I know exactly what you mean. There are times these days when shooting in quiet locations I wish I had my Leica, however I have yet to get a digital Leica so I am using the relatively loud DSLR. In the editing before my post was published one of my sentences was changed and it really changed the meaning. Now it reads:

"Never once while on these adventures did I stop and think, “I wish I had a Leica (or Nikon or Canon) camera.”"

I originally wrote it to read: "I am here because I have a Leica, Nikon, or Canon camera”

I feel that the changing the word "because" to "I wish" changes the entire meaning of what I wrote there.

Lots of photographers spend too much time on discussions about gear, brands and technics instead of style, creativity and photography itself. One of my teachers in portrait photography used to say: "Folks, the one who KNOWS photography puts a hole in a campbell soup can, adds a film - and is still able to take great photographs .....!"

Thank you, Harrison - this is a great post. I'm looking forward to read more of this really inspiring stuff

Best regards Heike

It seems you have to choose sides though.

One and a half years ago when I was in the market for my first DSLR, having only used Olympus bridge cameras before, I had totally no bias either way toward Nikon or Canon. I knew I wanted to go with either one of them because the ecosystem for each was just too large to ignore.

I lived in Tokyo at the time so I could literally walk 15 minutes to three huge camera stores (Bic Camera, Yodobashi Camera, Map Camera and others too). I put hands on with all the Nikon and Canon models in my budget, and made my decision on which body felt best in my hands mostly and had the minimum features I wanted at that time.

Love it!