Last Updated on 05/12/2016 by Chris Gampat
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It’s very true that many photographers can become addicted to photography gear–otherwise known as gear addiction syndrome. Essentially, it’s marketing and consumerism that fuels this in addition to the fact that they’re telling you that you’re not good enough. It’s possible that you may not be, but the only way to get better is to educate yourself…or is it.
Method 1
- Purchase a Leica
- Get a lens
- Get another lens
- Buy yet another lens
- Put it all on a credit card and worry about paying it all off when you can make money from your products
- Go out and shoot stuff without any direction
- Realize your Leica is crap
- Buy another Leica, but this time film
- Go shoot film
- Develop film
- Love 2 out of 36 images
- Buy more film
- Shoot more film
- Tell yourself that film sucks
- Sell your Leica stuff and go with Canon
- Buy two 5D bodies, 24-70mm, 70-200mm, 50mm f1.2, 85mm f1.2, and 135mm f2
- Go try to shoot weddings
- Hate weddings
- Get out of weddings
- Sell Canon gear and go to Sony
- Credit Card gets maxed out so use another credit card
- Now buy Sony
- Get two high end a7 series cameras and their beautiful high end lenses
- Realize you don’t know what you want to do with them
- Find a calling
- Shoot and try to promote your work just by blasting it out there
- End up in debt
- End up poor
- Sell gear
- Get yourself off of gear and just shoot with your phone.
Method 2
This method is much more practical and it’s generally the method that actual photographers who decide to make money from their gear and work take.
- Buy a camera and a lens
- Learn on it and save up money
- Upgrade lenses
- Save money and start to build up more of a portfolio of work using these lenses and with your older camera
- Buy a flash or off-camera lighting system, and learn more about lighting
- Start to do small paid gigs
- Buy second camera body
- Continue to expand the type of work that you can do
- Find inspiration
- Get ideas for more personal projects
- Do more gigs with the gear that you have
- Learn to edit and improve the images you create with the current gear you have
- Do even more personal projects and keep them separate from your commercial work
- Start strategizing to quit your day job and make photography your full time thing
- Plan budgeting accordingly
- Buy a couple of items that you may need to really start your full time transition to photography, but hold it off until you absolutely possibly can’t anymore.
- Quit day job. Keep doing the jobs you do with the gear that you have.
- Realize that photography isn’t about the gear even more than you possibly have.
- Break gear addition and don’t upgrade until you’ve got a genuine reason to.