To pay or not to pay: that is not the question.
Yes, I will certainly pay to retain access, but in doing so, a lot will have been changed. I have been a contributor to this site for a few years now, and it, along with the early BJP website and some few special people I met there, have helped me through the threshold of digital to the stage where I need no further help in achieving anything that I want to achieve, technically, in the medium, which was where I already was with film, after building a reasonably successful career in photography, starting in 1960. My sense of gratitude to LuLa is why I shall pay, as well as my gratitude to those here who have helped me, too.
I received an e-mail from a photographer today, thanking me for my LuLa input, which helped him on his own way in the business, if in the discipline of motion; that's a very gratifying place in which I find myself this afternoon, and makes much of the hassle worthwhile.
But. And several buts come to mind.
I have already left this site on perhaps three occasions, and am currently distant. This isn't about hurt feelings, but it is about health: I have scored two heart attacks, and I'm told a third is usually curtains. Now this is all about frustration and exasperation created when confronted with the rare posters whom I consider to be congenital idiots, even if one of them can produce rather good photographs. Anger isn't hurt feelings or 'sensitivity'; it's its own very damaging emotion and I don't need the risk that increased nervous tension offers me.
As often admitted, I have never been much interested in landscape, finding it very difficult to tell the difference between high-art landscape and commercial stock landscape. Some of it that I see here (or anywhere else) falls into the stock category, and much more even fails that basic litmus test. The truth is, there are really very, very few good photographers around – here or anywhere else. If you want to find the best work, look at photographers' agents' websites and eat your collective hearts out. So, if LuLa turns more to fit the label on the tin, it loses ever more appeal for me and, perhaps, others, too. Will it turn that way? When Michael was running the show, his greatest input, in my view, was his exemplary reportage work. It fitted him like a glove – which, no doubt, was why he spent so much time working at it. Health fucks everybody up at some time – change is inevitable; it's the only sure bet there is.
Workshops? Trips? Photography is something best done alone, so you can think, react and be yourself. If you just want some fun with fellow snappers, that's okay too, but not for me - never was nor could be.
So, technical videos are of no interest to me, and neither are camera/lens reviews, which simply fly right over my head. I already own all the gear I need - and more – to do what I find that I do today. I don't even like digital gear, findng it so unlike Nikon F Series or Hasselblad 500 series miracles of instinctive usage, as to be obstacles in the way of images rather than aids to making them. But, as I said, change happens and you gotta go along with it or simply quit, which creates its own void to list amongst others.
However, on the matter of LuLa's future, perhaps this is the time to create a two-tier LuLa, where one section is clearly restricted to pros and another to amateurs, this to facilitate conversation between people with some common professional experience where the bullshit chat (and even insult) is not present, because there is shared substance in place of wannabe. You only have to look at the existing, two broadish parts of Lula to see that few pros ever migrate to the Coffee Corner/Critique part, because they simply don't need it or give a toss about what's written there. This indicates, to me at least, that there are two very different constituencies in LuLa, and this shouldn't be overlooked or underestimated. I'm not suggesting denial of reading access to non-pros, just denial of contribution in order to keep it professional.
Another of the buts is this: writing and posting images freely is all right when the site is also free; who really feels that they want to contribute in the same manner where the organ is now grinding out money? Being a supplier of free content where money is being made for somebody else, is akin to microstock, and flies in the face of self-respect. I have no problem with people making money, just with that being made on my supplied content without some return to myself. Which, of course suits the amateur perfectly, it always has, because being published is the holy grail for these people, not monetary value in return.
So yes, I'll pay, but I doubt I'll be having much to write about.
Rob C