MORE SAMBA, LESS GEAR!
By Julio Dubeux
Dear friend!
I am a Brazilian architect living in the Northeastern City of Recife (a collection of roughly four million souls that you probably never heard about).
Pardon the audacity of a humble amateur photographer, itching to offer his take on the so called ‘state of gear’ that we live in nowadays.
[A word about gear.]
With the currency exchange ratio aggressively tilted against my wallet here, for the most part we have to make do with older tech, ancient even, if you go by the velocity in which the camera makers spit out their brand new products.
It is somewhat funny listening to the influencers casting doubt about the future of this, or that brand, and the squeals of their users disputing it.
For me what is happening is simply that we have WAY TOO MANY CAMERAS ALREADY!
Albeit I'm not a professional photographer, neither myself, or anybody in my immediate circle, really feel the need to upgrade virtually any of our gear.
If you pour yourself a good shot of cachaça and really think about whats on offer it is really pathetic to justify spending all kinds of crazy money just to have a burst rate of now twenty shots per second in lieu of the awful eighteen that you currently have.
And they go about infinitesimal gains in refresh rates of EVFs that, our phone screen tired eyes could not discern, even to save our lives!
Oh, then, theres the extra half stop of image stabilisation, MY GOD, the absolutely crucial second SD card or the cats and dogs eye focus that one simply cannot live without. The onboard IR, 3D panorama and macro stitches, the capacity of shooting 8K (even though your audience will only check your latest masterpiece on a broken screen Motorola cellphone from 2010, nine out of ten times).
There is simply nothing that could, in my judgement, justify this crazy rat-race of gear lust.
I still use cameras that go back 10 years or more. Still working at 100% and delivering all that my imagination ask of them.
Leafing my photo books of Doisneau, Bresson, Koudelka, Leiter or Hass, prowling the streets with one manual camera, one lens, without any of these accoutrements, but still delivering images that we aspire to, prevents me from ever complaining about what I have at hand.
It is ridiculous listening to the moaning of people complaining of infinitesimal lacks of performance in dynamic range when you have Capa's D-day pictures in front of you.
Sometimes I think the limitations economics cast upon us are, in fact, a blessing.
It makes you work harder, adapt, evolve yourself, instead of your gear.
Lately I decided to do just the opposite. I've taken to impose ever greater limitations of my gear. Lately, going crazy on old CCD 10MP relics. I added to the list the original digital Ricoh GRS, Pentax QS, some first generation Sonys and Panasonics and you know what? Any of them proved to be more than capable to deliver whatever I had in mind. It just takes you to be mindful of their limits and how to circumvent their frailties.
I gather cell phones will never substitute cameras as they say. The ergonomics remain incompatible. If one decides to use just a phone, they probably would not buy a camera anyway.
Regardless of it, camera sales WILL continue to fall. There are mountains of perfectly good and extremely capable used gear out there. One have to be delusional not to take advantage of it!
When visiting the jungles, rivers or roaming in one of our miles of sunny beaches here in Brazil, don't hesitate to say hi!
(I can not be more that four of five days away of us having a brew).
Just in case curiosity pops up, I can be found in Instagram under thetimestandstill. Just knock on the door and I’ll answer.
Obrigado,
Julio Dubeux
