You have to do something for yourself in this life, otherwise there is no quality of life.
Remember the old saying "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy?" People seem to have forgotten that little truism. It's still true, though. Too much work and not enough recreation results in burnout. It sounds like many who are responding to this thread are on the cusp of burnout - if not past the cusp.
Take some time for yourself, brothers and sisters! Do something for you, something that is fun. The house won't collapse if it's not 100% perfect in every little detail. The teenagers won't die if you don't cater to them 24/7/365.
It all depends on how you look at the money and cost facet of photography.
I find $4.50 for a roll of Tri-X and less than $0.25 for chemicals to develop each roll alot more affordable than buying a Monochrom M to use with my Leica M lenses.
Sure, I could get a D7100 for around $1000 to use with my Nikon glass. But SLRs can be very exasperating in some situations, lile low light shooting when the autofocus goes deaf, dumb and blind - GRRRRRRRR!!! SLRs and the lenses for them are big and heavy compared to a rangefinder camera - and SLRs are noisy as hell compared to the whisper quiet operation of a rangefinder.
I frequently find myself photographing in situations where a quiet camera is mandatory. I have tried to use my F100 and it is just to loud. It causes disruption and distraction in the quiet of a church or temple, which is exactly what you don't want. When doing street photography at close range, the racket caused by a SLR alerts your subjects. It intrudes on the unguarded moment - or else it causes them to walk away.
Once you become accustomed to rangefinder cameras, SLRs are just not as much fun as they once were. That's been my experience, at least.
Hey! Thanks for picking up on my ramblings Cheese! I used to be a "professional photographer" back in the 80s. It kinda sapped my love for the medium, so that by 1990, I just quit, and put my degree in chemistry to work, doing industrial quality control, then finally finding academia, where I could teach chemistry and play every day with the biggest, best 'chemistry set' in the world! (Anybody else here old enough and nerdy enough to remember what a chemistry set was?)
So I love my job, and never feel like doing it will make me a dull boy. However, there was the photography thing rattling around in the back of my mind. I still had cameras, but by the mid 1990s they were obsolete film cameras. I was excited - titillated if you will - by the emerging technology of digital photography. In 1995 (or so) I bought my first digital camera. It was a sphere that was tethered to my Mac, and had a non-focusable lens. I put it on a stellar spectroscope, and WOW! Suddenly I could obtain star spectra that rivaled anything I had seen in the literature, for a fraction of the cost. Soon I was pointing the
QuickCam at a variety of subjects, in short doing photography with it.
I was hooked, and went whole hog into digital photography, Nikon 950, D100, Olympus pocket cameras, bought (and sold) a Canon P&S.
Blogged it all! I was the digital photography poster boy of 2002.
Although I didn't go fully back into the Biz, I did work part time in photography. I shot weddings, grip&grins, and other events, made websites, and even did the odd art show (winning Arizona Artist of Promise, first place in the Eric Fischl photography competition, and a few shows locally and one that traveled around California.) I felt I was back in photography, all the while having a full time job that could support my part time job!
But then I started with the burn-out once again. One wedding where the bride-zilla was particularly brutal got me started, and a website where they wanted more and more free touch-ups finished it off. I quit doing photography for pay cold turkey. But I wanted to keep making pictures! So I dug out my Olympus OM-1n, and the three lenses I had for it, and signed up for a "portfolio development" course at the local community college (which coincidentally was also my employer, so it was nearly free) and began working on my skills and creativity with film based photography. I started blending chemistry with photography, culminating in a large collection of modern urano-ferro-vanadotype prints which derived their intense colors not from the cibachrome of my past, but from heavy metals.
The teacher of that class is now one of my best-ever friends, as well as my biggest fan. I turn down paid jobs now, and only work on what I want to do. I have a saying when students or others talk about improving their photography:
I'm trying to become worse, I want to be less accessible. If you ask my girlfriend, I've succeeded!
So yes: if it weren't for digital, I would not be doing what I do today. I still use digital cause it's fun, but I shoot film because I'm driven to.
