Am I an equipment junkie?

A slightly different style of post today, but bear with me on this.

I do get asked a lot about the camera I use, what lenses, lights, modifiers etc both in general and on specific photos. I never have any problem sharing any of this info but a lot of the time I'm fairly puzzled why people are interested in just the equipment I've used.

I have to confess I have bought certain pieces of equipment on a whim or for a particular set of features and fallen prey to the marketing machine equation:

Your photography + This piece of equipment = Masterpiece

Don't get me wrong I love some of the equipment I have, and some photos just aren't possible or are at least very difficult/ take longer to do without it, but what happens when I'm in a situation where I don't have it?

Luckily I spent years using a 1970's film camera (Pentax MX) with a standard 50mm lens and a digital point and shoot (Sony P-10), then moved on to the cheapest digital SLR at the time (Canon 350D) with a kit lens. Why is this significant? Well I had to try and get the best photos possible with most limited amount of gadgets. I had to figure out work arounds for everything, I had to see things to make the composition "pop" on a photo.

Take this example taken on a Sony P-10 point and shoot camera in Berlin back in 2005.

I had no extra lighting, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the photo, the angle composition etc. then at one point the guy in the photo just walked straight into the frame completely unplanned and I managed to get this shot. This is one of my most popular photographs and in terms of equipment, anyone could take this shot.

For those of you that know me, met me, shot with me, you'll know that I love shooting portraits and fashion work. I do have softboxes, octaboxes and beauty dishes, a selection of lenses and strobes etc. but when I'm teaching someone photography I rarely bring out loads of equipment that I know they want, but don't really need.

A few examples of where I'm using loads of lights/equipment to create a look

The first two examples are using 3 lights, booms, 135mm lens, beauty dish, octabox, grids, reflectors, gels etc. The 3rd shot is using 2 lights, softbox and a gridded dish.

Overkill? maybe but that's what the assignment called for, if i didn't have all of that stuff with me, I probably wouldn't get the same shot but I'd still be able to get a shot that I want.

This is the point where someone will tell me to prove it, so here's two recent examples.

Surprise No 1. The Student

I teach Danny each week around various parts of photography, from camera settings and composition, to photoshop workflows and creativity. A couple of weeks ago he caught me off guard as I thought we would be doing a theory session to go through the photos he'd taken in the last week and evaluate them, but arrived to see he'd set up a home studio and had been taking portraits of family members all day.

He showed me some of the photos and asked me what I'd do to improve them using the equipment and space that he has got. Rather than just look at the photo and say change this, do this... think about this etc... I took him through how I would approach the shoot and showed him various techniques and ideas to get something more professional looking. The catch was, I had none of my equipment and as Danny is a Nikon shooter I had to work out how to use the camera and how to change the power on his flashes as well!

This was the final image of Danny, he'd recently bought a small softbox (if you can call it that from ebay) thinking it might be like one of my small softboxes, but rather than a 40cmx40xm box it was just slightly bigger than the flash head of an SB800. I'm not suggesting you can get the same photo with this tiny modifier, but it's just big enough to take the edge off of a bare flash gun. I pulled Danny away from the background and moved the flash in as close as possible to get this shot.

So just to recap, that's one light, one stand, £2.50 worth of modifier from china and a completely different camera system.

2) Corporate headshot

Life is full of Surprises and this one was a biggie. I was staying at a friend's house when I was asked to shoot a couple of corporate headshots the next day as there was a print deadline. The big problem was, I only had my spare body (a Canon 350d) which I hadn't used for over a year and a 70-300mm budget lens that was my friends that I'd never used before. I had no lights, no reflectors and most importantly no time. I had no more than 5 minutes with each person to get the shot. The one saving grace is that I knew the building fairly well and had a good idea of where would have a good natural light at that time of the day. The bad news was that particular room wasn't available, and being in the UK the weather is never predictable at the best of times.

I chose a corridor that had a large set of windows on one side, and a white wall on the other. I knew from looking at the size of the corridor the wall would act as a reflector for the window light and add fill.

So a recap of this shot:

Cheapo Camera

Cheapo Lens

No lights

No modifiers

No extra equipment

I long for the day when someone asks me what was my thinking behind getting the shot instead of what lens I used, what inspires me to take the photos I take instead of why don't I use the latest camera body.

The moral of this post is, stop worrying about how much you're not spending on your equipment or what lens/camera body your friend has. If you can't take a decent photo with the most basic equipment then even with £10k worth of gear you're still not going to get a good shot.

For those that are still interested I'll post a list of my equipment and possibly a photo in the next week or so, those that haven't seen me shoot will probably be quite surprised.