Photo Milestones

I put cameras through their paces. My last camera, a Sony DSC-H1 12x superzoom, has taken well over 23,000 pictures in the last two years or so that I've owned it. I made the jump to a Canon DSLR about six months ago, and my EOS 40D has now served up 6,400 images of its own. Even my iPhone has taken 305 pictures during its last year of service. In all, iPhoto catalogues 43,715 photos and 276 movies for me.

I was talking to a friend who spent years as a film photographer and he remarked what a milestone it was to pass 5,000 photos on a camera back in the film era. It is amazing to think just how different things are now. I have a jar of old film that never was developed because of the cost of developing 35mm or APS film (especially the latter). Now, it hardly costs anything to take pictures. I've been taking most of my shots as of late in Raw so that I can submit them to a stock photography seller who said he would try to sell them for me. Assuming my camera lasts just 100,000 shutter cycles with me saving every image in an approximately 10mb Raw file that is then stored on my primary hard disk and an external backup drive (courtesy of Time Machine), I figured the total cost of taking and storing photos comes out to just over a penny a shot. That's with the photos backed up even! Remember how much double prints used to cost?

A penny per shot, camera wear and tear included, and almost all of that very small cost is from the cost of storing the photos. What a marvelous era it is to be a shutterbug!