JeffreyG wrote in post #11530437
But
I want to be more creative. That's my problem.
I spent long years in the wilderness of 'magic box' photography with 35mm film and digital P&S. I picked up a digital SLR some four years ago or so and I started to really learn the details.
I'm an engineer, and the technical aspects of photography were pretty easy for me to understand. I understand perspective, DOF, inverse square laws, color temperature, triggering remote flashes, flash modification and the effects of size and distance.
But what is always before me as a challenge is being more creative and haivng a better eye. That's what I was thinking about when I started this thread. Those two portraits in the first post by me are just a part of what I mean - they are just boring, too tight portraits with DOF so thin the subjects could be anywhere.
You'll have to find what motivates you but I can tell you my story and how gear radically changed my approach to photography.
I've always been semi-interested in photography but I only took it up as a serious hobby early this year. I had for years a 350D with a super zoom and no particular ambitions. Last year I got a 7D in order to shoot video with it. It was fun and the quality was superb. I bought a pile of video gear and made a bunch of short films (http://vimeo.com/luka/videos). In January I decided that I should learn a bit about the lenses I had bought (a modest collection of mid range Canon and Sigma primes) by going out and doing some regular photography. I was amazed at the 7D's performance as a still camera and I realized that I could enjoy photography much more than cinematography. The latter is really not easy as a one man show due to the excessive amount of gear one has to carry.
So a second gear frenzy ensued. I bought L primes & zooms with the enthusiasm of an alcoholic finding a bar on a deserted island. I took a trip to South Africa and went on a safari and used that as an excuse to buy more gear, including a 5DII and the then new 70-200/II. That lens together with the 7D is an unbeatable combo. I was machine gunning away at an incredible rate. And sure, it paid off. I got some really nice wild life shots. This type:
At one point I realized though that while I was enjoying the photography itself that I did not really like my own photos and that my approach was really flawed. I was firing away in burst mode, without thinking. My image library was suffocating under piles of near-identical images. Sifting through them took forever.
This coincided with being very displeased with the soft corners of the 16-35 which had ruined a couple of landscape shots. So I bought a Zeiss 21/2.8 Distagon. This was the serious turning point for me. After a time getting to know the lens, I fell in love with it. The rendering was magnificent. Much more important though was that it is a manual focus lens, so as I took time to focus I also took time to compose the image. This made a massive difference in the quality of the output. I took it one step further and started using live view for exact composition and started using a tripod. After the 21 Distagon, I got five or six more Zeiss ZE lenses and a couple of other manual focus lenses. I used a tripod, live view and became very concerned with getting a good composition.
I've done my best photography that way and it's still what I know best.
The only thing that bothered me was the size and bulk of the equipment. I got a Leica X1 to use as a P&S but was disappointed by it. Its slow AF made it practically unusable. Still looking for a more compact system I got the Leica M9 a couple of months ago. I don't know if you've ever used a rangefinder camera, but it's a primitive mechanical device that has not changed at all in the last 50 years. You don't look through the lens but through a fixed piece of glass that has framelines that approximately indicate the framing. The M9 is a full frame digital range finder but it's in essence not much different from a 1940's Leica but with a digital back. The sensor is superb, probably the best on the market but it is in terms of the rest of the electronics exceptionally primitive. No live view, horrible low-resolution screen. It's painfully slow. No real 100% preview etc
In short you are not much better off than with a classic film camera. It's all up to you. Back to basics of photography so to say. The main benefit is the superb image quality and the very compact size. Despite it's shortcomings, it's a real joy to use and my photography has changed once more due to gear. A 5DII + Zeiss glass on a tripod is excellent, but it kills off spontaneous photography. With the M9 I've rediscovered the joy of just walking around and taking pictures of interesting stuff. No tripod set up and a camera bag that weighs less than one of my larger Canon lenses.
I started taking photos like these - essentially snapshots of stuff I found visually interesting:
The down side is that I'm still not as 'fluent' with the M9 as I'm with the 5DII. I have not reached the same quality of images in terms of composition and overall look. The frame lines are very approximate and what you think you are framing and what you get can be quite different. Wide angles are very easy to focus while 50mm and above is difficult as the frame lines cover a small portion of the viewfinder.
So I'm still working on getting better at the whole rangefinder thing. My idea is that if I can learn to fully handle the M9 and get the results exactly as I want them then I'll really be able to get consistent results across the board regardless of which gear I choose to use. The 7D + Canon zooms is excellent for action & wildlife shots. The 5DII + Zeiss glass is an unbeatable combination for landscape photography. The M9 is superb for handheld casual shooting.
Anyway, I'll stop here. The main point of the story is that manual focus glass forced me to pause before taking a picture. As I paused to focus I could also take some time to compose the photo and that in turn lead to a significant improvement in my photos. So gear limitations can indeed help you to break certain patterns that are not good for your photography.
