Spending money

Or really: prioritising what you spend. I recently had a good conversation with my friend Henk-Jan about that new Leica Q3. What a fantastic device, and finally with a tilt screen. That alone is reason enough.

Shall we just trade our car for an affordable model, fourth hand if need be, and buy that Leica? Or is it an idea to trade in our Sony and some lenses, and could we then manage our commercial work with the 28mm on the Leica? Crop? That we could do, with those 60 megapixels.

In an earlier column I wrote about the brake and the accelerator. Staying calm and going deeper into what you already have (brake), instead of ruthlessly buying the newest and possibly best (accelerator). Last month I read on Instagram that William Rutten is leaving his studio after 35 years, because he did want more space.

In my head I thought back to his previous theatre tour, which I visited twice with an enormous amount of pleasure. In it he says that he too suffers, in inverted commas, from gear acquisition syndrome. That he buys everything new that comes out. In my head the bigger space in his studio became an opportunity to buy even more. Storage space. Mind you, that says something about me and nothing about William. I have no idea what his plans are, and I follow his wanderings as curiously as ever.

In the discussion about spending money on photography my current answer is always the same. I would rather buy a train ticket and a hotel night in a new city than a new camera. Easy for me to say, because I already have the cameras I want. And the lenses. And the lights. And the bags. But that Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 (Sony E) DG DN OS really would be a fantastic lens for the side of a hockey pitch.

At the start of last month I went to our capital for three nights. Hotel prices in Amsterdam jump well past two hundred euros a night and in my order of priorities that goes just a bit too far. Four days of street photography to top up my social media content and work on personal projects should not cost seven hundred euros. I have to eat as well. And staying with someone is another thing entirely.

If I want to walk out of the door at six in the morning, I should not have to feel awkward about it. Something to do with freedom, and freedom being worth something too. Nearly fifty, you see. Now it happens that I have always been enormously taken with stations and the photographic possibilities they offer. With that in the back of my mind, Amsterdam suddenly became a quarter of an hour bigger by public transport. Then Monnickendam and Zaandam are suddenly in Amsterdam too.

I live in lovely Wijchen. Nijmegen is just down the road from Wijchen, so now you roughly know where that is. Our capital is an hour and a half away. In America an hour and a half of travel means you live ‘by the sea’, but in our small country psychological distance works differently. But a quarter of an hour is doable. Prioritising. And a bit of creative thinking.

So we circle back to the budget I do or do not have for a Leica Q3 like that. I spent a long time weighing it up, looked at what my current cameras fetch second hand, and decided that the budget I have left for the Leica is exactly zero euros. For the nearly six thousand euros that device costs, I can stay almost a month in a hotel in the heart of Amsterdam. Then I do not have to share a dormitory with twelve others and I have my own shower.

Then I gather experiences that nobody can ever take away from me. Then I have photos that tell me where I am on my photographic journey and where I can and want to go next. But let us be honest: when the Leica Q4 arrives, this whole story simply starts again.

This article first appeared in Focus Magazine (the best photography magazine in the Netherlands), for which I wrote a column in every issue in 2023 and 2024.