Nice analogy ppcroft, So will this escalate to a fascination for pinhole cameras??

Haha, the fascination comment was in reference to my addiction to doing lot's with little, not your trouble maker quote :-) I see i i put a comma instead of a full stop, bugger. Ok now you got me Goggling pinhole cameras, see, it is an addiction.

So you are saying I/we as men, are programed to seek out the simplest, easiest way to do something. I think my wife might agree with you there VK.... haha

And here i was blaming my poor old RED GF2 for my predicament when in fact it was my fault all along. VK, what would i do without you:-)

I sense some nodding heads in various locations around the world.

Agree Ebacherville, converting ENG cameramen one at a time. Like VK said QUOTE"" All animals try to reach their goal using simplest way with smallest energy consumption"" :-)

Rambo, if you want a pinhole camera who not try this, it will work with your M4/3 cameras http://wanderlustcameras.com/products/pinwide.html

Hey, a bit of a commercial plug, but if anyone buys a pinhole lens, I have some spare pinholes I can sell you.

On a more serious note, my father used to say that the measure of tools and technology is in its transparency. Clark Blumenstein said (in reference to a $50,000 pair of drivers he worked on with Feastrex) that the only way to describe the listening experience was like there was nothing between you and the music - direct music into your brain.

The best tool for the job is the one that most directly allows you to create or the one that most directly connects to the audience. Once the subjective quality threshold is crossed, simplicity becomes the key factor alongside ease of use (and maybe versatility).

But there is one more factor in play: being inspired by our limitations.

Just as some writers are inspired by the limitations of a certain character (as much by knowing what they would not say as by what they would), or place or rhyme scheme, so are some composers inspired by limitations. At a point in time where it less expensive than ever before to have a virtual orchestra of ever increasing realism at your fingertips, many people are writing "chip music" that imposes the artificial limitations of a 1980s era sound-chip on the compositional process.

My friend Jordan Aguirre sometimes uses the "chip music" approach at an early stage for pieces meant for more complex sounds later on because "If I can make the melody sound good on that, it will sound awesome with better sounds".

International game score superstar Nobuo Uematsu at GDC in 2005 talked about how the creative process composing for early Nintendo games was fueled by how boring the games could be without the music. You really had to do a good job and even with the most basic sound processor he would still get jealous of the sound quality of the competition and push the sound programmer to make it better.

@Rambo And of course, there is that famous photography article where they handed several well-known American photographers basic Polaroid or point and shoot cameras and they came back with photographs that blew away what many amateurs did with more expensive equipment.

Maybe you like seeing how much of it is your skill as opposed to the equipment. Maybe you are fueled by creative limitations. Maybe you like things to be simple. Maybe you do not like carrying around a ton of gear. But whatever the case, it does not sound like a disease if you continue to cultivate your creativity. :)

@oscillan, I hear you and agree. On the other hand I think the constraints are also what challenge us to strive and create.

For example, which of these two questions would inspire you to more creativity:

1) Write about anything you like in any way you like for any length you like or
2) Write a 20 word poem about the first tree you see today, without using the letter "e"

Once I went to the beach with an old Nokia phone camera. Its limitations made me seek out interesting light, colour and shapes because I knew the actual format and lens would be so crappy. Actually not only did I come back with some great photos, but I even got creative and did a few panoramas to stitch together which overcame the limited resolution of single images on that phone. To me, this is the "hard work" of creativity, to work within boundaries. The limitations really engaged me, and led to some amazing photos.