Thoughts On Tools

A friend of my dad's was eating dinner with us, a couple of nights ago, when he said something rather interesting: "Golf is a great game. It's cheap, it has strategy, and you win all kinds of cash prizes when you're playing it."

"It's cheap?!" I asked, surprised.

"Oh yes. You just buy one club, and it lasts for ten years. The expensive thing is really the club membership."

"But isn't there like - all kinds of clubs?" I asked. "Like one for sand, and one for water, and -"

"Oh no," He said, waving his hand in my general direction. "No no no no. Those are used by the lousy golf players. The good ones can play golf with any club."

*

Are tools important for doing good work? Or, phrased differently: if tools are important - then to what extent are they so?

The first thing we must be clear on, however, is that not all fields have the same attitudes towards their tools. Some fields are filled with practitioners obsessed with them. Others are not. An obvious example of this is to compare writing with photography: you don't become a good writer by having a better pen, and so you don't find people obsessing over different pen brands. Whereas with photography you get all kinds of adolescent squabbling over which camera is the better one.

This makes sense, of course: the more your work hinges on the kind of tools you use, the more likely you are to think about them. And what is true with art is also true with sports. This explains golf, which is filled with talk of the latest advancements in club technology; and — at the other end of the spectrum — basketball, where nobody really cares about the kind of shoes you use on court.

So are tools really that important? A simple way of finding out is to look at each field's top practitioners, to see what they have to say about their tools.

The funny thing, however, is that when you do that (and so long as it's a field with a proven obsession with tools) you'll begin to see a pattern that repeats itself. People at the apex use good tools, but they never seem to talk about them. They don't even appear to think about them.

Take photography, for instance. Henri Cartier Bresson, the father of modern photography, is annoyingly coy in his interviews about his practice of the form. He makes no mention of his camera, although he uses an excellent Leica rangefinder. And in fact, if you look carefully at photos of Bresson in action, you'll begin to think that he treats his camera like he would a boot. (Bresson plasters the camera with lots of ugly duct tape).

There's also this fairly famous story told of photographer Ernst Haas, in a 1985 workshop:

Two laddies from Nova Scotia had made a huge effort to be there and were great Leica fans, worked in a camera store, saved to have them and held Ernst on high for being a Leica user (although he used Nikons on his Marlboro shoots, when the chips were down).

About four days into the workshop, he finally maxxed out on the Leica adoration these kids displayed, and in the midst of a discussion, when one of them asked one more question aimed at establishing the superiority of Wetzlar, Ernst said, "Leica, schmeica. The camera doesn't make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to SEE."

Nobody talked about Leica, Nikon, Canon or any other brand of camera equipment for the rest of the workshop.

He also said, "Best wide-angle lens? 'Two steps backward' and 'look for the ah-ha'."

In sports this is made all the more obvious by corporate sponsorship. Federer wears Adidas on court, as he bends for the serve you see the tiny trident logo on his breast pocket; Tiger Woods appears in Nike advertisements and models for golf clubs and fancy watches. But they never seem to talk about them. At least not voluntarily.

*

I have a friend who wants to buy two camera bodies because 'the pros do it like that'. But this is ridiculous, of course. It's a bit like saying that you need to grow scales on your belly in order to become a better swimmer, because the best swimmers in the world - the fish - have scaly bellies.

If the best people in their respective fields don't obsess over their tools, then it's worth asking if the reverse is true: that if you do obsess over your tools, does that make you a lousier photographer/golfer/practitioner? Does the principle work both ways?

I'm beginning to think that it does. As of press time, the evidence I've found thus far seems to suggest that a fixation on tools can be dangerous for your sport/art. I once read an online essay arguing that the more fixated the photographer is on his gear, the lousier his photography. I found the notion ridiculous at the time - (how can a $10,000 camera not affect the quality of the pictures you take? I thought) ... but that was some time ago; I'm now beginning to see some truth in it.

Hugh Macleod's got a brilliant theory on why this happens: ".. as the artist gets more into his thing," Macleod says, "and as he gets more successful, his number of tools tends to go down. He knows what works for him. Expending mental energy on stuff wastes time. (...) The last thing he wants is to spend 3 weeks learning how to use a router drill if he doesn’t need to."

There's another reason I suspect this is true. When you buy a new, supposedly better tool, you're giving yourself a psychological crutch. Pictures don't turn out right? Oh but it's not your fault. It's the camera's. That's what you get for buying a lousy camera body. The same goes for golf clubs, and tennis racquets, and surf boards.

This assumption is dangerous because it sounds so convincing: surely the camera has as much responsibility for a bad picture as you do? But this just isn't true. If your photographs suck, 9 times out of 10 it's your fault, and not your camera's. Either your composition was off or you used the wrong settings or you didn't compensate for some of your camera's larger idiosyncrasies. Consider the fact that some of photography's most powerful images were made on film, with a shabby little device that probably had half the features you'll find in a cheap compact today.

Shiny new tools tend to be more a distraction than an aid. The cooler the tool, the more likely you are to waste your time obsessing over the purchase, or the awesome capabilities thereof, as opposed to actually getting better at whatever it is you're supposed to be doing with it.

My experience seems to bear this out. I recently switched from a DSLR to an old, dinky film camera. And my pictures have improved after the switch, despite lousy film and the lack of any onboard electronics. This doesn't mean, of course, that film cameras are better for learning photography (although a few people I know are sure to argue that this is so) - it simply means that my skills as a photographer have little or no correlation to the camera I carry. All that matters is that I know how to use that camera well.

One exception to this rule-of-thumb, however, is the field of programming. In programming, the better hackers tend to drift towards particular programming languages. And they tend to be very vocal in their support of whatever language that is. But this field is an exception, not a norm. Programming languages are expressed methods of thinking about problems, and using a better language forces you to look at things differently. So programming is one field where using a shiny new tool does make you better than you currently are.

*

There is one last bit that doesn't seem to make much sense: if the very best professionals don't seem to care much for their tools, why do they continue using the very best of their field, the same ones the amateur gear-freaks lust after? Bresson and Haas used Leicas, after all, and Federer still plays with a high-end Wilson racquet (sponsored - but costly nevertheless).

I suspect the secret to this is that while they do use the best equipment, they don't attribute anything to it. In simple terms: their attitudes towards their tools are a more telling sign of their ability than their usage of certain tools over others. If professionals don't seem to care much for their gear, it simply means that they treat it as they would any other tool: something you use to get things done.