For the first time I used my little Canon G10 to do more serious photographs. Also, I've started shooting in RAW. I know that I'm probably the last person who was still shooting jpegs which is sort of a holdover from my newspaper years. We didn't need huge files for news print and were encouraged to shoot jpegs and had to be technically sharp, treating their delicate exposures the same way we had treated chrome, even slightly underexposing, a habit that probably won't be broken. Another reason is that I bought a bunch of new stuff: an iMac, PhotoShop CS4, and Lightroom which can actually handle RAW files.
I've never been a techno sort of person. However, I had the good fortune for years working with a number of colleagues who were and loved every new gadget, software or newer, faster camera or lens about. As a staffer, I took what I was given which was typically pretty great equipment. However I would've probably taken anything. I prefer small gear. In my last film camera days, I used to favor my personal Nikon 8008s over my company issued F4's. I remember buying a personal F5 and hardly ever using it, choosing instead my FM2 (which I still have but never use (too sentimental)). In all truth, I love the size of the G10 and if it had a few more of the SLR capabilities, it would be the perfect camera for me.
Recently, I've been listening to a number of photo podcasts mostly to learn about Lightroom and CS4 (my previous version was Photoshop 7.0). The podcasts are of varying quality, some with sort of loudmouthed techie guys that have wedding and portrait businesses (there's nothing wrong with that) and love stuff. They manipulate their images and do all kinds of things with Photoshop I would never dream of doing. They buy every new gizmo that comes out and can't wait for the next big item. They are typically like children on Christmas when they get any "insider" news from Adobe, Apple, Nikon or Canon about the next new thing.
To some degree, we need these guys just as I needed those wonderful techies that I used to work with. They're being played by companies to get excited and create a buzz about the next new thing that nobody's supposed to know about. Still, as much as I hate to admit it, the fascination I have with my new stuff and the list of things that I plan on buying makes me a bit of a "nerd" as my sister recently put it. The fact that my wife falls asleep when I talk to her about Lightroom is a realization of this.
Even so, the thing that I dislike about photography is all of the "stuff." I don't like lugging around big gear or having mounds of files to archive. For years when I was single and moved around the U.S. from newspaper to newspaper, I was a minimalist and typically took whatever my car could carry and would give away the rest. The movers from Florida to New York were surprised and pleased with just how little they had to do to move me. To some degree at newspapers, I loved the fact that I could just shoot, file my negs, put photos in Merlin or give them to the librarian to archive and move on.
I'm not sure who it was from our group not long ago who passed on an article about Sam Abell and how he would shoot with nothing if he could. I couldn't agree more. One of the reasons I love Cartier-Bresson is because he never diverted from his fabulous little Leica and a few basic lenses. I wrote some time ago about how I went about selecting my gear when I left the Times. The two folks who gave me the most advice were Tyler Hicks and Vince Laforet. Vince was all about getting two Mark V's and a bunch of big lenses, etc., while Tyler told me to get a couple of 20D's and some small lenses and talked about friends who were using point-and-shoot cameras for magazine assignments. I'm no Tyler Hicks, Sam Abell or HCB, but as much as my purchasing actions and camera lust contradict my words, for me less is more.
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