Expense for Amateur Digital Photographers

I shot this image more than a decade ago with my entry-level Nikon D60 DSLR, a Nikkor 70-200mm f/4 lens mounted on it, which I had recently bought brand new for $1150.00

Motivation

The cost of owning a darkroom—I used to shudder at that. My wife used to romanticize the thought of my having one. To be completely forthcoming, she still does, and there was a time when I shot with a Pentax K-1000 35mm film camera. But that time is long gone.

It’s not that I have no darkroom experience. I took photography in high school, and I loved working in the darkroom. My best friend in that class became a professional photographer.

That I don’t consider myself to be. A few of my fans think so…and my wife…but given the little money I make from selling the temporary rights for images to various publications, it’s an absurd notion. It’s small time business, and I prefer to think of myself as involved in photography for the love of it. As expensive as it is.

I’m an amateur, and even though I have the dream of creating three books of photos—from Round Valley Recreation Area, the Raritan River Watershed, and Lake Hopatcong—I’m realistic about that and believe it will never happen.

But since I’m a writer first, and I hope to publish a memoir and a novel, I reserve the wild hope that if the two books do especially well…they’ll make it easier, perhaps, to get books of my photography published.

It’s a wild hope.

Take a leap of faith, though, and imagine how psyched someone who’s had to work for a wage all his life…at least, since he left self-employed clamming…how psyched he might get when some photos he’s shot seem pretty good. No, when they seem to pulsate with brilliance. He naively sets the distant goal of getting three books of photos published, and he has to improve on his equipment so he can do his very best.

That’s motivation and it’s a great trip. I saved money I earned from writing for fishing magazines, buying lenses and cameras. But in the end, the reality of the publishing industry is very forbidding. Especially for a man in his 50’s and 60’s who is not young and capable of devoting his entire life to photography. Nor have I had any intention of devoting my entire life to photography from my 50’s forward.

I’m like most of us. An amateur with sincere intentions to do well. Someone interested in creating photography as an art for which he alone is the chief audience.

And I can’t speak for others, but I’ve become very conservative since I left my job. Regarding photography’s expense, nowadays, I think of saving money to pay for medical insurance. My health is great, but it won’t be forever. The price of medical treatment might be anything but reasonable, too.

Today all the photos will be from more than a decade ago, shot with that D60. As you can see, an entry-level DSLR is a good camera. Not very expensive, either. Shot with the same zoom.

Why It’s Worth It

The money I’ve spent on photography has made me radically reconsider the value of American productivity. In a world threatened by that—above all else—when it comes to the future of the climate, rising sea level, and mass migrations. I am, as a photographer, guilty by association.

As a wage worker—not so much!

But I hold no job any longer, and I live acutely conscious of being in a world of attractions. Could it be better to refuse them and live as Spartan an existence as possible? I might have to, in the end, given the rising cost of medical insurance, but I don’t really believe denial is superior to affluence. To think that air travel is being denied as I write, I consider the Ominous Parallels.

There is no way back. We can’t tariff our way out of a world climate already changed. The way lies forward, and that means greater and greater technological change. We can’t solve the climate problem without technology. At least, not if the human species is to live with that problem. And to deny oneself technological affluence in the meantime lacks logic.

A day or two after I bought my zoom lens, I visited the New Jersey Meadowlands, where white cedar stumps exist from the 19th century. White cedar was logged for general lumber purposes, boat building, fencing, shingles, and siding.

If you can afford expensive equipment and you have a vision of how you’ll use it, then that equipment might be worth your money and time. After all, I pretty much gave up on my hopes—not entirely—for getting books of photos published, but I kept right on shooting landscapes at Round Valley Recreation Area. But keep in mind that if you’re using a less expensive crop camera, you can buy various lenses for it and do some very interesting work. That’s why all the photography of my post this evening is that of a Nikon D60. I went from that camera to a refurbished Nikon D7100 crop camera, and from that to a brand new Nikon D850 costing me $3500.00. I would have bought a refurbished model, but in 2019, I couldn’t find one. (The model came out in 2017.)

I want to suggest that I never could escape the fact that I did good work with the D60.

I bought two expensive lenses for my D60: the zoom, and a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 wide angle, which I had mounted for this shot. In addition to lenses proper, I bought a 1.4 Nikkor teleconverter (extender) for about $350.00. I bought none of my lenses refurbished, but don’t think for a moment that refurbished lenses will be a bad deal—just make sure to buy from the right dealer. Back then, I wasn’t even sure what f-stop to select. Even though I selected 5.6, and the background is soft, the image doesn’t come off too badly. The plants in sharp focus in the foreground are interesting, too. I left white balance as is, rather than bringing out the green of the trees, since the sun at low angle cast a warm light on them.

Cameras and Lenses

The D7100 manages low-light situations much better than the D60, and the D850, much better than the D7100 (crop camera). Full frame (D850) cameras have larger sensors, which means the sensor captures more light and data, low-light sensitivity is superior, the camera has a wider dynamic range, and high ISO settings result in less graininess. The wider field of view captured is superior when it comes to wide angle photography, but on the other hand, when I use my D7100 with the zoom and extender, I can get 420mm at the full 24 megapixels of that camera, compared to a maximum of 280mm at the 46 megapixels of the D850.

The equation is not necessarily so simple. Double the megapixels does not necessarily mean you can simple crop a D850 image to equal one at 420mm. If a 420mm, D7100 image is shot from a tripod at 100 ISO, and a 280mm, D850 image is shot at, say, 6400 ISO, you might have a better quality image from the D7100, rather than cropping the D850 image. But the scenario has an obvious problem. If you’re shooting from a tripod, why not put your D850 on it and shoot from its native ISO 64? (The native ISO of the D7100 is 100.)

Forty-six megapixels mean that large images require a lot of storage. Some of my RAW images are 75 megabytes. Naturally, I shoot a lot of small (10 megapixel) images with my D850. The good news is that with the greatly refined and more powerful sensor, a 10 megapixel image from a D850 is not the same as a 10 megapixel image from a D60. I can shoot small D850 images at night like I never could with the D60.

Photography Monitor, Lightroom, Affinity Photo

Another piece of equipment to consider is a photography monitor. I invested in BenQ because the process of my research landed me on what they have to offer. An SW2700 cost me $600.00 in 2020, and I bought an X-Rite colorimeter for about $300.00. All of it still works to this day, although there are a lot of dead pixels in the monitor screen now. For all that, I never notice anything amiss. (I had to examine the screen closely to find the dead pixels.)

The colorimeter modifies the color of the screen to meet International Color Consortium standards. In effect, it means you get exactness when it comes to adjusting the color of images by manipulating your RAW data. It’s especially important if you submit exported jpgs to a company to get color prints done. (Prints are another cost.)

I bought the standalone Lightroom 6 in 2016 for $149 and change, after using Photoshop Elements 11 for a couple of years, also a standalone. Elements cost a hundred. Now I pay for the 20GB Lightroom/Photoshop subscription, and though it’s significantly more costly, I feel no protestation about it.

In 2020, I spent $50.00 on an Affinity Photo standalone, just so I could focus stack images, which I did to the degree of taking up a lot of space on my computer and external hard drives. Again, for 50 bucks—not bad, really. I still have the application, so if I go back to stacking images, I can use that instead of photoshop. I’ve read online that Affinity is better for stacking.

Closing Thoughts

Does it all get old?

So long as I could believe in getting books of photos published, I never did the research to convince myself that for an amateur largely unknown, and who isn’t devoting his life entirely to making himself visible as well his photography, it’s all but impossible. I looked into the business…and vaguely told myself I could self-publish, if necessary.

That’s not happening. Talk about expense.

But belief allowed my greatly avid pursuit. For example, for four years, I was at Round Valley Reservoir, shooting, on almost a weekly basis. I do, in fact, possess the unique collection of photography from when the reservoir’s level, 30 feet below full pool, created unprecedented opportunities for photography.

I know that because I was there and no one else.

I’m very picky about what photos I keep, what I delete. Even so, I have thousands of RAW images. Many of them from eight or nine years ago and later aren’t even developed. I visit them sparingly. As if, if I were to work on them every day, I’d get fed up.

So long as I could believe my photos might have a future beyond being my own lonely files, the passion felt powerful. Of course I was willing to spend money.

Now that I feel—besides what I do through this website, the publications that take my photos, photos I post on Facebook, and images I have prints made of—that I am alone with all these files, my practicing photography is bittersweet. A lot of files, but each of them reflects a large cost. Do I have honest aesthetic responses to these images? Do my own photos still captivate me?

Yes.

But not only do I “appreciate” them. I take pleasure in the greater critical ability I exercise now, compared to 10 years ago. Far better compared to back then. It used to be that I could hardly bear to find flaws in my images; now every mistake I note is an opportunity to exercise my judgement. The same applies when composing shots afield. The eye is more sensitive and quicker to judge the value of a shot and how to take it. If I feel it’s worth taking.

And I continue to read about photography, so I’m still learning in that way, too.

That critical ability definitely goes along with the bitter half of “bittersweet.” It’s an edge that only failure develops. Failures, mistakes you become conscious of. Cost.

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My Aunt Judy once told me, “It’s an expensive hobby.” That not only sums it up, Aunt Judy was a photographer who won at least one contest. (I placed second in a contest and won $500.00. Kudos to me.) Like me, she took her own pleasures in photography, and she was conscious of the money spent. Possibly, she became conscious of it after the fact of spending it without hesitation, as I have.

She spoke those words about the expense with a directness that was unforgettable, just the slightest hint of grim resolution present.

Maybe.

Ultimately, you’ll learn from experience as I have. You’ll come up against your own limits. For example, I would find it nice to own a 600mm or 800mm lens to shoot birds, but even though some used lenses of those sizes cost as little as $2000.00, it’s not happening. Not only would I not use it much, to haul that thing around would be a pain.