What is a Stop Worth, and the Meaning of Life

[Michael Erlewine]

I shoot for my mental clarity, not for others. Of course, I may show other folks what I am doing. I approach photography as an impressionist. I don’t criticize other’s photo impressions, and don’t benefit from others criticizing my photos, any more than I would criticize your appearance. No accounting for taste.

I have learned that even the best lens expert’s opinion (the ones I admire) may not work for me; typically, I have to see for myself what a lens can do for me. The photographer with the best all-around eye that I have ever seen is, IMO, Ming Thein.

I send a lot of camera equipment back, especially mirrorless cameras, so far. I used to save all of the lenses that I have “moved through,” so to speak, but I finally realized I did not want a museum of lenses I never use, so I have been selling them off. I don’t miss them and am not sentimental about lenses. I only use zoom lenses for snapshots and family stuff. Everything for me is about fast primes that are sharp and, most of all, highly corrected.

I am always teetering on the bleeding edge, wanting something that does not exist yet. Things I am (recently) thankful for are the ISO 64 on the Nikon D810 and the just-barely-good-enough LiveView. One Thing I desperately feel I need is a D810-equivalent camera with a great EVF and the ability to magnify the image in order to focus better.

I love Nikon camera bodies, but only some of their lenses, the more exotic ones, industrials mostly. Of course I have the Nikkor Trifecta, the 14-24, 24-70, and the 70-200, but I seldom use them. I seem to be very sensitive to lens correction. Most of my working lenses are APO lenses and have been for many years.

I am even thinking of selling my three PC-Nikkors  (24mm, 45mm, 85mm). They are sharp enough and fun to use (especially for stitching), but they just are not highly corrected enough.  Bummer.

I have tried many different photography sites, but this is the most interesting for me. I like gear and I like to see what others are doing with their gear. Luminous Landscape, another site I like, is now going subscription, but not charging a lot, something like $12 a year. Anyway, that’s my two cents.

[Ron Scubadiver]

Your wrong in you basic way of approaching this IMHO.
Please let us have our 1.4 lenses with being poked at.

Wrong is a pretty strong word.  One may shoot whatever they please.  My approach is there is a point of diminishing returns.  If you can afford it and have the desire, need is not a requirement.  In this life doing things which make sense is not a requirement.  However one who is headed down the road of needing a fix costing several thousand dollars every few months (whether it is photo gear, bicycles or guitars) and has no savings for retirement really needs to review their priorities.  Remember, this is the view of someone who lives in a country where our guaranteed old age pension is not much above poverty, college education is not free, student debt is approaching crisis levels and millions are hitting retirement age with no savings and no plan.

What I think you are saying about pros is the better ones anticipate what they will be shooting and have the right setup in hand.  Did I disagree with that?

I go diving and see other divers with $1800 wireless computers.  These are less reliable than a $400 basic computer and a $75 brass air pressure gauge.  The fancy computers have a lot of options for things few divers understand and may result in serious injury if one accidentally enables a different gas mix than what is being used.  The urge to have the best keeps these things selling.  I know people who buy $2000 wheels for their bicycles and tell me they can ride 5 km/hr faster.  An engineer will tell you the difference is less than 1 meter per 1000 at racing speeds.  It might make a difference in an elite race, but these are being used for training and recreational riding.  Those wheels will last about a year on the street.  Good coaches will say to train on second class wheels so you will ride like a rocket with the better ones in a race.  Am I a bad guy for thinking these people are silly?

In both of these examples people are indulging themselves and achieving a negative result.  It's like the opposite of Galen.  It is possible to load up with so much gear one either is hindered by bulk and mass or has no money left to go places to shoot something interesting.

I might not think like the majority around here, but does that make me wrong?

[simsurace]

Am I a bad guy for thinking these people are silly?

Your examples exemplify how susceptible people are to marketing claims, and how effective marketing is in distorting people's perceptions. But the issue goes even deeper I think. One could perhaps say that this is just human nature, and human nature can be extraordinarily silly. Spending money on the 'wrong' product* is perhaps the most harmless form of human stupidity, but you are right in pointing out that even that can have long-term consequences that are problematic. But maybe this behavior is a symptom rather than a cause of the greater economical and social crises that are happening?

* In the example of bicycle wheels, the tradeoff is speed vs. longevity, but for a recreational rider longevity is objectively more important than a minuscule gain in speed. Therefore the buying decision has to be accounted for by either exaggerated marketing claims or a heightened self-perception, i.e. the rider thinks that he is the next world champion, or indeed a combination of both, i.e. the product gives him the feeling that he belongs to the elite of bicycle riders and the illusion of being similarly fast. Thus the buying decision has become almost totally irrational. For camera lenses the more expensive ones are often also more durable, so paying more can cost you less in the long run.

[Tristin]

Good thing you're not responsible for their finances. 

I support other people wanting only the latest and greatest.  Keeps the used market cheaper for myself and others. 

[Ron Scubadiver]

Simone, it is a symptom.  The underlying cause cause could be described a lot of ways.

It is true that Nikon's pro equipment and even a lot of the semi pro stuff is "built like a tank".  There are other ways of wasting one's money that are even more harmful.  I know someone who bankrupted himself building a dream house in a remote part of New Mexico.  His folly was so severe it wound up costing his sister a bunch of money.

[Jan Anne]

For me life is too short for mediocracy, I've come to terms with the fact that I can not own or do everything in life so decided that the few things I do own are of high quality.

Besides bringing me joy and pride of ownership with each use, the longer lifecycle these items usually bring to the table is also cheaper in the long run but more importantly also a more efficient use of mother natures resources.

We live in an over consuming society that is so disconnected from the production of the goods we use and the food we eat that the majority treats them as throw away items not realising how much resources and effort were needed to make them. And because we want everything in life we buy the cheap stuff and throw it away when it breaks or is no longer needed replacing it with new cheap stuff or an abundance of food we don't really need.

Almost a decade ago I bought my first MacBook Pro 15", before it became popular by the masses to do so, and people ridiculed me for doing so because of the amount of money involved. That same laptop is still in use by my sisters family after their third cheap plastic laptop died in the 6 years I had the Mac, they only needed to buy a new battery and charger and they have been happy campers for the last 4 years. Same for my 6,5 year old MacBook Air and 5 year old iPhone 4, they aren't the speediest devices anymore for my use but they are still in use by friends and family built from roughly the same resources but with a little more design and production effort than the cheaper stuff.

To put the massive waste of food into perspective; the western countries waste more food than is needed to feed the one billion malnourished people in the world....

Not trying to insult anybody here but I do wonder how people see the world around them when they make a pyramid of food on their plates at a buffet, only eat half of it and repeat this a few times because the food has been paid for. Maybe because I'm raised to only take what I need but I hate throwing away food so much that I only order steaks in places that I know can cook them properly medium rare as I don't like eating overcooked meat and don't want them to make me a second one.

Sorry for the rant but thats what you get when discussing non photographic topics on a photography forum

[Bjørn Rørslett]

Well, I prefer this discussion at least to have an ectoplasmatic relationship and significance to photography. Ron raised relevant issues in his opening post. Let us take it from there.

[Ilkka Nissilä]

I think the f/1.4 lenses make sense to some photographers who are either making frequent use of the shallow depth of field (e.g. full body portraits need a wider aperture to separate the main subject from the background than head shots), or when photographing at night / indoors in available light. I do this a lot, with concerts, karonkkas etc. where I find often that I have to put up with a lot of noise or motion blur if using f/2.8 or even f/1.8 lenses. Every little bit of extra light helps.  In November or December it is typical that my ISO setting lives in the narrow window between 3200 to 6400. I just talked to a wildlife photographer who said there is often a very narrow window of opportunity both in terms of time (to catch an event in nature, e.g. bird attacks prey, 3 seconds of shooting after 16 hours of waiting in a hide), and light (in Finland the sun often shines from a low angle, which creates nice moody lighting but the quantity of light is often very low), so he felt it necessary to use lenses like 500/4. A 200-500 can do if you have enough light. In November-December in some years there is only a few hours of sunlight per month. That doesn't mean photographers don't want to make new images during this period of time. Also, in the summer around sunset and sunrise, there are several hours of soft beautiful light, but there isn't a lot of it, so again a fast lens and ISO 6400 may be needed to work with this light.

What can be used to save money is how many focal lengths you really need with a large aperture. A few well selected primes usually is sufficient even to the most ardent low light photographer. And no, they don't need to be zooms, if you're willing to work at the pictures.

In my country the education is free, day care and health care are both heavily subsidized. Retirement is collected automatically if you're an employee and you can't touch the money (and spend it on something else); the only way you get some of it back is by actually retiring. So, yes, we pay higher taxes but we can't quite screw up our lives (or our children's lives) by not saving in the same ways as someone living in a different system could. However, we also pay a bit more for our lenses because of the higher VAT. Most of the taxes go to fund these benefits that everyone in my country can benefit from, especially families that have small children get quite a bit of support from the state over the years. So the education you get is not limited by your parents economic or social status, although in practice well educated parents' kids tend to follow in the footsteps of their parents because they were brought up to value education highly.

[Tristin]

I would like to add that for some, faster aperatures are a need and not a want.  I love shooting local music in underground venues, which always have very dark lighting.  At f/2, I am always at ISO 8000 or 10000 and, even then, I often have to lift the exposure later.  Going with a cheaper lens for me means having to always shoot at extended ISOs.  For my uses, it makes no sense to spend thousands on a FF Nikon and then save a few hundred and cut my IQ quite severely.  F/2.8 is often useless for me, at that point I might as well just use my phone with it's flash. 

[Ron Scubadiver]

I must be spoiled by having too much sunlight.  Houston is at 29.7 North, within the Tropic of Cancer.  In the summer the sun appears directly overhead on a few days.  Next week I will be at 20.8 North.  Anyone want to guess where?

[Gary]

Santa's Village, helping to prepare the sleight and all the goodies ... ?

[Bruno Schroder]

20.8N is more likely Santa's holiday beach

[Ron Scubadiver]

20.8N is more likely Santa's holiday beach

There is most definitely a beach.

[schwett]

There is most definitely a beach.

there are a lot of beach candidates available at that latitude! maui, pv, cancun, even jeddah. i personally wouldn't recommend the latter

[schwett]

ron's original post is an interesting one, but i'll admit that i think the "concern," if that's what it is, is a bit misplaced. i highly doubt that the people who are buying a 70-200 f/2.8 over a 70-200 f/4, or even a 200-400 f/4 over a 200-500 f/5.6 are the ones who are imperiling the world's economic future, and if they are, it isn't from 5 or 10 or 20 grand in photographic expenditures. ron's politics and mine clearly differs, so perhaps the less said about the better, other than perhaps that the united states is fairly balanced in being both a low-tax country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP) and a low-benefit country (no "free" education, limited "free" housing, terrible "public" transport and national rail, etc.)

so i guess i'd ask what the concern really is? as michael noted, most amateurs don't take photographs for profit, but rather for the pleasure of it. if your DC bureaucrat gets more pleasure from photography with the 200-400 than the 200-500 or 70-300, that in itself can and may be both the end and the means.

those who chase only the latest gear in order to have a feeling of superiority, and derive pleasure from only that rather than the inherent pleasure of using or owning well made or well designed things.... well, i don't think there's many of those people on this website, and in my life i've actually met relatively few of them. they're probably not out taking pictures in crowds or at a freezing (or boiling) dusk/dawn/twilight, that's for sure...