In over two decades as a professional photographer, I've spent more than I will ever admit on photo gear. From cameras to lenses, from modifiers to lights, from tripods to c-stands and from computers to editing softwares.
In this episode of Beyond the Image, I spill the tea on all my favorite pieces of gear I've ever purchased as well as all of the items I wish I could get my money back on.
Have you bought and loved or purchased and regretted any of these items?
Connect with James Patrick https://www.instagram.com/jpatrickphoto https://www.instagram.com/jamespatrickphotos/ https://jamespatrick.com/
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We need to move beyond the posturing, beyond the facade, beyond the image to navigate the unique challenges we face as creatives. Together, we're going to dive into real stories, real strategies, and the real work that can lead to the real results. This is the Beyond the Image podcast. Thank you so much for tuning into our latest episode of the Beyond the Image podcast. I'm happy you can take some time to get some information and get a little inspiration to help you in your creative entrepreneurial journey. So let's dive in, have two lists, some of my favorite pieces of photo gear that I bought in 20 plus years, as well as pieces of photo gear that I wish I could get my money back. Maybe I can't get my money back because, well, maybe I was too proud to return it. I bought some of those pieces of gear or maybe I just waited too long and it's been a bit past the warranty and they're not going to give me my money back, but let's start positive. What are some of the best pieces of photo gear that I've ever purchased? I'm going to start this off with the Canon 70-200 F2.8L series lens. I've been using this lens as my main lens for as long as I've been a photographer. It was one of the first lenses I ever got. It was the first L-series lens that I purchased. Well over 90% and I would say 95% well over 95% of the magazine covers that I've shot. I've shot with this lens. Now my version of this lens is so old that Canon will not service it anymore, but I don't care. I keep using this lens even if I need to duct tape it together and I know all the quirks about this lens that I've had for two decades now. I know it's softer at two weight. I know where it's most razor sharp. I know how to use it in different situations or circumstances or settings. It by far is my favorite piece of glass and my second favorite piece of glass is next on the list which is the 24-70 F2.8L series. My first time I purchased this it was actually the second L-series I ever bought. I bought one when I was in college. That one broke and Canon, unfortunately, refused to service that lens. You're noticing a theme here as Canon is trying to move out of the SLR market and into the mirrorless market. They don't want to service these very expensive pieces of glass from the SLR market. Oh, well, thanks, Canon. That being said, it is a brilliant lens for almost anything. I could use it for fashion, I use it for portraits, for landscape, for shooting events. Having it at F2.8, it is amazing at low light. It is incredibly sharp at every aperture. It is almost always in my camera bag as my secondary lens. The third lens on this list is the Canon 50 F1.8 USM. This is a spectacular lens that I love to use for editorial or environmental portraits where I'm incorporating a lot of the environment in and around the subject I'm photographing. It is brilliantly sharp at its most wide open at F1.8. The thing that I like about this lens, the USM lens, is it is thousands cheaper, thousands cheaper than the L-series, which is 1.2. I don't necessarily need a 1.2. That's not worth the thousands of dollars it would cost to upgrade from the USM. The USM is a phenomenal lens. I could buy a lot of burritos for those thousands of dollars. I'm going to stick with the 1.8 USM. Moving on from glass, the Ellen Chrome Small Deep Rotolux. This is an amazing softbox for dramatic moody portraits. The light is soft. But because it is a smaller softbox, it has a very fast and sharp falloff. I know that I've said that a softbox is a softbox and for the most part I agree, and the only exception I will have to that, in my experience is Ellen Chrome softboxes. There is just something so amazing about how these shape and push out the light. This is my favorite modifier for dramatic portraits. I will also add to this list their indirect octa, the Ellen Chrome indirect octa. I believe mine is a five foot indirect octa. This is the softest of the soft of the soft light. Using this indirect octa makes me feel like maybe I could shoot like Annie Leibowitz. Yes, it's a pain to set up, but it is the smoothest light with the most gradual, graceful falloff that I've seen from any modifier. It is worth the mortgage that I had to skip in order to pay for this modifier. It is that good. Moving on from modifiers, I bought it used a Mamiya RZ67 Pro 2. This is a medium format film camera. Now, shooting film to me is just fun as hell. Everything about this camera is painstakingly slow. It takes time to load the film. It takes time to set up your shot because you have a hip viewfinder at the viewfinder where you have to look down into the camera and your image is then flipped. It's inverted. Left is right and right is left, which makes framing your shots and posing and adjusting the posing of your subject that much trickier because what you're seeing through the viewfinder is the exact opposite of what is happening in front of you. It has the very slow bellows focus on the camera itself. It just takes time to use. Because it takes so much time to use, I think that's why I love it so much. I also have a Mamiya AF645 and I absolutely love using that, but the RZ67, the quality of captures I'm able to get on this using 120 or 220 film is just absolutely mind-blowing. Next up on my list is I have a 7-stop variable neutral density filter. Now, I love neutral density filters. These are great for moody portraits. These are great for outdoor use when you want rich skies. These are great for any time you want to open up your aperture, but you want to control the amount of getting into your camera and the variable to have that on this filter gives me that extra layer of control. So I use my variable ND filter a lot of times when I'm doing outdoor portraits and I want a really rich, robust, moody sky. This is the perfect modifier for that. Last on my list is the Lacey Rugged Drives. Have a bunch of these. I use them on every project. I use them all the time and I'm so grateful for them. And in fact, I've had some of my Lacey Drives for well over 10 years and if I still have any issues with my Lacey Drives, their customer service is still right on with helping. So I cannot sing enough praise about Lacey Drives. Okay, I feel like that was enough positive. Feel like we started off on the right foot. Now let's start to gripe. Let's start to complain. Let's start to get into the things that, well, I wish I could get my money back. The first off is a Paul Seabuff ring flash. Now, when I got this light, which was 20 years ago, I thought owning this light, just the act of owning this light was going to dramatically transform my portrait work. And I was finally going to have those professional looking trendy photos, not mind you. This was 20 years ago, that that all these amazing professionals are getting with their ring flashes and I finally have a ring flash. And what I found was that this light was incredibly difficult to use. I wasn't that great at using it and I really didn't care for the look that I was achieving with this light and I had spent a lot of money to not like what I was getting. So I still own this thing, I've had it, like I said, for almost 20 years, it is so brittle, it's falling apart. The plastic is just flaking off of it. I maybe, maybe use it once a year, maybe so I probably have not got my money's worth out of that. Okay, next up, the Paul Seabuff giant softbox. When this came out, I was really excited, wasn't just a big softbox. It was a giant softbox. This thing was massive. It was so enormous and I was so excited because like, oh, the light, I'm going to get off this thing. It's going to be so soft. Here's the problem with this modifier. It was incredibly heavy, obnoxiously heavy and ridiculously cumbersome. And if you're not familiar with Paul Seabuff mounts, the entire mount system is set off of or set up by using small metal clamps, four small metal clamps, that's it. This softbox was so heavy, it was actually bending and breaking the metal clamps off the lights. This softbox was actually breaking the mounts that it was specifically designed for. What an appalling, freaking design on that one. But I actually have a bit more to say about Paul Seabuff and their modifiers. So next on the list is every single Paul Seabuff modifier, every one of them. There was a time when Paul Seabuff played an important role. And the role they played was to provide affordable solutions, affordable lighting solutions to photographers who were budget conscious or very new to the industry or very unsure of if this was something they wanted to invest a lot into. Because being a photographer at one point, there was a high barrier for entry. And one of the biggest parts of that was the cost to become a photographer. Cameras were expensive, lenses were expensive, film was expensive. Lighting equipment was prohibitively expensive. Paul Seabuff really changed that and made lighting available to photographers who historically would never have been able to have lighting equipment. And I'm grateful as a photographer who was in college, who did not have a lot of money, who was scraping together paycheck to paycheck to buy pieces of gear one at a time, I was grateful that a company like Paul Seabuff existed, that their brand, AlienBees existed because I could afford that. I could buy that and still buy groceries. They were innovative, Paul Seabuff was innovative, their vagabond battery packs, that was revolutionary. Once again, an extremely affordable solution for creatives, that before would have been too cost prohibitive for anyone to achieve portable power for their lighting. But at some point, and I could hypothesize it's when the founder of the company passed away, but at some point around then, the perception is they'd stopped innovating as much and the prices started to get a little steeper. So as a consumer, you're seeing a company that appears to be getting lazy and also appears to be getting a little greedier. Their prices start to go up, their soft boxes are now, all of them are like well over $200. You can get the exact same quality of softbox, the exact same quality of modifier under $70. There is no reason that Buff should be charging what they are charging right now because their quality as a company has not drastically improved, in direct proportion to the price that they are assessing their consumers. Next up are the Interfit S1 strobes. I bought three of these over, it was like late 2019, early 2020. The reason I bought them is they appeared at the time to be a great affordable alternative to the Profoto B1s. Profoto hit the market with their battery powered units and they are still outstanding, I've rented them, they are amazing to use, but I cannot justify the Profoto price for a light. But Interfit, I could get two or three for what it would cost me to get a single Profoto. But at some point Interfit kind of stopped existing, at least it appeared to stop existing, and the units I bought literally fell apart, fell to pieces. And then shortly thereafter other companies like Godox and their Adorama version Flashpoint, they surged in the market with even better products, even more affordable products, especially for battery powered lights. So Interfit S1 strobes. Next up is the Elynchrome BRX500. Now, as you've heard, I'm pretty obsessed with Elynchrome modifiers, I've spent several mortgages on Elynchrome modifiers. But I bought an Elynchrome BRX500 to use with my indirect oxy, because I was too dumb to just buy a modifying speed ring, oops, I eventually did buy that. I didn't use this light more than 10 times before there was this loud bang from the light, and literal smoke pouring out of it. And I didn't even like the light before it blew up on me. Next up is the product light cone. Hey, here's a question. Do you want to spend around $180 for a dog cone that's marketed as a photography tool? Well, me neither. So I bought it for $1 off an auction website. And honestly, for $1, it was still overpriced, and I threw it in the trash. It is the exact same thing as a dog collar or dog cone. There's no difference. It's the same material. It's the same size. But because they slept the word photography on it, they're going to charge you a hundred times more than you should be paying. And it works as well as you would think a dog cone would work to take photos in that it didn't. Next up are V flats. Now this one comes with an asterisk because I use my V flats. Every single time I'm in the studio, I use them several days a week. I'm just really perplexed and probably a little piss that V flat world charges over $200 for something that if I had a big enough truck, I could just go to Home Depot and buy some insulation foam core, paint half the side black and I'd have everything I need for $10. And here's the thing, for $200 more than $200, the quality and the durability is not there. Mine are more held together now by gaffer tape. They might even be more gaffer tape than they are original material at this point because they've fallen apart so many times. And I just think this is an example of Ries photographers were just used to getting bent over on prices or used to it. All right, next up is the Drobo system. When I bought my Drobo system, I thought, ah, finally, I have all the space to keep all my files secure forever. Wait a second. What's that red light? Dry failure. These drives aren't supposed to fail. That's the whole point of this. I haven't even had this thing for a year yet. Every contact Drobo support, oh, Drobo supports not willing to help me. Nice. That's a great way to lose several thousand dollars and all of my files. Thanks, Drobo. Well, Drobo's not listening to this because they were not a business. All right, next on the list is every light meter I've ever purchased. I don't like light meters and I might get some heat for this. I have this thing called a digital camera with a playback functionality. I just need to press play on the back of my camera to see what my lights are doing. I don't need a light meter to tell me what my eyes can clearly see. The only time I ever really used my light meter was when I wanted to look more professional with some clients. I'd bring a light meter and hang it around my neck. So I'd look like I knew what I was doing because in the movies they wear light meters around their necks. All right. Next one. And this one too is the color checker. I've maybe used this twice and then I put it back in its box. I do portrait photography and in portrait photography I feel color is very, color perception is very subjective. If I want a photo warmer, I'm going to warm up the Kelvin temperature. If I want it cooler, I'm going to lower the Kelvin temperature. It's that simple to me. I'm going to do what looks good. And if I don't like how it looks after I take the photo, I can just change it in post production. Pretty simple. Next up is the road video mic. I need to preface this by saying I absolutely love road products. I have the roadcaster board. I have multiple procaster mics. I have the road go lab. I have the road shotgun mic. Love road. But the onboard video mic that I spent a lot of money on was absolute garbage and did not capture audio effectively at all. It worked about as well as the onboard microphone in my camera. So still love you road. Spend several G's on you. Please don't hate me for saying that. But this brutal critique does not mean I'm not willing to accept free gear from any of these companies. Should they want to give it to me? My consumer brand loyalty is absolutely for sale. And that means you, Paul C. Buff, I've paid enough into your company to probably own 5.8% of your company. I want to throw a few extra units my way. I won't say no, but let me know what your thoughts are. What are some of your favorite and least favorite pieces of photo gear that you've ever purchased? Drop it in the comment section or shoot me a message at J Patrick photo on Instagram. At James Patrick photos, at Instagram is my other portfolio account. Thank you so much for tuning in. Appreciate you and talk to you in the next episode. Take care everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in to The Beyond The Image podcast. As always, we appreciate your reviews and for sharing this podcast with a friend. To learn more or to connect with me personally, please visit jamespatric.com. This message comes from BetterHelp. Can you think of a time when you didn't feel like you could be yourself? Like you were hiding behind a mask. BetterHelp online therapy is convenient, flexible, and can help you learn to be your authentic self so you can stop hiding. Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for your emotions. Take off the mask with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelpHELP.com.
