That proverbial sink
I was playing equipment tetris* for a job recently – a regular occurrence. It occurred to me that most of the hardware I was packing was ‘just in case’; contingency planning if something happens to go pear shaped or I encountered a situation at the very edges of the envelope. There are of course no excuses for not delivering what the client wants, at least if you intend to keep your clients. This means I basically had two complete Hasselblad medium format kits – including backup lens coverage – a set of filters, double the number of batteries and triple the number of cards, critical backups, etc. Add a spare tripod head and brackets to the mix, plus a day bag to work out of, and you’re soon seriously encumbered. This wasn’t even a job requiring external lighting, which brings the packed weight to somewhere in the 50kg region once you include stands and modifiers. In practice, for that once in a blue moon occurrence, you’re glad when you have it – but the rest of the time, your back is cursing you. The rest of the time, you shoot with one body and the zoom. There’s probably got to be an easier way, right?
*Attempting to fit in various camera bodies, lenses and accessories into the smallest possible volume for that amount of gear, but the largest possible volume that would pass for carry on – my record is 24kg overweight for hand carry, at which point Air France forced me to buy another seat. At full price. In one of the front cabins, because the rear one was full – and with a penalty fee for cancelling the old one. I definitely didn’t want to repeat that.
It was even worse with the Nikon kit – I’d carry all three PCEs because there are times when there are no alternatives; use each lens a couple of times (or not at all) and you can’t really predict when because there’s no way to do a sufficiently comprehensive site reccie beforehand for an overseas location to a level you can plan out every shot. At least now my TC and my PCE are one and the same – the HTS gives me a 1.5x multiplier and movements, and doesn’t take up that much space. There’s a tradeoff, of course: the simpler the hardware/ tool/ equipment/ whatever, the more focused you can be on making the most of it – and getting around the limitations to make something visually interesting. Not having it can be equally frustrating when the opportunity arises and you left that widget at home. That said, there’s no guarantee that if you had the widget you wouldn’t miss the shot fiddling with it because you hardly use it etc…
I actually find the same applies across everything – not just photography. You pick up spare XYZ thinking you’ll need it because it’s a fragile or consumable object that you use often…which inevitably turns out not to be the case. The things you don’t have spares for break, and often for want of a small part that there isn’t even a code for. We buy SUVs in case we happen to need the off road capability…which we never use. We cook extra in case we’re hungry, or have unexpected guests. There’s a spare bedroom in our homes for the two days a year somebody stays over. We buy the economy pack, even though it’s twice as much as we need. We hesitate because our heart tells us that we want the bigger, more powerful one, at the same time as our brains are telling us you’ll almost never deploy the difference, and you might as well save the money. We think we are much better than we are, things might be worse than they are – even though arguably human skills are the furthest biased towards comfort over raw survival than we’ve ever been – and that keeps the economy going.
I’ll be the first to admit that I enjoy driving (though probably not with any degree of skill) and can appreciate the difference between most vehicles. A friend recently bought a Lotus Elise, and I accompanied him for the pre-purchase test drives. I admit the experience of the car was so enjoyable – with every bit the anticipated tactility and feedback through the controls – that there was a period where I couldn’t shake the feeling that every motoring experience thereafter was somehow incomplete. Never mind the yoga required to get into the cabin, the complete lack of padding, the manual gearbox, the wheezily pathetic air conditioning, the rattles and shakes, the weight of the steering at low speeds etc. My own car felt like piloting a feather mattress on the way home, and it’s not exactly what most people would call plush. My wife’s car also needed replacing around the same time – there was a week or so where I seriously considered consolidating things into one Lotus and one beige box family wagon.
Alas, that would be pointless: anybody who’s been to Kuala Lumpur knows that the city is good for four things: a lack of public transport; legendarily bad traffic jams, especially when it rains, which happens often in the tropics; bad drivers who move without looking – let alone signalling, and of course heat. There is probably a reason why they have not sold many Lotuses in Kuala Lumpur – and it’s not because it’s a bad car; far from it. The Elise was probably the most enjoyable thing I’ve driven in…well, ever. It’s because as much as most of us want to indulge our hearts, even if we can afford it, our brains tell us we’re stupid. Or our wives. Or both. And putting up with the pain 99% of the time for 1% of the time when you hit that driving high (plus dealing with your wife being unhappy about driving a beige box for two hours plus of daily commute) seems, well, painful.
At the same time, there’s a problem with sensible thinking: it means avoiding risks and maintaining the status quo. Sensible thinking is the antithesis of innovation and progress; and without creativity, things get rather boring rather quickly. That’s the other problem with being human: most of us are also malcontents; whether that is a product of societal conditioning and the expectation for instant gratification with minimal effort or just the nature of being a self-aware and somewhat contemplative species, I don’t know. But I do know that as much as I try to be sensible, moderate and logical in all things, if I don’t at least turn it up to twelve – forget eleven – for something, I feel like I’m going mad. Fortunately, photography is somewhat cheaper than cars (actually, if it’s medium format, it isn’t). But the good thing is at least you can generate a positive return off your investment instead of just a tax write off.
Admittedly, at times it just feels wasteful – I have eleven ways to get to 85mm-e, for instance. Of those options, I only use at most three of them regularly – the rest are for the edge cases. And they’re not the options you might think – the 24-120 and now 35-90 rank at the top, with the 100 and 85 PC coming in close second. The Otus and 85MMG whose rendering I love – I admit a lot of the time I don’t have the luxury of a do-over or extra bag space, so they stay at home. I admit this bothers me, both because I know I’m making a compromise for the sake of certainty, and because it’s a very inefficient deployment of resources. My mind seems to value efficiency: minimum effort for maximum results – but my heart wants to go climb the diminishing returns curve, no matter how steep that might be.
I’m sure many of us are guilty of doing the same thing even when there aren’t any direct physical or financial resources involved: we take the shot, keep the variants, and take some more just in case. We never look at them again, but we do have to curate them out of the final selection. It begs the question of efficiency once again: why not just curate in-eyeball, and make the one you know you’ll keep?
The simple answer is one of experience. We have to experiment to learn, and experimenting by definition also makes waste. If we could retain 100% of what we learned, we’d probably be a lot more efficient, but sadly almost nobody’s mind works that way; worse still, no two situations are ever the same. And even if they broadly are, doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is the very definition of foolishness*. If I didn’t for example shoot with the Otuses, I wouldn’t know what I was missing with the other lenses – or that some applications (portraits, for example) work much better with smooth transitions rather than a complete absence of chromatic aberration. Others don’t – like architecture. Sure, we can shoot anything with anything, but there’s always the possibility for better, and more importantly, the possibility for different – and the purpose of photography is of course to see differently, and share that with your audience.
Or, death by corporate culture.
The oft-challenged (but never beaten) second law of thermodynamics states that entropy is inevitable – this applies to ideas, concepts and the creative pursuits, too. We have to make images that fail to make images that work: if every image is successful, then nothing is really memorable because everything is memorable. We’ll continue to serve as mules to our cameras and buy the next new model and a longer lens to assuage our own fears of just in case, and that one image we couldn’t have made with anything else that somehow also passes muster through the creative filters will give us just enough encouragement to keep doing it again. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t a frustrating and expensive process…MT
__________________
Masterclass Prague (September 2016) is open for booking.
__________________
Visit the Teaching Store to up your photographic game – including workshop and Photoshop Workflow videos and the customized Email School of Photography. You can also support the site by purchasing from B&H and Amazon – thanks!
We are also on Facebook and there is a curated reader Flickr pool.
Images and content copyright Ming Thein | mingthein.com 2012 onwards. All rights reserved
Filed under: Articles, Off topic 
