Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/12/08

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Subject: [Leica] Ted's comments on "Inferiority Complex"
From: lrzeitlin at aol.com (lrzeitlin at aol.com)
Date: Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:46:21 -0500

Ted,

Thanks for your reassuring words. I'm slowly getting better from the 
flu and I trust that you are well on the road to recovery from your eye 
operation. It's tough being an old fart, isn't it.

About picture taking. I know my skills as a photographer. Patience 
isn't one of them. My few years as a news photographer trained me to 
snap a shot as soon as an appropriate scene presented itself. Any 
reasonable picture would do as long as it could make the early edition. 
A follow up piece on the Planet Earth nature series mentioned that a 
photo crew stalked a snow leopard for three years to get 30 seconds of 
screen time. Let's see. A photographer and two assistants probably 
would cost about $150,000 per year, perhaps more. Add in supplies, 
equipment, transport and overhead and the three year cost would 
probably be between $750,000 and a cool million. So it comes to about 
$30,000 per second of TV time. And that doesn't add in the really 
expensive costs of editing and production. It sure makes owning a 
digital Leica one of the best bargains in photography.

My wife, a well respected painter, constantly tells me that fine art 
isn't spontaneous. You must form an image in your mind and carefully 
work to realize it in actuality. The lesson is usually lost on me. If 
it looks good in the viewfinder, I simply push the button.

Best regards,

Larry Z



Replies: Reply from tedgrant at shaw.ca (tedgrant at shaw.ca) ([Leica] Ted's comments on "Inferiority Complex")