Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/11/21
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]On 11/21/04 11:44 AM, "Feli di Giorgio" <feli2@earthlink.net> typed: > > Just think about all the Tri-X you could buy for $30,000. AND plane > tickets! > ;-) > > feli > Let me repeat my story I've not posted in a few years about the time I almost bought an early Nikon which had a 24x34 not 24x36 format. When the guy found out I was planning on SHOOTING PICTURES with it, and I had mt money on the table, he flat out refused to sell it to me. This would have been an affront to everything he held dear. There is no reason why the camera collecting mindset and the camera using or "photography" mindset should be mutually exclusive. Yet it is rarely the case when they are not. The kind of thinking and lifestyle which wants to line up rare and expensive TOOLS on the shelf behind glass is almost never the kind of thinking and lifestyle which inspires one to USE similar tools. By similar I mean "non collector" versions or these tools. As in cameras you buy new in a camera store to make it simple. Not ones in which you loose a thousand dollars for every roll of film which puts wear on the rails. I'm trying to think of someone who is as good at making a Cibachrome 20x24 print as they are in at knowing why a lens shade should cost 30,000 USD or even might even own one and at the top of my head I'm not coming up with one. I'm sure they're out there though. Lurking. I've got nothing really big against collecting. I don't happen to think it's what the LUG is all about. I have things which bug me a lot more. 1. people who buy and sell without even collecting. They trade. They play with money. The cameras become in effect this money. Camera gear is just another form of commodity or asset. Like pork bellies perhaps. I have no clue what that's all about are there pork bellies with red dots? What's the current market value of hammers and saws? 2. The other thing which bugs me a lot more than collecting and collecting really doesn't really bug me at all is the act of collecting but calling it "photography". People who confuse the "amassing" with the "doing". I meet a lot of those. As much of photography itself is in a sense "accumulating" as one clicks away adding to ones body of work this could in some sense be understandable. In the darkroom perhaps is when one "gives back". Mark Rabiner Photography Portland Oregon http://rabinergroup.com/