Petrol vs. EV

I burned some gas yesterday. (Petrol, in English.) And the day before. Meaning, I got out photographing for several hours each day, roaming around the territory looking at the weather, scouting for pictures. I had a lot of fun, and got some nice shots.

Photographing used to be expensive—in the fifteen years from 1985 to 2000 I had it worked out to the penny how much it cost. I was both lazy and cheap, which made me very efficient. I rolled my own film cassettes from 100-foot rolls using a Watson bulk loader. I mixed my own chemicals of course—I made stop bath using a gallon jug of lab-grade glacial acetic acid, a dangerous chemical that required careful handling. Why? Because it worked out to something like 1/100th of the cost of those little bottles of yellow indicator stop bath that Kodak used to sell. I bought 250-sheet boxes of 8.x11-inch RC paper for both proofing and workprinting, and for the most part my negatives were consistent enough and my contact sheets so carefully made that I could set the time and contrast of the work print merely by looking at the tiny image on the proof sheet. (Pam Noyes, who was in the class ahead of mine, could set the color pack of a color enlarger just by eyeballing the contact sheet, when she worked in the lab at National Geographic.)

Despite all this, after school I budgeted between $2,000 and $5,000 a year for photography expenses. Depending on how flush I was or how tight money was in any given year. I had it all worked out how much each frame of film cost me. I wish I could remember the number.

Digital rocks
In comparison, of course, these are good days indeed. However, I still pity "film virgins," those who grew up with nothing but digital—they didn't get to experience a lot of things we did, like the print coming up in the developer tray, which was a high point of the first day in the darkroom for my photography students. Another thing digital-only people never got to experience was the incredible freedom of suddenly being unshackled from the cost of film, and being able to shoot with no immediate per-shot expense! That was a great feeling. Like stopping banging your head against the wall.

The worst thing about those days was probably the appalling cost in time. I probably spent 10,000 hours in darkrooms from the time I started until I made my last optical/chemical print. I don't know what my overall rate of shooting—and hence my rate of developing, proofing, and workprinting—might have been, so I can't quantify that, but one tank of film the way I did it held three rolls of 35 exposures per roll [sic] and took about an hour and forty-five minutes from setup to carefully clipping the filmstrips to load them into the PrintFile sheets. Now I can shoot many times those 105 exposures, without pause, for very close to 0¢ per exposure—I suppose it costs a minuscule amount for the electricity in the battery and the wear on the camera—and it takes all of about four minutes to transfer them to the computer.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch
But for me, up here in the Finger Lakes, one expense still associated with photographing is: gas. There's always something interesting around the next bend. You're always trying to get somewhere that might have a clear view of things you've caught a glimpse of. Especially when the weather is putting on a show, there's promise everywhere.

Plus, if I get lost, I can always have the GPS take me home.

But I probably used half a tank of gas over those two days. That's five gallons. At current prices, $18. It's not a lot, but it's not nothing. Plus, there's a tiny nagging cost in guilt. Why drive around when you don't have to, converting gasoline to greehouse gasses? I'm not the problem, nor am I the solution. But still....

The perfect photographer's car
I used to think that a perfect photographing vehicle would be a Sprinter van with a platform on top, a modern version of what Ansel Adams had. Now, I think maybe an EV with a bank of solar panels on the garage roof would be ideal. That way I could meander all over the countryside, photographing to my heart's content, neither siphoning money from my wallet nor polluting.

An EV would be perfect for up here. We have to drive everywhere—everything is far away from everything else—but the farthest I ever drive in a day is to Rochester and back, and that's only 125 miles round trip. I drive to town all the time (15 miles round trip), to Watkins Glen (40 miles round trip), to Branchport (30 miles round trip), to the Spiritual Center of the Universe (26 miles round trip), to Canadaigua (60 miles round trip), and occasionally to Corning (86 miles round trip). So an EV with 200 miles of range would get me everywhere I could possibly want to go in a day, with plenty of margin for comfort. Wouldn't that be great? Imagine, no film or developing cost, and no cost for puttering around the countryside until it's almost dark. That'll be the day.

I don't have to think about it today. The marvelous weather of the past several days has given way to more smoke pollution from the forest fires in Canada again. It's a gray, grim, smoky day here. I won't be wasting any gas today.

I'll show you some new pictures when I get them up, in a few days.

Mike

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Comments

[Kent Phelan]

"That's five gallons. At current prices, $18. It's not a lot, but it's not nothing."

Whoa, really? That works out to $3.60 per gallon. I live on an island and because of that everything here is a bit more expensive. Gasoline here is north of $5.50 per gallon. I am also thinking of an EV to eventually replace our CR-V. My son has a Tesla, and the experience of riding with him is like driving an iMac. It is very Apple-like. But I am not sure I can stomach giving that man my money. Good news is many more EVs are on the way from many manufacturers.

[One word my friend: Lucid! —Mike]

[Adrian Midgley]

Taking the EV to races is nice. We did have to charge on the way back from Cornwall, which is an expense heading toward flammables at the moment* - £1.60 per litre, £0.70 per kWh - for the last 30 miles, but most of the energy had come from our panels, at currently about £-0.075/kWh (yes, minus, but it is complicated).

There are better reasons to choose an EV for a new vehicle, or 2nd hand as they become available, but that one is nice.

* flammable will carry on rising, electricity atcharging stations not so much.

[Robert Roaldi]

We're so addicted to cheap gasoline that we think it's our right. The local grocery store parking lot nowadays is full of pick-ups and SUVs that are so big I can't see over them even when I'm standing next to them. And I know they can't see out of them. A sane culture would not permit the use of commercial vehicles for personal purposes. If the price of gasoline reflected its true cost, a lot of those oversized trucks would never have been built.

We have to listen to the whining of people who claim taxes are too high and regulations cost us too much while they blow $80,000 on on trucks that are bigger than my first apartment. It's utter nonsense. We're so knee-deep in bs we don't even smell it anymore.

We live in an infantile culture.

[John McMillin]

My Ford hybrids have been the most satisfying cars I've ever owned, judged on a combination of driving quality, reliability and low running costs. The plug-in hybrid version does miracles. It's racked up 65 mpg cumulative over 70,000 miles, with about $250 in repairs. Every local trip can be done in EV, and long trips cat last 500 miles per tank, at over 40 mpg. That's like two cars in one.