Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Should Digital Wedding Photography Be Less Expensive Then Film


Unfortunately, this is a common misconception. While digital capture eliminates the need for film and developing, the difference is negated when you now add the time it takes for the photographer to process all of the images. When using film, you purchased film, photographed, sent it to the lab for developing and printing where the lab took care of color correcting and analyzing. Now, the photographer is responsible for all of the work that the lab used to do. This added workload is tremendous. It results in more man hours needed to process any given wedding (about 40 hours for an average wedding) or event, as well as the extra expense of hiring people to do so. In addition, the equipment needed to efficiently produce digital photography is of considerable expense. Not only are the cameras and associated equipment to perform digital capture much more expensive than their film counterparts, but
there is a considerable amount of ancillary equipment necessary. Computers are an important part of the digital photography scenario. With files from professional digital cameras being anywhere from 25 megabytes on up, powerful computers are needed to manipulate these files. With the average wedding consisting of 600 images, this comes to a whopping 15 gigabytes of digital images. Plus, these have to be backed up several times to ensure the security of your wedding photos. Oh, and files this size won't fit on CD's... they will only fit on DVD's and physical hard drives. Add in high capacity Flash Cards (4gigbyte
capacity or more) and the devices to read them, plus having a powerful laptop computer to take to the event for backup, etc. This translates to more expense for computers with the proper disc burners and processing power in the 3+Gigahertz range with RAM minimum of 1 gigabyte or more. Software to process these images is also pricey Not to mention the necessity for high speed internet to upload files of this size to online viewing and posting sites as well as to the photo labs for prints. In reality, digital photography should probably cost triple what it does!
Photo provided by: Black Forest Photography

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