Photography Gear – What To Buy And How To Use It

What photography gear should you buy? How do you use it? Where do I start? I am confused!

Right. Stop. What gear do you have? What do you need more gear for? You might not need more gear; you might have all you need; you just don’t know it.

Listen to this episode before you even think about buying any more gear. Please don’t do what I did.

In this episode, I tell you.

• The criteria for buying new gear.
• What gear do I use?
• How I use my gear.
• Why you might not need more gear.
• What if I use a phone to take photos and not a camera?
• What if I use a film camera?
• And finally, what I do. Oh, I really tell you what I do and how I use my gear.

All explained in plain English, without the irrelevant detail, in less than 27 (ish) minutes!

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Transcript

Photography Gear – What To Buy And How To Use It

Hi, and a very warm welcome to Episode 178 of the Photography Explained podcast. I'm your host, Rick, and in each episode, I will try to explain one photographic thing to you in plain English in less than 27 minutes (ish) without the irrelevant details. I'm a professionally qualified photographer based in England with a lifetime of photographic experience, which I share with you in my podcast.

Here is the answery bit

Get the photography gear that you need. Only get more photography gear if

The gear will help you take better photos

The gear will help you to take photos that you cannot get with your gear

The gear will save you time or money

Or

The gear you have is broken/ worn out/ about to fail.

There – that is gear sorted.

But how do you know what gear you need?

Well, I'll let you know what gear I use. And no, I am not being paid to say this. Well, not at the time of publishing this podcast episode, that is. Maybe one day….. No, this is the gear that I have paid for myself and that I use. I will come back to the how bit a bit later.

And I need to warn you now – it is not a lot of gear.

• Canon 6D
• Canon 17-40mm wide angle lens
• Canon 70-200mm telephoto lens
• Canon 24-105mm all-in-one lens
• Lenshoods always attached.
• Manfrotto tripod with a geared head
• Universal L Bracket
• Grey Card
• Wrist strap
• Manfrotto Magic Arm
• Loewpro Magnum bag
• Loewpro Photo hatchback 22L AW
• 12 SD Cards in hard case
• Spare SD memory card hard case
• Soft case for SD cards
• Four batteries
• Loupe viewer attached to Canon 6D
• Eclipse cleaning solution
• Pec pads
• Hurricane blower
• Gaffer tape
• Lee Big Stopper
• Painter’s pole
• Slippers. Yes, slippers.
• Wet wipes.

And that is it. Now, this might sound like a lot, but it isn't really. I have listed everything that I use for my commercial photography work.

I am not talking about my computer and associated paraphernalia here – just the stuff I use to take photos.

I also have a backup camera system, which I use for travel photography and sometimes for landscape photography. I swap the camera bodies, lenses, tripod, and camera bag, and the rest is the same. So, if my Canon system completely falls over, I have a backup system. I have a completely spare set of camera gear.

In the next episode, I will discuss gear in general, but in this episode, I want to stick to what I do and how I use my gear.

What I used to do

I used to love looking at new gear and spent loads of time looking at all sorts of photographic loveliness. I would look into the best this or that, find the best price, buy that shiny new lovely thing, and when it arrived, play with it and put it in one of my many camera bags. Then I would move on to the next shiny loveliness, and the process would go on and on.

That was before DSLR cameras. If mirrorless cameras had been around back then, I would have been in a pickle with even more choice!

My lightbulb moment.

I did a commercial shoot, an event, where I was the second photographer. The chap I was working for had a battered old camera and an even older laptop. He didn't have half the gear I had, so I thought ha, I will show you!

I turned up with my massive bag of gear to be greeted with a smile. He asked me if I had a smaller bag, which I did. He suggested I take the gear that I needed, put it in the smaller bag, and put the rest back in the car.

I was gutted—how could I possibly work with just one camera and lens plus a few bits? I needed all this stuff to get the variety of shots that I was going to create.

Reality hit. I was told to stand in specific places and get the same shot each time someone ran past me. And that was that—my first very valuable lesson in photography. And do you know what—I did not need any of that other gear. And this applies right now.

On a commercial shoot I take the following with me.

• Canon 6D and 17-40mm lens.
• Loupe viewer.
• Tripod and head (with gaffers tape wrapped around one leg).
• Grey card.
• Lens cleaning solution and cloths.
• Slippers.
• Wet wipes.

And I put these in my small camera bag, which is actually a backpack.

This is all I use for 95% of the photography work I do, possibly even more than 95%.

This is the point that I want to get over to you.

Every bit of photography gear that I use has a specific need, a specific use.

How I use my gear on a shoot.

I have two bags. One has the stuff above, and the other has everything else, and stays in the car.

My full-frame dslr camera (Canon 6D, still a great camera) has a fully charged battery and a formatted memory card and has been cleaned. I have blown the dust out of the sensor chamber and used the sensor cleaning thing in the camera. The loupe viewer is attached and covers the LCD screen.

The front and rear lens elements of my 17-40 mm lens have been cleaned, and the lens hood is attached. Sometimes, I even put tape over the zoom lens to make sure that I am using only the 17mm focal length.

The L bracket is attached to the camera, and the tripod head is in landscape orientation. The tripod is set so the head is level. When not on a camera, I use a wrist strap; I don't have a camera strap that goes around my neck anymore.

All the settings are set before I leave the house—more on those in another episode. I also take all my photos in RAW format.

If I need to hold back curtains or trailing leads, the gaffer tape comes in handy. I have wrapped some tape around a tripod leg, so I always have it with me. This has saved me a ton of time and is an invaluable tip for you.

I use my gear that way. It is that simple. During a shoot, I will change the camera from landscape to portrait orientation when the composition demands.

Slippers? I take my shoes off when I go into a house and put on my slippers. Yes, really!

Wet wipes? I clean the feet of my tripod before I go into a house. That simple.

And that is how I use my camera gear.

What about all that other gear that I didn't need?

Well, there is the stuff that I listed, which goes in the other bag. And there is everything else that I ever bought that I never needed. What happened to all of that stuff?

I sold it. 

And I only buy new gear if

The gear will help me take better photos

The gear will help me to take photos that I cannot get with my gear

The gear will save me time or money

I have applied these principles for many years. Sure, it took me a long time to figure it out and work out what gear I needed, but I got there in the end, and I want to help get there, too.

So what do you do? How do you know what gear you need?

Start from this position. Camera equipment, photography gear, call it what you want. All this excellent stuff is there to help you take the photos you want, and to achieve the highest quality.

Photography gear is equipment, tools, and stuff that you use.

A tradesperson buys the tools needed to do the job. They start with basic equipment and, over time, buy better equipment that will help them work more efficiently and to a higher standard. They will come across situations where they need a new piece of equipment and will have to buy it.

And that is what you and I need to do - this is how we need to look at photography gear.

To start with, use what you have and find its limitations. Accept the disappointing fact that you might not need more camera gear—that what you have is just fine. And this is fine. This is a great place to be.

Push your gear to its limits and find out what you can't do that you want to do. When you have found something that you want to do that you can't do with your gear, you have to find the thing that helps you do that one thing.

If you want to take higher-quality photos, a new camera and lens may help. We all need to progress, but be honest with yourself about what you really need.

Photography is drawing with light.

Camera gear is simply the tools we use to capture light. Sure, professional photographers have all sorts of gear, but they probably got each bit for a specific reason.

What if I just love gear?

That is fine; of course, it is your business. But if you want to take better photos, you are not helping yourself. Don't make gear the most important thing.

Make what is in every photo you take the important thing.

The talky bit

I am not against getting new gear by the way, but I am against the feeling that more gear is needed getting in the way of taking photos. You should buy the best camera and lens combo for you. And that is the point - the best camera and best lens for what you want to do. My first camera was a basic Canon cropped sensor camera, and the first lens was a kit lens. I got some great photos with that camera and lens combo. So if that is your starting point, that is your starting point. Don't worry about it.

You will progress from kit lenses. When is up to you, but get the best that you can out of that kit lens and crop sensor camera first. Yes, the good news is that you can take great, pretty excellent photos with a basic camera. And you can still take rubbish photos with the best camera in the world!

I hope you get the point. Photography gear is simply the tool we use to take photos. My advice to anyone who wants to learn to take better photos is to concentrate on the photos they are taking and on getting the most out of the gear they have.

I am fortunate to have a full-frame camera and professional-quality lenses, but these are the key tools for my work. I only have gear that helps me take the photos that I need to take.

When I stopped obsessing about gear and feeling that I needed every piece of kit, things started to change. I started to take the gear that I thought I needed with me, and over time, after my lightbulb moment, I got to where I am now. This took a few years.

When I started thinking like this, something else happened—my photos started to improve. Yes, it turns out that the gear was a distraction, holding me back and keeping my attention on anything other than taking the best photos that I could.

I was clearly wrong with my approach, and it took me years to work this out. Hopefully, this will help you in your own photography journey. 

What if I use my phone to take photos and not a camera?

You have a phone and minimal other gear, if any. You probably don't have a tripod, which is not good. But you also don't have a camera body or a load of interchangeable lenses. And that feels good, doesn’t it? Not having all that extra stuff to carry around. You might have a few bits, but probably nowhere near as much as someone with a camera and lens.

But you still need to clean the camera lens - that is so important.

What if use a film camera?

Everything I have discussed applies the same as with digital cameras. Plus, you have the film to buy, store, and manage until it is processed.

What do I do?

I have told you what I do, what I used to do, and how my photos improved once I got my priorities right.

Photography is drawing with light.

I use the gear I need to help me take the photos I want. My aim with every photo is to get the best composition and the best image quality.

And this is what I do now.

Oh yes, I nearly forgot. 

My photography website, rickmcevoyphotography.com, has a full list of gear. If you go to my gear page, you will find the full list of gear that I have, along with Amazon Associate links. If you click one of these links and buy something, I get a bit of the money that Amazon would have—well, that’s fair enough, isn’t it?

This is what I do.

Some thoughts from the last episode

I talked about taking photos handheld and that rule of thumb, the reciprocal thing. I should have said that a shutter speed of 1/60th is generally the slowest shutter speed you should use when taking handheld photos. But there is image stabilisation in camera bodies and lenses that can reduce this further.

And to reiterate a point that I made,  if you're given a choice between a sharp photo with noise and a blurry photo with no noise, you choose the first. Noise can be removed, reduced, or even tolerated, but a blurry photo will always be a blurry photo.

Oh yes, and the crisps I had were quavers. How could I have forgotten that? 

Next episode

Camera gear, a general chat, and how I look after my gear.

I will discuss new cameras and used cameras. Yes, I will talk about used camera gear, giving you options and saving you a ton of money. I will also discuss the various camera accessories that you can get and expand on what I talked about in this episode, helping you work out what are the best accessories for you.

And of course full frame cameras, cropped sensor cameras, mirrorless cameras, DSLR cameras, and the options with interchangeable lenses, both zoom lenses and prime lenses. But I am glad I started with what I use and how I use it. That gives you context.

And remember, new photography equipment does not always mean better photos.

I am looking forward to this episode. 

Ask me a question.

If you have a question you would like me to answer, email me at sales@rickmcevoyphotography.co.uk or head over to the podcast website photographyexplainedpodcast.com/start.

And if you want to say hi, please do – I love hearing from my listeners.

Get an email from me.

If you would like to receive a weekly email from me where I tell you what I am thinking about, fill out the form on the podcast website, and every Friday, you will get a lovely email from me.

OK - I am done.

This episode was brought to you by a homemade—wait for it—a cheese and pickle sandwich washed down with water before I settled in my homemade, acoustically cushioned recording emporium. Still, no crisps!

I've been Rick McEvoy; thanks again very much for listening to my small but perfectly formed podcast (it says here) and for giving me 27 ish minutes of your valuable time. This episode will be about 23 minutes long after I have edited out the mistakes and other bad stuff.

I hope to see you on the next episode.

Take care and stay safe.

Cheers from me, Rick