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Is conventional beginner gear advice not just wrong but even one of the leading causes of GAS?
A lot of people are being led to believe that focal length is a lot more important than it really is. Which is somewhat natural, it's a lot more intuitive than something like f-numbers.
So usually you will start with the kit 18-55mm on APS-C. Then you add a similarly lacklustre tele zoom and a wide zoom. Or a superzoom. Or maybe several low quality primes, someone told you they were sharper. And now you've gone and spent quite a bit of money and have more choices than you know what to do with. And none of them are weather sealed, so that limits how much you can actually be out and shoot. And when you do you have tons of chromatic aberration, distortion, high ISO noise, cluttered ultra-wide scenes and hazy ultra-long ones. It's just not fun anymore. So you try to fill the void with even more gear that you don't know what to do with, if you haven't financially ruined yourself yet.
Why not instead get just one really stellar lens from the start and stick with it? Maybe a constant f2.8 standard zoom, or a fast prime somewhere in that range. You can always get more later when you have the skill set to make use of them, but a lot of the great masters went their whole career with just one or two lenses, or lenses no more extreme than what is found in the said standard zoom, and it didn't hold back any of them.
What do you guys think, is it time to fundamentally reconsider what we tell beginners about what gear to get? What advice would you have wanted to hear before getting your first serious camera?
A lot of people are being led to believe that focal length is a lot more important than it really is. Which is somewhat natural, it's a lot more intuitive than something like f-numbers.
So usually you will start with the kit 18-55mm on APS-C. Then you add a similarly lacklustre tele zoom and a wide zoom. Or a superzoom. Or maybe several low quality primes, someone told you they were sharper. And now you've gone and spent quite a bit of money and have more choices than you know what to do with. And none of them are weather sealed, so that limits how much you can actually be out and shoot. And when you do you have tons of chromatic aberration, distortion, high ISO noise, cluttered ultra-wide scenes and hazy ultra-long ones. It's just not fun anymore. So you try to fill the void with even more gear that you don't know what to do with, if you haven't financially ruined yourself yet.
Why not instead get just one really stellar lens from the start and stick with it? Maybe a constant f2.8 standard zoom, or a fast prime somewhere in that range. You can always get more later when you have the skill set to make use of them, but a lot of the great masters went their whole career with just one or two lenses, or lenses no more extreme than what is found in the said standard zoom, and it didn't hold back any of them.
What do you guys think, is it time to fundamentally reconsider what we tell beginners about what gear to get? What advice would you have wanted to hear before getting your first serious camera?
