To put this in context … in the past 12 months I’ve bought a new bike (Kona Dew Deluxe) and a new camera (Nikon D80). In both cases there were cheaper options available, even staying in the same broad requirements (a cheaper hybrid bike, or a cheaper DSLR), but I decided to pay for the best gear I could afford.

One of the problems with this attitude though, is that with some purchases it’s not the initial hardware that hurts. It’s the “Razor and Blades” scenario, but this time it’s a much larger scale.

Take, for example, the camera. When we got it, we paid a reasonable $1300 for the D80 with a 18-135mm lens included in a kit. But having a “real” camera, and starting to get more interested in photography, I’m now shopping around for accessories. First thing I hunted for was a 50mm f/1.8 lens. This was supplied by my partner as a birthday present, but the price tag was around $200 … a significant percentage of the initial purchase price of the camera. If I’d been after the higher-spec f/1.4 version of the lens, that would’ve been closer to $500!

A short while back I started to look at tripods, remote shutter releases and a good quality bag to carry all this stuff in. While you can get tripods very, very cheap in various places, I’ve looked at some and there is no way I would trust 1.5kg+ of camera and lens on them … In fact, I have a crappy tripod that I got from Zazz for about $25, and it’s so poor that the head doesn’t even sit level. On a flat, level floor, you need to adjust the legs to different heights so that the head of the tripod and the camera are level. No thanks. So now I’ve just spent $470 for a remote control ($50), bag $(120), tripod and head ($300). If you’re interested in what gear I’m using, check out the Camera Gear page.

This is just the camera hardware! Then we go back to the computer, where after several weeks of research and agonising, I caved in and bought a 23 inch Apple Cinema Display. That one really hurt the bank balance, but once I dropped it on my desk and took out the crappy 19 inch Viewsonic monitor that it replaced, it felt like the right decision. But now I’m looking for software to take me out of iPhoto … And I haven’t even started on the bike gear!

So beware! Always buy the best you can afford, I stick to that. But make sure you know what buying the best entails, now and in the future!

But surely it’s getting ridiculous when movie trailers start picking up the (sponsor’s) message and running with it. Have a look at the trailer for the latest Jim Carrey film, “Yes Man“. Seems to be all going fine until you get to about 1 minute in … even then it’s just dropped casually. Then about 10 seconds later, in case you missed the first one, RED BULL RED BULL RED BULL RED BULL. I mean, I get it, the movie industry wants more money, and they can get that from advertisers in the form of product placement. How else do you explain Apple usage in “Hollywood America” being exponentially larger than the regular USA? But sometimes it’s just ridiculous.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m thirsty …

The good, and bad, thing about having a good camera is that you feel the need to justify the large sums of money spent on it by taking a lot of photos. Although I enjoy taking photos, I’m typically not the type of person to photographically record every major event, simply because I hate being that guy who wanders around at a party taking photos, not having a party. As a result, my photos tend towards landscapes and places, rather than people. What it also means is that when I do take the camera out, I take a LOT of photos.

Coming back from a recent ski trip, the camera had 250-odd photos on it. Not bad given that it was one day of photos in a place where, trust me, I’ve taken a lot of photos in the past. And then this past weekend was up at my parents’ property (”The Glen”) in the Hunter Valley (just north of Sydney), which netted another 266 photos. Combine that with some other, smaller “rolls” and my “Current Working” set - being all the photos I need to filter through, clean up and upload - is sitting at around 600 now.

Of course, that will filter down to something like 30-40 shots that make it up to my flickr page, but that’s a lot of culling to do! And on that note, I’ve got some photo tweaking to do - expect some serious picspam in a post soon!

For now, here are four shots that I uploaded quickly, just so it felt like I got something done.

Bee and Cherry Blossom 1

Bee and Cherry Blossom 2

View From the House

Front Paddock

Like the TV shows, which were announced earlier this year, there’s a significant price disparity between the iTunes prices and dvd prices. Or rather, there isn’t. The purchase prices for movies on the iTunes store are $10 for “catalog”, $17.99 for “recent” and $24.99 for “new” releases. Obviously these are just guidlines, since Star Trek: Generations, which I would definitely consider “catalog” is $12.99. That’s better than all the other Star Trek movies though, which for some reason are “recent”, and thus $17.99. All of the Star Trek movies can be picked up for around $20 each in a shop, on a physical medium, in a plastic box, shipped from a warehouse. If you buy them all at once, they come down to $15 each. Yes, I’m aware that there are costs associated with digital distribution, not least of all the bandwidth required, but these movies should be significantly cheaper than their dvd counterparts. I suspect that a large portion of the blame for this lies with the big bad movie studios, who can’t seem to see beyond their short-sighted quarterly earnings reports, but I wouldn’t put it past Apple to put all the blame on the studios while not being overly aggressive in driving those prices down.

But that’s just the start of the financial pain train …

Take my aforementioned example of Star Trek: Generations. That comes in at 1h 57min 54sec (thanks iTunes). This translates to 1.39GB. That’s really not that bad, given how cheap storage is and such. But comparing that to the download limits on some typical broadband plans in Australia and it doesn’t look so good.

Say you buy or rent one movie per week. I presume that’s not an unreasonable target … You’re looking at close to 6GB per month, just on your iTunes movie habit, let alone the music purchases you’re supposed to be making, or any other internet usage. So let’s check what we have to spend with the ISPs to get that.

First up -this is going to seem comical, but please, bear with me - let’s have a look at Telstra.
$40/month will get you ADSL, hobbled to 1500kbps download speed, and a massive 400MB (not a typo) of downloads per month. Wow.
$70/month will get you the same blistering speed, but a 12GB limit, so we could rent and download two movies per week. Slow down!
Of course you could get that 12GB limit for $10/month less … if you slowed down further to 256kbps download. On the plus side, at that speed, you wouldn’t be able to download more than two movies per week anyway, so your limit would be pretty safe.

So we’ll move to the other “big” player, Optus. Not that great either, with $50/month getting you 2GB or $70/month getting you 15GB. But with Optus you’re on full ADSL2+ speeds (or as close as the disclaimer will allow).

Since doing this for even just the major Australian ISPs will get boring fast, I’m going to skip to the ISP widely regarded as the best in $/GB terms - TPG. Ignoring off-peak limits (since I think the majority of people included in this example won’t, or at least shouldn’t have to, rent a movie at 3am) we need to spend $50/month to cover our target, and we actually get 18GB of peak downloads, which means a ridiculous three movies per week, plus a bonus movie per week in off-peak time if we’re so inclined.

Seriously - is this really how we are Building Australia’s Prosperity with our National Broadband Network? Okay, it’s not likely to happen via iTunes any time soon, but is 3 movie rentals per week really that odd? There’s a big problem with the iTunes store selling and renting movies, but this one isn’t Apple.