Gear envy. Yup, there's many a time I've been sitting in a photography hide (or blind if you prefer) with my, well let's be polite and call it "economy photography gear" and there's somebody else there who has been camping out in the prime spot since sunrise with a lens the size of a bazooka and a camera which is firing off about a billion frames a second, with a second camera, with an equally enormous lens sitting in a branded backpack beside them. Sure, there's a moment of loathing, I'm big enough to admit it, but that stuff didn't just land in their lap - they probably worked their ass off for years and years to buy that stuff, so that temporary moment of loathing says way more about me being an asshole than anything it says about them. And when/if a conversation strikes up then 9 times out of 10 these folk have been very nice indeed, generous both with their time and the information they can impart.
So sure, I wish I could afford £20,000 worth of equipment. It would be lovely. But it's never going to happen so there's a lot of sucking it up to be done. But this does not mean that I can't take outstanding pictures with what I have.
Like all material things, there is a law of diminishing returns: as the price goes up, the improvements get less. A 600mm prime lens costing £13,000, in the right hands, is going to take a picture which is unsurpassed. Nobody is going to argue that fact. However, if I can take a sharp, well exposed and aberration free picture with my £1,200 lens then do I really have any cause to complain? Yes, I might have to tinker a bit more in post processing, I might have to sharpen things up and I might have to get rid of some purple fringing and noise but at the end of the day I'm not producing massive prints of my pictures, I'm not looking for magazine work or anything in the pro arena. I'm taking pictures primarily for me because I like it, and they're only ever seeing the light of day on social media and in some cases in these articles. In the future I may look at submitting some of my stuff to a stock photography site but that's not something I've done yet so this is a wholly amateur endeavour. My point is, the equipment I have, budget though it may be, takes excellent photographs and any failings I've encountered thus far are not down to the gear, they are down to me and my skills, or lack thereof.
As I've said before, you are quite welcome to spend whatever money on whatever equipment you like, but over and over and over again I hear professional photographers telling learners that expensive gear does not make you a better photographer. Why do you suppose this is?
Is it different light hitting that £13,000 lens? Is it a different composition? Of course not. And because it's light and composition that make great photographs, it clearly isn't the gear that matters - I partially covered this back in my Megapixels Don't Matter? article.
Now of course with that said, you really can't be expected to take a great picture of a bird from a photography hide/blind with a mobile phone, they just don't have the reach, so in that respect, and in that respect only does the gear come into the equation: obviously you need the correct tool for the job, but let's be realistic, I could put money aside every month, I could save for a £13,000, 600mm prime lens, but why would I do that? In my position it's far more sensible to buy the budget lens (which does the job) and spend the £12,000 I've saved on a few other budget lenses to do their jobs (for portraits, landscapes and macros for example) and then spend the rest on some plane tickets to see the world, to get new experiences, and all the while take perfectly serviceable pictures which, unless we were to blow them up to immense proportions, would look as good as anything I could take with that £13,000 lens (maybe with less tasty bokeh admittedly).
Too many people think better gear will help them take better pictures, and I just don't believe that. A wise man once said "Every famous photograph ever made was done with equipment that wasn't as good as what you have right now." And that's certainly worth thinking about. I consider the video I've linked to there compulsory viewing.
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