The first digital camera I purchased was a Konica Q-M100 with a 1 mega pixel sensor. This was 1998 and although the performance was pretty dire, the ease of placing those instant jpegs into my digital graphics workflow was a revelation.
Back then I was leading the family agency, with a graphics studio turning out thousands of pages of travel brochures. The improvements in 35mm film and our particular use case had already consigned the Hasselblad to a dark cupboard in favour of Nikon F4’s loaded with Velvia 50, the film of choice for depicting mass market holidays.
Then digital SLR’s arrived with enough resolution for litho print, and the significant cost of film, processing and drum scanning at high resolution made the switch away from film the only sensible thing to do. The days of lugging dozens of pro films packed in lead bags to protect them from airport X-Ray machines were suddenly over.
Everything had to be digital, so along with all the film cameras I even sold off the darkroom equipment for a song on eBay. Progress (and expenditure) was relentless with a palpable excitement as Japanese boffins presented next level cameras. Always a better system, a better lens, faster storage, more, more, more… enough! With a moment of clarity I realised that with the the last full frame Nikon SLR, the quality was now as good as I could use and it was time to get off the megapixel express.
Gear Acquisition Syndrome or 'GAS' is a common problem among photographers and I am as afflicted as the next person, however I do really try and avoid relapses (my search for the perfect travel tripod was a particularly ridiculous episode).
At the root of GAS lies an addiction to buying new gear which needs to be recognised and controlled.
So how can you differentiate between unwarranted GAS and an investment in your professional gear that will actually help your business; this GAS with justification is what I call the 'Tyranny of Better'.
For example I had started to eschewing my walkabout compact in favour of a shiny new iPhone Pro. As the saying goes, the best camera is the one you've got with you, and when I spot a scene that might be a useful addition to my stock shot library, out would come the phone. Considering that most of this stock shot use is online at no more than 900px wide, an iPhone RAW is fine. But then a litho brochure project came up and I realised that the resolution in one of my stock shots wasn't quite there with the desired crop; my immediate reaction was to 1/. go and shoot with a 'proper' camera, which I did, and then 2/. look at upgrading my compact camera choice and making sure it was always carried.
In reality, nobody but me would have been able to identify that the small image in question was not rendering as well as the others. The customer would have been happy either way, so was the purchase of a new compact camera and getting in the habit of always carrying it an example of GAS or the Tyranny of Better?
The answer here is that to my wife who looks after the books, it was most certainly an investment, so I can roll my eyes and explain the 'Tyranny of Better' made me do it.
Again.
