Some tips on managing gear hobbies
Welcoming a new addition to my happy camera family: The Nikon Z6ii, with the superzoom kit lens. It's good! More detail on it and how and why I bought if you scroll down to the second heading.
This is Photo Newsletter, a newsletter about photography. I'm Nat Bennett, and I'm not a dentist, I promise. I obsessively take photographs and every week I share a few of them here. I often can't help writing some stuff, too.
Craig Mod is doing another pop-up photo newsletter until June 14th, about a walking trip in England. If you like this newsletter you'll enjoy that one too, highly recommended.
In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Room
Had myself some fun massively over processing this image. Again, I took this picture in a dark room on a goddamned phone. Truly we live in an age of wonders.
New camera
Unfortunately all the pictures I've taken with it so far I took in JPG, not raw, so I haven't been able to really see how far I can push the RAW images I get from the full frame sensor. Much more to experiment with.
Cameras are actually a whole separate hobby from photography, that I am definitely at risk of getting too caught up in. Some guidelines I follow on gear.
Buy one piece at a time. New gear is fun! Learning gear is fun! It's also, often, a lot, and it's more fun when I have the time to really focus on the new thing rather than overwhelming myself with options.
Set milestones. I had a mix of personal and photography-related milestones that I wanted to hit before I bought the next big piece of kit. This helps slow down gear acquisition and helps make photography-hobby related things happen. I now harbor an unseemly desire for two new prime lenses in the Z-series, which I am going to use to motivate finishing the next photo book. (And then probably the next.)
Buy gear at least two weeks before I plan to use it. Whenever I bring new kit, or rarely-used kit, with me on vacation, I regret it. I spend a bunch of time fussing and stressing and trying to figure out how to use the gear and it makes taking pictures much less fun. I had been originally planning to delay this particular piece until after I ended the contract I'm on, but then we started planning a big road trip for right after it, and I realized that if I waited to buy the camera until the end of the contract I was going to be fucking around with new autofocus settings on this trip and that I'd mostly be miserable. Now I'll have gotten the basics out of the way by then, and be able to actually enjoy the new camera.
Have a specific photograph in mind. This is probably the hardest rule to actually follow, but it really clarifies the research process and makes new gear more satisfying, since it ties it to a creative goal. I chose a Nikon mirrorless system for a mix of reasons but once I knew I wanted to get a Z-series body, knowing that I wanted to be able to shoot animals at medium range in challenging light conditions brought me to the Z6ii in particular. Its downsides relative to the Z7ii don't matter much in that scenario, it has some features that make it better at shooting action, and it's much cheaper.
Anyway here are some stupid pictures I've taken with this ridiculous camera. More soon!
