Do you need new photo gear?

Photography, like most hobbies, needs a certain amount of investment to achieve the results you want. Plenty of camera and lens companies are more than happy to sell you new photo gear with the promise of better pictures. As a professional photographer with a limited budget, I only want to spend money if it will add value. The big question is, how will I know if a new lens or camera body will add to my camera kit-bag? This week, I will consider how looking back can help me look forward and decide what new photo gear I need and take advantage of the January sale prices.

Was there something I couldn’t do last year?

Looking back over the last twelve months, I consider that if I ever turned up at a job and didn’t have access to the photo gear, I needed to do the job. There were a couple of times when this was true. My lighting stands weren’t sturdy enough to cope with shooting outdoors. There were a few times I would have liked to have used an extra flash to a set-up to get a better photo. These real-life examples tell me I either need to make an investment or accept that I can’t do outdoor shoots, or get more creative with lighting. I decided that I had the cash and could afford to buy a few stands and an extra light, and I can see these adding value to my photography.

A wildlife or sports photographer might make a similarly easy call if their lenses don’t give them the reach to photograph the subjects they want to. These are easy decisions. There’s a gap in the creative process, which can be filled with additional photo gear. The decision is purely financial. Most of the time, the new purchase could be a new version of existing equipment. How do we decide then if we need to buy more gear?

Past behaviour is a predictor of the future

Over a decade ago, I worked in finance, and one of the most used statements I heard was that how people behaved in the past usually showed how they would perform in the future. It was generally shown to be accurate, and the same will be valid for photography. Adobe Lightroom is an excellent tool for editing and organising photos. Did you know it can also tell you how you performed in the past? Therefore, it can also be a good predictor of how you might use your gear in the future.

When you take a photo on your digital camera, you instantly collect a plethora of data. Your camera records many things, not just what you’d expect, such as shutter speed and aperture. It also collects what orientation you have shot in, the lens you used and if you fired a flash. All this data is available in Lightroom for you to analyse. To view all this data, head to the Library module in Lightroom and hit the backslash key (‘\’). At the top of the screen, you’ll see the Library Filter – if it isn’t there, press the backslash again, and it will toggle the filter on and off. Head to the Metadata section, and you can combine many variables to filter your photos.

What was last year like?

I can use the filters to see how I performed last year to determine if I need new gear in the coming year. Let’s start with camera bodies. I use two cameras in my day-to-day work: the Canon R5 and R6. By using the Camera filter, I can see that in the last twelve months, I have retained 6375 photos on the R5 and just 822 on the R6. Unconsciously, I tend to prefer the R5 despite concluding when I initially bought them both that the R6 was better value than its bigger brother. Strike off trading in my R6 for the Mark II version – I’ll wait until the new R5 appears (maybe).

Next, I wanted to determine which lenses I was using. Leaving the filter on photos shot in 2022 on the R5 and R6, I can see that I have used seven different lenses. Unsurprisingly, the most used lenses are the 24-70mm, 70-200mm and 14-35mm – the Holy Trinity of lenses. Less than 1% of my photos were on other lenses. I could also see that my 8-15mm fisheye hasn’t been used at all this year. There’s a candidate for selling gear rather than buying.

The next interesting thing to look at is the apertures I am using. Why? My 70-200mm has a largest aperture of f/2.8, whereas my 24-105mm lens has an f/4 aperture. Am I missing opportunities by not having that extra stop? Around 28% of the shots on the 70-200m used the aperture range bigger than f/4. Clearly, there’s a need to use wide apertures, but is this a thing on the longer lens and not appropriate for wider angles? To check this, I filtered on photos taken at f/4 on the 24-105mm to understand if an extra stop would be worthwhile. 15% of the 24-105mm photos were taken at f/4. Nearly 20% of these were taken at the widest focal length, so the aperture wasn’t having much impact on the depth of field. When I went to look at the ISO being used, a good proportion was at values greater than ISO 6400, with a quarter at ISO 12,800. Buying a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens would add value as I could reduce the ISO being used by one stop and produce images with much less noise.

Please give us your feedback.

I’d be interested to hear if you have used a similar data-driven approach to your purchasing decisions. If you’ve got any questions or comments, leave them below. You can sign up for the Edinburgh Photography Workshop monthly newsletter, where you’ll get regular updates on exciting things happening in photography and some great tips. Sign up by clicking here.

About the author

As well as running Edinburgh Photography Workshop, Rich Dyson is a professional photographer. His photographs are regularly used in newspapers such as The Times, Guardian and Daily Telegraph. He also had two solo exhibitions and was featured in a members-sponsored exhibition in the Scottish Parliament. You can see and buy his photography at richdysonphotography.com.