I just checked...
my Photo Storage. It looks like I've got 54,763 files/images. There accumulated from about 9 months BEFORE Julianna was born through October of 2007. Roughly a 6.5 year span. Over the 81 month period I might have had 3 months of total inactivity in photo taking. This amounts to an avergage monthly production rate of 702 images over 78 months. That translates into 23 frames a day on average over 6.25 years of photo taking!
My most active period of photo taking was probably the recent 11 nite Disney Southern Carribean sailing we took this past September. Over the 14 days of travel I took 6,737 images which translates into an average of shooting rate of 481 frames per day. That breaks out into roughly 40 frames an hour for 12 hours of each day... over the 14 day period.
Averaging 481 frames a day on this
Disney cruise is signifivantly more then the 23 frames a day averaged over the past 78 months. In fact... if we just modify the numbers to exclude the single big Disney Southern cruise photos then.... I've really taken approximately 48,026 images. So - the calculation over 78 months is that I've averaged 615 frames a month... or about 20.5 frames a day over 78 months.
Crazy, eh? So... you wonder why my next DSLR must have a 100,000 actuation life shutter design... unlike the estimated 50,000 actuation design life of my current DSLR. In this forum discussion Bob Atkins thinks the 10D has a 50,000 MTBF design life on the shutter. Then it'll be $180 for a replacement shutter assembly!
http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00BWHV&tag=
Oh well... that's not too bad as it compares favorably to shooting 50,000 frames on film. Which would have translated into 1,389 rolls of 36 exposures. And at an estimated $18 per roll to buy/develope and double prints translates into an estimated total film cost of $25,002!!! ... so $180 for a shutter or $5000 for a new equipment is pretty cheap to produce $25,002 in images!!! In fact... the shutter replacement alone means the average cost to take a pictures with the 10D is 0.36 CENTs per image (about 1/3rd of 1 cent/image). OR... Thats' about 1.08 cents per 3 images. (shutter replacement alone).
Or... if you factor in that I've spent slightly in excess of $5,000 for all of my digital equipment (obsolete digicams, flash gun, lenses, filters, bags, tripods, hoods, batteries, memory, paper packs, photo grade printers, etc.) against the 54,763 images I've shot - this averages out to 9.13 cents per digital image. That's with having counted the few dozen MPEG movies individually. I've excluding computer, color busines laser and multimedia HDTV costs from this figure otherwise my total capital outlay would just about triple!!!
Even so, I think my per frame capital outlay is still too high! I need to try and reach 75-100,000 images with only ONE shutter replacement and less then $300 of further expense. That would contain my capital outlay to about $5,500 for the 75 or 100K images. Which would translate into an average per image cost of 7.33 - 5.5 cents each! That is more tolerable then a dime an image!
