Never needed 'Pro' equipment

There’s a assumption that since I do a lot of photography that I work using a lot of

‘Pro’ equipment. That couldn’t be further from the truth. As y close friends and people who I’ve worked with have known that I tend to not follow the trend of having the most expensive equipment to professional work. I’ve always followed belief that its the person using the camera that creates the image. The camera is just a tool that captures that moment that the person is after.

I may have changed through a lot of cameras and brands over the years, but one thing for certain is that I never went for the top end of the range of cameras, because of things like money and not needing all the latest features. I remember from the beginning when I started out if a tiny canon 1000D. With the kit lens, funds were very restrictive since I had a bar job to fund my new habit. Slowly over the first six months, my kit expanded with the next basic lens a 50mm f1.8 and then finally a external flash which in my belief took the quality of my photos to the next level. It was another whole year passed before I could afford anything else. I wanted more lenses for my camera to open more possibilities for my creative side. But with the very little funds I had that kind of equipment was out of my reach

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Since I was still learning to use the camera through online articles and tutorials on YouTube, I come across a few interesting videos about adapting old lenses from film cameras to use on my DSLR camera. This was an exciting things for me since I always see old lenses being sold at my local flea in town. So after following some recommendations from YouTube about what adapters to get and what type of lenses I should be after. After a few months of collecting managed to gather a large selection of lens for about £150 all together. Some of the lenses I collected were just about as good as the lenses you could buy for upto £1000. The only major downside is that all these old lenses were made before autofocusing motors were invented. It was a trial and error to try using the small viewfinder on my camera to see what was in focus. So after a while I decided to not use these lenses for my professional work, since there’s a chance that I ended up in a miss-focused or soft image. Over the years I did sometimes go back using the lenses every so often because some of them had unique look which other lenses don’t give. When I finally moved over to using mirrorless cameras, I fell back in love to using them again because of my new cameras electronic viewfinder and focusing peaking which shows a dotted out line of what is in focus in the image.This super useful feature vastly my usages of the old lenses for a while.

Even buying new camera bodies I found myself always trying to save money by buying second hand cameras for a fraction of their original retail price. The best deal I think I’ve always got on a camera was my Fuji X-E1, which normally goes for about £350 at the time, but managed to get a auction won on eBay for £150. This was the main camera that I would use for the vintage lenses. The funny thing is how it already had an old film body aesthetic, so it was a perfect pair to use with old lenses. Even through I had the perfect to use still tend to not use the old lenses for pro work.

It was only recently over the last two years when I gained a more steady job, that money was a little bit more flexible and I could finally afford a brand new camera. But since I was so used to not having all the latest features and was happy with what i got, I decided to go for a camera for more the video side since I wanted to film more. So that’s where I am now using the Canon M50. Sometimes I do chuck on odd old lens every so often for fun with it. So at the moment I still stick in the mentality that I don’t need the most top-end equipment to get the job done and I happy to use what I have on me.

Canon M50

So for the moment I don’t think I’ll ever find myself investing in the top of the range equipment since I’m happy with what I’m using now.