James’ Tools of the Trade

a quick blurb on getting asked about my gear

One of the most common questions I get from readers is what gear I use. Depending on the day, I receive this question with different feelings. I think this is because there really are two different angles to approach this question with, and I’m not totally set on either side of the fence. One part of me wants to gladly tell them the gear I use and be on my way. My fear with this is that I don’t think photography is always about the gear. A complete amateur with deep pockets could certainly not go out and buy all my gear and create the same shots. There is much more to it than that. One of the most irritating comments is when someone says, “Wow that looks amazing, you must have a nice camera!” I always compare that kind of a comment to pulling a chef aside at a restaurant and saying, “This food is great, you must have really nice pots and pans!” Isn’t that a bit ridiculous? Ansel Adams once said, “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it.” The camera is simply a means to capture what a photographer see’s in his or her mind. True photography has nothing to do with taking pictures, it has to do with creating them, with telling the camera what to do manually to create what you see in your minds eye. Not setting the camera on automatic and letting Canon or Nikon decide how the picture will look, that’s just taking a snapshot of a scene.

But there is still another side of me. The darker side I think that most photographers wouldn’t confront usually, mainly because for some reason it is taboo to say this. That side knows that to a certain and definite degree…it is about the gear. I can fight this notion until I’m blue in the face but in the back of my mind I know it’s true to a degree. There have been countless situations, and I mean countless, where I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could not have gotten certain shots with lesser gear. The same is true with using the newest versions of software. Some play it safe and use Adobe CS4, or CS3 or earlier. I think to give the company time to put out all the necessary updates and bug fixes. I want the newest because I want to be able to do things my competition can’t. There are features in Photoshop CS5 that make what used to take an hour now take 10 seconds. With any industry or hobby, or anything in life for that matter, you get what you pay for. The higher up the ladder you go, the better quality you get. If all the industry leading pros out their tell the amateurs it’s not about the gear, then why aren’t they using Rebels or D40′s? Why are they using $50,000 Hasselblads? Or travel cases full of $4,000 prime Zeiss lenses to attach to their fleet of 1Ds Mark III’s, 1D Mark IV, and 5D Mark II bodies? I’ll tell you why: The equipment allows them to do things that consumer level equipment won’t allow. You can’t post a JPG from a Rebel on a billboard. You can’t shoot tack sharp images at near dark when your ISO isn’t usable past 800. You can’t shoot in 90% humidity at 105 degrees with plastic lenses and bodies. You can’t shoot confidently in light rain with much less than Canon or Nikons top of the line bodies and glass. You can’t get a shot at 200mm in low light when your hand holding a lens that stops down to f/5.6 when zoomed in. I could go on and on with these examples. But the point is this: Gear doesn’t have much to do with the vision of the photographer, but the best gear absolutely makes the photographers vision easier to carry out. Cheap gear creates obstacles that you have to get around, and I don’t have time for that. Not when my clients are paying me their hard earned money to get crucial shots. I don’t want my gear to get in the way anything.

So with that said, here is a list of pretty much all the gear I use on a day to day basis. It’s not everything I want, I could easily spend tens of thousands more, but it allows me to do my job efficiently and without worries.