PAST

August 03, 2006

NEXT

While taking pictures of a thunderstorm in the distance, and scaring off all the critters in the general vicinity and in the whole desert, I also turned around to the south and took a few pictures of the sky. The lights of Tucson cast an orange glow into the sky. And you can see a small rain storm there in the image as well. 

It's really been a pleasure for me to be able to present and share the things I witness and see within these images and through my web site and email. And now to be able to present, in a better format, more closely what I am experiencing. Like in this case, where this image took a little bit more attention and settings to actually capture the light, color, and even the stars in the sky.

One of the things I like to do is to try to take a picture of what I am really experiencing at that moment, and to fully capture that moment in time. Unfortunately some things you just can't express in one shot. You just can't bottle up an emotion and put it on paper. Like the awe inspiring and breathtaking view of the Grand Canyon, as it just seems to go on forever. Or a full shot of a beautiful rainbow painted across the sky. The heart pounding feeling of being right next to a bolt of lightning as it strikes the ground. Or even the most subtle shots of trying to capture the emotions on the face of a child when they're excited or the expressions of somebody who has just lost a loved one. All these places, moments, and emotions in time are just simply impossible to hold on to, retain and share.  
But sometimes that's part of the game. Just like reading a book, or looking at a painting. To look at a photograph, and try to imagine what that place was really like, or what that person was really feeling. We still have to use our imagination. And that's a wonderful adventure all in itself.

Digital photography tip: "Soo Many Pictures!"

Storing, archiving, and sorting through all of our pictures is something such an excruciating chore that they just tend to disappear into the abyss of our computers and we never look at them again. And then, with the higher resolutions and our images now becoming larger and larger, they just take too long to load up every time.

Well, I feel that I've come up with a few option and possible solutions over the years. I mean, after all, I've got quite the collection of images. And I store all of them and never delete any of them. Yes, even the ones that appear to be no good. Probably more than 30,000 of them since 1997. 

But first of all, one thing I would probably express is that you familiarize yourself with Windows Explorer and the format and layout of the folders in your computer. I think that is a very important key.
Then to start storing your images into specific folders. At first I tried to categorize all my images into specific folders that way. But trust me, that gets rather old really quick as you acquire more and more pictures. And then it takes too long every time you dump the images to your computer, trying to decided where to put each and every one. So I started creating a folder for each year, and then 12 subfolders in each of those for each month. When I dump my pictures to my computer, I store them into the specific months that the pictures were taken. This way, down the road, it's a lot easier for me to locate past images.

But the images can get so large that they can take too long to sort through. Now previously my Sony camera automatically took and stored small (email) versions of every image along with each large copy. When I stored the images to my computer, I had a separate folder for the large images, and one for their smaller counterparts. This way, when I would begin to run out of storage space on my computer, I would copy and store all the larger images to a disk, but keep all the smaller ones on the computer so that I could easily sort through them, and know where to find the larger ones, if I needed them. Although, now I have purchased a few large volume hard drives and I am able to keep them all on my computer, for easy location. But still use the small files to sort through.

Since I have been using my new, Canon, and it doesn't have that cool "email" feature, I have located and purchased a program to manually resize all of my images, so I would still have those smaller copies of everything. It's been very useful, and they are so much easier to work with, view, and sort through and of course, to use for my daily images. The program I found was about $30. There are lots of other programs available out there, and many of them for free. But I have very specific tastes and needed certain features that I couldn't find from some of the other ones. 

So I hope this information has been useful. Maybe some day, like all my other rambling, I'll take the time to put it all together in more detail and publish it in a book. Do you think it would sell?

Galixy.net