Winding down the inventory. Kinda fun to see white space instead of black, Codura nylon cases of stuff everywhere.

 I'm starting to have a lot of fun handing off no longer needed gear to younger photographers. And doing trade deals with photographer friends of mine who are also trying to rationalize what they have with what they really need as they too are determined to shrink their gear footprints.

The sigh of sheer relief at giving away three huge and heavy C-Stands was palpable. Glorious. Freeing. Ditto with a whole silly collection of softboxes. Last week a friend called to see if I had any Godox hotshoe mount flash units I could part with... you bet! A box full. Take a couple.

I've spent the better part of twenty years anxiously planning for worst case working scenarios which mostly never happened but did happen enough that I was constantly able to rationalize owning two or three of everything which I considered to be critical to the success of remote assignments and tightly time sensitive projects. After all, if your 80mm lens for your Hasselblad decided to crap out while you were on assignment in post Soviet St. Petersburg, Russia, in the dead of winter, in 1995, the chances of replacing it in a day were slim to farcically pure fantasy. Having a second copy at hand seemed (and still seems) prudent. 

Even in the digital age the idea of redundant back-ups seemed prudent. I got endless unwelcome critiques over my desire to always have at least two identical camera bodies for work. Three always seemed even better to stave off risk. But here's the partial logic behind the plan: Imagine you are out on a dusty, windy day in far north Texas photographing a bunch of construction people building a lake. Yeah, a lake. You'll need a wide angle zoom for expansive establishing shots and a longer zoom, something like a 70-200mm lens for portraits, details and, well, because you can't always get as close to giant earth moving machinery as you'd like. Safety and all that.

If you have one camera body you'll need to change lenses multiple times during the day. And you are not doing so in a climate controlled building. You are changing lenses while standing a mile or so from your rental car while the wind is whipping dust around at 20-30 mph. Well, you might be changing lenses if this was your first location photography rodeo. The grizzled old pro has two working bodies with the correct lens attached to each one. Both on straps. Both immediately accessible. And the bonus is that if the lenses don't come off your weather resistant camera (and are themselves weather resistant) you stand a good chance of not getting a kaleidoscope of dust all over your very precious sensor. And that's a win that keeps on giving all the way into post production. So....is that second body overkill? Or just good, solid planning? And that third body? It's there just in case...

Throughout my career I tried to stave off failure by bringing copies of just about everything I would need to get the jobs done no matter what mother nature or clumsiness tossed in my path. My favorite story from back in the film days was of a big, national shoot my company was doing for a hardware store chain. We were re-creating a little league baseball game complete with paid model kids, chaperones, make-up people, assistants and the like for a series of print ads. On the afternoon of the shoot we had an unexpected sand storm move into the area. Or a dust storm. Or maybe it was a storm of small, windswept particles. We were already on site when the sky turned orangish and the contrast lowered must enough to make everything look really, really good on film. Nobody was suffering respiratory distress and most people were successful at keeping the flying particulates out of their eyes so we continued on, taking advantage of very dramatic and unique lighting. 

We were shooting with industry standard Hasselblad film cameras. 500 C/Ms. No electronics, just lots of gears and stuff with fine mechanical tolerances. And very much not weather sealed.  After the first few set-ups the camera I was shooting with locked up. Died. Refused to cycle. The client looked .... very concerned.  I reached into one of our big, rolling Pelican cases and pulled out a second 500 C/M camera body with an attached lens and we shot without issue for the next hour until the flying particles infiltrated the second body and it ground to a stop. At this point the client-side art director gulped and was certain the shoot was over --- and we still had six or seven critical set-ups to shoot. 

Back to the Pelican case for yet another body and lens which we used to get through the rest of the shoot. We packed up, drove back to Austin from San Antonio and dropped the film at the lab. The film  looked great. The client was thrilled and remembered and reminded me for years about how surprised her team was at the fault tolerant/redundancy that was part of our service. Over time that one client added about mid-six figures to our bottom line. Because we had the back-up we needed to complete a very scheduled constrained project in spite of Mother Nature's surly weather. Competency brought loyalty.

The three H-blads went into the service facility to get cleaned, lubed and adjusted. They served me well right up to the more mature part of the digital onboarding (circa 2002). 

But now? Now if a camera fails while I'm out drinking coffee, walking down S. Congress Ave. or otherwise just out screwing around? No harm, no foul. If a camera jams I'll be momentarily chagrined but I won't disappoint anyone if I don't keep making images that day. The camera will go off to service and another one will get the nod to go out on the next day. It's no longer an existential business crisis if a camera gets wonky. It's just a mild inconvenience. And I no longer feel like I need to carry an extra. Hard to change habits though. Working on it.

I have a friend who wants to trade me a really cool, L mount zoom lens and asked me if I had any M 35mm or 50mm lenses I didn't need anymore. Seems I had collected, in short order, three or four 50mm lenses and three 35mm lenses for the M cameras. I had a couple of minty Zeiss lenses that would be a good fit for his M needs. I get to winnow down the M stuff while adding a longer zoom. Truth is I might have just given him the lenses had he not mentioned the zoom. He's a good friend. Been there through thick and thin. 

Two big video tripods left this year when I realized I hadn't put a camera on either one in about 18 months. It's amazing how much stuff one accrues when doing photography or video commercially. And how much one can get rid of if there are no clients to worry about.

It may seem excessive, to anyone who hasn't had to depend on their gear to put food on the table, pay the mortgage, pay taxes, pay for insurance and put kids through pricey colleges, to have so many options at one's fingertips. But I'm proud that I didn't go overboard and buy a second SUV/car for assignment work. You know, a back-up car. Just in case. I could have driven one and the assistant the other on every out of studio assignment. Because you never know when a splooter valve will fail on your way to the client location. Right? What's that line called? OCD?

Now the studio looks twice as big...