The cost of photography

After fireworks, originally uploaded by jiihaa.

I did a fast review of what kind of costs my photography hobby caused in 2008. (Of course, not counting all the hours spent taking photos, processing them and discussing photography.)

It turned out that there were three categories: equipment, books, and software plus services.

In the equipment category I have the Panasonic LX3, a spare battery, two 2 GB memory cards, an adapter tube plus filter, a camera pouch, and two different mini-tripods. The total cost of these is 520 euro, of which the LX3 was 400 euro.

In the software category, I bought licenses for Pixelmator, Photoshop Elements 6, LightZone, PTGui, PTGui Pro, Flickr (two year pro account), and DoubleTake. Many of these were bought in software bundles with other software, so I'm counting only a portion of those prices here. But the total is still about 300 euro.

As for books about photography, I bought three books in Finnish published by Docendo (including two books by Michael Freeman). In addition, there were quite a lot of other books: Digital photography masterclass (Tom Ang), Photographing the World Around You: A Visual Design Workshop for Film and Digital Photography (Freeman Patterson), Photography for the Joy of It: An Introductory Workshop for Film and Digital Photography (Freeman Patterson), The Tao of Photography: Seeing Beyond Seeing (Philippe L. Gross), The Simple Secret to Better Painting: How to Immediately Improve Your Work with the One Rule of Composition (Greg Albert), Stieglitz: Camera Work (Julia Krumhauer), Magnum Magnum (Brigitte Lardinois), The Creative Digital Darkroom (Katrin Eismann), Life of a Photograph (Sam Abell), The Genius of Photography (Gerry Badger), and On Being a Photographer: A Practical Guide (David Hurn). In total I paid for these books about 250 euro.

So, to sum up, the new LX3 camera was the biggest individual item, but suprisingly much went to software/services and books. It seems that there is quite a lot of things to spend in photography. And probably a lot of earning possibilities for those producing the books, software, services etc.

The photo here is from today. A nice scene (on the surface), but the ice is littered with the remains from the fireworks at midnight.