Taxes: Codae

There are a couple of codas to my "Taxes" post below (in which I tried to affect a sort of rueful tongue-in-cheek humor and evidently, for most readers, failed. Oh, well, I tried). Anyway, consider:

• Photography isn't that expensive. No matter how much you spend on it, there are any number of other hobbies / passions / obsessions / pasttimes which constitute much more efficient ways to pee away specie. You could own a boat, for instance, or collect cars like Jay Leno, or have a passion for racehorses, or be into really high-end audio. Photography can be expensive, sure, but there are lots worse things. Even if you collect photography, and do things like pay $2.1 million for the odd Cindy Sherman, you could always be buying paintings instead and tossing away ten times that. Comparatively, photography always comes out looking pretty good.

• Photography is reasonably wholesome, all things considered. I always qualify this by noting that there are indeed a few ways one can break the law with photography, and there must be a few ways that one could turn it toward immoral ends. But for the most part, it doesn't hurt anybody. Including you. Whenever one of my friends mentions that a spouse or S.O. is complaining about his or her counterpart's immersion into the hobby, I point out that it's better than crank 'n' liquor, poker 'n' prostitutes, yatta yatta, things of that nature—real vices. You could be pouring your wealth one quarter at a time down the throat of a one-armed bandit. That's a far sight worse than overspending on ink, methinks. Wouldn't you say that, on balance, photography keeps more of us good folks out of trouble more often than it gets us into trouble? That would be my guess.

I've always paid the various taxes and been happy. I spend a certain amount of my money on photography, sure. Have for years. But it's my thing. And that's a good thing.

Posted by: MIKE JOHNSTON