[walwyn]

I do believe I've cured myself of this. I have a big bag of unused stuff from my film days that sits behind as a reminder, plus a loft full of darkroom gubbins that hasn't seen electricity in two decades. Back in the days I'd lug about the big bag of stuff in all weather, ferret about in big bag of stuff for the correct lens or filter, or whatever, take a shot, and then run to catch up with the people I was nominally with.

Then I got busy doing other things and when I restarted taking photos and finally decided to go to digital I was contemplating an Olympus system, but there were reports of problems with the macro lens. So I looked at what others were using and one guy was doing very good macro work with an panasonic FZ30 and Raynox lens. I'd never heard of panasonic as far as cameras were concerned but saw that the thing did 35-420 zoom had all the manual overrides and looked at the big bag of stuff and recalled the pain lugging it all about.

That pana worked pretty damn well for 8 years, still does. But eventually I decided on a new one and got a FZ200 25-640 zoom. I still use the Raynox lens and a TCON1.7 for extended zoom. For me its enough recently the wife bought a FZ72 20-1200mm it is a whole lot of camera.

I might buy some ND filters this year, or maybe not.

I stopped buy photo mags after one had an issue on macro photography and stated that a ring flash was an essential item.