HONEY, I (SHOULDA) SHRUNK THE CAMERA BAG

By MICHAEL PERKINS

TWO YEARS AGO THIS MONTH, I changed residence for the first time in a quarter century. The actual implementation time for the relocation was in short supply, as the last weeks before the vans rolled were jammed with weighty decisions. Given that Marian and I were moving to an apartment half the size of our house, tough calls had to be made. I jettisoned thousands of CDs, hundreds of books, a Goodwill store full of outdated apparel and a crap-ton of assorted junque.

However…

I brought every single lens with me.

No tearful goodbyes for the various speciality glass and one-trick optical ponies I’d accumulated over the past twenty-five. And it’s not that certain gadgets here and there shouldn’t have gone to their glory. I just lacked the guts to push the button, and so a short life-time of gear and gimmicks made the journey with us, even as my ongoing evolution in technique had, in recent years, seen me taking pocketfuls, not bags, of kit on my shoots. To put it simply, most of the time, I use fewer and fewer lenses to do more and more. Many days, I go out only with whatever’s mounted on the camera. And, looking around, I am not the only aging shooter who’s come to that decision.

Closest thing I have to a single “go-to”, a manual Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 from 1977.

That said, I never really saw myself as a one-lens-for-everything kinda guy, and so it was amazingly easy to sell me on the wondrous properties of the next lens I’d buy. Surely that next hunka glass was going to address whatever shortcomings there were in my style and vision. And yet, I could be spare when I wanted to. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t make fewer lenses do more. After all, The Normal Eye was borne out of my exclusive use of a 50mm, or “normal” prime lens for an entire year, not to win a bet or a dare, but because my work needed re-grounding, a re-set after too many years of pictures that were little more than family candids. Keeping the emphasis on my own mindfulness rather than on tools accomplished that. Regardless, my interest in other, more specialized optics grew over time, even though I would actually use many of them only on occasion, and hardly enough to justify lugging them all around with me on trips “just in case’. Oscar Wilde, on his deathbed, reputedly remarked, “either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” Similarly, either my work was going to grow, or the goodie bags needed to haul an increasingly unwieldy arsenal of glass were. So it’s time for a little tough love.

I’ve spent the two years since the move going through the lens trove, attaching each of them in turn to bodies, and taking each out for a run to see if they really still justify their continued status as dust collectors. I already know that I am going to continue to run leaner in terms of what actually gets packed up to accompany me on shoots. My last trip anywhere saw me leaving the house with two, count them, two lenses total. That, for me, is crash diet. The question is whether I can actually divest myself of the extra junk or continue to haul it out for occasional sessions of polishing and dreaming. I keep hearing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s exhortation to “simplify, simplify” and contemplating just how much camera I actually need to get a given job done.

It’s a process.