Don’t buy a photo camera … or a drum set

I’m always amused by the question: “Hey, I want to be a photographer. What camera should I buy?” You can replace “photographer” and “camera” with your choice of occupation and equipment.

While I understand the spirit of the question and desire to get a good learning experience and future success, that is completely irrelevant.

What will define your success and even if you are going to stick with the activity is the amount of fun you’re going to have with it and desire to continue when you hit the wall.

Learn with what you have. It’s simple, it’s cheap, you don’t need to make any hard decisions. Use your phone to make pictures and your limbs to practice drumming. If you can’t make that work and don’t have fun with that approach — expensive equipment and extensive studying won’t make you love it more, quite the opposite.

Good equipment is for those who know what to do with it and can appreciate it. When your creativity and progress is limited by a phone camera and air-drumming, that’s the appropriate time to get better tools.

Don’t forget about the accessories. They can add up to quite a substantial cost and can be as important as the main instrument. I was shooting quite a lot of videos and instead of an expensive camera I used multiple cheaper cameras, gimbal, lights, microphone, etc. That setup helped me to produce much better results easier compared to if I’d have just one expensive camera.

Another example of starting slow and low is to build appreciation. When I was researching buying a guitar I read opinions that it should be at least $800 so a novice will experience less frustration. And it is better to be acoustic so you learn it the proper way. As you can imagine I bought a $100 electric and had tons of fun with it.

It gave me the freedom to experiment. I was not afraid to break it while restringing and setting up, doing modifications. Going into technical details and having hands-on experience made me understand why I would pay more.

And air-drumming? Gave it up after some time. Not as fun as I thought. Costed me nothing in the end.