For the longest time, I owned only one camera. When I bought a new camera, I just donated or gave my old camera away, and I usually hung on to a camera for years. In fact, I wasn’t really aware that many photographers bought and sold gear fairly regularly, or that used cameras were much …
I’m sure the readers of this website do not need me to explain what G.A.S is. I’m sure we’ve all experienced it.
In this article I want to talk about a little realisation I’ve had about my own G.A.S and the sorts of things that have featured on my G.A.S list over the past month or so. First of all, as the name suggests G.A.S is about gear but, I would argue that film forms a part of gear – after all, the cameras that I own wouldn’t function without it. However, for the purposes of this article I would like to add a third strand of G.A.S that I suffer from, and that is the acquisition of photography and art related books, magazines and other publications.
I am an amateur photographer, shooting family and friends and also doing outdoor / travel photography. I don’t think I suffer from GAS but I like to test gear, so I suppose I may suffer from GAS a bit. For my 50th birthday last year, I went for a Sony A7 III. Before that I tested a few systems, mostly Fuji APS-C format and some Sigma Foveon cameras. I really enjoyed them for different reasons but then I wanted to switch to FF and the Sony system because of the dynamic range of the camera that is really usable from ISO 100 to 6400, and for its autofocus performance for indoor action sports.
I’ve had a bit of Pentax SLR GAS recently. I’m not going to try and sugarcoat it, the reality is, I’ve just let myself fall into the trap of buying kit to solve a problem I don’t really have. It’s even got as bad that – at least in some cases – I’ve buying even more kit before I’ve really even had a chance to try the last bit of kit I’ve added to the pile. The unusual thing is, at the end of this path I’ve found myself with a camera I haven’t even bought to review, which is definitely the reason I buy most kit these day. Instead, I’ve bought because I actually think it might really suit me, in some ways at least. But I’ll get to that in a moment…
A couple of words about myself first. I’m a hobbyist photographer with about a decade of experience. I come from the “digital generation”. My first camera was a Panasonic FZ-something-superzoom I acquired somewhere about the year 2004. Ouch. This makes it 16 years old. Quite a painful discovery that is…
