Today’s Post by Barry Staver with Mary & Joe Farace
Let’s take a minute to catch our breath and talk about lenses, their price tags and our need for them.
Joe has always wondered why professional carpenters are not more like us in their feelings for their tools. Like us, they need expensive equipment to accomplish their work too, and cameras and lenses are nothing more than the tools of our trade. Yet while cabinetmakers may covet a new saw, they usually don’t rush out and buy one unless they can actually put it to work. That does not seem to be the case with photographers. We are more prone to acquire an item for the prestige of owning an interesting piece of hardware. Maybe carpenters would be more like us if they could hang an orbital sander around their necks.
One of the biggest mistakes many of us make when purchasing new equipment is doing so in anticipation of getting an assignment. Does this sound familiar? The phone rings and a client you’ve been after for a long time is on the line. They have a big job coming up, and want to know if you can handle it? “Sure,” you say, all the while realizing that you do not have the right gear to do the best job.
If you can cover the cost of the new equipment and manage to make a profit on the job, you may want to go for it, but only after a contract for the assignment is signed. But the way this scenario usually concludes is that our eager photographer runs out, slaps the new gear on his plastic and the job is given to someone with a lower bid. If this sounds familiar, you know what happens next. The new hardware ends up sitting in a corner or becoming a very expensive bookend.
In these situations, it pays to look at alternatives to purchasing new equipment: Used equipment is available at a variety of places. eBay comes to mind but many of the larger camera stores maintain extensive used equipment departments. Joe and Mary have had great luck buying and selling with KEH over the past, almost, 40 years.
Have you thought about rentals? Rental gear tends to not be as clean as your own personal equipment and occasionally will fail on the job. That’s happened to Joe when he rented a Hasselblad Super Wide back in the film days but haven’t you had your own equipment fall apart on assignment too? Rentals offer significant cost savings and you may be able to bill a client for the rental cost.
How Mary Made this Photo: Mary Farace made this photograph as part of assignment for a local construction equipment sales and service company that wanted to promote its service capabilities. She shot it with the same equipment that she used for her on-location portraits including using a strobe as fill plus a long exposure to get the welding “trails/” Camera used was a Hasselblad 500CM with 60mm Distagon f/3.5 T* lens, exposure unrecorded (it was part of a bracketed sequence) on Ektachrome 120 film.
This image was featured on the cover of the first film-based edition of Barry Staver and Joe Farace’s book Better Available Light Photography.
Joe Farace is co-author along with Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Barry Staver of “Better Available Light Digital Photography” that includes more information on how some of these images were created. New copies are available from Amazon for $21.50m with used copies are starting around $7.00, as I write this.