Advice sought

["Jeff Segawa" <segawa@nospam.netone.com>]

Let me just start off by saying that I'm grateful to have the sort of
"problems" mentioned below, and having recently read Material World, feel
that life is pretty soft, furnitureless apartment notwithstanding :-)

Do you fellow LUGers feel entirely comfy about having a rather large amount
of money tied up in what is, after all, still a small-format camera, though
a very good one? I love looking at what might be called "fine art"
photographs, whether they be mine or someone else's. The ones I seem to
respond to most strongly seem to be shot on medium or large formats, and
tend not to be documentary-type shots, though there are a few exceptions.
For the most part, grain, excessive contrast, deliberately soft focus and
the overuse of graduated ND filters seems to weaken the experience in some
ways, as the medium then takes precedence over the message.

Put another way, the sub-$1K prices I'm seeing on used Contax G-1 outfits
and the even lower price I just paid for a Fuji GA645 have been on my mind
a lot lately! While I enjoy the hardware itself as a sort of art form, my
enjoyment of it in this regard is very limited, and not one which I wish to
place a large investment.

I'm on my 4th Leica RF camera now, and this time around, had the brilliant
notion of how great it would be if I could somehow put together a package
for around $450, but missed this goal oh, by a factor of about 4! What
happened to the nice, useable IIIc's? Had hoped to achieve these ends with
some judicious buying and selling of systems (hanging onto just a choice
bit here and there) but obviously, someone else is beating me to these
things! And for those of you who ARE good at this sort of thing, does it
take you weeks, or even months, to recover your investment, and do you need
to really work your butt off in order to do it?

Wondering,
Jeff