• Registered: 28-06-06
  • Posts: 66

Topic: Is Photography Easy?

Recently, I was reading about Richard Avendon, and his grand  photography project, "In the American West".
Born in 1923 , his early  professional career centred  around making thousands of  passport photographs for personnel of the American Merchant Navy , during the war.
In 1979, the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth , Texas  approached him with a project to photograph the people of the western USA.
The landscape had been well documented, this would be something else.
He agreed with some provisos.
The project would take 6 years, in between  his  numerous other committments, and would consist of trips from his base in New York, out west on stints that varied from a few days to a month  on the road, doing huge mileages from Texas to the Canadian border.
Throughout he used a Deardorf 10x8 wooden field camera. He  usually had his two assistants from New York, and Laura Wilson, appointed to be his assistant linked to the museum to co-ordinate their ideas, and approached the people they needed to photograph.
The set -up was a large sheet of  white background paper, usually taped up to the shady side of a convenient building.The people to be pictured stood on their markers, Avendon stood at the front of the camera, with his shutter release, looking closely at the subject, making eye to eye contact.
He worked very quickly, the assistants swapping the negative holders between shots, natural light, with a reflector or two.
He photographer 752 people, using 17,000 sheets of Kodak Tri-X film.
The final exhibition collection number 123 images, which was also produced as a book, or 0.723% success rate.Most of the exhibition prints were 56x45 inches , with 10 printed 78x64 inches, all unused negatives were destroyed.
At todays rates, the film would cost £61,500 before processing or printing.
The quality of the images is breathtaking, and many people were shocked by some of the pictures.He reportedly said, "I photographed what I feared, aging, death and the despair of living".
So digital photography allows us those sorts of shooting statistics, at a lot lesser cost per frame.
I wish you better statistical success.

  • Registered: 24-06-06
  • Posts: 238

Re: Is Photography Easy?

A fascinating post Dewi and the answer to your question has to be that photography is certainly not easy; at least it wasn't in Avedon's day and was indeed a very wasteful process.
I remember seeing a documentary about Litchfield shooting a Pirelli calendar in the 1990's. He used hundreds of rolls of film to get just 13 "good" pics - cover plus 12 months. Material costs were probably the least of Pirelli's worries as the fees and costs of  Litchfield and his entourage of helpers, technicians and models must have been astronomical. I just wonder what the "cpi" (cost per image) was and did anybody really care.

If we still used film cameras shooting 35mm slide film we could expect each exposure to cost about 40p. Therefore 100 exposures would be £40 and if we operated at 10% success rate then each acceptable slide would be £4.

In a survey of photographers in 2009:

% Photographers        % Success rate

      30                                  20

      40                                  40

      20                                  60

      10                                  80

So where do you fit in?

Now you've no doubt heard the adage "Lies,damned lies and statistics." In the above survey only 10 photographers took part so the survey may have very little credibility.

Nevertheless, we can each of us be our own success analysts and arrive at our % sucess rates. Then do the sums assuming every deletion of a digital image would be worth 40p as a film slide.

It might make us take more care before pressing the shutter button.

"A hundredth of a second here, a hundredth of a second there—even if you put them end to end, they still only add up to one, two, perhaps three seconds, snatched from eternity". (Robert Doisneau 1912-1994)
  • Registered: 29-06-10
  • Posts: 36

Re: Is Photography Easy?

I dont know about the Financial costs, but the cost to my Sanity since i took up Photography are  Astronomical  wink

Light travels faster than sound.  That's why some people appear bright until you hear them Speak!