Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Space Invaders


Like most self-respecting photographers I back-up everything to a separate hard drive, this includes both processed and unprocessed material. For the uninitiated unprocessed is as it comes out of the camera in what is known as RAW files, it isn't an acronym it means, well, raw. This means that when you download a memory card using some programmes you get two copies of each shot, one in JPEG format and the other which is in need of processing.

I'd noticed that the memory on the external hard drive was gradually declining and decided that before it got down to around 10% of the total disk capacity I'd buy a new back-up. As an example of how quickly technology is moving and how quickly the price is falling the new 1TB back-up cost less than £70, the old 500GB cost £120 two years ago!

Anyway the point of this post is to say that the total number of files that were transferred to their new home was 35,000. It's frightening. Back when I got my first digital camera, all of five years ago, I took shots with some sort of abandon. Even in the studio my attitude to begin with was why shoot 50 when you can shoot 150, thankfully I've now decided that more is less or less is more and it's worth taking fewer to get that best shot rather than taking loads hoping that post-production and Photoshop will help out.

2 comments:

Name Witheld said...

In my dealings with photographers I've gained the impression that they seem to take shed loads of photos and, as a result, that they all have massive hard disks. I spoke to one guy a couple of months ago and he told me that he had taken 800 photos over the course of one weekend. I don't quite know how he managed it, to be honest.

Paul said...

You'd be surprised how easy it is once you get going. I don't think it's healthy that's why I'm trying to do some sort of quality control as I go along. I once shot 300 photos in 3 hours so I can see 800 would be easy to do.