DiAblo, most commercial photographers have gone or are going digital these days. There are simply too many advantages over film to shoot digital for most customers: instant feedback, quick turn-around, etc. If you don't do digital, your competitor will. Stick with film exclusively and you will start to lose a competitive edge.

If you shoot in a studio, there's no need to rely on a memory card: you can connect the camera up directly to a computer and save the images immediately to a server with a RAIDed hard drive system (which would also be backed up regularly). No need to worry about losing images due to a faulty memory card.

But it is indeed a wise investment to get an external hard drive - more than one is better - to backup your digital images. I live near a Fry's electronics and they have blow-out deals on internal hard drives every week. This week you can get a 160GB internal drive for $30 after rebate! What I do is buy something called a USB enclosure (about $25 cheapest) and put one of these cheap drives into my enclosure and bingo - budget external hard drive. I can swap out the internal drives from my enclosure to add redundancy. Having more than one copy of important files on separate hard drives is crucial. Having yet another copy at a separate location is even better.

Andrew

And as you save your images to CDs or DVDs, don't forget to re-save them to the next technical breakthrough, when it comes.
And as MS and NOLA have shown us, the safety deposit box is not a bad idea.

According to several photo trade journals, 74% of professionals have gone back to using film for many types of photo shoots. They now use film and digital equally in their business. Film will pick up the lace in a white dress without burning out whereas digital will.

According to the people trying to sell you there products, a 4 or 5 Mege pixel camera will make a "photo quality" 8x10. But a professional lab will not do it under 11 Mega pixel. 5-6 Mega pixels they say is 11x14, but a pro lab will not do it under 30 mega pixel. While image size can be increased, they more you play with it the wore it gets.

That is why digiatl and film actually complament each other. Each has its own use.

I never considered the possiblity that it could fail-- how naive is that? Thanks for the info.

Ever changing technology is a real pain sometimes!

Will an 11 Megapixel image look better at 8x10 than a 3 Megapixel image? Yes, if you look carefully at the image close-up. Will 99% of observers be able to tell the difference or care? No. An 8x10 print from a 3MP can look stunning if it was shot with good equipment, etc.

I have a 24x36 print shot from my 6.3MP Canon Digital Rebel hanging over my fireplace. To most people, the quality is fantastic. I've sold a number of these and never had complaints. If people are happy with the quality of the finished photography, it doesn't really matter what a "professional" magazine survey tells you.

Andrew

“Author: Andrew
Date: 10/06/2005, 04:39 pm
“DiAblo, most commercial photographers have gone or are going digital these days. ...Stick with film exclusively and you will start to lose a competitive edge”

Sorry, Andrew, our studio has used digital since the very early 1990’s and no one here would even CONSIDER doing anything important with it. However we’ve learned never to argue with the digital camp. In the end digital is merely a tool, one that, despite many limitations, we use many times a day for business portraits, senior portraits, quick I.D. stuff, but we are a fine arts studio and “fine arts”, quite frankly, means FILM and photographic paper, expanding far beyond digitals “matte” or “gloss” choices. I imagine so far this week I’ve made something in the neighborhood of 600-700 digital exposures yet probably less than 30 with film. But guess where we will make the real money?

You’re quite right in your assessment otherwise. However, we find the public comes to us (and has since 1927) because of the quality of what we produce and they trust us to find the BEST way, not necessarily the fastest, cheapest etc. Can just anyone see the difference between a digital print and a photographic print? Obviously not. But then there are those who cannot tell the difference between a glass of THUNDERBIRD and a glass of DOM PERIGNON.
Simply put, we don’t really feel that we’re in competition with Sears, Wal-Mart, Penny, or the “weekend warrior” photo guy working out of his garage. Nor are we threatened by them. Surviving---and thriving---in an industry for 70+ years we’ve seen lots of changes in technology. Some stay, some go. Digital is here to stay. But film is a long, long way from being finished.

You obviously have a niche business and a lot of expertise in film, but you do need to be careful that you do not lose this edge. At least you have embraced digital technology and use it for some purposes. But, your type of studio is more of an elite business not catering to the majority of the public. There are many other studios and labs that offer higher quality than Sears or Wal-Mart but still use mostly digital technology. The lab I use has had the same person processing my large prints - not an easy job - for a few years, so I know she will give me good results. I would never dream of getting such prints from a Wal-Mart or Sears. So it's not just a matter of "Sears/Wal-Mart or elite studio and nothing in between."

Consider this: many people who still use "film" do not realize that their final prints are still digital prints. Not many consumer labs still do optical prints anymore - they use digital printers. If you take your 35mm film to most labs, they'll scan the negatives to computer and use a digital printer. What's really the difference between a digital scan of a 35mm negative and 8MP digital image? In many cases, the 8MP digital image will produce a better print.

35mm film is not going to be around as a consumer format for much longer. Medium and large format film will be used for a long time by elite studios like yours - but these formats have long been non-consumer types of film anyway, so I don't really see what has changed. Photographers who have developed an expertise with these types of film and can get stunning results will continue to use them - if you know what you are doing, you can do amazing things with film. But when time-to-product demands quick turn-around, most people will choose digital, especially when the quality is more than good enough for what they need.

Andrew

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