Why GAS Ruins Your Photography

Every photographer I know went through it, and so did I. Gear acquisition syndrome, GAS, is the constant pull to buy the next thing: a new lens, a new body, an accessory that will finally make your photos look the way you want them to. When I started out, I was always hunting. Something to make the camera look cooler. A lens that would fix my composition. A body that could do the one thing my current one could not.

It was expensive. It was also, I think, a necessary phase. You learn what you actually need by buying a lot of things you do not.

The shine never lasts

There is a real thrill to a new piece of gear. It does something your old one could not, or it takes a kind of photo that was out of reach before. For a week or two you shoot constantly. Then the shine fades. You start noticing what the new thing cannot do, and you start looking again.

This is the trap. The satisfaction is in the acquiring, not the owning. No camera ever ends the search, because the search was never really about the camera. There is always a sharper lens, a newer sensor, a body that someone you admire is using. If buying gear is how you chase the feeling of getting better, you will never be satisfied, because that feeling wears off the moment the box is open. You will not be happy enough. Not ever.

The paradox

Here is the strange part. GAS made me a worse photographer and a better one at the same time.

Better, because every new tool pushed me to experiment. I tried things I would not have tried otherwise, and some of them stuck. Worse, because I started leaning on the gear to do the work. Instead of solving a problem with my eye, with where I stood or when I pressed the shutter, I solved it by buying something. I outsourced my creativity to my wallet.

And it piled up. At some point I had so many cameras and lenses that just picking one became its own kind of paralysis. Too many options is not freedom. It is exhausting. I was burnt out by choice before I even left the house.

Get good with less

When you are starting out, experiment. Try things. But keep the kit small while you do it. One or two cameras, one for different situations, and one or two lenses for each. Then get really, really good with exactly that.

I shoot between 35mm and 75mm. That range covers almost everything I care about: street, travel, documentary work. Every lens I own lives inside it, and my cameras run from small to medium because that is what those styles ask for. The constraint is the point. When the gear stops being a variable, your attention goes back where it belongs, onto the scene in front of you. It is the same reason I only shoot f8, and it is the whole argument behind the Leica as the art of limitations.

None of this gear makes the photograph. I make the photograph, and so do you. The camera is a tool for getting an intention across, nothing more. Once you actually believe that, the next lens stops calling so loudly.

Buy the thing you genuinely need. Then stop, and go shoot until you have wrung everything out of it. The best photographers are not the ones with the most gear. They are the ones who know their gear so well that it disappears. That, in the end, is what film taught me about chasing perfection: the work was never in the tool.