Exotic exposures
Photographically, we have the luxury of having a camera in our pocket.
We might just call it 'the phone', but an iPhone 16 Pro, Google Pixel 9 Pro or Samsung S25, has a seriously smart camera, and a series of lenses.
We have the luxury of being able to point and shoot, and our smartphone camera will pull out just about all the tricks in the book to make us look like a brilliant photographer.
We travellers then have the luxury of a wide range of light, high quality mirrorless cameras — the Sony range, Canon's R7, Nikon's Z8, and the Panasonic Lumix and Olympus OM ranges, for example.
And then there is the seriously 'luxury' end of digital photography.
I've just spotted a Hasselblad H6D-100c medium format DSLR camera in a sale. This camera has a recommended retail price of $58,309 — but in this online sale, this price has a line through it and it is replaced by a price of $58,299. Ten dollars off! (Sign me up now!)
(By the way, would you like a lens with that camera body? The Hasselblad XCD 28mm f/4 P lens is a mere $3020.
But for sheer 'isn't that beautiful' luxury, you'd have to track down a Leica R3 Electronic Gold 'Oskar Barnack 100th Anniversary'. It's like jewellery-and-camera rolled into one. Just 1000 cameras were made in 1979 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Oskar Barnack, the inventor of the LEICA camera.
Plated in 24 carat gold and with a lizard skin covering, the front of the prism housing is engraved with Barnack's signature and the dates '1879-1979'. Match it with a Leitz Wetzlar Summilux-R 50mm F1.4 lens. And what might you pay for it? Somewhere between $16,000 for a reasonably well-used one, to $23,000 for a cracker in a box.
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