How about this for an analogy? Say you're a great executive with tons of experience who decided he's fed up with wearing business suits. It's really not about the suit, but the person behind the clothes.
Say you've been wanting to get out of the corporate world, so one day you decide to sell all your business suits. One day your friend calls you saying that he has a meeting with a investors for a startup company that you are partly involved with. You show up with a polo shirt and jeans. Your friend stops you at the door and says you cannot attend because it'll make the company look bad. Can you blame him? Is he better off taking a stoner friend who works at Men's Fasion Depot into the meeting with him? No.
What do they want? Both. The man with a professional appearance and the professional skills.
If businesspeople were
that appearance-conscious, Steve Jobs wouldn't be able to buy his way into a meeting. The reality, of course, is that plenty of people can only dream of getting a few minutes with Jobs.
At the end of the day, results are what count. It's not just any executive who can get away with faded jeans and black turtlenecks, but once you've proven yourself you earn some leeway to go casual.
Right now, the m4/3 problem is not yet having proven itself to enough people. Sadly, it'll probably take a similar type of product from Nikon or Canon to really change things.
Just ask yourself, if it was your wedding, and the photographer showed up with a GF1 or a EP-1, knowing everything you know about these cameras, would you be disappointed?
Not if I knew the photographer to be capable. But that's what comes with being an enthusiast -- you will take the great photog with unconventional gear over the weekend warrior with the latest and greatest. It's true that the average person won't necessarily have the same response.
Personally, I'd like to attend more weddings where the photographer was a little bit less of a walking photo studio, but maybe that's just me.
A) I know there are better equipement out there that every other wedding photographer would likely have.
There's almost always better equipment. What? You only brought a D300? Why not a D700? Or a D3x? Why not an S2? etc. etc.
B) I could see too many of conversations from my inlaws about how I was too cheap to hire a photographer. And how he is a real photographer, and even though his camera doesn't appear to be a SLR, it is about the same. And then there would be some difficult inlaws not taking the shots too seriously and me having to convince them otherwise, as if they would be standing in front of someoen with heavier gear.
Interesting point about some people not taking the shots seriously because of the camera. Not sure about it, though. I find at weddings (always attended as a guest), almost everyone seems ready to strike a pose at the mere sight of a camera, any camera.
Which is not to say that the amateurs take equal or better photos than the pro, just that wedding guests tend to respond to a camera a little differently than they do in everyday situations.
One of the things that sets a pro apart from the rest of us is being skilled in interacting with (i.e. directing) subjects. As long as the photographer is capable in that area, I suspect most people wouldn't even notice that the camera wasn't a big black SLR.
