I keep encountering the conundrum of whether to upgrade camera or lenses first, and there’s occasionally a comparison of a high-end camera paired with a low-cost lens, against a low-end camera paired with a high-end lens, as if that’s a dilemma anyone is actually having.

I had a similar problem lately, when I decided I want to buy the FE 100-400mm GM lens, because I wanted to make a certain profile of pictures with it, but I of course understood that the autofocus on my camera isn’t capable of utilising the lens properly, and there’s our solution: camera and lens need to be seen as a unit that is combined to produce a certain result. This means that you can’t have bottlenecks that limit the effectiveness of the system as a whole, for instance you can’t have only one part of the fast autofocus system, because both camera and lens need to work together.

Also, the realistic conundrum isn’t whether to get the most expensive lens and pair it with the shittiest possible body, or vice versa. Realistically, it looks more like “should I get the 70-200 f/2.8 or 85mm f/1.8 for the portraits”, because “cheap lens” is often a fast prime, and “expensive lens” is often a zoom, where the cheap lens might actually give you better results; also, with the body it’s “do I need faster autofocus for portraits and weddings”, because that’s where the difference in price is today. If you’re shooting macro, you don’t need a body with the best autofocus, you need a great macro lens and, probably, additional lights. So, basically, the answer is to see what you actually need, where the bottlenecks of your process are, and then remove those bottlenecks. Someone else will have different problems to solve, and different money pits to fill. Sometimes the solution is counter-intuitive, for instance getting the expensive new camera body and cheap used lenses of otherwise very high quality, which looks like putting cheap lenses on an expensive camera, but in this case price is not an accurate measure of quality obtained. In any case, the lesson is to avoid formulaic thinking when solving practical problems.