old-gregg wrote: gdanmitchell wrote:
… and folks should, as I’ve long said, just pick one and get on with the important work of making photographs.
But why? Why ignore the fact that juggling gear and making fun of other gear jugglers is fun? And GAS **is** fun, and it's great for the economy! Moreover, for many of us GAS is more fun than making an image. I am perfectly comfortable acknowleding and encouraging this.
Besides, the technological progress, by continuously trivializing the technique, has already ruined the effort/reward ratio for many, and soon coming for others. If you're hoping that computational photography is going to stop at sky swapping and noise reduction, you're in for a wild ride. So more and more of "the important work of making photographs" is being done by engineers working at tech companies, not the moist self-propelled tripods who buy and transport their products to scenic locations (or just to a nearest cat or duck).
TLDR: as a hobby, GAS is not inferior to "making photographs".
Well, if gear is what is fun about photography for you, who am I to judge? ;-)
And gear is fun and interesting. I keep track of what’s out there and what I might be interested in when it is time for me to add something up upgrade. (I’m getting to that point with my 10+ year old DSLR system.)
But beyond whatever fun one might have from buying stuff, I think that a lot of the questions in a forum like this are from people who are trying to figure out what will do the job for them. Many of them want to make appropriate purchase decisions and then get on with using the gear to make photographs, and quite a few would rather not have to turn around and replaces stuff in a few months or discover that they paid a whole bunch of money for something that didn’t really gain them much.
If one brand/model or lens/camera/tripod/whatever was truly and objectively significantly better than all of the other choices, photographers would all eventually lean that direction. But that hasn’t happened. In fact, when we look around a great photographs and the excellent photographers who make them it becomes obvious that they are using virtually every brand, model, and type of gear. In the end, it is more than enough to figure out what fits your needs and your photography, pick a brand that provides that, get gear appropriate to what you are trying to do…
… and then focus on making photographs.
As someone once said (paraphrased and modified a bit): “The least significant problem you’ll need to resolve as a photographer is, ‘Nikon, Canon, Sony, or Fujifilm?’.”
YMMV.
Jan 17, 2026 at 08:01 PM
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