Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: > 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 >
Godfrey, Your response ignores my entire point. I dunno where you got Hobbyists costs from what I posted, since I was talking about a pro shooter's costs. My point is that certain types of work require much larger investments in gear and thus you aren't going to be able to amortize them over 3 years or easily switch systems (due to initial cash outlay required). So while your point (that you'll simply switch kit if Pentax becomes unavailable in the future and your bodies fail) is valid, you need to understand that it isn't a simple exercise for some due to the cost of switching, if only for the reason that replacing the kit requires a very large outlay (And on that point, amortization is irrelevant, since we're talking capital costs here, and not insignificant ones some someone who shoots that type of thing, amortization is how you're going to pay the kit off, not how you get the initial outlay). -Adam -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
