Why I don't like talking about gear.

"What brand do you have?" "Ah, I don't like those" "What type of light do you work with?" "You should buy this" "You absolutely need that" "You know you should use that instead" “Well I think that it’s crap, I use this” “A professional should have this”

I've heard a lot of those sentences in the past 14 years I've been using a camera, mostly from men and I wanted to have a little chat with you about why it's a talk I really don't like having, with men & women.

I've asked a couple of questions to a male colleague that has been in the industry for longer than me to have his more experienced point of view on the matter and I think we actually came up to a simple conclusion. In the general sense (notice the use of general please) men are more techy oriented than women, like Chris mentioned, whether it's cars, video games, photography… Men are more representative on that side of things, is it a bad thing? No, but I wonder if it's not a bit restrictive as well for them?

Let me tell you about my very first photography class in fine art school, we were told to get our phones out, and start taking portraits, that was about 8 years ago so we didn't have very good phones. 

What we learned was to do before we learned how to actually do it, in any class we had, we were told that not having gear, material, the right kind of paint, wasn't an excuse, if we wanted to do something we should just do it. And this has stayed with me to that day (it’s called the Macgyver style)

Gear is important, yes, but not that much, yes it will give you better photos, but only if you know how to take good photos in the first place. I will spare you the fact I had that yellow and blue fisher price camera as a kid and jump to when I actually started photography with a compact camera when I was 16. My photos were… okay… Like, what you would expect from a basic 16 years old who just learned to use a camera, lots of self-portrait, cats shots, saturated colourful stuff and a lot of macro photography.

After several years I felt a bit stuck so moved on to a bridge camera, a few years later, when I went to fine art school, my boyfriend helped me buy my first proper DSLR camera. Because I needed to evolve in my practice and felt stuck with the gear I had. I only bought the camera I'm currently using about 4/5 years ago when I decided okay, this is going to be my job.

But still, the only people I've ever talk to about gear were probably salesmen and once or twice to other photographers to ask their opinions about something I was looking into buying, but rarely, it's not something I talk about, because, I don't care, I literally couldn't give any f**ks, that is if I had some to give. 

You don't need a fancy camera if you want to start photography, you don't even know if you're going to like it! So keep your money, start slow, create, take photos, learn to see, to work with the light, natural, artificial, borrow stuff or rent them if you need. And stop. Talking. About. Gear. 

I also had a chat with my boyfriend who works in the videogame industry and we ended up realising that it was probably going beyond that “men like tech stuff”, to society itself, stay with me there. Techy jobs, even photography, have been mostly if not only handled by men in our society until quite recently, in factories, in garages, anything involving technical stuff, were men's job, of course, it's not the same now and yay women are presents in those industries (not as much as men yet though), but we're getting there.

But when I said I thought it could be a bit restrictive, well it’s because even now, women tend to be baby/family photographers (and there’s absolutely nothing wrong about it!) when commercial photography gets more men in its ranks. And I’m pretty sure we would all be talented as much in one field as another no matter our sex or gender… Because last time I checked, we don’t use our gear with our genitalia? (If you do, please do that in the intimacy of your house and don’t hurt yourself…)

The reason I wanted to ask about Chris’ advice though, was because as a woman, every time I've been given unwanted opinions about gear or had to justify why I'm using this or not using that, it was only with men, the fact that I look like I'm 25 (or less than that if you consider I still get ID sometimes when I get my groceries delivered without any alcohol in them) and fresh out of uni doesn't help so I felt biased to only see this as a "who's got the biggest" contest. There might be a bit of that, but I think, and it's only my personal input, I'd love to hear what you think, mostly because men and women just don't always care about the same things. And I can tell you something, every time and I literally mean every, single, time, I’ve seen a “what’s the best brand” debate on social media, it was 100% men, women don’t care, really we don’t, how is it important? Please enlighten me, I don’t understand, besides showing about your knowledge about xx which is better than yy?

I do think there's a slight "I know more than you" vibe to that type of talk, and you know what, you probably do, good on you, now, can we just talk about other stuff and stop comparing the length of our lenses? Pretty please?

PS: The first person to ask me “so… what camera do you use?” on that post get the naughty step