Traditional or Digital?
Thoughts on the costs of a photo-blog
I think there could be milage in digital. I took the photograph above on my daily training ride exactly four hours ago... and even whilst I was pushing the pedals (a period of quality time I usually utilise for thinking of nothing - impossible, of course, unless in a Zen-like state - but I assume you know what I mean) I was calculating the cost of "argentique" versus "numérique."
Traditional black-and-white photography, not taking into account whatever investment previously made in equipment, has got to cost £4 minimum for the first 10x8 glossy (I'm calculating in English money because that's the currency I've used for many years). Assuming a discount warehouse price of £2.50 for a 36-exposure film, 50 pence for chemistry, 30 pence each for a contact sheet, a test-print and a finished print... and you have spent £4 of the hard-earned folding stuff.
After 365 blogs I will have spent £1,460, or $2,700, or 2,170 euros on showing you whatever image per day I choose - I have to like them whether you like any of them or not. This rough costing exercise was enough of a jolt to trash my regular attempt at maintaining a cadence of 90... a difficult enough routine when riding a fixed-wheel bike in undulating countryside. Added to which a solid Nikon F2 and wide-angle lens slung over my back for the benefit of today's image didn't help on the downhill stretches either... piston-pumping legs (remember, fixed-wheel... no cruising without pedalling on my velo) repeatedly shifted it to a rib-bashing attitude in rhythm to my legs.
It was then I noticed my lengthy staccato-flickering shadow cast by the late-afternoon sun on the undulating roadside verge and scattered fields... five exposures made in a few seconds, the 24mm having enough depth-of-field not to worry about eye-focusing the lens, but I had to manipulate one-handed-one-fingered-and-one-thumb the shutter speed down in steps from 1/250 to 1/125 to 1/60 to 1/30 and to 1/15th of a second whilst stopping down the aperture by a stop each time to balance the exposure.Merde! Life's too short at 60-plus. [Note: I'd really hoped to upload a blog entry every day for at least a year - I'm still here but there have been some gaps... some small, others not so small!]
So back to the question that disrupted my cadence... for £1,460 I could buy a 10mp Nikon D200 digital SLR with a storage card... or, a neat pop-down-my-bicycle-shorts 6mp Canon digi-compact for a third or quarter of that saved price and likewise upload colour or black-and-white images in seconds.
A photo blog done digitally for a third of the price and 730 hours free time (that's a month... a twelfth of my life) sounds very tempting and hard to argue against. I'll come back to this for sure... although I don't realise it right now, it will take me 2 years - less one day, to be exact - to post my first digital weblog!
9:15:37 PM 
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