Reduce the Clutter: A Case for Owning Less

Selling most of your camera collection sounds like a crisis. For this creator, it turned into a way to shoot more freely and pick up a hobby he'd dropped over a decade ago.

Noe Alonzo walks through exactly what he kept and what he let go, and the short version is that he's down to a working kit that fits a small bag. His main camera is now the Canon R5, with a Canon film body for analog work and a Ricoh GR III as his travel camera. He describes a recent trip to Hokkaido as the first time he left the R5 at home, and he was surprised how much more he enjoyed the trip without hauling bodies and lenses. Alonzo has never been a heavy gear buyer, but he admits the small gadgets and grips pile up regardless.

The lens purge follows a rule worth stealing: one lens per focal length. He sold most of his autofocus glass and kept the vintage pieces he actually loves, including a Pentax 105mm f/2.4 he uses on his medium format Fuji, plus a pair of Voigtländer lenses he treats partly as collectibles. The surprise is his most-used lens for night photography, the Canon 24-105mm f/4. He owns faster glass but often reaches for slower, adapted lenses on his Fuji X cameras because they force him to slow down. Fewer lenses, he points out, means he'll finally use the ones he keeps.

The one-lens-per-focal-length idea is quietly one of the strongest ways to fight gear creep, and it works because it removes the decision that eats your shooting time. When you own three 35mm-equivalent options, you spend energy choosing between them instead of framing the shot. Street and travel shooters have leaned on single-camera, single-lens setups for years for this reason, and the rise of fixed-lens compacts like the GR III reflects the same instinct. Constraint tends to sharpen a photographer faster than choice does, and building a kit around gaps you actually need to fill rather than lenses you might use someday keeps the bag light and the mind clear.

There's a second thread running through the video that has nothing to do with cameras. Alonzo talks candidly about feeling worn down by the platforms he built on, and with the money from selling gear he picked his guitar back up, an instrument he set aside when he moved to Korea in 2011 and committed himself to photography. He's approaching it the way he approached the camera, learning the fundamentals properly and building a foundation before rushing ahead. His shooting habits have changed too, now that he lives in the countryside and mostly makes photos on trips around Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong, then spends the rest of the year editing and cutting videos from that work.

He's blunt about upgrading his pocket camera as well, having sold his previous model to fund the newer one, so this is less about buying more and more about swapping and thinning out. See how far he trimmed his kit and what stayed in the bag by watching Alonzo lay it all out in the video above.