Let’s Talk Gear
In the world of photography there really is a huge emphasis on gear. You can see it all over Youtube. What camera body should you get? What sensor size should you try? What lenses are the best starter lenses? What lens should you upgrade to? What’s the next greatest thing your camera system’s manufacturer is putting out that you MUST have?
These are all topics of videos and articles I’ve digested over the first year of my photographic journey. When I take a step back from this thought process, I realize I was getting a tad obsessed. I wanted to try new niches of photography, and oftentimes that led me to buying a new lens with a new focal length to toy around with. By the start of 2023 I had amassed, in terms of lenses, a 75-300mm, a 15-85mm, a 24-70mm, a 50mm, an 85mm, and a 70-200mm.
Were all of those bad purchases? No. In order to further educate myself on my DSLR, in my case the Canon EOS Rebel T7, I needed to upgrade from the (let’s face it) silly plastic 18-55mm kit lens they toss into the box with the camera body. So my answer was to pick up the 15-85mm and the 75-300mm as a duo to cover a wide range from ultra-wide to super telephoto. The lesson here is that the 75-300, while not a bad lens, is limited to tripod usage only due to its lack of image stabilization. The 15-85mm was a very good lens to practice finding what focal length I was most drawn to.
The next step, for me, was to refine the focal length I was shooting at to a versatile 24-70mm. If you’re a photographer, you’ll hear this lens’ focal length tossed around a lot. There are “cheap” 24-70s and expensive 24-70s. In theory, this focal range covers the way the human eye sees the world quite well, so it’s virtually a standard to have in a lens lineup.
But those aforementioned lenses are all zoom lenses. The other side of lenses are set focal lengths, or “primes”. The no-brainer purchase for me was to acquire a little 50mm lens with a very fast aperture of f1.8. To this day, I still use this lens in my go-to street photography setup. It’s small, light, and unobtrusive. Plus, I find 50mm to be the dead-center focal length for tight, but not too-tight, images.
Here’s where I’ll pause and breathe for a second. All these lenses I have mentioned are for the Canon EF mount; in short, the EF mount is on all Canon’s DSLRs. Modern cameras are mirrorless, so Canon’s new system has a different mount: the RF. I had made the jump relatively recently to Canon’s entry-level mirrorless camera body, the EOS RP, and thus I picked up my first RF mount lens to compliment that. I bought an 85mm macro lens. I don’t want to be too hyperbolic, but the results I’ve gotten using this 85mm the past 2 months have been night-and-day compared to my EF lenses (minus my 70-200mm, but that’s besides the point).
This new, ultra sharp, versatile, native lens for my Canon RP made me step all the way back from how I was going about buying gear. I had excess lenses. Lenses I actually never even take out with me anymore because I’d purchased better, faster glass that worked for me where I am in my journey now. So, thanks to a helpful introduction to a certain lens at a recent studio photography meetup (thanks Ethan!), I sold the 75-300mm, the 15-85mm, and the 24-70mm.
But this wasn’t just a house-cleaning snap decision. I created a plan for what I wanted to shoot with while having less to carry around. So I purchased a big, bad RF 24-105mm “L” lens. This lens is an affordable trade-off for me after selling off lenses which are all encompassed by the L lens’s focal range, and then some. The ideology here is this: I will virtually leave the 24-105mm lens on my camera at all times. My 85mm lens is perfect for both portrait work (a niche I’m starting to get into) and tight street photography. For the landscape side of things, I have my Tamron EF 70-200mm; though this lens is less versatile for handheld shooting, it will be getting plenty of use on outings such as a trip to Utah I have planned for this summer. And, of course, I kept my 50mm lens because you really cannot go wrong having one in your bag.
With this gear shakeup I now have a 3-lens setup and can comfortably pop my camera in my bag for an outing without having to think about what lenses will be good for the shoot. Ultimately, I believe this is how the camera industry gets you. It’s easy to get caught up thinking about gear, and soon enough you’ll be stuck thinking about what to bring with you to an outing or a shoot rather than just grabbing your camera and thinking about what to shoot.
Now, this isn’t a sales pitch for any particular lens I’ve mentioned in this blog. That’d make this post the same as any of the previously mentioned Youtube videos. What I do want to convey is that owning every focal length under the sun isn’t important. What is important is having lenses which match how you see the world and eliminate gear nit-picking when you want to go out and shoot. Get the best bang for your buck you can afford, and get out and shoot!
