Digital doesn't reduce the cost for many photographers. In fact more often than not it increases it by a large factor. True you do not have film and processing costs, but you have to get on the digital upgrade train. A new computer every couple of years, a new film body every two years or so, software upgrades, upgrades to calibration equipment, hard drives, and of course storage transfer and archive maintenance. All those digital images are soon lost unless you maintain your archive, because today's cutting edge is tomorrows unreadable.
Compare that to a solid 4x5 view camera you can use a lifetime, medium format that likely will last you a lifetime, and 35 mm film gear that could last you a lifetime, but at least the lenses are usable on the current Dslrs.
When you factor all that in, not to mention the time in post processing digital that in the old days was done by a lab, unless you take a VERY large number of images film is still for many of us cheaper. I suspect the two main reasons many pros went digital are 1. speed of product delivery and 2. customers expect it. Some how the general public has the idea digital is better than film, not just different
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Everybody Is A Photographer
From: asharpe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, September 21, 2011 11:03 am
To: List for Photo/Imaging Educators - Professionals - Students
<photoforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
And 92.683% of statistics are made up. It is rather interesting that the
statement "the 20th century was the golden age of analog photography
peaking at an amazing 85 billion physical photos in 2000" has no
attribution.
And why should "professionals" "weep" if analog is deprecated? Many
"professionals" already use digital. Indeed, I'll bet many "professionals"
are overjoyed with digital, because it vastly reduces their cost.
Andrew
On Wed, September 21, 2011 4:34 am, John Palcewski wrote:
> The article below (linked on The Dish by Andrew Sullivan), says every
> 2 minutes today we snap as many photos as the whole of humanity took
> in the 1800s. In fact, ten percent of all the photos that exist were taken
> in the past 12 months.
>
> Also, it's clear analog images are virtually dead, and the competition
> is growing at a rate that defies quantification. Read it and weep,
> professionals!
>
> Text and link below.
>
>
> How many photos have ever been taken?
> By Jonathan Good September 15, 2011
>
>
> http://bit.ly/qkKZ3c
>
>
> Today we take photos for granted. They are our memories of holidays
> and parties, of people and places. An explosion of cameras and places to
> share them (Facebook, twitter, instagram) means that our lives today are
> documented, not by an occasional oxidizing of silver halide but constantly
> recorded with GPS coordinates and time stamps. However it hasn't always
> been like this - the oldest photograph is less than 200 years old[1].
>
>
> So how many "Kodak memories" has humanity recorded? How fast are we
> snapping photos today? And how many of these treasured memories are
> confined to our shoeboxes as lost relics of a pre-digital era?
>
>
> First we quantify how many analog photos humans have taken. There is a
> surprising dearth of direct data, but we can make some reasonable
> estimates. It is safe to say that at most a few million photos were
> snapped before the invention of the first consumer camera - Kodak Brownie
> in 1901[2]. From that time we can use Kodak's employment statistics as a
> reasonable proxy for how many photos were taken (Kodak’s dominance of
> those "Kodak moments" persisted for most of the 20th century). More
> physical photos needed more physical cameras and rolls of print[3].
> Throughout this period photos became more and more
> mass-market - by 1960 it is estimated that 55% of photos were of babies.
> From 1984 onwards the Silver Institute and PMIA published
> estimates of how many physical photos the world was snapping each year
> (silver halide being an important chemical in film)[4]. Year after
> year these numbers grew, as more people took more photos - the 20th century
> was the golden age of analog photography peaking at an amazing 85 billion
> physical photos in 2000 -- an incredible 2,500 photos per second.
>
>
> At the dawn of the new millennium a new technology (that Kodak itself
> invented) was reshaping the whole industry - the digital photo. When the
> first few hundred thousand digital cameras shipped in 1997 their memory
> was strictly limited (in fact cameras like the Sony Mavica took floppy
> disks[5]!). Digital cameras are now ubiquitous - it is estimated that 2.5
> billion people in the world today have a digital camera[6]. If the average
> person snaps 150 photos this year that would be a staggering 375 billion
> photos. That might sound implausible but this year people will upload over
> 70 billion photos to Facebook,
> suggesting around 20% of all photos this year will end up there[7]. Already
> Facebook’s photo collection has a staggering 140 billion
> photos, that’s over 10,000 times larger than the Library of Congress.[8]
>
>
>
> Even accounting for population growth the exponential growth of photos
> is incredible (we take 4 times as many photos as 10 year ago). Today every
> party, birthday, sports game and concert is documented in rich detail. The
> combination of all these photos is a rich portrait of today, the
> possibilities of which are illustrated by a tool like “The Momentâ€. As
> photos keep growing we take a clearer and clearer snapshot of our lives
> and world today - in total we have now taken over 3.5 trillion photos. The
> kind of photos we are taking has changed drastically - analog photos have
> almost disappeared - but the growth of photos continues.
>
>
