> > Try to see it this way: when most of us fossils started in > > photography, it was a difficult and expensive craft that you learnt > > and then liked to show off. No, not always. > > You invested a small fortune in heavy metal (!) gear that you thought > > would last your lifetime, you tested materials and processes, and all > > was well with the world... I still do, and all is still well with the world. My equipment will last if cared for. > > Suddenly people without training can buy a small, convenient camera > > and produce lots and lots of decent pictures. Your investment in > > brass gears and glass falls enormously in value (I still almost cry > > when I see what e. g. Hasselblad gear is going for now; luckily I sold > > before that), and even big companies that produced your favourite > > materials go bust (Agfa), No, they click a button and out spills endless quantities of junk. And, it is quire apparent from looking at much of the work produced by amateurs, they are indeed "without training." You also assume our investment in equipment is suddenly worthless or has less value, just because digital arrived. Such a silly notion. I do not care how much the monetary value drops. Means nothing, if you intend to use the equipment and you are not interested in selling. You also fail to look at the other side. What about people like me that purchased laptop computers at four grand a pop? Computers like the laptop I am using today. It cost me more than four grand more than eight years ago, and it is "worthless" today because I can buy triple the machine for a third (or far less) of the cost. Five hundred dollars will get me a more "capable" machine. This does not mean it is useless. We will not go into the worthless IBM ThinkPad, the PowerBooks, and the others I bought. Each cost more than three thousand dollars and I cannot sell them. I can sell the Hasselblad, the boat load of lenses, the M3/M4 and the Visioflex stuff. I can sell everything I own for more money. You cannot say the same thing about your digital camera. It is outdated almost as soon as you bought it. If by outdated, you mean megapixels and the like. Something better will come along. I often use my 486 laptop with 8 mb of ram and a forty mb hard drive. I use it quite a bit. Perhaps useless to many, absolutely ideal for me. > > Your world falls apart, you feel like the dinosaurs looking at the > > falling asteroids... Not my world. It is a grand place. > > Some fossils do what I did: try the new, and try to find out how best > > to use it. Others just sit down and MOAN. Can you really blame them? And "fossils" like me prefer to wait perhaps a year and buy a far better camera and computer than you did for half the price. Or three months, for that matter. Bob ..
