Arun Venkatesan has lots of thoughts on photography gear:
The problem lies within the question itself. It’s one of those inquiries that cannot be definitively answered with anything other than “it depends.” It depends on who is using the gear. It depends on what they are using it for.
I genuinely enjoyed reading this entire post, thanks to Jarrod for sharing it. It reflects much of my own photography journey, especially the part about owning a Leica. Initially, I purchased all sorts of equipment, thinking it would improve my skills. To a certain extent, it did—I learned where I wanted to go and what I wanted my images to convey. Then, I scaled back, seeking something simpler.
After the X100V came an even smaller camera, the Ricoh GRiiiX. It fulfils my needs and truly fits in my pocket. However, this post isn’t about me; it’s about gear, and I believe it does matter to a point. An amateur with a point-and-shoot camera will not be able to achieve the same results as even a half-decent mirrorless camera will—but the question is more about the end result. Learning about what you want to achieve with the final image shapes the gear you ‘need’.
The issue with the realisation that you don’t need so much stuff often comes after purchasing all the things you don’t need. Buy all the things you want; it won’t necessarily make you better, but there’s a chance you might learn something along the way - it’s fun.
Ava writing about effort in their newsletter:
if someone’s much better than you at something, they probably try much harder. You probably underestimate how much harder they try. I’m not saying that talent isn’t a meaningful differentiator, because it certainly is, but I think people generally underestimate how effort needs to be poured into talent in order to develop it.
Whenever you feel yourself saying “I’d love to be good at that thing” - the answer is go and do it. Sure there is talent at play for getting to the extremes of things, but nothing replaces hard work, effort and dedication.
It doesn’t matter what it is, writing, taking photos, getting fit - just go do it and stop wishing.
Another day, another tweak I’m making to my blog. Today’s task, alongside sorting out the navigation to display better, was adding some content to my Posts page. On my old blog, this page listed all the tags I have and a few examples of the posts found in them, so I set about doing exactly that.
After attempting to write my own code to pull out the latest five posts from a specific tag, I stumbled across Max Böck Github repo with an example of how to display webmentions. This filter allowed passing a collection to it and also customizing the number of posts to display. The filter is as follows:
// Get the first n elements of a collection.
eleventyConfig.addFilter('head', (array, n) => {
if (n < 0) {
return array.slice(n)
}
return array.slice(0, n)
})
This made my job much easier, and the filter could potentially be reusable in other situations. For the time being, I chose to display the three most-used tags until I can clean up my imported posts from my old blog and integrate others than using for. As an example, to show the first 5 posts in my Reviews Collection, I use {% raw %}{% for post in collections.Review | head(-5) %}{% endraw %}
.
I use head(-5)
in the filter to get the latest 5 posts, whereas head(5)
would get the first 5 from the collection, i.e., the oldest posts. Once I have cleaned up my posts, I plan to display all collections here and make the code cleaner rather than repeating it three times. But as a stopgap while I do this, I am pretty happy with how it turned out.
James Somers encouraging more people to write:
More people should do what I’m doing right now. They should sit at their computers and bat the cursor around — write full sentences about themselves and the things they care about.
This is an old post, and reminiscent of many newer versions I have linked to but it captures what I experience perfectly. When I am motivated to write, and that doesn’t come easily, the world seems different. As James says about himself — I feel curious about things, with a desire to form thoughts and ideas about myself.
It doesn’t need to be great writing, I mean look at the state of my posts, you just need to do it. Let me know the things you are doing and what you find interesting. Set free your inner weirdness and display your motivations. Just write and the world will be right.
Really early on a Sunday morning, and with sore legs from a long run the day before I took my Richo GRiiix out in Grantham to see what I could find. The answer was not a lot, but I loved the cold air but nice low sunshine. This is where my street photography excels.