Which would you choose?

I would choose not to get into debt. When it comes to luxuries I only every purchased with spare cash.

But I plan on traveling and vloging/photography soon and don't have a weather resistant or prime lens.

This would be my primary focus. Memories are forever - and perhaps an exception to my no-debt rule. Here you would borrowing for the future - in other words, borrowing money now, to take high quality photos now, to enjoy in the future when you're paying back the debt.

I only have 1 monitor and my Desktop video card is 6 years old.

The game "Grand Theft Auto V" was released 6 years ago (2013). If your computer can play that game then do you really need to upgrade your video card?

My laptop is big and 7 years old and not portable.

If this was impeding your digital life you'd have taken care of this by now. You can do most of what you want on mobile phone. You can buy cheap SD card readers for your mobile phone, too. So worst case when travelling the world you can upload your photos to your mobile phone and then to the Internet.