Computers and Cameras

It’s amazing how digital photography has changed the business of photography. While the basics photography has not changed as much, it’s all about capturing light regardless of the medium (film or digital), the backroom of the business is drastically different.

Some people suggest that it is less expensive to run a professional photography business because there is not the need to buy film or pay for processing. However the truth of the matter is quite different. In the days of film, a high quality camera and lenses was a long term investment. You bought a camera with the assumption that you would use it for several years.

However, in the digital age, camera’s have a built in obsolescence. This is true due to the medium – the digital sensor. With film, the medium (film itself) is constantly being upgraded. New, better films were being developed that improved image quality. The digital sensor is built into the body of the camera. To take advantage of higher resolution or better quality images, you must upgrade the entire camera. This gets quite expensive when you consider that camera models are usually upgraded in a signicant way about every 18-24 months. Along with upgrading to a new camera, you must also upgrade your computer software so that it can read the new image file formats. Luckily, a good lens will last quite a long time, becauses advances in optics occurs at a much slower pace than computing power.

So, let’s say that you are keeping relatively current on camera models. Due to the increases in resolution, image quality is improving, but also file sizes are increasing proportionally. So now a single photo can easily be 20mb in size and that number is constantly increasing. To give you an idea, that means that a standard CD will only hold less than 40 photos. If the photos are retouched or manipulated the file sizes can quickly swell to 150mb or more. So what do you do with all of these large files? The answer is large amounts of redundant data storage (so your clients images are safe) and RAM, plus powerful computer processors.

Overall, digital photography has certainly changed the business, but it has not really made it cheaper to do business. It has just shifted the costs around so you are constantly chasing technology.

Now to be fair, you can capture some really great photos using older lower resolution digital cameras, but especially on commercial side of the business, clients are expecting you to keep abreast of the newest technologies. Nowadays switching to a new technology is something like converting pdf to word a couple of years ago.

As you might have guessed I have just recently had to upgrade some computer network hardware to handle advances in technology. So, this is the end of my rant. 😉

Ok, one final thing, totally unrelated to any of the above. I love wide angle lens shots. So I naturally had to shot a photo of our dog Abby. She is a red-tick coonhound/lab mix and has the characteristic hound dog nose and ears. Perfect for a wide angle shot. 🙂