Note: This is a repeat of a pre­vi­ous post. Why? Because I’m on a sub-​tropical island and may not have the time to make any posts. With any luck, I’ll bring back some sto­ries and pic­tures for the future.

A friend of mine on Twit­ter re-​tweeted some­thing that got my atten­tion today. Here it is:

New­bies always ask about gear, it’s never about the gear. Ppl w/​some expe­ri­ence ask about approach. The lat­ter is the ? we should be asking

Respect­fully, I dis­agree with the first part of the premise. Gear mat­ters. Oth­er­wise, we’d all be using the same gear. There would be no such thing as “lens lust” or “Nikon Acqui­si­tion Syn­drome.” I’m sure Canon users have sim­i­lar con­di­tions, too.

So why is it that pho­tog­ra­phers lust after gear? Do you really get a bet­ter shot with a more expen­sive lens? Is there that much of a dif­fer­ence between my old D70 and the D3S that I crave?

Well, yeah. Why else would I have switched from a D70 to a D200 to a D700? Why would I stop shoot­ing with my old, beloved 18-​200mm VR lens to use heav­ier ²⁴⁄₇₀ 8 & 70 – 200 f/2.8 lenses? It’s because each acqui­si­tion did some­thing to help me improve the qual­ity of my images by solv­ing prob­lems I couldn’t work out with the pre­vi­ous set of gear.

Lenses

You can buy cheap lenses. You can buy expen­sive lenses. Cheap isn’t always bad, though. Expen­sive doesn’t guar­an­tee a good shot. That’s not the point. Instead, I’m try­ing to sug­gest that your gear mat­ters when it helps you solve a problem.

Fast glass (lenses with an aper­ture of f/2.8 or larger) allow you to bring in more light, but they also help iso­late your sub­ject using shal­low depth of field. The focal length you choose does more than deter­mine how far you are from your sub­ject. It also changes the angle of view to that sub­ject. Longer focal lengths allow you to nar­row that angle of view and elim­i­nate poten­tial dis­trac­tions from your com­po­si­tion. Longer lengths can also com­press the sub­ject, mak­ing objects appear closer together. Con­versely, a wide-​angle lens will make objects appear far­ther apart.

Even fea­tures about the aper­ture blades them­selves can impact your photo. Does your lens have six blades or nine? Are they nicely rounded? What dif­fer­ence does that make? Plenty, if you look at the qual­ity of bokeh. Have you ever seen out of focus lights in a pho­to­graph that take on a mag­i­cal glow? Were they round or did they seem octag­o­nal? The dif­fer­ence has to to with the aper­ture blades.

Eliz­a­beth — © Copy­right 2011 by William Beem

Cam­era Bodies

My old D70 saved files at about 5 megapix­els. My next cam­era, the D200, saved them at 10 megapix­els. My D700 saves 12 megapixel files. The dif­fer­ence doesn’t really have so much to do with image qual­ity as it does with the size of the print I can make. It also gives you a bit more room to crop, if nec­es­sary, and still have suf­fi­cient res­o­lu­tion for a print. A cam­era like the D3X has 26 megapixel files, so you can really make some whop­pers with great res­o­lu­tion. Of course, you also end up using twice as much card space and disk space to save those files. It’s a trade-​off. You, as the pho­tog­ra­pher and the cre­ative genius behind the cam­era, have to decide what you need.

I switched from my D70 to D200 because of the cam­era con­trols more than the file size. By that, I mean that it was much eas­ier to con­trol var­i­ous set­tings and fea­tures of the cam­era exter­nally with the D200, where sim­i­lar set­tings would require going into the menu of my D70. Both cam­eras could take great pho­tos, but the D200 made it eas­ier for me. How­ever, I wasn’t sat­is­fied with its high ISO capa­bil­i­ties. Any­thing above ISO 400 showed unac­cept­able noise lev­els in most cir­cum­stances. My inter­est in the D700 was to get bet­ter high ISO capa­bil­i­ties, due to its full-​frame sen­sor. Once again, I made the switch to solve a prob­lem. The D3S has even bet­ter high ISO capa­bil­i­ties and I’d have one, if I could con­vince myself to part with the $5K price.

Frame rate is another con­sid­er­a­tion. The D70 could shoot at three frames per sec­ond. The D200 and D700 shoot at five frames per sec­ond, and boost up to 7 frames per sec­ond with the addi­tion of a bat­tery grip. The D3S shoots at nine frames per sec­ond in FX mode and 11 frames per sec­ond in DX mode. If you’re shoot­ing action, those faster frame rates give you a bet­ter oppor­tu­nity to cap­ture a crit­i­cal moment. Gear matters.

DSLR cam­eras are fairly large and heavy. Point and shoot cam­eras are small and light. How­ever, they suf­fer from fewer fea­tures and slower oper­a­tion. There may be times when it’s more appro­pri­ate to take a small, light cam­era. The trade-​off is that you have to be able to take a bit more time to get your shot. When I look at the qual­ity of images from my D700 and P7000, both are really great in well-​lit envi­ron­ments. The dif­fer­ence between them becomes a mat­ter of con­trol ver­sus convenience.

Gear Mat­ters

I haven’t touched on every fac­tor where gear mat­ters. You could make the argu­ment that there’s more to a pho­to­graph than gear; I agree. A pho­tog­ra­pher needs vision, cre­ativ­ity, a sense of com­po­si­tion and a myr­iad of other tal­ents in order to make a good pho­to­graph. If you don’t have those skills, the gear won’t make the photo for you (unless you just get plain lucky). How­ever, it’s frus­trat­ing as hell to know what you want to accom­plish and not have the right tools to make it happen.

Please note that I’m not say­ing that your gear has to be expen­sive. A good exam­ple of get­ting a great bang for your buck is right over on the Stro­bist web site. David Hobby uses old, rel­a­tively inex­pen­sive speed­lights and makes his own mod­i­fiers out of card­board cereal boxes, yet gets out­stand­ing results. He’s still select­ing his gear with a par­tic­u­lar pur­pose, though. That’s why I’m say­ing “gear mat­ters.” You can only jug­gle so much until you finally get into a cir­cum­stance where you need to have more con­trol to make the expo­sure you imag­ine. When you get to that point, you’ll reach for the gear that helps you unlock your vision. So with all due respect to the per­son who made the quote that set me off on this post, some­times it really is about the gear.