HT2738 - Your Minimal Kit

Here's a thought I'll title Your Minimal Kit.

Have you ever wondered what is the least amount of gear you can possibly get by with? Most of us spend most of our photographic gear selection time thinking about how much gear we can afford, how much gear we can carry, how much gear we might need.

We try to maximize the amount of gear so that we don't miss any opportunities, that sort of fear of missing out complex.

But I think it can be equally important to ask the opposite.

What's the least amount of gear you can get by with? This is a particularly important question if you're traveling or you have limited space or you're concerned about the weight of your gear or, and I think this is particularly important, if you want to simplify your choices in the field.

What can you get by with? Do you need two cameras and three lenses? Do you need one camera and one lens? Can you get by with just your iPhone? And how do you make such decisions? Do you make them based on affordability or complexity or where you're going or what it is that you want to photograph or the kind of light you anticipate you'll find when you're out there photographing? How do you make this decision? Well, here's an idea that you may not have thought of.

Go into your Lightroom catalog, go to the library, go to the metadata and look through your very best images, the ones you're most proud of, the ones that you think best represent your aesthetic point of view.

Not the ones you've sold the most of, not the ones that have won the most blue ribbons, but the ones you feel are your most pure aesthetic expression.

Look at those images and then examine the EXIF data.

I won't be surprised at all.

I've done this myself.

I've talked to a number of photographers who have also done this with their work and discovered the same thing I've discovered, which is a variation on the old eighty-twenty rule.

Eighty percent of my very best images are all photographed with the same lens.

And which lens is a function of the photographer's natural vision.

Some people just tend to see in wide angle.

Some people tend to see in a normal focal length.

Some people tend to see in a telephoto focal length.

What is your natural vision? And it's by looking back at your past successes that you can best determine what gear you need.

What's the gear that has served you the most and the most successfully over the course of your career? And by the way, is it trending in one way or another? Maybe you started off early in your photographic life using mostly telephoto lenses, but more recently you find you're using wide angle lenses a lot more.

And by the way, this isn't just a focal length decision either.

Maybe early in your career you did everything with shallow depth of field and so you needed really fast lenses and all your successful images from that part of your career were done with fast lenses.

So the question becomes, is that still true? Then look at some of your more recent successful images and are they heavily weighted towards those with shallow depth of field or has your aesthetic changed over the years so that your more recent images don't need super fast lenses because you tend to stop down a little bit and want tack sharpness? Looking at the past is a great way to discover not the theoretical potential of gear, but the actual success, the gear you may have used even a little bit subconsciously.

That is to say, you didn't really make a decision based on the gear.

You just made a decision based on the subject and how you wanted it to look in your photograph.

And as it turns out, you had the gear to do it and it made a very successful photograph.

Well, maybe that's an indication that will help you minimize the amount of gear you take as you develop your minimal kit, the stuff you actually need and actually have used in order to make successful photographs.

Curiously enough, I find most photographers don't know what is their most successfully used lens.

There's lots of opinions about favorites, but whether or not that actually makes the best photographs, that's a different story.

And that's where an examination of the EXIF data in your Lightroom catalog of those really terrific images provides an objective view of what works for you based on your natural vision.