 BetterPhoto Member |
Necessary Equipment for Digital Photo Business I am a novice interested in establishing a digital photography business in action sports. Although we have some photographic background, we are not certain of the basic equipment needs. Please advise exactly what equipment is needed to become funtional. I expect to make a rather large investment but need some product info guidance. Patti
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Diego Mera |
I opened my digital photography studio in November of 2000. We are doing family portraits but want to do outdoor sports pictures in the Fall. Our photos are coming out great so far. I suggest a Nikon 990, an Olympus P400 printer - it is a thermal printer and it only costs $1,000 - we also bought a brand new Epson printer and no printer (not laser color or anything else) can touch the P400 for its quality pictures. It costs around $2 per sheet ($1 per page and $1 per page for the ribbon), but you will find that the ink that an inkjet printer plus the paper isn't too far from this price. I also bought a new computer with a writeable CD-ROM drive. You may want this to be able to offer to your customers. Software is very important - we have been using Microsoft's Photo-It and have had great success. All in all we have spent about $7,000 on our business - this includes advertising and everything else. Equipment costs ran about $4,000. Good luck. Diego
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Morgan W. Bird |
If you're willing to make a pretty big investment, you shouldn't bother with the 990 for sports photography. Nikon recently announced the D1h, an updated version of the D1, designed for sports photography. The camera can do 5 fps for 40 frames (more than *any* other camera out), at the same res as the original D1, 2.7 megapixels, and can save to the 1GB microdrive cards. If you feel like you need a higher resolution, go for the D1x, which doesn't have as a high a frame rate or as long continuos shooting, but it does 5.47 megapixels, plenty for an 8x10. As far as printers go, if you're going to be doing on-the-spot prints at the events you go to, then definitely look into a dye-sub printer, like the P-400 Diego mentioned. If you don't need the prints really fast, you can get Epson's new inkjet at half the cost, and it does up to 13x44 prints, instead ot the 8x10's that the Olympus does. Hope this gives you some ideas.
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