Sigma announced a new camera today. It's called the BF (as in "best friend"???) and the whole concept is about making it simple. More simple. Most simple. It's an L mount product so it accepts all the L lenses from Leica, Panasonic and, of course, Sigma. It's got a full frame, 24 megapixel sensor, a built in memory of 256 GB, one USB-C port and damn few buttons or physical controls. No IBIS. No EVF. Carved out of a solid block of aluminum (a process which is reported to require seven hours per camera...). And...no mechanical shutter. The asking price in the USA, for the silver or black finish (no lens) is right at $2,000.I'm sure everyone here will rush out and buy one...
We read about Gear Acquisition Syndrome on every photo or camera blog, v-log, channel, website or podcast extant. Everyone constantly gear-shames people who want to have more than one camera; more than one lens or more than one anything photographic. It's almost as if some leading, charismatic influencer proclaimed on Digital Equipment Review dot Com over twenty years ago this set of understandings:
1. Every camera should be able to handle all kinds of assignments, genres of photography, styles of photography without exception. Any camera that isn't a de facto Swiss Army knife of capabilities is a failure and any divergence from being fully packed with features shall make that example of camera both a "failure" and a "deal killer." From sports, to portraits to large still life images writ enormous, and even to space exploration it shall be a given that a successful camera will do everything. Completely. Freestanding. You know, like demanding that an athlete be an excellent jockey, a world class basketball player and a champion weight lifter all in one. You know, the way most athletes already are.
2. A second understanding is that one camera body and one camera body style will be designed to fit everyone's hand perfectly. From a hand that can palm a small car to the delicate hand of a small child a successful camera will fit each with perfect haptics and happiness.
3. The third and most popular web corollary shall be that no camera should have a price that exceeds the amount that a person who makes mimimum wage can afford in any given year. Any camera that is more expensive shall be declared "Veblen" and stricken from all catalogs and consideration. We might also declare these offending products to be "luxe" or "over the top" or "insanely pricey" and we shall shun them like the plague. The are symbols of financial inequality. Talismans of greed and avarice.
4. One must embrace the camera he or she has purchased and use it for a period no shorter than four years with no thoughts of "upgrading" or "trading in." To do so is a corruption of the order of the photographic universe. A camera should be good for at least the duration of two of the manufacturer's upgrade cycles otherwise a premature change should be called out as "indulgent."
So, here's the real reason for G.A.S. (gear acquisition syndrome). Availability and opportunity. For centuries something like 98% of most populations had nothing like the income that most of the middle classes of the present enjoy. In the past men lived short lives; maybe half the lifespan of today's average specimen, and most of their time was spent acquiring food, shelter and heat. And none of these things was of the quality enjoyed by the vast majority today. The worked, ate what was in season and available, and then died of gum disease, on the job, by the time they were 40. Today, men have much, much more leisure time and live, on average in the USA, to about 76 years of age. If they forego hundred thousand dollar Cyber-Trucks, yearly large screen TV upgrades and eating every meal outside the house just about anyone can afford their choice of camera today.
The denizens of the 19th century weren't nearly as lucky in as much as there was no large scale access to personal cameras. And cameras of the time were costly, relatively speaking. We can almost all afford a camera these days, if we are working adults. The working adults who struggle with low pay don't have the luxury of prioritizing camera purchases with their budgets but the techie workers who dominate forae and feeds on the web can. And often those specimens spend more money on pizza and diet Coke each month than the average dentist spends on Leicas in a year.
I have G.A.S. but I do not suffer from GAS. I rationalize camera and lens purchase as product acquisitions that will make it easier or faster, or easier and faster, to make a good photograph or complete a complex photographic job. It's a good rationalization when it comes to working photographers because any advantage that can be explained to a client can be "profit-ized" to the benefit of the photographer. We also find that some cameras are well suited to using with flash for event work where other cameras with higher image quality are better able to achieve their potential in the studio. Still other cameras are better at making videos but poorer at making big, delicious raw files. Some lenses with very special characteristics are only available for certain camera lens mounts. And while some cameras are small and light enough to work with drones those cameras wouldn't be a first choice to make huge point of purchase, print images that will be commercially printed and seen, close up, as life-sized promotions.
I have one camera that does amazing images at very high ISOs. Come to think of it I have three different cameras that do great high ISO work. But they are limited to about 24 megapixels. That's fine for most work but when I do jobs for advertising clients who might want exacting photos at very high resolutions, for big print jobs, I find that it's easier to make sellable images with cameras that have twice or more resolution than the low light champs. Should I restrict myself to one or the other because of someone else's perception of how many cameras a person should own? Not likely.
I have big cameras with big lenses that are perfect for carefully controlled jobs, the likes of which must be lit and carefully composed. That's work. But I would never take those big cameras and lenses out on the streets to shoot casual images spontaneously. They draw too much attention. Require too much energy to carry around all day. Change the dynamic between subject and photographer. Rather, quick street snaps are usually better done for me with smaller cameras like rangefinders and fixed lens compact cameras. Cameras I would not be comfortable pressing into service for serious studio work.
I have friends who love to use large format cameras for "Ansel Adams-like" landscape work but who swear by their Leica Q2 cameras for family vacations and casual, walking around photography. Some even have other, medium format digital cameras for everything in between.
But these are the more practical considerations of the question. How different is it for hobbyists, enthusiasts, artists, etc.?
There are many out among us who would prefer working in one style all the time and for them one camera at a time seems to be the way they proceed. But even in that group there are plenty who want to make sure that the camera they use for making art, memories and documentation is the optimum solution for doing their work. Just as in cars, air conditioning, running shoes and so much more, improvements, ACTUAL improvements in gear are being made all the time. A person who started photographing digitally with one of the finer cameras around the turn of the century would have to work hard to make images at settings beyond ISO 100 to get results with low noise. The worker with a $7,000 Kodak DCS 760C camera who needs portability can do much better now by jettisoning the five pound load out of camera, batteries and one lens of the Kodak for a one pound Nikon, Canon, Sony, etc. camera now.
A photographer who needed big files for big work ten years ago might have had to work hard and long with multiple composited frames or spend much time working with noise reduction and enlarging/interpolating software programs of the day. Now? 60 to 100 megapixel cameras are available for less money (and with much better overall results) than my 6 megapixel cameras from circa 2001-2006.
And then there are the ancillary benefits for relentless camera improvement. When Leica improved the EVF in their SL line of camera they moved from 4 meg finder to a nearly 6 meg finder but they also moved from LCD to LED which made for faster refresh times and better colors. What photographer would not find that sort of upgrade valuable?
Cameras used to be considered normal even if they "only" had one card slot. Now they are the odd man out if they don't have two fast card slots. Would it be worthwhile indulging GAS to gain a reliable back-up of everything you shoot? Of course.
I also remember that not too long ago only the priciest sports oriented, pro cameras from Nikon and Canon were weather resistant while that feature is now almost always a part of nearly every good camera's engineering. By the same token, if you have been using a Canon camera for video and it overheated all the time would you consider it silly to upgrade to the newer model that mostly fixes that thermal fault?
If you have a Sony camera and you hate the labyrinth approach to menus would you scold yourself if Sony totally changed the menus to the point that you didn't need to carry around the owner's manual on your phone and it only required you to upgrade to a slightly newer camera? And would anyone blame you for switching systems if you accidentally handled a Leica SL3 and then were forced to go back and live through the relentless horror of the Sony menus again? Or the older Olympus menus? You might find that your G.A.S. was really your subconscious's way of telling you that photographic life could be much better!
Conversely, if you shoot video and you're trying to use C-AF in a Leica SL to follow a moving object while shooting video you might consider that Sony camera as a vital upgrade instead of a GAS effect.
But the real origin of G.A.S., if we consider the GAS to mean an accumulation of gear, or a turnover of new gear, lies in the early age of the home computer. We used those ugly beige boxes with those damn SCSI interfaces to do tasks that we used to do with calculators and typewriters. But they were slow, unreliable and costly. Each generation, following the fantasy of Moore's Law, got faster, cheaper and easier to use. Upgrading to new gear bought you back time. You were able to save quicker, print quicker, and perform the usual tasks quicker. And each new generation got more reliable. If one was in a challenging occupation and your job was time-performance driven, you got into the habit of upgrading whenever an improvement showed up. Faster processors. Bigger memory solutions. Nicer, bigger monitors and much more. Sure, there were and will always be geeks who just got off to the ever improving specs but most users changed models or sub systems to gain performance advantages.
And most of the early adopters and serial computer upgraders were men. And what is the majority of the demographic of camera buyers? Well, it's men. And since cameras are products that are perceived, at the professional level, as being costly, the market, over time has skewed to service higher earners with more eduction. A segment of the market that was pre-trained by the computer makers to understand and welcome the upgrade game with relish.
A writer in Santa Fe might have struggled to get the files he wanted from one system that did a lot of advertising but found themselves behind the curve when it came to implementing features the writer felt he needed. He looks to another camera maker and finds some advantages in their products. If he's writing best sellers and is financially comfortable the upgrade to a new, better-for-him system might be an almost infinitesimal percentage of his overall net worth. Give that his time is very valuable having the camera and lenses that make the most of his time is financially and emotionally sound. And some times it takes months of long experience before one discovers that a certain way of working in one camera just flat pisses him off...but it might take time with a new system to become comfortable with it. If he makes the leap and the new camera shaves off the angst of the one thing he hated about the previous camera then GAS has delivered a fundamental benefit to him as it's pushed him to have better. To have better to do better. And to be more satisfied with the end products. The photographs.
There are endless curmudgeons out in the world who would insist that you find yourself one camera, one lens and one system and then spend the rest of your time learning to love the system. About as logical as trying to teach left handed people to only write with their right hands... And almost as cruel.
The curmudgeons aren't correct. They are fossilized into doing something over and over again in the same way because they can't be bothered with continuous learning. And I sure hope one of them isn't your heart surgeon whose only tool is a scalpel. Technology moves on. In almost every field.
On another topic that goes hand in hand with these is the topic of why someone might buy more than one of an identical camera model. As in, "why in God's name do you have X number of SL2 cameras???" My instant analogy goes to clothing. If you find the perfect pair of walking shoes; ones that make you feel like you could comfortably walk forever, you know that eventually they will wear out. They all do. You love the shoes you bought but when the holes in the soles go all the way to your socks you know it's time to change shoes. You go back to your favorite shoe store only to find that the pair/model of shoes you really came to love has been discontinued. Replaced. Redacted. And the new model chaffs your Achilles tendon and pinches your baby toe on your left foot. In short, they are nothing like the model you loved for hundreds or even thousands of miles. Now you start the long and mostly fruitless search for another pair you can tolerate. And, of course, inflation makes all the shoes, even the shitty ones, seem that much more expensive.
But... what if....after owning the original pair of really wonderful shoes for say...a month...you decided to go back to the store and buy one or two more pairs of the same, indentical model and size of shoe? What if you had them dutifully stored in your closet just waiting for the inevitable decline of the first pair? My God! You'd be thrilled.
Owning multiple cameras is like that. And for the working pro it's exactly like having two memory cards in a camera or an extra battery in your bag. Cameras break. Cameras fail. Cameras get stolen. If you are on a job it's just logical to have an identical back-up camera to use to finish the job. Why identical? Because it's the model you are used to and can be most efficient and effective with. And wouldn't you be sad if you only had one and it was destroyed in a rock crushing machine and you went to the camera store to replace it only to be told that....the model has been discontinued. Replaced.
If you had your in-bag back up and another one sitting on the shelf in your office you could fend off having to undertake the new camera/new model learning curve till sometime in the far future. And, when it comes to cameras, even if you wanted to upgrade immediately to replace your destroyed camera how crestfallen you and your potential clients might be to discover that the logical, new upgrade cameras are relentlessly back-ordered and inaccessible for up to a year. Would you just take that year off instead? Or accept that you'd have to shoot for the year on a brand you didn't like nearly as much? I sure wouldn't like that.
Finally, it's all about personal priorities and personal circumstances. A person with a high net worth would not have to worry about the price of a Hasselblad or Phase One camera. Or the top of the line Sony. Or a Leica. For some very affluent people those price tags are a rounding error.
But what if you aren't as well off? Interesting analogy with cars. I bought a really, really nice and high performing new car last year for $36,000. The average new car price in the USA now is a bit over $50,000. Most people radically over buy when it comes to transportation. Big, SUVs. No fun to drive but with lots of space for ever larger rear ends. Imagine how many cameras the average Ford Explorer or Range Rover driver could afford if they had chosen to buy a more practical, economical car. A $25,000 Toyota Corolla would last longer, be easier to park, maintain and drive, and would, as a percentage of purchase price, be worth more when sold used. $25,000 extra dollars (even more with lower insurance costs, gas costs, loan interest, etc.) could buy you years of camera purchases. Either purchased because you just wanted something new to goose your passion for photography or because you found you really needed a new feature, upgrade, etc. It's all choices and priorities.
For some people it's important to own cameras that they THINK will make them better photographers. As my favorite Jedi Knight said, in the Movie, The Phantom Menace, "Your focus determines your reality." Sometimes a placebo camera can be just as effective a cure for photographer's block as anything else. And a far better use of wasted money than most SUVs.
Finally, It's nice to have a few extra cameras around for those times when your son, niece, nice guy neighbor, is going somewhere wonderful and needs to borrow a decent camera. Might as well share...
