Photography - then and now

During the lightning storm last night I made over 200 exposures with my Nikon D-90 digital camera.  As I was sorting through the images and deleting the ones that I couldn't use I got to thinking about how it was when I first started.
  My first camera was a Kodak Brownie box camera. It could produce 12 images on one roll of film.

As I recall a roll of black and white film was about seventy-nine cents and processing was about $1.29.  My mother would get very frustrated with me when I would, in her words, "burn through a roll of film in less than a week".  To put that in perspective; bread was fifteen cents a loaf and gas was twenty-five cents a gallon.

When I finished my 4 years in the U.S. Air Force I had graduated to a 35mm camera and of course film and processing costs had increased.  I was moving from hobby to professional status and shooting more film as I was learning my craft and the costs were taking a toll on my financial stability.  I remember seeing a quote in a photo magazine at that time "Photography is a cruel mistress who makes you write bad checks".

In 1980 I had finally made it to professional status and was under contract to buy a studio where I had worked for a number of years.  By the mid-eighties costs were going through the roof on everything from gas to film. And people didn't seem to understand how expensive it was just to do one portrait session. Film, processing and printing, overhead and support materials, enlargements and so much more.  People would as me why I charged $7 for a 5x7 when they could have one made at the drug store for seventy-nine cents.

That's about the same time that color copy machines were becoming very popular.  People could make a copy for about thirty cents (although very poor quality) of a professional photo and say "that's good enough for me". Also, stores like K-mart and Penney's were opening studios and charging rock bottom prices.

Today, there is the cost of the camera and a memory card - one time purchase and you can shoot to your heart's content without any additional cost unless you want to make prints or enlargements. Wow, what a difference.

I was curious about portrait pricing today and found that a portrait session can be $50 to $100 and a 5x7 costs about $20. And of course a loaf of bread costs $3 and gas is almost $4 a gallon.