And, if you're making the switch from a film based unit, the saved cost of
film will make up for the fast depreciation of the unit over time. For
example: I bought my 10D for EUR1899 three months ago. Now you can have one
for EUR 1600,thus, a EUR 299 value "loss". So far, I've taken a bit more than
4000 photos, that translated into my usual slide film would have costed me:
4000/36* EUR 20 (film + dev/cut/frame)= EUR 2222.2. Get it?
I don't want to start a debate of digital versus film, but this example you give would
only make sense if you had taken the same amount of pictures with film in the
same period of time. It's my experience that digital owners are, understandably,
very trigger happy.
What it comes down is how many pictures one is left with after getting rid of the
bad ones. Perhaps one only save 1% of digital pictures compared to maybe
20% with film. On a more philosophical side, one could look at how much increased
failure a digital camera brings (99% failure versus 80% in this case) although that's
a different discussion altogether. As an engineer I've always felt photographers have
a rather casual attitude towards their own failure, but then again it's not a matter of
life or death.
I believe you're working with an incorrect concept here. Even for an engineer, designing something that is then redesigned before it is built does not mean the first design is a 'failure'. It is just part of a design process. I'm an architect and a photographer, and when I am working as an architect, I never go straight from just one concept to working drawings to construction. I've severely failed my clients if I do that. I work at and explore many different concepts before finalizing and progressing with one. The early, rejected concepts are not failures; they are a necessary part of the design process and are part of what enables me to arrive at a successful concept that my client approves.
Similarly, if I'm doing a photo job, I 'work' a situation and try to gather images, and develop images as I look for the one that will best express what I want. Even if I'm shooting 4x5 of static subjects and have explored the situation extensively I rarely shoot just the number of frames the client needs; light and textures have to be explored.
The frames you don't use are not necessarily 'bad' ones; in fact they should not be. They might well be bad if your haven't been shooting very much and don't feel at ease with your camera. What they are are images that don't quite express what you wanted to say. If you don't shoot very much, your shots tend to go down in quality. To a certain extent you can do 'dry' shooting, ie, without film, but then the feedback isn't there.
If I go through a period where I'm not shooting very much, I find that I have to consciously go out and shoot for a while before I can start 'seeing' well again. The shots that I take during this period are again, not 'failures' but part of my training, or 'staying in shape' in athlete's terms. A 100m sprinter would hardly consider any running he/she does outside of qualification runs or races as 'failures'.
What a digital camera does is unchain you from the nagging worry that all the shooting you are doing is costing you a lot of money, and allows you to do what you should be doing in the first place to become a better photographer, namely shoot enough to fully explore a situation to your satisfaction.
Still, I'd like to have a digital camera but it's a lot of money and hard to justify for
me.
-- * Henning J. Wulff /|\ Wulff Photography & Design /###\ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] |[ ]| http://www.archiphoto.com * **** ******* *********************************************************** * For list instructions, including unsubscribe, see: * http://www.a1.nl/phomepag/markerink/eos_list.htm ***********************************************************
