i go on vacation and come back to this. has it occurred to any of you to
work out how much it costs Frank to shoot each year doing what he does
today? how many rolls do you think he shoots in a year? you can figure that
out just by counting the times he posts and his discourses on the rolls he
has shot. how much does a roll of film, processing, and printing cost him?
do the arithmetic and you will find he is spending a fair fraction of that
$600 already. wait until the cost of materials goes up. so i have every
reason to ask if saving $600 over a year is a hardship, why isn't what he
spends already a hardship?
as for the actual dollar figure, $600 is the most possible that Frank needs
to spend. he has a scanner and scans his B&W prints to show us. that means
he has an adequate image editing program on a good enough computer right
now. if his scanner is a USB scanner, he is done. no computer upgrade needed
for B&W. the monitor quality isn't so important because he's doing B&W. if
his computer doesn't have a USB port, he has a couple of options. looking
for a hand-me-down from a friend that has a USB port for perhaps $100, go to
a refurbished computer place that takes them off-lease and resells them for
perhaps $150 for an older but adequate system unit (on occasion, i've seen
some refurbished desktops for $80 that will do the job.), go to PC
Connection or some similar place and configure a new system unit for $250. i
walk around computer shows and see some new system units for $200 and under.
getting a laptop like Rob suggests is about the least cost-effective way of
buying computing power. even then, i see refurbished laptops at computer
shows for $200 that will do what Frank needs doing.
then the camera. if you pay attention to what Frank posts, you'll see that
sharpness isn't especially important. neither is high resolution since he
doesn't go beyond 8x10 often. he can get a more than adequate camera that
will take 80% of the shots he shows by looking for a used 4 megapixel P&S
camera set to B&W mode. that's assuming that he doesn't have a friend
looking to upgrade and letting him have their old one for next to nothing.
if Frank really were interested in getting into digital, he could do it for
about mostly likely no more than $150, $250 at the outside if he has to buy
another computer, and at close to the same quality he shoots today. that
camera would cover about 80% of his shooting that he shows us, all except
the indoor shots.
the rest of you who responded with all those negatives, i thought i saw
plenty of group no-think on other mailing lists, but this takes the cake.
just about no-one questioned whether Frank needed a new computer to go
digital or not. only a few people questioned the cost. just about no-one
questioned whether Frank needed a DSLR or not. just about no-one questioned
whether he even needed a new anything. i do 5 seconds of arithmetic in my
head and conclude that Frank spends a fair amount of the actual cost needed
to go digital on his photography already and would save a lot of that by
buying a small digital camera and not printing as much. some of you thought
of this, but none of the negative responses did. Frank's $6000 figure was
disingenuous posturing for not going digital. my system didn't cost $6000,
including the *istD. if he had just stayed with just saying he didn't like
digital or didn't want to spend the time, he would have been like a bunch of
other people on this list, agreeing to disagree. instead, he spouted a
nonsensical figure and you swallowed it all. next thing i know, the lot of
you will cheer Frank's heroic sacrifice for refusing to save up for a car
because he'll never afford $100K for a decent BMW.
Herb...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ann Sanfedele" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, November 25, 2005 1:15 AM
Subject: Re: Shoot now, focus later
Herb Chong wrote:
as Rob said it earlier, $600, not $6K. if that is a hardship, should you
be
shooting anything?
Herb...
What a very bigoted comment , Herb. How sad.
ann, to whom $600 is a hell of a lot of money
