[This post is a ramble. Which is okay with me—I like rambles, sometimes. Ken T. doesn't like rambles, though, and other readers might not. So, up front: All it's going to say is something I've said before, that you shouldn't baby your camera gear, you should "use it up." That's the tl;dnr (too long, did not read) summary. There, now you don't have to read this and you can go cut your grass or watch football. :-) —Staff Writer Mike]
Saw a video about a car the other day. A guy—not just any guy but a talented and knowledgeable guy—spent eight years, and Lord only knows how many dollars and pounds and hours, hand-building an exquisite modified replica of a very rare Jaguar. The detailing is superlative and the car is gorgeous. If you like that kind of thing.
There was one thing that bugged me a little, though. In making the video they put three miles on the car, which quadrupled the mileage on the odometer. The car had one mile on the odometer when they started. One.
After the video, the car was off to the Concours d'Elegance at Pebble Beach, the top auto show in the USA. Trailered, obviously.
If I owned that Jaguar Low Drag Coupe, much less built it, I probably wouldn't drive it either. How could you? What a horrible fate. You'd spoil your work of art.
Some people have a thing about perfection. Other people have OCD (mild or worse) and really have a thing about perfection. (One of my many favorite book titles: Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect.) Many people are just "particular"—I like the hillbilly word persnickety. They like things a certain way. I have no problem with that at all. I have a buddy who was buying a new shaft for his pool cue and he wanted one that has a decorative ring that matches the decorative ring on the other part of his cue. Totally understandable. I have another buddy who buys a lot of guitars, and some of them he never touches because he doesn't like the idea of getting fingerprints on them. So? He owns more than enough of them. He has guitars he plays. If he has one he doesn't want to touch, that's up to him. It's his guitar. Again, zero problem with that.
But for me, just speaking personally, guitars would be for playing, and cars would be for driving, as cameras are for taking pictures with.
(I know, I take too long to get to the point sometimes. I get interested in the intros, know what I mean?)
Many months back I watched a series of videos by Tom of Tom's Turbo Garage, a guy who is both an expert professional mechanic and also a passionate amateur geek mechanic. Tom tore down a Mazda Miata and built it back up again according to plans and ideas he'd been developing in his head for years. There are some updates at the end that show him happily tooling around the back roads in his V8 Miata build. He tells us he's put many miles on the car since he finished it.
I keep my cars a long time, but the thing is, I like the status quo, where cars are considered slow-motion disposable. Buy one new or lightly used, drive it for a bunch of years until it's getting shabby and the repair bills start to hurt, then rinse and repeat. Well, let me modify that. I dislike it when cars are either too shabbily built to last a decent amount of time, or when they're so stupid-overcomplicated that they break easily and then are hellishly expensive to fix. Those are examples of the wrong kind of "disposable."
What I mean is, cars are meant to be used up.
"Using stuff up" is a concept that's a little difficult for people with OCD. I'll speak for myself, at least. That guy Tom is probably a little OCD, but he channels it positively. I'm probably a little OCD too—you have to be, to edit a blog for 47 years.
It's easy to get a little persnickety about camera gear. Many people love to shop, and "build the perfect outfit," and choose the perfect lens set, and find the perfect bag, and get all that just right. And I have no problem with that.
But then you can get into this uncomfortable zone...the Keep It Perfect Zone. Probably everybody understands that thing about the "first ding"—when you get a new car, you keep it washed and waxed and you do things like get down on the ground to clean off every spot of tar from the rocker panels. Then comes that day. You know the day I mean. You get that first parking-lot ding or chip in the windshield or scratch in the paint, which you can't fix yourself yet just isn't worth taking it to a body shop for, and from then on it's downhill.
The same thing happens to me with cameras. When they're new, I don't want them to get...well, fingerprints. Okay, not fingerprints—I'm not that bad. But I have this urge to baby them and keep them new-looking. I actually make it a point to get to that first ding, or its equivalent. I consider it kind of, I don't know, healthy.
I only have a little wear on my 5-year-old
X-T1. It's not for lack of trying.
Oddly, digital cameras come across as much more fragile than old-timey metal-manual-mechanical film cameras, and I guess things do fall off some of them or stop working, but, if the ones I've owned are any indication, they're actually not that easy to put much wear on. My old X-T1 has been battered and banged and wetted and dried and dirtied and cleaned and tossed and toted, but it hardly looks it. It's not even close to being used up.
Of course, I do have a couple of cameras that are for show, for decor, like my friend's untouched guitar or that Low-Drag Jaguar car. "Use it up" is a helpful attitude, I guess. An approach, a mindset. Get to grips with the stuff—wring it out—especially, don't baby it. For cameras that are "users," it just seems like a more useful attitude to have.
Mike
P.S. Usually, when I ramble, I'm talking half at myself. Stop babying that X-H1! might be another way of summarizing this post.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Bob Gary: "Funny! Good one. As usual, right on the money. Use it up, wear it out, make it last. Buy good, well-made stuff to begin with, and take care of it, my parents said. And when you’re done, move them along, with thanks for their help. When I get the tools out to work on a home project, I’ve told people sometimes that I had some of my relatives helping me on it, because of their tools I used that were handed down to me. I have my grandfather’s Kodak to shoot with sometimes, and I can almost hear him giving me advice...."
Alex Buisse: "I am with you on this. I take great pride on having well-worn camera gear. Babying my equipment is often not an option at all while shooting in the mountains or in a refugee camp. I have gotten lenses and bodies (including a Nikon D4) to stop working quite right, though never to totally fail, except for the one I literally dropped off the side of the mountain."
David Evans: "Re 'Of course, I do have a couple of cameras that are for show.' Of course? You must be rather rich by my standards. I have a longish list of cameras (probably starting with a Lumix S1R) that I would buy, and use, rather than have a camera just for show."
Mike replies: You can see my main "show camera" in this post. The camera was a gift from a friend.
Richard Parkin: "That’s one of the advantages of buying used, it’s already got its first ding and you don’t need to worry about it."
Peter Williams: "My favourite photography quote is, 'A camera is a tool, not a jewel.' I read it somewhere in the 1970s and cannot remember who said/wrote it, but it's perfect."
John: "With cars, I’ve learned to relax. Stuff will happen, so I take it for granted that it will and deal with it when necessary. With film cameras, I didn’t care much, but since I tend to sell my digital cameras after a while, I don’t really pamper them, but I put gaffer tape in places where they may otherwise easily get damaged. Same for expensive lenses.
"My pain point is fountain pens. I’m not a collector, so I use them, but I have way too many to actually use each a reasonable amount of time. So, I’m caught between admitting I’m like that guy with his Jaguar or get rid of the stuff that sees no use. And I don’t want to be like that guy...."
Huw Morgan: "Tomorrow morning, I'm going to get in my 1987 Jaguar with over 200 thousand kilometers on the clock and drive it from its summer home near Haliburton Ontario back to the city where it will be garaged over the winter. She's a beautiful car with a V12 engine that still purrs. Driving it is pure pleasure. Years ago, I parked it in a classic car show and a guy wandered up to admire my car. He had the same year and model, but with nearly zero kilometers on the odometer. He admitted to envy because I got to drive my car whenever and wherever I wanted to. He could only look at his car. My Jag is nearly worthless in the market, but it is priceless to me."
John: "There was a line from I think the head camera technician who worked at Life Magazine. 'The Nikon F is a hammer that takes pictures.' I remember taking one of my malfunctioning F's into the local Nikon repair shop and Rolf, the senior technician, came back to the waiting room to see me within minutes, the camera apart in his hands, 'There’s mud everywhere inside this camera.' Well there would be. It had been hot and dusty for a few weeks and then it rained, hard."
Darin Boville: "One important difference in 'use it up!' between old-timey mechanical cameras and today's is that the old-timey cameras are used up slowly, and eventually stop working and can't be economically repaired. Modern cameras can look beautiful but then suddenly be worthless if the electronics go. Used up all at once with no warning. (But, to be honest my Nikon D800E never failed me nor has my current camera, the Fuji X-T3.)"
Gary Nylander: "When I worked as a newspaper photographer you would not believe how fast I could wear a camera out, especially working on a daily. My first Nikon was a beautiful black painted F model. Aer a couple of years of daily newspaper work it was pretty well dinged up and brassed around the edges. A few years later I thought nothing of trading it in on a Nikon F2."
Ludwig Heinrich: "My Citroën C5 has over 350,000 kilometers on the clock (220,000 miles?) and the lettering has won off most of the buttons on my Sony A6000—I'm with you on this one. :-) "
