Selecting the right tool

I firmly believe that photography is an art. As an art it appeals to the creative  and intuitive portion of the brain and  feeds and grows off the  fluid and fickle nature of us all. But scratch many a photographer and you find gear hounds.  As much as we chaff under when someone says  that is a nice picture  you must have a nice  camera.  We find ourselves lovingly gazing at new piece of tech that emerges in the hopes that it will bring a  new weapon in our arsenal to craft a wonderful story.

 I am not so much talking about getting new equipment as pondering how do we choose what tool do we use for each assignment. It is very easy to say let's bring it all.  And we lug this enormous pack with us which grows heavier year by year because we want to have the right tool for each situation.  I think sometimes we need to scale back on the amount of things we take in order to make us better at using that which is in front of us.

 This means more than  every time we think portrait we grab our 85 mm or we are doing landscape and  thinking we need the heavy tripod. It means understanding how each tool works and how much overlap we might already have.  Sometimes by limiting the options we have we stretch ourselves creatively and in doing so learn our equipment better. I am by no means arguing  we can do night shots   on time lapse  with a 105 mm but I am saying maybe we need to open up the manuals to our equipment and think a little bit before we decide we need to pack  like we are about to scale Everest when we are taking a stroll at the Farmer's market in the early morning.