The Little World

You’ve seen my figures before on setting up for re-enactment or radio-controlled aircraft or amateur photography but I’ll give them a brief reprise:

a. Reenactment – $ 200 to stand around home as a medieval, $500 more if you wish to slay dragons. Add $ 1000 if you wish to camp out and another $ 1000 if you wish to do it interstate. Then you can start to economise by buying cheap wine and pouring it into a goat-skin flagon.

If you wish to shoot a gun with or at anything double all these figures.

b. Photography – $ 1500 for a camera, lens, and card. Add $ 1500 for computer gear. Every step after that add in multiples of $ 1500 – printer, lights, backdrops, etc. Do not be surprised if you have eventually spent the price of a small new car.

c. Scale modelling – $ 200 worth of tools, paints, brushes and a $ 14 kit gets you started. Add another $ 500 for airbrush and compressor when the bug bites. Then $ 25 a week for the rest of your life.

There are people in all of these fields who have gotten into them cheaper than this by buying secondhand gear and making all their own tools and equipment. Some find that this becomes the hobby – not the thing that they started out to do. They can function on a shoestring and derive as much pleasure from this as the person who spends thousands – though the spender will scoff at them.

The ongoing costs can be the killer in some cases. Take the business of making your own decals. You can do this quite well with a standard inkjet printer and some expensive decal paper from Testors. The quality of the printing, however, isn’t up to the standards of commercial kits. To approach this you must use a colour laser printer.

Now these are certainly available from office suppliers – and $ 400 buys a useful one. However, when you run through the toner cartridges for it, you find that you are paying another $ 400 to fill it up again. $ 800 is an expensive set of decals, no matter how you view it.

Likewise the inks and paper for photography. This sort of cost explains why so many people confine their work to screens – the internet above all – and then try to persuade people to purchase their works. But that is going into business and as we said, that destroys a hobby.

If the re-enactor, photographer, or scale modeller were a different person they might be content to play chess for a hobby or take walks or sing in a choir – all activities that can be done cheaply. But some hobbyists are hands-on people all the time and that means expense. In the end, they do themselves better than those who put their hand to a beer glass or a roulette table, so the price they pay is not so bad.