[Leica] WAS: M8 Impressions, Pro and Con NOW: LEFT EYE SHOOTER! :-)

[larry.k at rcn.com (larry.k@rcn.com)]

Hello Ted,
  You bring up a lot of great points. For professionals, at least you have 
some reason to get out of bed in order to make images. That is, if you have 
a project that directs your efforts.

  For amateurs with no commercial projects or paying customers, what reason 
do we have to go out and shoot anything? Why bother? I think the internet 
has provided the answer for a lot of people. The internet allows people to 
easily share their images with other people. Is that enough? I often ask 
myself that question. Is it enough to just share your images on the net 
without earning any money from them? 

  I wasn't into shooting yesterday, mainly because the weather turned bad, 
and it started to rain. So, then I had to think about carrying around this 
$5k camera in the rain and worry if something would happen to it. I 
remembered something Sean Reid said in one of his reviews about the M8 
needing weather sealing and well, I couldn't agree more. Maybe it is time to 
buy an M7! ;-) Unfortunately, I spent the money already....

  Regards,

  Larry 

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As a professional I was talking about myself, it's like shooting just to 
kill time for no reason.  I hate, being told "why don't you go out and take 
pictures for something to do!" as I'm often told. Drives me crazy!!! It's 
depressing and frustrating walking around shooting for absolutely no reason 
than "snapping just for the sake of snapping something." You can't feel the 
moments let alone see them! You might as well be as blind as a bad at high 
noon!  :-(

Sometimes once you get started and begin to see and feel the moments you 
come alive and it's all beautiful, you feel wonderful and up lifted. Other 
times it's sheer black hole hell of frustration of "why am I doing this I 
might as well be dead!" :-(

After all these years there's nothing more depressing than "taking pictures 
just for something to do killing time."  It's time filling with no feeling 
of inner satisfaction! Yes then sometimes it's just such a pure joy I can go 
for hours looking about for magical moments and it's so satisfying.  But 
that's being "IN THE MOOD!" I suppose some will not understand this feeling, 
so be it, but I don't know how to explain it in any other way.

It's always been an assignment, a documentary, a book, whatever, but the 
photography was predominantly always doing my thing for a client whom I knew 
I had to satisfy and most importantly, myself. There isn't for me anything 
as tremendous as the drive of emotion to shoot good photographs of life. 
Probably a self induced emotion, but when it happens and it works it's so 
damn satisfying you just can't get enough.   And I'm not sure that's the 
reason either.

But in the earlier post my remark had absolutely nothing to do about other 
folks. Hopefully this will explain my comment.

ted