Love photography but not all the gear? Simpler Photo is about learning to create photos you love by knowing when and how to use the right gear – and less of it.
If you’ve ever been disappointed with your images, frustrated you can’t translate your vision or find all the talk about gear and technical stuff boring or not applicable, my goal is to make it easier.
Making beautiful images doesn’t have to be complicated. And it doesn’t require that you have a lot of equipment, either.
I hope to:
- Help you make photos you love.
- Show you it’s not so much the gear, but what you do with it.
- Share small & actionable tips to improve your skills.
How the Site is Organized
The Quick-start Guide is a good place to get started.
You can also dig into a particular section:
Working With Less
Unless you’re a professional photographer, you probably don’t need a lot of camera gear to take beautiful photos. You just need a few key pieces based on what you like to shoot most.
Forcing yourself to work with less can really help you focus more on the picture making and being creative. It helps you more quickly learn what your specific equipment is best suited for and how it will help you achieve a certain look.
Living the Moment and Capturing It
I think a lot of us want to capture a moment (that’s why we carry our cameras around in the first place, right?), but we sometimes lose out on the experience of actually living that moment because we have so much gear that we end up messing around with it so long and forget to experience what’s going on around us.
The goal is to have just the right gear to be able to capture great photos without missing out on what’s happening around us.
Sometimes carrying all of our stuff isn’t exactly fun or viable, so we have to pick the best stuff and make do.
My Story
When I first took up photography full time, I didn’t know exactly what type of photography I was interested in doing.
In the beginning, I assisted on some commercial photo shoots and quickly learned that wasn’t for me. Commercial shoots are big productions (lots of gear, staff and budget) and I prefer to keep things simpler.
I ended up shooting weddings and dog portraits, and while I really enjoyed doing both, I reached a point where I knew that if I was going to take it to the next level with those things, I’d need to invest in more gear. But my life goal was to become more location independent, so buying more gear wasn’t appealing to me.
Now I do live a much simpler and very mobile lifestyle, so successfully managed to pare down my camera gear to what I actually need versus what I want (granted I didn’t have much extra stuff to begin with). There are challenges that come with not having a bunch of gear, but I’ve learned to work around limitations and enjoy working with what I have. If you feel similarly, then hopefully you’ll find the information here useful. And of course there’s also the book I wrote if you want to go deeper. :)