James Schenken writes: : In the literature that I read, most mid to high-end wedding photogs : are now taking between 1500 and 2500 images at a wedding but only : printing proofs for about 200 or so. 2500 images in RAW at say 10-20Mb per image = 25-50Gb call it 25Gb. forget the adjusted images, 40 weddings to a terrabyte add backups, 2 terrabytes of storage - and replace the drives every 5 years or less and we've got some serious costs for storage : Assuming that't right, then that's 45 to 75 rolls of film at $5 per : roll plus another $7 - $8 for processing. : That makes ( for 60 rolls ) $720 cash out of pocket before getting : paid for the pictures. Did people really absorbe the costs of film where you are? No one here did that - the deposit at the time of booking covered film and processing, which was always loaded by a percentage (more profit for the photographer) : The revenue for each is the same, the difference per wedding is $670 : and 10 weddings later, the digital photog just paid for his latest : $5,000 Nikon or Canon and a swell additional lens. Many here do not know how to cost time for manipulating images, so some of those shoot dollars get eaten in post production. : That's why the wedding business is almost completely digital, the : sports business is completely digital, and most other revenue : producing photographic activity is or will be digital. Here weddings shot on film command much higher prices, with demand for film increasing. People about to get married ask around and hear stories of lost CD's, failed CD's, photographers failing to keep *all the images* (understandably I might add! see above for amount of gobbled up hard drives) Given films long history and the fact that even the young 'uns getting married know of old albums and boxes of negs still hanging around the family somewhere, an increasing number see the long term storage benefits that go with film : For the large format landscape folks, take 12 exposures of a scene in : sets of 4 overlapping and with one stop under, one right on, and one : stop over and splice them together to make a 16bit dynamic range 50 : megapixel image that will be better than anything you can get : directly from 4x5 and will challenge seriously up to 8x10. : Quality, film prices, and processing costs will eventually drive the : large format folks to digital as well. Film: The rule always was, a kit cost the same amount whether it be 35mm, MF or LF. A good body, a short, 'standard' and long lens, darkbag and appropriate film holders. So I have my F1N Canons, a cluster of medium formats a 4x5 and an 8x10 None of them is newer than the Canon F1N, the oldest is around 60 years old, lenses dating back to 80 years. they have cost me nothing since I last bought a second hand 200mm 2.8 FD lens for about $100 Since then I've accumulated about (New prices) $35,000 worth of scanners, about 6 digi bodies ($25,000), over 2 terabytes of hard drives ($ ??), about $2000 worth of printers which are exclusive to photography and additional to the computer bits and bobs I use exclusive of photography. There's also the print server and the scanning machines I *could* stick a bag back on my 8x10 with an xy axis micrometer adjustable rack and shoot digital images that way, stitching them together afterwards but 5 minutes V 1/60th of a second seems a joke. I could get a scanning back, but X number of minutes to make an exposure again seems a farce. Then there's the storage of such large images .. : BTW I'm in a Documentary Photography class at my local university and : there are zero film photographers in class. The last one switched : mid-semester last fall. I can understand that. k
