We had our first deer spotting of the season in the backyard this morning. There were three deer that I could make out. Sadly this was the only in focus shot I got. I didn't turn on the vibration reduction on the lens so the other couple of shots were blurry. Even though it was perfectly bright outside, the camera still had trouble registering enough light when shooting into the woods. And I only got a couple of shots because Catherine came out to see and coughed pretty loudly and all the deer scattered after that.
I got to thinking about how many pictures I take these days compared to when I was using film. I still took a lot of pictures using film, but I was much more cautious about taking pictures because it cost so much to get a roll of film developed, and you didn't want to waste shots where you didn't think there was at least a chance of it being a decent shot. Nowadays I just snap a picture whenever, because it's digital. I've taken somewhere around 15,700 pictures so far, and that's only with the Nikon D70 and not even counting the Cannon Powershot I had before. If I were to have taken that many pictures using rolls of 24 exposure film and gotten them developed it would have cost a pretty penny. In fact, if I use what I believe is a fairly cheap estimate of getting the film developed at $3 a roll, I would have spent close to $2,000 dollars so far. Not to mention storing all those negatives. So am I glad I switched to digital? Heck yea! The only thing I've ever been concerned about is the possibility of some catastrophic failure causing me to lose all the pictures. So I've been backing them up on different drives on different computers. It's been over a year though since I made CDs of all the pictures and stored them somewhere else offsite, so I probably should do that again soon. At this point with drives being so cheap, I'm thinking maybe I should just buy some extra hard drives and store the stuff on there and take the hard drives to some other location. I am curious to hear what other people do in this regard though, just to see if someone else has a better solution.
3 comments:
i've got a little lax with regard to backing up my photos too.
i should really get in the habbit of backing up more regularly because i lost 3 months worth of photos at the beginning of last year when my computer's hard drive died. all our photos from november to february were lost - 2 birthdays, christmas and new year - all gone.
i'm not sure i've learnt my lesson!
when i do back up i transfer them to an external drive and onto dvd.
<sarcasm>I just read your whole post and I loved it. Brilliant discussion! Stimulating!</sarcasm>
Seriously, I save all of mine first to the laptop hard drive. Then, about once a month, I move them to an external media hard drive. Then about twice a year, I copy that entire media hard drive to an external network storage device. I keep that network storage device in a fireproof safe, because most people lose their pictures (film and digital) to a house fire. (Talk to Elisa Ambrose).
Also, if I get a virus that wipes out all of my hard drives, the network drive is safe, because it's normally not connected.
This is the cheap man's solution. Both external hard drives cost about $300 total.
Popular Photography advertises RAIDs and Terabyte disk farms that are, I'm sure, much more on the professional's budget.
Going along the lines of Scott's post, I'm about to move my old 160GB drive to my fireproof safe. Just replaced that drive with a 500 GB.
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