The cost of photography

bradleysmith

bradleysmith

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Bradley Smith
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I just occurred to me that a 12 megapixel camera could fit over 100 images onto a £10 2 gig compact flash card whereas a 36 exposure roll of film costs about £2.75 (7dayshop's cheapest) and that doesn't include development costs so even if you used a new memory card when the last one was full (rather than copying to a computer and reusing the card) it'd still be cheaper than shooting with film. We don't know how good we've got it really.
 
Absolutely.

The cost of film and processing made us old-timers really careful what we shot; we refined our technique bit by bit to cut out the dross.

It remains to be seen whether you young whippersnappers with the latest digital wonder will go through the same learning process without the financial incentive.

(takes off old fogey hat ....)
 
jerry12953 said:
The cost of film and processing made us old-timers really careful what we shot; we refined our technique bit by bit to cut out the dross.

It remains to be seen whether you young whippersnappers with the latest digital wonder will go through the same learning process without the financial incentive.
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If time is money then shooting thousands of shots these days 'just because you can' is not particularly good value, assuming the vast majority of digital photographers put a fair bit of work into post processing.

Even with staggeringly cheap memory I'm still very cautious about what I shoot (at a motorsport event, for example) as the idea of sorting through them all, uploading etc is incredibly boring to me. I prefer the activity of actually taking the photos far more enjoyable than any other stage of 'the process', including sharing them.

As much as anything I think it's also far more satisfying if you can nail shots first or second time, digital doesn't/shouldn't change that. If I was to get my panning shots from shooting at 6fps every time a car drove past and hoping to get one sharp shot out of that, I hardly see that as challenging or particularly enjoyable career/hobby.
 
The way I look at it is I stopped shooting so often before I went digital. I very rarely used my film SLR (Fujica ST605) because of the costs involved, I literally couldn't afford it, and without the film and processing I couldn't afford to learn. The bonus wih digital (in terms of learning) is you can see your results straight away, while it's still fresh in your mind how you did it. And of course EXIF data means you can evaluate your work with the exact settings in front of you.

I do still enjoy running the odd roll through though :)
 
If I open a restaurant, cook 200 meals, throw 180 away and serve up the 20 that came out good - would I be a master chef? ;)
 
@andyb:
consider a slighlty different analogy:

a masterchef cooks one meal for £100, its very good

a nobody chef cooks 100 meals for £1 each, one of them, by chance, is very good, the rest are discarded.

they both produce one very good mean for the same effective price. Being able to shoot hundreds of pictures allows your average joe to take better photos, while the professional still akes the extra time to compose the shot and post process rather than just shooting till her gets lucky
 
ChrisMClark said:
I very rarely used my film SLR (Fujica ST605) because of the costs involved, I literally couldn't afford it, and without the film and processing I couldn't afford to learn
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You can shoot a lot of film though for the cost of the gear in your signature (and other's here, not trying to single you out), not to mention photoshop CS3 (assuming you paid for it, not judging if not before anyone starts that arguement)

I hear this alot from people who say film costs too much, but have lots of money tied in to digital. Fair play if you don't upgrade your digi equipment a lot
but the cost of one prosumer dSLR is about 2 years worth of film and processing for me, and I'm not exactly shy about burning film

Digital can be good in a lot of ways but cheapness isn't necessarily one of them:exit:
 
raathistle said:
You can shoot a lot of film though for the cost of the gear in your signature (and other's here, not trying to single you out), not to mention photoshop CS3 (assuming you paid for it, not judging if not before anyone starts that arguement)

I hear this alot from people who say film costs too much, but have lots of money tied in to digital. Fair play if you don't upgrade your digi equipment a lot
but the cost of one prosumer dSLR is about 2 years worth of film and processing for me, and I'm not exactly shy about burning film

Digital can be good in a lot of ways but cheapness isn't necessarily one of them:exit:
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I certainly see your point, but once gears paid for it's paid for. The bonus is if I have a tight month I can carry on shooting, whereas when I used film I'd have to curb it, or cut out shooting completely. Like I said I still shoot film now and again, though I must admit it's getting rarer and rarer...I just love digital :LOL:
 
Digital has an initial high cost associated with it comparable (not in price but in equivalency) to setting up your own darkroom. The ongoing cost of digital is much lower though.

If you can get hold of a student copy of Photoshop/Lightroom then you're laughing, or if you are happy using the camera manufacturer's software, or download free software like GIMP
 
Uneducated_Rick said:
If you can get hold of a student copy of Photoshop/Lightroom then you're laughing, or if you are happy using the camera manufacturer's software, or download free software like GIMP
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Or if you can talk someone into buying CS3 Ext. for you :LOL:
 
Shooting with my S5 pro in RAW, which doesn't compress the raw files at all, so I have 25mb raw files each time I hit the trigger, I treat as costing me 0.3p per frame, for a backed up permanent storage.

1TB hard drive (the volume I'm buying in) = £70. = 7p per gigabyte.
0.025 of a gig * 7p, times two copies on two different hard drives = 0.35p a shot. Which is still a hell of a lot, considering that jpegs use less than 1/10th that size.

Even prices of 15p a frame make me cringe... :p
 
itsdavedotnet said:
Shooting with my S5 pro in RAW, which doesn't compress the raw files at all, so I have 25mb raw files each time I hit the trigger, I treat as costing me 0.3p per frame, for a backed up permanent storage.

1TB hard drive (the volume I'm buying in) = £70. = 7p per gigabyte.
0.025 of a gig * 7p, times two copies on two different hard drives = 0.35p a shot. Which is still a hell of a lot, considering that jpegs use less than 1/10th that size.

Even prices of 15p a frame make me cringe... :p
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Do you put every single photo you take on your hard drive??!:eek:

No sarcasm, I'm genuinely interested!
 
wjh31 said:
@andyb:
consider a slighlty different analogy:

a masterchef cooks one meal for £100, its very good

a nobody chef cooks 100 meals for £1 each, one of them, by chance, is very good, the rest are discarded.

they both produce one very good mean for the same effective price. Being able to shoot hundreds of pictures allows your average joe to take better photos, while the professional still akes the extra time to compose the shot and post process rather than just shooting till her gets lucky
Click to expand...

The difference being that master chef knows his one meal will be good - nobody chef takes a chance and might end up with 100 duff meals if he doesn't get lucky :)
 
AndyB said:
The difference being that master chef knows his one meal will be good - nobody chef takes a chance and might end up with 100 duff meals if he doesn't get lucky :)
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but s/he stands a better chance than if s/he could only afford to make 10meals
 
Yeah yeah ok I give you that point ;)
 
It's still going to take me a long time to save up for that 600mm VR :(

Oh well. £110 million coming my way tomorrow night. That'll take care of it :D
 
I learnt my photography on film... and feel a bit of an old timer on here at times and I'l only 30!

I always try to nail the shots first time... That for me is the skill and the art... I do take much more now than I ever do... but all it really seems to mean is I take more images... rather than lots of pictures but only a few images if you get me.

I think we have it easy now... but in a way it's much much better for thousands of reasons than film ever was... The one thing im not really into is my post processing though... I just never used to have to find that time with my film photography... but you do with digital...
 
I think digital has sped up my learning process I like playing with film but digital is where I can move quickly and learn, also I can expose in ways that are 'wrong' that I wouldnt know how to meter for film IE a lot of the gigs I sometimes have very underexposed shots or over blown lights but I can chimp and find that out with digital. Also the strobist thing would be soooo hard to learn without instantly viewable results
 
Slimbert said:
Do you put every single photo you take on your hard drive??!:eek:

No sarcasm, I'm genuinely interested!
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My workflow is that I transfer everything onto my harddrive, then go through in lightroom and 'x' anything that's obviously crap, and then nuke it.... this is done way more heavy handedly if the files are RAWs rather than jpegs, but still... but yes, mostly, the photos I take go onto my hard drive, and are then duplicated to another harddrive in a weekly scheduled process.

Hey, I also do a hell of a lot of HD filming.... glad that doesn't go onto hard drives that I've gotta buy personally ;)
 
Never shot with film. Just turned 21 and don't even remember the parents having a film camera!
 
I don't think it is simple as 'digital is cheap because you can get lots of images on a memory card'. You need something to store the images on and, because of the transient nature of the digital medium, some backup storage as well. So using a computer (of some type) is a requirement.

Allied to that is the ability to see the images in the future - a few years ago I had some film developed and got a CD back with the images on. Fine - but I've discovered that my current DVD drive does not read the old CD - so without the actual negatives those images would now have been lost to me - just 6 years after they were taken. I've been working in IT for long enough to see the end of Winchester and MFM disks and the death of 5¼" and 3½" floppys I don't doubt that the next iteration of hardware will not be compatable with the current

I have my doubts about reading some image encoding software in the future - it's fine now but what happens 10 years down the line? You may have saved the date form drive to drive as you upgraded, backed them up and find that you've lost the chance to see the images again! At least if you have a sleeve of negatives you can scan them again. Does anyone remember Kodak's 'Photo CD'? What happened to that? You could play your images on special CD-i players and on computers with special software. Who has got them now? What has happened to the images?

In 'the old days' you could drop off your film and collect it sometime later - with a paper wallet containing 36 images. Now you have to spend time (and money) on processing your own and although the outcome is the same there is rather less of the excitement you had as you flipped through the pictures of the recent past to find where you had caught that moment in time ....

Digital isn't better or worse than film. Nor, do I suspect, is it particularly 'cheaper'. It probably doesn't make better photographers out of us either.
 
bradleysmith said:
I just occurred to me that a 12 megapixel camera could fit over 100 images onto a £10 2 gig compact flash card whereas a 36 exposure roll of film costs about £2.75 (7dayshop's cheapest) and that doesn't include development costs so even if you used a new memory card when the last one was full (rather than copying to a computer and reusing the card) it'd still be cheaper than shooting with film. We don't know how good we've got it really.
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This very point made me buy my first Dslr, the mighty D70! I recall the first "memory card" I owned, it was a 2GB micro drive which set me back £299.00! This still worked out cheaper than the film camera, it had paid for itself within a year.
I now buy 4GB SanDisk cards for around £30 a time, how technology has moved on, oh and the cost has dropped somewhat along the way.

How many of you recall using one of these in a camera, my first point and shoot used these:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Two_Rolls.jpg
 
Pro Digital is just as expensive as film. Computers/hard drives/software all cost as much or more than darkroom gear. Bodies are updated more often - resulting in bigger files - more powerful computers needed etc. Deadlines have also dramatically shortened. Pictures used to be delivered 'next day' or in a few days sometimes - now often it's within hours - sometimes within minutes of shooting! Changing film every 36 (or 12!!) concentrated the mind but unlimited (almost) shooting at high frame rates also allows you to get shots you could never get with film equipment - unless you were very lucky.
It's progress - and I love it!
 
It is the compatability issues that Voyager has explained which is the main reason I am a little reluctant to switch over to digital.

Don't get me wrong, I am not against digital at all. I work with film and enjoy processing in a darkroom. But my biggest fear would be to store images and not be able to view them a few years down the line for whatever reason.

I have to be truthful here, I am not a computer expert and I know next to nothing about digital cameras, so I can't put up an arguement for or against digital photography. All I know is I would be much happier having a set of negatives and, as Voyager has said, scan them into the computer when necessary.

As regards to the cost, well photography in general is an expensive hobby particularly when you do your own processing, and I admire photographers who can make money out of their images.
 
I always worry anyway even when using a DSLR - the number of actuations goes up if I click! :( I'm a tight bast*rd so I do try when I take a shot.
 
I started in photography with film several years ago, had some really good kit (fuji Ax-5, ST-1, lots of lenses i.e. 70-200 f2.8). I stopped for a while then got interested again and started using it in anger. I swapped to digital after one weekend of shooting 10 rolls of film and paying out £60 for developing and then doing the same the next weekend.

I hadn't quite realised the price to replace my lenses though :bang:

I think it's helped my photography though, mostly because digital suits my workflow and post processing skills. (It helps I work in IT for a world leader in digital media :D)
 
My first camera used 127 film, then I had one using 120. I think I bypassed 110 and 126 and went to 35mm after that.

Digital does encourage people to shoot a lot more than they did in the film days. The perception that's it's free, once you've bought the camera, is probably true for many of them too. Most people I know just download the images to a computer, and possibly print/email a few. They don't post process or back up.

Does anyone know how the cost of DSLRs and lenses todays compares with the prices of gear back in the glory days of the manual/mechanical SLRs in, say, the 1970s and 1980s, adjusted for inflation and average earning power?
 
MartynK said:
My first camera used 127 film, then I had one using 120. I think I bypassed 110 and 126 and went to 35mm after that.

Digital does encourage people to shoot a lot more than they did in the film days. The perception that's it's free, once you've bought the camera, is probably true for many of them too. Most people I know just download the images to a computer, and possibly print/email a few. They don't post process or back up.

Does anyone know how the cost of DSLRs and lenses todays compares with the prices of gear back in the glory days of the manual/mechanical SLRs in, say, the 1970s and 1980s, adjusted for inflation and average earning power?
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Well I can tell you I bought my first 35mm SLR back in 1983. It was a Pentax MX with 50mm f/1.7 and it cost £119.99 - I only know because I was up in the loft the other day sorting some rubbish out and came across a box with brochures and all sorts and the receipt was still in there after all these years.

I remember looking at Nikon SLR's just before buying the Pentax and these were around the £200 mark with a 50mm lens if I'm not mistaken. I only managed to afford the Pentax because I had a Saturday job whilst I was at college.
 
I went crazy shooting when I first got my DSLR, when I was learning. Then I could sit and review them, and see which settings/technique produced the good shots.

Now I try and nail a shot first time if it's a situation I'm comfortable with, if it's a new situation, I'll still fire off hundreds so I learn how to nail that shot next time :)
 
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