The Habit That Improves Your Photography Faster Than Any Camera

Most photography advice online pushes you toward the next purchase, the next lens, the next body. The habits that actually move your work forward cost nothing and get ignored in favor of gear.

A 25-year-old camera bought for about £200 sits at the center of the argument Max Kent makes in this eight-minute breakdown. Kent uses it because the lenses are decent, it has aperture priority, and it's cheap enough that he'll carry it anywhere without worrying about drops. His point about gear is simple: it doesn't make the difference people think it does. What matters is finding the setup that fits how you shoot and then leaving the shopping cart alone. He extends this to lenses with advice you've probably heard and probably ignored, which is to grab a single prime lens and commit to one focal length.

The reasoning behind sticking with one lens holds up. Kent admits he bought the full spread, a 28mm, a 50mm, an 85mm, a zoom, and ended up shooting nearly everything on one anyway. When you stop switching, you start seeing in that focal length. You work faster because you're not stopping to swap glass and second-guess your framing. From there he moves to the skills worth your actual time: composition, framing, light, depth, and a consistent editing approach that makes your photos recognizable. All of it outweighs saving for another telephoto unless you genuinely need to photograph a blue-footed booby from a mile off. 

The photo book advice is where this connects to a bigger shift in how photographers consume other people's work. Kent recommends looking at photographers through books rather than the endless feed. Scrolling Instagram drops you into a sea of disconnected images with no structure, no sequence, no sense of a body of work. A photo book forces an artist's edit on you: the order, the pairings, the pacing, the decisions about what to leave out. That's a different education than a grid of one-off hits. If the cost stings, a photo book shop lets you spend an hour flipping through work for free, and the exercise doubles as a cure for the days when you can't be bothered to shoot at all. Looking closely at other people's choices, then back at your own, is how you start to hear what you actually want to say with a camera.

Two of his strongest points land near the end. Shoot far more and go online far less, because there's no shortcut that a new camera or a single borrowed technique can hand you. Volume gives you room to make mistakes, figure out what works, and build an archive you'll mine for years. If you want to get paid for a specific kind of photography, do it for free at a low level first. Want to shoot football at the World Cup someday? Start with a non-league side, take their photos, build a portfolio, and make contacts inside the sport where nobody's watching yet. 

You'll get the full run of his advice in the video above, so give Kent his eight minutes and see which habit you've been putting off.