Do you spend thousands on your equipment and training?

[Loose Canon]

The carpenter would not do very well with a bread knife and dinner set and a piece of sand paper.

In the words of the Immortal Joe Walsh:

"There's two sides to every story"!

[rpcrowe]

I salivate over the 7D but, realize that I do very well with the equipment that I presently own.

I do pretty well with local community college Photoshop Courses which are totally free and I get a lot of my photo enjoyment from field trips with the two photo clubs to which I belong.

At my age, it may not be cost effective to buy a lot of new gear, especially when I am satisfied with the gear that I own.

I think that I will spend my money traveling to photogenic locations that really get my creative juices flowing.

My Spring 2010 trip to China was an example of this type of journey, I would go back there in a heartbeat but, my spouse says she doesn't want to experience the long air trip in one leg (San Francisco to Beijing is a killer)..

So, we intend to spend a couple of weeks, this Spring, in the Eastern portion of the United States.

My wife is a Westerner (California and Nevada) through and through and has never even been to our nation's capitol. I want to go there and also visit other historic sites in the area such as Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia and the Gettysburg National Battlefield in Pennsylvania.

Eventually on my bucket list of photogenic locations is Istanbul Turkey. Of course, a quick trip to the Eastern USA is a lot less costly than visiting Turkey. But maybe in 2012..?

[Donald]

Eventually on my bucket list of photogenic locations is Istanbul Turkey.

Highly recommended, Richard. I spoke there at a child protection conference a few years ago. We had a few days there, into which was built some free time out of the conference centre. A fascinating place.

[mythlady]

Ooh, Istanbul. Dying to go there. Many things on my photographic bucket list . . . an idea for another thread?

[Wirefox]

An important discussion,

Both important and irrelevant

Important because it reminds us of it's irrelevance and irrelevant because photography is not about cameras. As so many of you have reiterated it is about images.

Needless to say I do not have expensive kit so you may say I am duty bound to say what I have said. I do have a 40D and judging by the results obtained by the Dynamic (range) Duo from the Celtic Fringe it is as much camera I will ever need. There is a good point made above and refers to a photographer's style. The style I want to develop does not require high accuracy colour rendering, pin sharp lenses or fast burst rates. I may be a bad example here because I can honestly say that the camera is a necessary evil for me. The camera is both incidental and essential in getting me where I want to go. I do not go all dreamy eyed over gear and my trousers do not tighten at the sight of a 5D Mk II. I dislike having to wrestle with technical skills to get results. Why bother with photography? Why not throw paint at a canvas, grow my beard long and and wear sandals. Well its simply because I love the medium...certainly not the camera.

If I won the Euro Millions...would I buy the Ferrari Hassleblad? No, but I would buy a Hassleblad and much more. It would not make me a better photographer but it would take out a parameter of uncertainty that we all wrestle with...is it me or is it the camera. Take the camera out of the equation and we only have one parameter to improve upon..the photographer.

As far as gear is concerned none of this applies to the professional. If you earn a living off of this then you have to have the most reliable and consistent gear your company can afford. The investment returns if you are also a good photographer...actually it only returns if you are a top notch photographer. This is what confuses the hell out of me. If I make a living off of low to mid range services I could easily blow £20k and call it an asset. Then I do a quick calc..how many weddings or portraits do I have to sell to pay a wage, meet overheads and make a profit and recoup the £20k in two years. Is my business plan of 1 wedding a week and 2 photo sessions a day realistic...No. It is one of the few businesses that the proprietor will sink thousands of his own dosh into his business assets year after year. I can only think he does it for the love of it...and that is encouraging.

I do have one last observation. Based on general demographics I should receive my 5D with my bus pass

[MiniChris]

Nearly 40 years ago, I attended the Photinka show in Los Angeles thinking I would be able to glean great amounts of information from the pro whose winning piece was exhibited. This is what I learned: take a 35mm instamatic camera and remove the shutter spring so you can manually operate the shutter. Don't use a tripod because they get in the way, but do stabilize the camera to avoid jiggling. Shoot long, colorful exposures, especially at night and you too can win one of the most prestigious photographic shows in the world. I will never know if that is exactly what he did, or if he was just jerking my chain but the point he was making is a point I've long held myself accountable to: All the best equipment in the world would not make me a better photographer; experience, diligence, and learning would do what the best lens in the world could not. I'm still plugging along, still learning and still loving the art of the photograph.

[crisscross]

pleased you have a nice chat going

I wasn't advocating spending nothing (except on training, where I admit it is a bore having to have 5 web windows full of tutorials as well as what you are trying to do, but I was suggesting this could be avoided by decent tutorials with the software), just spending carefully.

[Geoff F]

Well after a lifetime of physically demanding work for little reward and having to make do with secondhand basic photo equipment, I am now trying to purchase a small number of better lenses for my 40 D.

As far as learning tutorials are concerned, I find that I can't learn anything by looking at a computer screen. For some reason the information doesn't 'sink in'. I have to print everything then carefully read it several times when it slowly begins to make sense.

Then I can keep referring back to the printed text as I experiment with a technical problem, which overcomes a lot of the difficulties of trying to look at two screens and getting totally confused.

I do have a lot of informative and interesting sites bookmarked for attention this winter; both photographic and wildlife identification. But keep finding so much else to do.

[dnperfors]

I didn't spend thousands on my equipment and training... My wife and I bought our first DSLR camera in 2008 a Nikon 40D which I still use. We mainly bought it because we wanted to be able to make more serious photographs, and the digital camera of my wife was broken....
Since then my wife didn't do much photography, but I became more serious and the first book about the camera itself came in 2009. 2010 was the most expensive year, in Januari I bought a external flash, because some pictures I took where really awfull with the oncamera flash. Before the summer I followed an online course for free and bought the videos afterwards. During my holliday in England and Wales I bought another photography book and a cleaning kit (since I had dust on my censor). My next buy will be either another lens or a tripod, but that will wait till januari
The software I use is completely free, UFRaw for processing the RAW files and gimp for cropping, tilting and exporting.
Basically I just buy what I need when I have the money for it. It is just a hobby and I don't want to take a loan to be able to buy fancy stuff...