Every accountant will tell you to save, file and organize your receipts. The George Eastman House takes the cake, though – they have a receipt for a camera purchased in 1840 on file.
One Samuel A. Bemis spent a total of $76 for a “daguerreotype apparatus” and 12 glass plates. Including shipping. That’s about $2,128 in today’s money, if you’re curious.
The news came out a few days ago that Adobe will not release a seventh iteration of its Creative Suite software, instead moving to a subscription model called Creative Cloud.
And then my email, Twitter, RSS and Facebook accounts all exploded with rage about how THOSE GREEDY BASTARDS DON’T UNDERSTAND I NEED TO PIRATE THEIR SOFTWARE SO I CAN DO MY OWN CREATIVE WORK AND HOPE IT ISN’T STOLEN, AS WELL!!
Or something like that.
Adobe has essential moved to a pay-as-you-go model – you want Photoshop for a month? That’s $20. (Or thereabouts, there is some confusion on the costs of all this, but that seems to be the generally accepted number at the moment.)
As photojournalists, Photoshop – even in its massive overkillingness – is still the standard. If you bought a fully, appropriately licensed version of it (because, OF COURSE you would NEVER pirate it or claim to be a student) you’d pay about $625 for it.
Let’s say you run it for two years before doing an upgrade, that puts you at $31.25 a month. Now, the upgrade is less at about $200. So, the next two years end up costing you $8.33 a month. Over four years, you’ve spent $18.17 a month to license (not own) Photoshop. And you may have skipped an upgrade.
Under the new plan, Photoshop is going to cost you … $20 a month. Or a small coffee every 30 days. And all those smart folks who in their businesses charge equipment rental fees to clients? You can now charge them for software rental, too. And mark it up.
So, to sum up: If you’re starting out, you can shell out $625 for Photoshop CS6 right now and be locked in to it for however long you want to run it. Or, you can shell out $20 a month and get all the updates … and, for the next four years, your monthly cost will be about the same.
Can we stop freaking out now?
We joke about launching a Drone Journalism program here at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication and, if we ever did (we won’t), I suppose we’d have to have an ethics and/or business class to deal with what happens when your drone crashes into Lady Justice.
(Thanks to Doral Chenoweth for the link.)
Had I been a little smarter when I was a shooter, I bet I could have convinced my bosses that they had to buy me Leica M rangefinders when they sent me to court. According to a Michael Zhang article at PetaPixel, several states use the Leicas as the standard for sound.
The video is kind of cool, but a little deceptive – the M7 sound is just the shutter tripping, while the digital Ms have the shutter firing and cocking, something that doesn’t happen on an analog M until you advance the film.
Ever wonder who did the first animated GIF? It was Eadwerd Muybridge … in about 1872.
See? Nothing on the web is really new.
Tom Tobin of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle has the story of the fiftieth anniversary of Kodak’s Instamatic, the camera many said changed the shape of photography.
The camera, all modern plastics and elegantly simple, launched the first really successful cartridge based film system that eliminated the, ahem, “hassle” of loading film into a camera. The square format lasted for decades.
How ubiquitous was it? Well, that’s me to the left with my first camera at about age five. We all had to start somewhere, right?
(Thanks to Mark Hertzberg for the link.)
This looks very, very cool – Tascam is introducing a new audio recorder to mount under DSLR cameras. It has all the bells and whistles and a price that puts it below a lot of the others out there.
Wantwantwant.
(Thanks to David Simpson for the link.)
This is the kind of story that restores my hope for humanity … and makes me want to get an underwater housing for my camera.
On Tuesday, John Branch from The New York Times will be talking about the stunning Snow Fall project he wrote late last year. If you haven’t experienced – and that’s a deliberate word choice – this, you have to click on the link.
He will be speaking at 12:30 in the Tate Reception Hall, which is on the first floor of the Tate Student Center on the University of Georgia campus.
Want to see what the future of journalism may hold? This is a big part of it.
I’ve always taught my students to reformat cards after they have downloaded and backed up their images. Occasionally, someone tells me I’m wrong … and, well, according to Michael Johnston over at the very well regarded The Online Photographer – I’m right.
And for the right reason, too.
So, to recap, when you put a card back in and need to clear the images, always reformat.