Over the course of 12 years I have accumulated a large number of cameras, buying them (some new, some second hand) at a rate of a bit more than one per year on average. (It was much faster than that in the last six years as in the first six years I only bought a camera once every two years.) And I have kept almost all of them, getting rid of just three that ceased working. I currently have a dozen. Surely that is excessive?
On the forums I often see comments like "Buying new kit won't make you a better photographer", and "It's the photographer not the camera" and "You can make great photos with any camera". There is truth in all these and similar comments. However, I think there is another side to this. In my experience I tend to get better results with one particular camera or camera/lens for a particular type of subject matter. I currently think in terms of the following seven types of subject, for which different kit works best: Larger invertebrates such as butterflies and dragonflies; very small invertebrates such as springtails and barkflies; medium sized invertebrates; botanical subjects; common birds in flight; cloudscapes and sunsets; subjects that turn up when I'm out and about and not particularly "doing" photography.
At the moment I have four different favoured setups for four of those seven subject areas: medium sized invertebrates, botanical subjects, common birds and flight and "out and about". The favoured setups are, respectively, a small sensor bridge camera with close-up lenses and diffused twin flash, a micro four thirds camera with a macro lens, an APS-C camera with an APS-C telezoom lens, and a small sensor travel camera.
The reasons for these four choices are as follows.
1. For medium sized invertebrates I almost always use minimum aperture and because the effects of diffraction dominate image quality it doesn't matter which setup I use in terms of image quality. The choice of kit therefore comes down to usability. The Pansonic FZ330 bridge camera and G3/5/80/9 used with close-up lenses focus faster with more reliable and precise accuracy than using the LCD screen on the Canon 70D using a macro lens or close-up lenses. This favours the Panasonics. On the Panasonics, close-up lenses have better (longer) working distances than the macro lenses I have, which favours close-up lenses (as it doesn't make any difference to image quality, because of the effects of diffraction). When using the FZ330 with a Raynox 150 close-up lens I get a range of magnifications with which I can do almost all of my invertebrate photography without changing the close-up lens. In contrast, with the G3/5/80/9 I have to keep changing between the Raynox 150 and Raynox 250. This favours the FZ330, which is currently my favoured camera, with a Raynox 150, for medium sized invertebrates.
2. For botanical subjects I am now most of the time using post focus to capture videos from which to extract JPEGs for stacking. The FZ330, G80 and G9 can do this. The FZ330 and G80 are limited to 4K post focus, which produces 8 megapixel JPEGs. With the G9 I can use 6K video, with 18 megapixel JPEGs. I can also use the very flat profile Cinelike D Photo Style, which makes it easy to produce tonality that I very much like in my botanical images. The G9 can do post focus with a macro lens or with a close-up lens on a telezoom camera lens. A macro lens captures very fine detail and opens up to f/2.8, which is good for shutter speeds when working hand-held, which I do much of the time. A macro lens can also focus out to infinity. Close-up lenses have a more limited range over which they can focus and this can be too limited for some scenes. Macro lenses can have issues of focusing speed and accuracy when used for single shots, but because of the way post focus drives the lens, focus accuracy and speed are not an issue when using a macro lens for post focus. Unlike with invertebrates, the shorter working distances of (my) macro lenses is not an issue for botanical subjects. Taking all this into account, my favoured kit for botanical post focus video capture is a G9 with an Olympus 60mm macro.
3. I photograph common birds in flight (mainly gulls) at a local little boating lake. I do this in good light when I can get a good combination of high shutter speed and a small enough aperture to get (my preferred) sufficient depth of field. For this subject matter I use a viewfinder rather than LCD. My Canon 70D is the only one of my cameras that lets me see very clearly what is going on. Even though electronic viewfinders have improved over the years, I still find a marked difference between all of mine (up to and including my Sony A7ii full frame camera) and the optical viewfinder on the 70D. I use a 55-250mm telezoom lens on the 70D which is quite light and so can be used for long periods with no strain, and it is very quick to zoom from wide angle (which I used to locate subjects) in to what I need for shots, and very responsive when changing the zoom, which I need to do quickly for birds that are close by with rapidly changing distances from me. The phase detect focusing on the 70D is very good at focusing on birds that are flying in front of busy backgrounds, which happens a lot at the boating lake. The Panasonics are not so good at this. For these reasons my favoured kit for common birds in flight is the 70D with 55-250 lens.
4. When I am out and about I am much more likely to keep a physically small camera with me, one that will go into a pocket, rather than a larger one. I have found that small sensor travel cameras with very large zoom ranges can, especially when shooting raw, produce images of sufficient quality for my purposes. The SX240 did not shoot raw. The TZ60 does, and the only reason I got the TZ90 was when the TZ60 started to malfunction. The TZ90 is my favoured "carry around" camera.
For a fifth area, cloudscapes and sunsets, I have yet to do thorough comparison tests between different setups but I may well end up using a fifth camera type, full frame (Sony A7ii), by itself or with a second camera to cover longer focal lengths, which might be of any of the other types. There are a lot of combinations to consider.
For the other two areas, larger invertebrates and very small invertebrates, I have, respectively, three and two setups which seem to do the job equally well. For large invertebrates these are the FZ330, G5/80/9 with 45-175 or 70D with 55-250, all three with and without a mild Canon 500D close-up lens. For very small invertebrates my best two options are the FZ330 or G5/80/9, with either a very powerful Raynox MSN-202 close-up lens or two Raynox 250s stacked together or a Raynox 250 and a Raynox 150 stacked. The G series cameras have the advantage that the 45-175 does not change length when zooming, which makes very powerful close-up lenses much easier to use. The FZ330 has the advantage that it provides a larger range of magnification with any particular close-up lens setup, and because of its long, 600mm equivalent maximum focal length it can sometimes be used with larger working distances than my other cameras (because it can sometimes use a less powerful close-up lens with a longer working distance to cover a particular scene size).
The choice of kit for particular purposes is therefore highly dependent on the specific characteristics both of the subject matter and of particular combinations of kit. It is much more complicated than something simple like "you get better results with a larger sensor", or "specialist macro lenses produce better results than general puspose lenses". It is all very context dependent, and has resulted in my using a variety of kit for particular purposes.
So have my camera acquisitions been excessive? With one exception, it doesn't feel that way to me. Two were direct replacements for cameras that I was using but had stopped working. Three were "historical", relatively old and very inexpensive second hand cameras bought just to see what they were like to use. For the rest I think I can make a good case for needing them to explore some new facility which looked as if it might help me produce photos that I liked better for particular subject areas.
There was one exception. In 2018 I thought I had worked out what my setups would be longer term, and one of those was a Panasonic G80, which would have had two roles, with different lenses. Because of the great trouble I have had with dust on sensors, and because my favoured kit setups were now settled for the longer term, I bought a second G80 so I could avoid changing lenses. That turned out to be a mistake because I subsequently decided that the G80 setups would not be used as I had envisaged, with probably only one of them at most having a place in my favoured toolset.
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