Gear doesn’t matter until it matters

I've avoided writing this one for a while, because "gear doesn't matter" is possibly the most over-written topic in all of photography. Every YouTuber, every forum, every guy with a new camera has told you it's the photographer and not the camera. It's true, it's boring, and I don't have much to add to it.

So I'm not going to write that post. I'm going to write the slightly more annoying version, which is: gear doesn't matter, right up until the moment it does. And most people have those two things backwards.

The part that annoys me

Here's the thing that actually irks me. It's not people spending money on cameras (spend your money on whatever you like, it's your money). It's the agonising. It's someone spending three days deciding which camera to bring on a simple day out. It's the person paralysed over what to pack for a holiday, torn between two bodies and four lenses, asking strangers on the internet to decide for them.

Here's what that indecision actually tells me: you don't know what you want to photograph.

That's the real problem, and it's disguised as a gear issue. If you knew what you were going out to shoot, the tool would mostly pick itself. The fact that you can't choose means the question underneath it is unanswered. When it's a holiday, it gets a little worse, because if you don't know what you want to take pictures of, it's worth asking why you're bringing the camera at all (if the holiday exists for the photography, and you still can't answer the question, well. That's a different blog post.).

Yes, I shoot a Leica.

I know: easy for the guy with an M6 to say gear doesn't matter.

That’s fair enough. I shoot a not-cheap rangefinder with a 28mm lens and an off-camera flash on a cable, and I chose every part of that on purpose. So let me be clear about what I'm actually arguing, because it's not "gear is irrelevant."

My baby, naked (I mean without the flash).. and with the wrong lens. This is an old photo.

It's that I did the deciding once. I sat with the question of what and how I want to shoot, I answered it, and now I don't think about gear anymore. That's the whole point. My setup is settled, which means it's invisible to me. I'm not standing in a shop weighing my options, I'm out shooting. The freedom I'm selling you isn't freedom from gear. It's freedom from deliberating about it.

Why this particular kit

For the curious: I shoot 28mm on a rangefinder nearly exclusively. Not always, I'll swap it up when something calls for it, but it's my default and the one I reach for without thinking. It forces me in close, and I like being close. It's fast, it's light, and it lets me shoot intimately without a lens the size of my forearm between me and the person. But 28mm also gives me something a 35mm won't: enough of the background to keep the context, the space the moment is happening in. 21mm would give me even more of that, but the distortion starts to bother me, so 28mm is where I've landed.

None of that is a universal recommendation. It's just the answer I arrived at for the pictures I want to make. Yours will be different, and that's fine. The point isn't the number on the lens, it's that I have an answer.

And then, occasionally, it matters

Here's where I'll happily admit gear matters, and it's the honest part of the title.

Every so often I'll be out with my settled little setup and I'll run straight into its limits. I'll see a reflection I want, and realise a longer focal length would do it far better than 28mm ever could. Or I'll find something intricate I want to shoot through, layered and close and fiddly, and realise that what I actually need is an SLR, where I can see exactly what I'm framing instead of guessing past a rangefinder patch that's fighting parallax at close range.

In those moments, gear absolutely matters. But notice when it starts mattering: only after I know what I want. The tool became relevant the instant the goal was clear. The reflection came first, the "I need a longer lens" came second. That's the correct order, and it's the exact reverse of the person agonising in the camera shop with no picture in their head at all.

Women playing Big 2, 2026

Case in point: I was maybe 30cm behind the woman on the right, and through the finder she sat a little further over and barely clipped the edge. The lens had other ideas: she came out bigger and pushed further in, covering more of the players on the ground than I'd wanted. It still works, and what I had in my head still came out, she frames the circle nicely and her red rhymes with the woman across from her. However, an SLR would've nailed it, because I'd have been looking straight through the lens and seen exactly this, no parallax to guess past; I'd have known she was creeping in and slid over a few centimetres to fix it. What I got is close to the picture in my head; through an SLR it would've been even closer.

SO.

For me the whole thing collapsed into something simple once I stopped agonising. I know what I want to shoot, so the tool mostly picks itself, and the days I used to spend deciding just... stopped happening. I even think about what to carry out the door anymore. I pick up the one camera and leave.

That's really all this is. Not a rule, not a discipline, just what happened when I answered the question underneath the gear instead of the gear itself. The money I didn't spend on cameras I don't need was a nice bonus. The time was the real one, because it went straight back into shooting.

If the day comes when I want to make pictures this setup can't, I'll change it, and then settle again. The goal moves the gear. It's never once been the other way around.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some shooting to do, and for once no decision to make about it (before shooting, lots of decisions to be made when you’re actually shooting).