They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does

> Of course if you see something worth taking a picture of then you need to use what you have available, whether that’s an expensive DSLR or your smart phone.

Except that some things are only worth taking a picture of if you have the right gear. (Yeah, the subsequent paragraphs kinda agree with this, but I do think it’s worth spelling out that for some sorts of photos, “the camera you have with you” may well be sufficiently unsuitable as to be useless.)

Does ski matter to beginners? Say, for a Ski beginner who can cruise light blue runs with ugly movement when carving? Should I just pick a pair in a certain price range, or pay close attention to all kinds of parameters.

I do some photography on the side.

I think the sentence describe it perfectly.

Gear won't take good photos. But it sure makes it easier if you know what you are doing. And it also opens new possibilities.

It is all good, IF you know how to use it. Probably the best advice I got when I started was to settle on a simple piece of gear, fairly constrained, and learn how to use it creatively. I settled on a Fuji X100s which is prime, non interchangeable lens. I learned everything about it for the next year and I am probably better photographer for it. When you learn everything about your fairly simple camera you can start learning how to use it creatively. The camera itself becomes your tool and you learn to predict what is going to happen and what is/not going to work in a particular situation. Those skills, for some reason, transfer when you change to other cameras.

Give my full frame with my expensive lenses to my wife and the pictures are worse than she would do on a phone. It is just too complicated for her to be thinking about the photo, not that she pays a lot of attention to the composition anyway.

So what is the application?

Whatever you do, try to understand different aspects of your craft and maybe figure out which of those aspects you are underutilising and how you could force yourself to learn them better.

For example, as a developer, decades ago, I was thrown on a project that required me to write a lot of code in a very constrained environment (embedded C, low memory, etc.) without being able to compile and run it. I was able to run my code once a week.

I probably learned more about programming working for 3 years on this project than I learned over the rest of my career before and after. I learned that compile/run/fix loop is a crutch that most people never wean themselves of because it is just so damn convenient. I learned that you can teach yourself to write code for days and then get it to work correctly on the first try (most of the time). I learned it gives you superpowers.

I can now barely stand watching people who can't predict what their code does, it feels so amateurish. I know I did the same and I know it was a chance that I learned it, but still.

It also makes your code much, much more bug free and reliable. Because QA/QC/code reviews, etc. only find certain types of problems that manifest themselves fairly easily. To reduce other types of bugs you have to create less bugs in your initial version because nobody will ever find them and fix them for you. Those bugs are still there and will manifest themselves in those rare occasions or when you refactor the software a bit. It also means when you are done coding the application is pretty much production ready -- there is no QA/QC phase where bugs are getting fixed.

Saying that gear doesn't matter is like old fogey programmers saying that programming languages don't matter. A good programmer can wrangle code in anything reasonably practical. And I say that as one of those old fogey programmers.

I mean c'mon, look at Golang. It is not a good language[0][1]. And yet, folks built k8s with it, and many other things.

It's like that with photographic gear too. Just like the best camera is the one you have, the best language is the one that all your domain experts can use. And if they're good at knowledge and design, but shitty at programming, golang it will be.

But it's also worth noting that k8s was not written in C++. Tools matter.

[0] https://yager.io/programming/go.html [1] https://xetera.dev/thoughts-on-go/

You can take phenomenal photos with just about any camera. Also: many photos basically require higher quality or specialized equipment. These statements are not contradictory. And they are actionable: as a beginner, it’s useful to develop general skills around exposure and composition with a cheap camera by taking photos that camera is capable of (eg plenty of light). I think of gear as enabling a certain kind of photo and my rule of thumb is that I don’t buy gear unless there’s a specific thing I want to do and I know why I can’t do it without that gear.