Do You Know People With Other Hobbies That Make Use Of Quality Photo Equipment?

There are aircraft spotters, they document and photograph airplanes much like the railroaders you mentioned. They tend to use digital cameras though. Just like trains they document the registration number and can get a lot of information on the aircraft from that.

https://m.wikihow.com/Be-an-Aircraft-Spotter

I think using a camera to make any image is a legitimate use of photographic equipment.

 

Food photography. I know people who photograph food they made, sell it and sell photos of food.
And then where are knife addicts. I remember more than one who wanted to photograph it with Leica. One fetish on top of another one.

 

My son, a computer science student at Purdue, is really heavily into building things with Lego. He has a DSLR and a macro lens that he uses to photograph the things he creates, then he posts the pics to online Lego forums.

 

Strange that no one mentioned birders yet. Prone to apply long, expensive lenses and the latest DSLR at the end of them. Tripod, gimbal, camouflage, it all adds up to an expensive past-time.

 

Astronomers would be another obvious one, astrophotography seems to be a growing field as well. I had a friend did it with a modified canon DSLR (IR cut filter removed).

 

Why not?

 

10-15 years ago I was pretty heavy into film astrophotography. My least expensive piece of equipment was the camera, an Olympus OM-1. Once we started having kids and then moved to New Hampshire, I just couldn’t find the time for it and transitioned into “just” photography.

 

I had drifted away from photography for 20+ years. I got into sailing and was sort of disgusted with the dismal quality of the cellphone pics of boats at the lake I sail on and it was one reason I picked it back up with a DSLR. Since then it kind of metastasized into 35mm, medium format and 4X5.

 

Years ago when I sold photo supplies exclusively to pros I had a client who was a technician for a proctologist.

 

When I was leading the design of projectors for my company we use a DSLR to photograph and Analyze the image quality of every item off the assembly line.