Rob, yes, if I could no longer print I simply wouldn't bother pressing that button.
:-(
I've been thinking about this since you posted. Okay, I know you have the skill set to make good images by hand, too, but if you didn't, wouldn't the pleasure of seeing, framing and capturing an image that you could only - perhaps - see on a monitor count as worthwhile?
As you know, I haven't printed anything for ages, but I do still find a certain joy in making photographs that will end up on my website and not on a wall. Having written which, even with a print, unless somebody actually
displays it somewhere, how are you, as photographer, any the better off than if you'd just put it into your site for your own convenient viewing?
We've all had chats on LuLa about the tactile quality of wet prints and of digital ones, too. However, unless one actually makes the thing oneself, by hand, then tactile qualities vanish behind protective glass and become evened out across the spectrum of papers we can access. Once mounted, framed and glassed, not much difference to looking at them on a good monitor except that one can, on the monitor, avoid seeing the room behind one, too.
Perhaps a touch of the devil's advocate here, but really, can
not printing allow you to abandon and lose the
other pleasures of your Leica system?
Rob