On Jun 2, 2007, at 9:04 AM, Adam Maas wrote: > One thing to remember is that a professional kit for sports or > wildlife > shooting is extremely expensive, and the income isn't actually any > greater than a less expensive kit. Costs of doing business in those > fields mean that your amoritization is much longer and the costs of > switching systems is significantly greater. Your approach is quite > reasonable for anyone whos needs are in the 300mm and shorter > range, but > your entire Pentax kit wouldn't buy one 500mm f4 AF lens. > > Your approach works for you, and it works for me (if I was shooting > professionally, as my kit resembles yours) but not for someone like > Bill > who's stuck using lenses with an individual cost greater than our > entire > shooting kit.
How the equipment pays for itself should be in the business plan. It is foolish to invest in $50,000 worth of gear for a business without knowing how it will pay off the investment. Sorry, but that's just sound business practice and has nothing to do with a hobbyist who buys a $5000-10,000 lens for the joy of making photographs. A working pro should be using that $50,000 worth of gear to make at least $250,000 gross worth of sales before it's fully depreciated. Or they should be renting/leasing that equipment as needed instead, cutting down the capital investment required to run the business. The aforesaid photo hobbyist should have plenty of disposable discretionary income to enjoy his/her pleasure if that's the kind of gear they want to play with. Sadly, most of the hobbyists I know who own these kinds of fabulously expensive lenses make two or three nice pictures a year with them and then bitch about how much the lens costs ... I can only shake my head. To me, there's no joy in that. G -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net

