Too Many Cameras, Too Little Time?
Can you have too many cameras?
I have by most reasonable people’s judgement, far too many cameras. I’ve sold quite a few and I probably still have too many cameras. I’ll probably always have too many cameras. Knowing myself I have come up with a recipe that gets rid of a lot of cognitive overload experienced in the past with my “way too many cameras” habit. I may not have that many cameras compared to various points in my past. I may not even have that many, it’s probably more a matter of too many camera systems. I’ll explain my current state of affairs in a moment for you to laugh at, serve as a cautionary tale, or as a way for some of you to rationalize your gear closet. Before that, let me give a brief update on workshop openings.
Workshop Updates
Advanced Awagami Printing & Display April 26 2025
We have one spot open for this workshop focused on two of the most distinctive Awagami papers, Bizan and Unryu. Participants will take home two finished, mounted, ready to hang artworks. More information and registration is available over on Les’ website.
Black & White Workshop June 6, 2025
The emphasis in this hands-on learning experience will be taking a deep dive into processing your black and white photographs using Lightroom. We’ll cover creative and artistic decisions and how to translate those into great black and white photographs drawing from the tools available in Lightroom. More information and registration is available here.
Matting & Framing Workshop July 19, 2025
This workshop is filled, please shoot us a message if you’d like us to open another one this year. Additional information.
Intro To Fine Art Printing May 5th, 2025
Both scheduled workshops for 2025 are filled. For those of you that missed the first two in 2025 again please shoot us an email or message and we’ll see if there’s another date we can open this year. More information and registration is on Les’ site.
Portfolio Development Workshop November 14, 2025
We typically schedule this workshop 1/year. This year the Portfolio Development workshop filled up before 2025 even got started. If there’s interest we’ll look at squeezing another one in for 2025. Please express interest or questions in the comments or shoot us an email.
On With The Show
With that out of the way, here’s a brief walkthrough of my addiction to gear… In the beginning was film. As my photographic aspirations grew so did my acquisition of gear. I really didn’t change cameras but I started buying more and more lenses, wides, super-wides, teles. Then I wanted more quality, more detail, more subtle gradations. Along comes medium format, and more lenses to cover all the things. Two systems were just not enough for when I wanted the ultimate image quality… and now I have three systems the last being large format. It was quite clear that each of those was not suited to every situation. They were completely different beasts. This lead to keeping my complete 35mm SLR system and adding a small Leica M system as my every day carry. Truth be told I went a bit overboard on lenses for the M system but it was reasonably constrained given the M system from the 80’s and beyond was never meant to cover everything.