I am sure you are aware that the inks and papers for ink jet prints are more expensive than pt/pd solutions and papers.
Actually, no, I don't know that. I know what my costs are for silver printing (You have disputed them in the past, but they are based on my notes on material costs and usage, so you are wrong). I have carefully tracked my costs for inkjet printing, in the same way.
I haven't made pt/pd prints, and have only vague ideas of what the costs would be like when producing prints in any quantity larger than onesies and twosies.
So, if we leave these expenses aside, how much do you think it is enough to get paid for your time spent making the prints?
It doesn't matter what I think is enough. There's an optimum price, and it doesn't really matter what I think I ought to be paid, the optimum is set by demand and supply. My contention is that the profits to be made from selling more prints at lower prices are larger than those made from selling fewer prints at higher prices. That's supported by my recent experience. If you have experience with adjusting the prices of your work, I'm eager to hear it.
You have just admitted that once you are done with your master file, making the rest of the prints is just a matter of clicking "print"....so then, are you saying that the extra time spent in the darkroom is the only reason why a silver print is more valuable? If so, isnt this the argument that a hand crafted item has an intrinsic greater value which you and many others here have told us is not true?
I'm saying that, because the production costs for each additional print for a silver print are higher, the optimum price is likely to be higher as well, assuming that the seller/producer is rational and values his time at some price above zero.
That would be true even if the production costs of the silver print were higher because they required an expensive material, rather than they required quite a lot of time.
I could, for instance, produce silver prints by making a digital contact negative and running the paper through a dry to dry processor. Such prints would, in fact, have an optimum price point quite a bit lower than hand made silver prints - a fact which has not escape the attention of people like Brooks Jensen.
In other words, the fact that Huntington Witherill prices silver prints higher than inkjet prints is likely to be a simple matter of that being the way to make the maximum amount of money, rather than some judgement on the abstract value of the material used to make the prints.
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