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One handy thing about digital cameras
is that they keep track of the number of images you shoot. As I was saving digital
images on CDs to clear off my Power Mac’s hard drive at year’s end,
I noticed I had a lot of digicam images. Wondering just how many I’d shot
in 2003, I added ’em up, and was startled to find that it came to more
than 20,000—not as many as a working pro who does digital would shoot
in a year, but certainly way more than I’d expected. About a third of
them had been shot with my own digital SLR, another third with my digital compact
camera, and the third third with the various digital cameras we tested in Photographic
during the year. As best I can tell, image number 20,000 was the pelican reproduced
full-frame here, shot with my digital SLR and 300mm telephoto lens (which frames
like a 480mm on the digital camera, due to the digicam’s smaller-than-full-35mm-frame
image sensor), in action auto mode.
Let’s do a quick bit of math.
If I’d shot film, 20,000 exposures divided by 36 exposures per roll equals
556 rolls. If I’d shot color slides (which is what I did before “going
digital,” and still do when necessary), at say $12 per roll for film and
processing, that’s $6672 for the 20,000 shots (costs if I’d used
color-print film, which sells for less than pro slide film but runs more for
processing and printing, would be about the same). What did it cost to do the
20,000 shots digitally? I have a 1-gigabyte CompactFlash card ($300), and a
512-megabyte card ($150), and archive the images on recordable CDs (about $1
each including jewelcase). So that’s $450 for the reusable memory cards,
and—with each CD holding about 300 images—$67 for CDs. So, costwise,
it’s $6672 for film versus $517 for digital. That difference would pay
for not only my digital SLR and digital compact camera, but also a top computer
system and the newest version of Photoshop—with some left over.
Besides keeping count of images and the economic considerations, digital cameras
allow me to check each image right after shooting it so I can confirm that I
got what I wanted in the shot, and can reshoot immediately if the exposure,
focus or anything else wasn’t right. I also find it easier to catalog
and retrieve digital images than pages of slides or envelopes of negatives and
prints. All in all, these advantages are why I now do about 80% of my photography
with digital cameras.
Why do I still shoot slides the other 20% of the time? Because the 4- and 6-megapixel
images my digital cameras produce aren’t quite “film quality”—we
can’t reproduce them much larger than full-page size in Photographic (although
I’ve made good-looking 11x17-inch inkjet prints from some of them), and
I’ve yet to see an image from a hand-held digital camera that can equal
a perfectly exposed 35mm color slide for color and tonality. So there’s
still room for both in my repertoire, but, hey, Mikey’s going digital.
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