I have GAS!

Last 45 days:

5D2
300 f2.8L IS
1.4x TC II

korrektor wrote in post #8400460
What I don't understand is that people getting lenses and "better" cameras while their skills are pretty much stay on the same level for years. It makes me sad because purchasing for the sake of purchasing is a disease.

Interesting. If you took all the images posted on this forum and gave an average mark out of 10, what would it be? I'd say about '5'. And yet., if you added up the cost of all the equipment owned what would the average score be?

nemo man wrote in post #8412059
Interesting. If you took all the images posted on this forum and gave an average mark out of 10, what would it be? I'd say about '5'. And yet., if you added up the cost of all the equipment owned what would the average score be?

I'd guess that the average $$$ spent is $4000/potner and the average rating of the photos is 4 out of 10 (equivalent to 2 out of 5 on the LR scale).

nemo man wrote in post #8412059
Interesting. If you took all the images posted on this forum and gave an average mark out of 10, what would it be? I'd say about '5'. And yet., if you added up the cost of all the equipment owned what would the average score be?

yes, people spend lots of money on gear they don't even need. Or think that they need it... but hey, it drives the Japanese economy and it can't be too bad
I honestly don't really care too much about this. If you own a Lambo it doesn't qualify you as a fast driver.

nemo man wrote in post #8412059
Interesting. If you took all the images posted on this forum and gave an average mark out of 10, what would it be? I'd say about '5'. And yet., if you added up the cost of all the equipment owned what would the average score be?

[geeking out here]
The problem is that comparing the mean of these two variables is misleading because it is almost certain that the underlying distributions are not similar. That is to say, the distribution of subjective scores of a member's images on a scale of 0-10 is not the same as the distribution of the total cost of gear owned by each member.

The image score variable is probably best modeled as a hypergeometric distribution (if scores are only allowed to be whole numbers) or beta (if continuous), whereas the cost distribution is probably gamma.

Because of this, it is misleading to compare the means of these two variables since it tells us very little about how values are skewed or distributed about the mean. You could have a vast number of people with total cost of gear < $2000, but a handful of pros with gear > $20000 would affect the mean to give the impression that the average photographer carries more expensive gear than they actually do. It also tells us very little about how each individual photographer's image score per $1K gear is correlated.

Constructing an appropriate and meaningful measure to describe how much contribution one's equipment has to the quality of the art produced is not a trivial task.
[/geek]