Hold the gas.

If you are into photography you soon realise that there are two schools of photographers. The first school is into photography to take photos. They are interested in camera gear but only as a means of taking photographs.This group is a very small group in the photographer universe. The second group are the so called "gearheads" and they dominate the photographer universe. They are into camera gear and many suffer from "gas"-gear acquisition syndrome.
If you write a photography blog and you write about camera gear the readers come flocking. Write solely about photos or devote your blog to great photography and you will have a much smaller following.
A great little,free,online photography magazine from NZ devoted to Australian/NZ photography has just folded after 5 years because it can no longer attract enough readers and advertisers who are only interested in photographs.Their lament is that if they turned it into a gear/gas magazine they would be thriving-but that's not what they want to do.
You can even see this phenomenon in the best photography blog-Macfilos.See-MACFILOS
When Macfilos editor Mike Evans posts a camera gear story-particularly about Fuji cameras -his readership goes up significantly.
Mike walks a fine line trying to balance the content of his site between gear stories and more interesting general interest stories. Macfilos is not a commercial site so whilst he appreciates having good readership numbers he is not driven to maximise them.
The sad part is that so many enthusiasts devote so much time and money reading about the latest gear and looking for the latest camera which will magically open the Pandora's box of brilliant photography for them when they could be taking good photos with modest gear or the gear they already own.
You often read that such and such a new camera is "ideal for street photography".
The above "street" photo was taken 12 years ago in Malaysia with a Leica Digilux1-a very odd camera with a very underwhelming specification. See specs at  Digilux 1 It may have a very modest pixel count and a sensor with very limited sensitivity by today's standards but it still was capable of taking good photos. See also Three days in China
Great gear is great but it is not the whole story by any means.If you want to take a good photograph it’s about the moment and the light. It has nothing to do with your equipment .

Yellowbird video

Back in the early 90's a Porsche enthusiast friend passed me a VHS video copy of the classic film of the 1987 RUF Yellowbird lap of the Nordschleife Nurburgring. Now if you are a younger reader you may not fully appreciate that before the internet,You Tube and digital the VHS magnetic tape cassette -or if you were in a small minority the Sony Beta cassette -was the way videos were passed around.
The VHS cassette was a flawed device as the magnetic tape travelled a convoluted path and easily got snagged.The Sony Beta cassette was a better system but Sony played their cards too close to their chest and the VHS system became almost universally adopted as it was "open source". Repeated viewings of VHS and Sony cassettes resulted in wear of the tape and a fall off in image quality.  Both systems also suffered from the problem of magnetic print through where the magnetic imprint on one layer of the tape transferred through to the layer below over time. The longer the tape,the thinner the tape and the more print through occured.
An analogue copy of any medium-film,audio or video always loses some quality-each generation copy is worse than the one before. My VHS copy of Yellowbird was far removed from its parent so it was more than a little fuzzy.
Nonetheless like so many others I found the video spectacular.
Ruf,the legendary Porsche tuner,has now released the video onto You Tube.This version is still not HD-it was after all shot on film nearly 30 years ago and it has  suffered  wear and deterioration.You can see it here RUF YELLOWBIRD.
There are other versions of the video on You Tube but they are not as good quality as the RUF version.
Nearly 30 years on the lap is still spectacular.The driver was RUF's test driver,Stefan Roser. Note the slim hips of the car,the lack of added aero devices and the standard steering wheel. The driver is in a short sleeved shirt,with no gloves nor a crash helmet. And it is not even a closed track. Those were the days. His car control is just extraordinary and he was driving on tyres which were so different to today's-hence the wonderful slides.
When I bought my 911 2.7 in 2001 my first thought when I saw it was "Yellowbird". Sadly it is not a RUF-it is in a totally different horepower league to the RUF car and I am most certainly not Stefan Roser but that does not mean that I did not try to emulate him-at least in my imagination.
The photo is me in my Yellowbird at the Huntley Hillclimb in NSW in 2004. I seem to recollect that I won my class and a plastic trophy that day although I admit the competition was pretty ordinary.The Huntley Hillclimb near Dapto south of Sydney is a charming venue. At 34 seconds for the climb it is hardly the Nordschleife though.
The photo was shot on my Leica Digilux 1 by a friend. Not bad quality for what was a very early digital sensor and a very basic in camera processor.