I'm always amazed at the high-level shit that even the most casual hobbyist buys these days. You can't even cook a chicken breast without a $250 sous vide, bespoke cast iron pan, and then slice it up with a $149 Santoku knife.
Now I'm hungry
They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does
31–40 of 49 posts
Re: They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does
#32As someone who does photography and videography, "Gear doesn't matter" is less about that the gear doesn't matter at all, but more that beginners tend to focus more on getting good gear rather than sharpening their skills, before they have the skill to use better/more advanced gear. A bit like buying really good monitors for audio production before you really trained your hearing so you won't hear any difference betw…
I'd generally agree however... I'm a drone photographer first, but wanted to supplement it with some ground video. Bought a gimbal for my phone. Wanted something smaller, so bought an Osmo Pocket. Bought a GoPro. Bought a GH5; bought a Ronin S. Wanted something POV, so bought an Insta360 Go 2. Found shifting bitty content to my phone annoying, so bought a new phone with stronger video capabilities. All the gimmicky options have paid for themselves on their first jobs, but in hindsight, I wonder if I shouldn't have just skipped most of them and put the budget towards something better than the GH5. Or better lenses for the GH5.
Re: They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does
#33IDK about photography, but my kitchen skills drastically increased when I bought proper chef's knife and device to make it sharp.
I personally think that keeping knives sharp is a sub-skill of cooking but a very unintuitive one at first, until you use someone else's sharp knife and all of a sudden things just click.
Re: They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does
#34On twitter I got sorta-popular mostly sharing photos of my life, documentary style, and a few are with a Leica Q2 ($5000). Most are with a Pixel 5 (or recently Pixel 7). People very often ask me what camera I used to take a photo. When they do, it's usually the Pixel! Maybe 80% of the time it's a phone camera shot. Of course highly specific gear matters for sports shooting (as he mentions) or wildlife shooting (telep…
I've shot content for a professional tourism contract on my phone. Helps that phone cameras these days are very good! I think what stands out to most people is when something looks non-standard. Usually that's because it's shot on a camera while everyone else is using a phone. But increasingly, it's shot on a phone by a photographer who's just using it in a slightly different way or who's edited it.
If the goal of the picture is to view it on a phone screen or print it on a brochure in small size, I am 100% there with you. If you want to make a print of the picture, then it makes a difference. The photo from iPhone lacks the details that my semi-pro camera captured. Same animal, similar distances.. but the photo from my semi-pro camera had the details when you zoom in versus the photo from iPhone was more a blob.
Re: They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does
#35Does 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.
The biggest thing that matters besides comfy boots is what type of skis (length and width). I personally use all-mountain skis which are, well, good in most conditions because I typically ski in the Midwest with trips out west. If you frequently hit powder and/or live near a mountain a pair of powder skis may suit you well either alone or as a compliment - don’t over think it too much. I highly highly highly highly r…
Speaking of lessons, I envy the kids who can join teams in those ski resorts, and the team coaches are usually regional or national medalists, who know how to drill fundamentals into kids. Adults are not so lucky. I tried many coaches or lessons offered by either ski resorts or by some ski schools. The coaches somehow could not convey exactly how one can go from pizza to parallel ski then to carving and finally to short turns. Yeah, they would give instructions like big toe small toe, lean forward, keeping upper body angular and etc. What they failed to do, though, is pointing out exactly what a series of drills that one can do to make progress.
Re: They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does
#36A common sentiment in guitar/music worlds is "tone is in the fingers."
Re: They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does
#37You’ll realize gear matters when you stop taking shitty iPhone photos of everything and use a proper camera with actual focal lengths.
Upvote for the chuckle while reading. Yes, we can very much have a blind spot from using whatever our current toolset is.
People don’t really realize the level of distortion an iPhone camera adds to an image, forget trying to take accurate photos of anything.
Re: They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does
#38I 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 whi…
>I learned that compile/run/fix loop is a crutch
Why is this a crutch and not an optimal way to do things? At a higher level, this is TDD (maybe with test cases in your mind). Why is that a wrong thing?
You are ascribing knowledge to a particular process and that does not sound right.
Re: They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does
#39In ordinary photography, target selection eats better gear for breakfast.
Needless to say, specialist stuff requires specialist gear (e.g. underwater photography, fast sports shots, long-distance animal documentary filming).
For a lot of application scenarios, today´s mobile phone cameras are amazing for what they can do, how small and affordable they are. More often than not, one's best shots are spontaneous, and the only camera around will be the one in one's smartphone.
In contrast, in many sports (not chess, perhaps!), e.g. a better table-tennis bat matters enormously. As they say, a match won is attributed to one's technique, a match lost is blamed on the bat (never heard a photographer blame anything on their camera or wideangle lense!).
In software engineering and writing, a good laptop matters enormously. Among the properties { keyboard, screen, battery, RAM, CPU, SSD }, keyboard and battery life are the most crucial elements to me, followed by RAM and SSD size followed by screen and CPU. In the past, ¨faster CPU¨ would have been higher up on the list, but even today's slowest machines are already very fast!
Whatever you do, new/better gear make it more fun! So if you want your kids to enjoy the new school year, buy them new colors or a new school bag.
Re: They say that gear doesn’t matter, but it does
#40I 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 whi…
>I learned that compile/run/fix loop is a crutch Why is this a crutch and not an optimal way to do things? At a higher level, this is TDD (maybe with test cases in your mind). Why is that a wrong thing? You are ascribing knowledge to a particular process and that does not sound right.
It is a crutch because people rely on it to tell them what is wrong with their code instead of trying on their own. They can't tell until they run the code because they don't exert themselves normally, when programming. Just like driving exclusively with Google Maps atrophies the part of brain responsible for navigation. Why, if you have a compiler or your app to tell you in a moment?
Unfortunately, ability to predict what a piece of code will do, exactly, is pretty important for a programmer. Training this part of brain will make you a better programmer, overall.
Anyway, I do pair programming and people are amazed you can work for a whole day and run large new module at the end of it and everything works fine, as predicted. It is a good feeling.
It does not exactly save time, usually. But sometimes when I know what I want exactly I can do feats of producing larger pieces of code in extremely short time.
Once my manager asked me if it would be possible to implement a substantial, complex feature. He had a meeting in half an hour and he would like to know. I somehow immediately figured out everything I need and have implemented it in half an hour and did a short demo literally 2 minutes before his meeting. I have not ran the code before.
I am also the guy to go at my company when stuff fails and a piece code needs to be implemented on an extremely short notice. Like when a team broke a bunch of data and somebody needs to quickly develop a tool to undo the damage but without risking further complications.
It probably has something to do with ability to understand what you are doing and all consequences of the code. Also structuring the code and solution to the problem in a way that limits possibility for unexpected behaviour.