Sea Change. Getting rid of lots of stuff. Feels good to downsize the inventory from time to time.

From the fashion shows at the Louvre. 1994

Certain photographers who worked professionally through the decades have a propensity for accumulating more and more stuff as time goes on. I count myself among the worst offenders. I've rarely met a lens or a camera body in which I wasn't at least passingly interested. Recently I looked into a drawer that holds most of my lenses and realized that things have gotten a bit out of hand. Especially when it comes to vintage 50mm lenses. Then there's my whole flirtation over the last year and a half with the Fuji medium format cameras and various MF lenses. I also found that I have too many big LED fixtures but that's not really my fault. I found newer ones with better, more consistent color and in one stroke they made my previous, first line LED lights obsolete. But the bottom line is that all this stuff is too much to keep up with and needs to go. 

A friend of mine offered to sell the Fuji stuff, and assorted lenses, on Fred Miranda for me. That's great. I'll do much better than trading it in on store credit here in Austin. But everything else? I just want to move it out of the physical space and the mental space. If I make money on it that's swell. If I don't that's no sweat either.

Which brings me to today's subject: The cost of mind space as it relates to diverse photo gear. 

It dawned on me when Leica discontinued M240 batteries as retail items ( you can still order them as parts, thank you! European consumer protection laws!!!) that having lots of different cameras means having to have lots of different batteries on hand. And though they last a long time they are, in the end, a perishable item. Batteries have a finite life and they also require routine maintenance during their lives. Lithium batteries need to be charged and used from time to time to ensure their long term health. Spread that around several different camera systems and you might end up with lots of batteries to think about. That takes up a share of brain power.  Having to keep track of them all is more trouble than it might be worth. One reason I love my Leica SL and Q stuff is that they all take exactly the same kind of battery and the batteries for these current and recent cameras keep improving (more power) as they become more affordable (price drop from $285 to $200 for the SCL-4 versus the newer SCL-6). One battery type works in everything from the original SL to the SL2 to the SL2-S to the Q2. The newer SCL-6 batteries I have been buying are the same as those that come with the (on perennial back-order) Q3-43 camera, should it ever arrive. But the batteries for the big Fuji 50Sii are a whole different kettle of carp and are disappointing when it comes to the amount of charge delivered to the camera. They just run out of power too soon. 

Having used the Fuji 50Sii for the better part of two years now I'm ready to see it gone. The files from the camera can be great but....  In the Texas heat I get temperature warnings almost every day that I try to use it outside. Not right away but frequently enough to assure me that it's not really a "professional" piece of gear. Good in an air conditioned studio but that's as far as it goes. The focus ability isn't what I would call quick and....the files are just about as good as those from my SL2 and I anticipate that they won't be any better than the SL3 camera I've been eyeing. I guess technique still matters.

All the manual focus lenses I've accrued for the Fuji are Pentax 645 lenses that I use with an adapter. The lenses are all quite good but everything is too heavy. They all would have made sense in earlier days when I was working more with assistants and also more frequently in the studio but now they are just an unnecessary burden. The sooner they leave my orbit the less I have to consider.

The general equipment purge is delicious. As I close in on complete retirement from the commercial field I find that many of the previous rationales I held onto for keeping certain gear in inventory are no longer apt. They no longer make sense. An example? Well, when I was photographing endless dress rehearsals at the theatre, shooting mainly from mid-house, I needed longer lenses. I depended on a series of 70-200mm lenses from various makers. The last one was the Panasonic S-Pro 70-200mm f4.0. It was rugged and reliable and I felt that I could not deliver the tighter images I needed in the mix without it. 

I stopped photographing dress rehearsal in the big theater back in early 2021 and, miraculously, I've found absolutely no need for any lenses longer than 90-100mm in my daily work. The 70-200mm left the studio several years ago and I've never looked back. I harbor no longing for a new one or a new variation. Around the same time I stopped doing multi-camera video productions and no longer need an assortment of microphones, gimbals and additional tripods. On one of our last video projects of a live concert production I was setting up five 4K video cameras. Four ran in unmanned set-ups while one was used as a main, or follow camera. When I quit doing that kind of work it orphaned three or four tripods and other assorted gear in short order. 

These days I am mostly doing environmental portraits for companies. I never need a lens longer than 90mm and I never really need lenses shorter than 35mm for 99.99% of the commissions. It's a pretty tight window of focal length requirements. But I do keep some wider lenses around for the errant street or tourist-type city scapes; just in case. 

In the past I would have said that our gear lust mirrors the parabola of our enthusiasm for the art form. We begin tentatively and then, as we gain more knowledge and money we buy more and more stuff, experiment with a wider range of options and generally expand out to, or past, our comfort zones. Only when we pull back would our equipment lust go out like the tide. I would have said this but now I know better. I know it's quite possible to maintain the enthusiasm and passion but at the same time pursue a narrower and narrower selection of necessary tools. And, if this is true of cameras and lenses I think it is also equally true of lighting gear and lighting modifiers. 

Stuff left the studio yesterday and today. The space looks bigger now. Less cluttered. Big enough for a couple of billiard tables (God forbid!!!) but not big enough for an indoor Olympic pool... There are now fewer decisions to be made when I get ready to walk out the door to work or just to make fun photographs for myself. And that's a good thing. The next purge will have to be extra tripods and also light stands. The studio feels over run by C-Stands. And heavy duty light stands of all kinds. 

More and more often I find myself going out into the world with a beater Leica SL and an older Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4. Not the big Milvus version but the much more manageable previous model. Seems like a good combination for most things. And it falls nicely into my routine. 

Marie Kondo had a good mantra. She suggested evaluating your possessions and only keeping the ones that continually bring you joy. It's a tough standard but you have to start somewhere. 

Have you winnowed stuff down to a manageable pile? It's never too late or early to start...