I was wondering how many have experienced this or how many don’t believe it’s possible. I would think that the more time you spend with a tool, especially one used for creative expression, the more that tool simply becomes an extension of you and also becomes a partner in the expressive output. From what I’ve read over the years some known photographic artists felt this way and some didn’t. We all know that some photographers used mostly one camera their entire career, Cartier-Bresson, Winogrand, and some stated they didn’t care what camera they used so long as they got the result they were striving for, Walker Evans comes to mind. Personally, some camera/lenses/gear I simply didn’t get along well with no matter how much I wanted it to work for me. Other times everything fits; you work smoothly with it, controls are second nature, it becomes an extension of you to the point where it does what every piece of equipment should do for you, it gets out of the way. It may seem silly for some to hear that such things have their own personality. After all, they’re just man-made pieces of equipment, right? But I ask those people to consider that everything we use everyday, every piece of equipment, at some point came from the earth, was a part of this living world, its form has just changed. Maybe these tools are living, in some ways on their own, in other ways maybe we give them life. Either way, just a thought.
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