[LargeFormat] Money With Menaces

[LNphoto]

On Friday, September 5, 2003, at 09:30  PM, rstein wrote:

> Dear Graeme,
>
>  Don't laugh -
> I meet people who are trying to succeed with no damn idea at all what 
> they
> are doing.

Exactly when did you and I meet again?
>
>     The worrisome thing is meeting people who have been perfectly 
> capable in
> the normal photo line being shunted into the digital business and set 
> to
> floundering uncontrollably for 3 years.

Whew! I've only got one more year to go!!! yeah!!!!

> Call me a traditionalist or Ludditie
> or cheapjohn or whatever - I am going to stick to the traditional 
> process.
> And snipe off all the HB and large format gear that the pros are 
> desperately
> abandoning. Our family crest features circling vultures....
>
>      Uncle Dick
>

Well I'm trying to keep myself in the ancient alchemy of wet 
photography, but the tide here is great, and there are pressures from 
here to fore unseen areas that are moving me away from silver and 
toward sand.

As I've stated here many times, when I'm shooting just for myself, it's 
either an 8x10 or 5x7, occasionally with a shutter and nearly always 
black and white.

Then I was struck with the book-writing-and-illustrating virus, a 
disease  nearly as deadly on finances as daytrading.  While the writing 
is going in fits and starts, the illustrating is in the middle part of 
that 3  year fog.  I've had to learn a lot,and tried desperately not to 
simply throw money at the problem.  In the early stages of this 
endeavor I wanted to be back in 1950, shooting 4x5 for every little 
photo, but quickly realized that I didn't want to spend the next year 
in the darkroom printing every photo....

I decided on digital. Now after a year of research and still not really 
comprehending the difference between an alias, pixel and photosite, I 
believe I might have been better off shooting everything with a 
miniature camera (35mm) and scanning not the negs, but 5x7 or 8x10 
prints.  Would the film/print costs been less than the $$$ I'm about to 
shell out for a digital camera that in 5 years I can give to my 10 year 
old daughter because it's that obsolete? I don't know. But the slippery 
slope has begun.  Other pressures are looming....My bread and butter 
contracts that were shot with a Hassy are now being spec'd for digital, 
so digital it must be.

I'm working on a construction project that was 10 years in designing.  
The photo specs were left over from the early 60s.....shoot everything 
on 4x5 color neg, 2 8x10 prints each.   When I started the job, I 
thought this was great.  I was always an avid large format shooter. 
Film was plentiful and there were 5 labs in the Detroit area that 
processed 4x5 film.

2 years later, film prices have climbed dramatically, the labs have 
dwindled to two and the processing prices have climbed as well.

Today I spent 5 hours shooting 20 shots--30 sheets of film.  My cost 
for film and processing: $150 (I know this will look cheap to Uncle 
Dick)  My point is the same 20 shots could have been done on 3 rolls of 
120 with my Hassy for less than $25, taken half the time, and without 
any loss in image quality.

If I could have shot it digitally, the hard costs would be zero, 
excepting the extra time in Photoshop cleaning up the files. Another 
pressure I hadn't considered....Prints from a neg are more than twice 
the cost of RA4 prints from digital files.   The point is very 
clear....digital is more profitable, at least here.

So now I'm in the painful process of selling off my extraneous 
equipment so I can buy digital.   I look around... some surplus protar 
V's might go up, a Minolta shift lens I never used....even a nice 250mm 
Hassy CF,  but as loudly as the bottom line screams, I still can't let 
go of the 5x7 Ansco, the 6x8 Century field or the Deardorff.  At least 
not yet.  In my heart, I'm still a Luddite.