Stop Upgrading and Start Creating

Do you lie awake at night worrying that the quality of your current camera gear isn’t good enough to impress your followers on Instagram? Do you stay at home and browse photo sites rather than going out to shoot because you don’t have that special camera or lens that will unleash your true creative potential just yet?

If this is you, you should probably rearrange your priorities a little.

I won’t try to convince you that equipment doesn’t matter, because it does (and I’ll get to that in another post), but compared to practice, as in “getting out and shooting as much as possible,” the improvement you’ll see with better gear is minimal, and you’ll need to practice to gain any benefit from better gear anyway.

The correct way to unleash your creativity is to exercise it. Get out and do it. Look at the results and identify the ways you screwed up, then do it again. And again. Pretty soon you’ll find that you’re not screwing up as much as you used to, and when your own deficiencies have been identified, catalogued, and corrected as much as possible (you will always screw up from time to time … trust me on this, just don’t ask me how I know), then you will understand how better equipment can make you a better photographer. Armed with that new well-practiced understanding, a new camera, lens, or whatever you’re lusting after might actually help you to achieve the results you’re aiming for. But you need to be ready.

In the meantime, go shoot!