Hi, my name is Dave and I am a cameraholic!
Yes, I know, I am a professional photographer and cinematographer and, as such, you would expect me to have a fairly extensive collection of image-capturing paraphernalia. And I do! I have Canon for stills photography, I have Sony for cinematography, I have action cameras, I have drones and I have a multiplicity of other specialist cameras for things like 360 shooting, live-streaming and even 3D applications. And that would be fair enough, but I have also become a serial camera hoarder and that means I have a LOT of cameras!
The sad thing is, I never used to be. Back in the halcyon days of film (and even the early digital years), I would happily trade-in almost all my old camera bodies when upgrading to a newer model, heck, I even traded my entire Mamiya medium format setup when I switched to a fully digital workflow (big mistake – huge!). But over the past 15 years or so things have changed and now I tend to hoard cameras, which is why I now find myself with an awful lot of them.
So why the big change and why do I now find myself with cupboards chock-full of increasingly “antiquated” and “obsolescent” cameras? The answer is threefold…
Firstly, there is the sad fact that some of these older cameras simply have no realistic resale value. With fewer shop-front photographic retailers out there, the options for trade-in against new gear are more limited than they used to. Retailers used to keep second-hand stock prices fairly high, but with manufacturers releasing new models at all too frequent intervals, and pawnbrokers like Cash Converters treating photographic equipment as a commodity, prices are pretty much in the gutter. Added to that are the EBay “grey market” sellers who sell new equipment at massive discounts (even if the warranty status is dubious). EBay also used to be a reasonable channel to dispose of gear too, but their new policies on the sale of second-hand equipment means you are not safe from the scourge of the “try before you buy” scammers who purchase a piece of kit, use it for whatever project they need it for and then return it claiming it has a problem, at which point EBay issue a refund and take the money back from the seller without any recourse. I’ve been a victim of this and will never use EBay to sell equipment again because of it.
The second issue is closely related to the first, and that is with secondhand gear at low prices, selling gear you were probably using right up until the day you choose to sell it is basically giving your potential competitors an advantage. With photo and video work suffering from the machinations of the “gig economy”, it really has become the “race to zero” with far too many new entrants into the profession desperate to “break through” by offering to do jobs at ridiculously low prices which are unsustainable in any normal business model. Although they think that this will create client loyalty, all it does is encourage those clients to keep shopping around, driving prices ever lower. The reality this creates is one in which I am not going to let equipment that for me was “good enough yesterday” be sold for a fraction of its value and be bought by someone for whom it is “good enough tomorrow” because they could then use that gear to compete with me and befuddle a client who is hung up on the technology being used, not the person using the technology. I know it sounds crazy, but I have won out on getting jobs simply because I shoot Canon and missed out on some because I don’t shoot Nikon! As if it matters! Ansel Adams had it right when he said that the most important piece of equipment is the 12 inches behind the camera, alluding to the fact that it is the photographer’s expertise that counts, not the camera capturing the scene. This means I do tend to hold on to “obsolete” camera bodies for some considerable time after they have been usurped in my arsenal before applying the theory of Marie Kondo and “letting go”. Trust me though, it takes a long time for a camera not to bring me joy anymore!
I’ve alluded to the third reason I tend to hang on to cameras in both points one and two and that reason is I genuinely don’t think that most of these cameras are anywhere near as obsolete or antiquated as the manufacturers would like you to think. In actual fact, many of my older bodies are still superior to their successors in significant ways and the reality is that newer isn’t always better. Far too often, particularly of late, manufacturers have become lazy with new iterations of existing models, adding a whizzbang, headline grabbing gizmo, but losing the best feature of the original model in the process. With the mega-pixel “war” happily now a distant memory, most manufacturers are adding incremental changes at best (things such as video frame rates or touch screens) that allow them charge a premium but don’t necessarily improve the offering as a whole, especially if the dynamic range, shooting speed or other factors are compromised (or at least no better than the previous model). This means that gear can still be profitable long after it is “fashionable”, particularly if it has a very specific purpose, and that means it can be worth hanging on to bodies far longer than the manufacturers might want you to!
Of course, there is one extra reason I have too many cameras, and that is that I do truly love them, and I like to keep my favourites for posterity. But I’m not a collector, I am, as I alluded to earlier, a serial hoarder! To be in my “collection”, a camera must have been one I used at some time in the past and it must be in functioning order, still be able to capture images. But how do I decide what stays and what goes? For me, each and every camera has a soul, its own unique personality traits and its own foibles. Inevitably, at any one time I own multiple copies of the same body model, to make shooting easier and to make my post-production workflow smoother. But I always have a favourite. Yes, just like those parents of identical twins who secretly harbour a preference, there is always one of the pair that just seems slightly better “tuned”, more reliable or more accurate and is the one you turn to first, even when you try to balance the shooting load between the two. Having a favourite like that can create issues though, especially with balancing shutter counts, yet often it is the body with a higher count I keep in the longer term, simply because it was just that little bit better than its stablemate.
So, there you go – that’s why I have cupboards full of old cameras, some dating back to my earliest days of shooting film in the 1970s, but most more recent acquisitions I simply can’t, or won’t, part with, and why I have to consider myself a serious, unreformed cameraholic.
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