The Cost Of Taking Your Photos.
There is lots to say on the subject of the cost to run a photography business so I thought I would share the cost of what I have in front of me.
I am running out of space on my storage and need to buy some more hard drives.  Now the problem is I can not put any more storage in my main PC so I will need to purchase an additional storage unit where I can move the images from my main PC to.  Doing some investigation the unit to do this will cost me anything from 1,000$ that will hold 8 hard drives or around 1,800$ for one that will hold 12 hard drives. The cost of hard drives is around 500$ each.  Yes I can by cheaper drives and a cheaper unit but I value your images more than that so I buy the best equipment to ensure your photos are safe. 🙂
Lets run the figures – If I wanted to buy and fill the 1,000$ unit it would then cost me 4,000$ in drives that makes it a 5,000$ purchase, for the 1,800$ unit it would cost me $7,800. Yay!!!!!!
So when you ask me how much are my photos are, I hope this will gives you some understanding as to why I do not do it for free and why my services do not cost the same as your mate Joe who has a camera and used it once.  🙂
I think I need more hard drive space.
The exact one I was looking at. 🙂
good way to go, RAID 6 for that many drives
🙂 That’s just the cost or computer hardware, Brendan Maunder, there is so much more to it.
Yep and don’t I know it. I also have the upgrade of my two camera bodies which will be 5,200$ each and the list goes on. 🙂
Is the 5d Iv that good and why
If you pop over to my facebook post about it I go into details there.
if all you want is wifi why not get a 6d
You might need to go back and read it again. Hahahah
Brendan Maunder maybe I’m reading the wrong article, but I don’t see the value at $5200
A lot of people don’t Graeme! 😉
Lol. One of the key features the 5D has over the 6D is the construction and weather seal as I do shoots like this. Lol
Sadly some people don’t realise this. I voted for external hard-drives that I store photos on. That way the computer doesn’t get bogged down either. I also only hold photos for 6 months unless they are of personal value (ie my own shots)
The problem for me with external drives and even ones across a network is speed. The amount I process is quite high so what take me a 4 hours to process after an event would go out to days if not local.
External drives like USB also di t guve me the extra security of a drive failure so I use things like hard disk RAID to reduce the risk of this. Now having said that I have and do use external drives when on assignment out of town and as a way to back up data for storage.
I might spend some time and go through and do a clean up as it has been about a year since the last one I think which should by me some time. 🙂
That cleanup process alone is a time filler 😉
Hahahahah oh yes it is and one that can be a real pain. I am sure there are some people out there that just dig doing it. Me….. not so much.
Me either to be honest. The last 6 months I have taken so many images that I can honestly say I feel your pain.
Though to be honest neither of us would change what we do for a million years 😉
ahhh yes the wonderful post processing and uploading lol !!!
Sir that is insane!, not up to that speed yet, do have some back to back gigs coming up end of next month though that require probably 1000 shots per photographer per night :/
I do have a week to get them processed though. Good luck with that major event 😀
Yeah it is the crazy event in my annual calendar. I am so lucky I have excellent people to support me and the company that hires me is also fantastic to work with. The look after us while on location with food and supplies which is nice when we get a chance between the different parts of the schedule.
So if I dissappear for a few days you will know why. Lol
I understand 🙂 I start work this week part time and have shoots coming up so I am most likely to disappear not to mention school, family etc lol
Yay for starting a new job.
Yeah I’m stoked, everything is coming together finally 🙂 at least this one pays more than the last 😉
Yeah I’m stoked, everything is coming together finally 🙂 at least this one pays more than the last 😉
Yeah I’m stoked, everything is coming together finally 🙂 at least this one pays more than the last 😉
Same goes for mechanics – there’s a lot more to the labour rate than the price of the person doing the specific work :).
Yeah it’s a service industry thing. The cost of doing business can surprise a lot of people even employees.
Are these any good for your storage solution? http://www.drobo.com
I do believe s lot of photographers use those. I wanted a bit more features than what they deliver so I am looking at the Synology range
Get a good NAS, I built my own 24 bay rackmount server at my place. RAID 5 or 6, it is absolutely worth it, get some redundancy.
Yup – you only need a moderate PC, a RAID card, lots off HDD’s, and FreeNAS or NAS4FREE.
Happy to talk turkey on this and give you a hand.
I did think about this ans the cost of the hardware was almost in line with getting a dedicated NAS and given my lack od free time to mess around with a NAS along with the extra feature rhat come with the Synology units I figured they would be a nice system that would give mw that and more. Power consumption and noise is a big one for me and also joining Nic together to increase throughput.
how many TB you want and $/TB you trying to spend? Because the synology using 8TB drives will make it fairly dear way to go, better off 4TB as the pricing sweet spot.
Money is not really a problem as such now having said that time is. The time it would rake me to update them when I run out again would cost me more in time lost than the cost od the larger drives if that makes sense.
I also don’t like to do things twice. Hahahahga
So I guess to answer the question I would be looking at least 10tb.
Regardless of what you do, just for the love of god make sure thats 10TB of REDUNDANT/RAIDED storage. Not just 10TB raw
Lol. I generally use RAID 5.
And I can definitely recommend the WD Red drives. Go for RAID6 for a large array, as you are quite vulnerable rebuilding a very large RAID5
Btw I have built some NAS’ for pro photographers before, and would be happy to help
Brendan – I’m actually about to get to the point where I split my LR catalogue into ‘current’ and ‘archive’ where the ‘current’ will live on the laptop and sync back to my server and the ‘archive’ will only live on my server.
I create a new one for evey year.
Thats not a bad way of doing it either…
Yeah it helps but I do take a few more than the average joe. Lol
true, but it still makes sense regardless. I guess it depends if you’re like me and just import *everything* and only export the ‘good ones’
Yup literally just go on allbids and get server storage arrays
I have a server already that takes 8 drives the cost of running it and the noise is much higher than I would like hence the NAS way of thinking.
Buy a small rack. Put it in the garage (y)
Have you been in my shed….. hahahaha I would have to clean it up or move the.motorbike out…. neither of those options sound like a good idea.