Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/08/01
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Dennis writes: > disproportionate to what? > n*k*n owners? c*n*n owners? Both. Leica attracts a lot of non-photographers, pseudo-photographers, real but extremely eccentric photographers, collectors, status-conscious people with money, and dilletantes with its longstanding mystique. A lot of Leica owners apparently just keep their cameras under glass. Others will take a photo of anything with the camera and then ooh and aah about the beautiful Leica glow or whatever, oblivious to the fact that the photo is completely devoid of any interest. Others are real photographers, but are so deeply invested in the Leica world that they cannot tolerate any suggestion that there might be other ways to take serious photographs. Still others collect Leica gear and will go to any length to take a picture with a Leica, even when SLR or MF systems are glaringly more appropriate for a specific application. And so on. In this respect, Leica is very much like Rolex, attracting people who are concerned only with the object, not the use of the object. Rolex owners generally care only about the mechanical engineering of the watch, and the fact that it is off by six seconds a day (compared to a $10 child's quartz watch that can keep time to within 500 ms a day) does not bother them--and they won't tolerate having this pointed out to them. The Leica situation, though, is complicated by the fact that you _can_ use a Leica to take great pictures; unlike a Rolex, Leica can meet or beat any other camera around. But it still attracts a lot of jewelry collectors and other people with interests very peripheral to actual photography. At my local Leica dealer I was told that some people change Leica bodies almost every week. You don't see that too often with Nikon or Canon, and I find it hard to believe that the people doing this are serious photographers.