[capableweb]

As someone who does photography and videography, "Gear doesn't matter" is less about that the gear doesn't matter at all, but more that beginners tend to focus more on getting good gear rather than sharpening their skills, before they have the skill to use better/more advanced gear.

A bit like buying really good monitors for audio production before you really trained your hearing so you won't hear any difference between standard and really high quality monitors.

The "return on investment" for sharpening the basic skills in the beginning when learning a new subject is much more important than getting the latest and greatest gear, as that won't give you as much knowledge and experience since you won't really know why it is the greatest gear, and how to fully leverage it.

That's why people say "Gear doesn't matter", because in the beginning, it mostly doesn't. Just like "Premature optimizations is the root of all evil" doesn't mean absolutely all upfront optimizations are indeed evil. If you're sufficiently experienced, you'd recognize when it's premature vs not, when it's worth upfront investment vs not. But for a beginner, it's easier to remember a simple dogma, and let them figure out that it does matter a little bit, once you get better at your subject.

[JohnFen]

I think this is tied in with Adam Savage's observation that practice alone gets you 80% of the way to mastery. Talent is what gets you the the other 20%.

Gear strikes me as being similar. High-end gear won't really improve the work of someone who is much below the 80% mastery mark, but it can make all the difference in the world to someone above it.

I also really like his approach to buying gear: if it's the first of a particular kind of equipment, buy the cheapest version you can get. Use that, and you'll learn if it's actually helpful to you and, if it is, what qualities are really important. Only then go out and buy the best version you can afford.

[jlkuester7]

> if it's the first of a particular kind of equipment, buy the cheapest version you can get. Use that, and you'll learn if it's actually helpful to you and, if it is, what qualities are really important. Only then go out and buy the best version you can afford.

I call this the Harbor Freight tool philosophy! If you need a tool that you do not have, buy it from Harbor Freight (the store sells very cheep but still functional tools). If (and only if) you wear out the Harbor Freight tool, then you know that your use-case deserves a higher level of investment and you go and buy the best version of the tool you can afford. This is a very simple and practical measure (for DIY folks) to decide what equipment to invest in.

[capableweb]

Would be nice to have a name to the "philosophy" indeed, but as someone who never heard of Harbor Freight before, maybe something internationally known would be better? :)

[prawn]

I'd generally agree however... I'm a drone photographer first, but wanted to supplement it with some ground video. Bought a gimbal for my phone. Wanted something smaller, so bought an Osmo Pocket. Bought a GoPro. Bought a GH5; bought a Ronin S. Wanted something POV, so bought an Insta360 Go 2. Found shifting bitty content to my phone annoying, so bought a new phone with stronger video capabilities. All the gimmicky options have paid for themselves on their first jobs, but in hindsight, I wonder if I shouldn't have just skipped most of them and put the budget towards something better than the GH5. Or better lenses for the GH5.