, I lost about 50% on. As my ambitions and confidence grew, so did my equipment, and so did the equipment I left in my bag. I came to rely more on the quality gear because it just seemed pointless to use anything else. Does that mean that I think you have to spend thousands on gear if you want to turn Pro then? Well, it might sound like it, but actually it doesn’t. It means I think you have to be wiser than I was when I started out. When I look back at the pictures I took with cheaper equipment, then even now I don’t really notice much difference between them. Sure, if I want to pixel peep I can see subtle differences in quality, maybe a bit of added sharpness here and there but, despite the reviews and all the technical data I actually see very little difference until I start including the L series stuff.

When I look at the gear I own now and I compare it to what else is on the market, then the conclusion i’ve come to is that it’s very much ‘horses for courses’ and if you want to spend your money wisely then it pays to decide at the outset just exactly what you want to do with your photography. When I think of Landscapes and I look at the work being done by close neighbours like Tim Parkin and Dav Thomas then Large Format seems like the best way forward. Large Format makes L series look as flat as the proverbial pancake. When I look at more general work though then sure the dslr is where it’s at (be that Canon, Nikon, or whatever) but, if you want to do it professionally, then at some point you’re going to need to go for top of the range equipment if you want to compete.

The time in-between? Well that is where the original point comes in for me. Despite everything i’ve said in the last few paragraphs, chasing gear isn’t that important. Vision is. You’re far better off investing your time on learning the craft and you’ll get more from £500 spent on a couple of days learning with a pro, than you will spending the same money on a couple of lenses that you’ll replace as soon as you progress to the next step. When it comes to taking the pictures, there’s not that much difference between the lens that comes as part of the kit, and the lens that you spend £2/300 on in the shop 6 months later. The same goes for the dslr’s.

Photography can be an expensive hobby, and it’s even more expensive to take it further. Save yourself some money and if you think ‘Pro’ is your goal then skip the in-between. In the long term and in these hard times, it just isn’t worth doing anything else.