I know we are all really gear oriented around here and biased toward RF's, but it's really pretty simple with this thread. There is a reason all those PJ's standing around at an event are shooting Nikon and Canon DSLR's with big zoom lenses. You can take a look at them, say to yourself "what idiots hauling around all those porky DSLR's and two pound zoom lenses," or you can decide maybe they know something about their day to day work you don't.
If you can find someone to commission you to do month long photo essays anymore, then you can use just about any camera you want. But there aren't many of those commissions left, I'm afraid.
Very true. Indeed, there never were that many. But that doesn't mean that everyone has to do the same kind of hard news photography in a ferociously competitive environment. They can try another path. They may or may not succeed. But I'd rather fail at something I wanted to do, than never even try it because everyone else was telling me that there was no point in trying.
Consider also what you mean by 'at an event'. My Leica-loving chum with the press awards is not one of the people you see 'standing around at events' He rather likes Leicas for scene-of-crime shots, and at minor royal events, and all kinds of other stuff.
No-one denies that big, heavy DSLRs are the standard kit, and that they are standard because they make it easiest to get a publishable shot. On the other hand,
IF you can build a career on a different (and often equipment-related) look -- and there are surprisingly many who have done exactly that -- then you'd be a fool to try to use generic tools for a specific task that calls for specific tools: in particular, the tools you're happiest with.
No, it's not easy. None of it's easy. Few press photographers achieve fame and fortune; in absolute terms, I suspect, rather fewer than achieve fame, if not fortune, in feature photography. But no-one is obliged to become a news photographer with two DSLRs, any more than anyone is obliged to be a feature photographer with a Leica or a landscape photographer with an 8x10 Gandolfi.
Photography, for many people, is about dreams. Earning a livelihood about photography is about living that dream. It's seldom as romantic as most people imagine: getting up before dawn on a freezing day at 10,000 feet in the Himalayas may be romantic, but it's better in retrospect than at the time. This is all the more true if you have a hangover and are suffering from the effects of dubious Tibetan hygiene in the kitchen of the monastery where you ate the previous night.
There is plenty involved in earning a living from photography that is less than fun. But I'd never discourage anyone from trying it, any more than I'd discourage a girl from trying modelling. I'd just do my best beforehand to make sure they knew as many of the drawbacks and difficulties as they could understand.
Cheers,
R.
