I’ve been into photography since 1980 when I bought my first Canon AE-1. I loved that camera. I’m sorry I don’t still have it. In 1990 my photography equipment got stolen. I replaced the AE-1 with a Canon EOS 650 which I still have. When I was deployed to Kuwait I took the first digital camera I bought, a Canon A10 (I think). Digital photography is pretty cool. Digital film is cheap and persistent. Take as many shots as necessary and simply delete all but the best, sans the cost of developing. I still think that’s pretty cool.
However, storing your old skool photograph prints is pretty cheap and easy. Shoe boxes are pretty cheap. Acid free sleeves are easy to find these days and then you just need shoes boxes. Digital photographs are a little different. They have to be stored on drives, CDs or some other media. That necessitates some kind of cataloguing system still you can no longer simply flip through the prints in the shoe box anymore. It all seemed so cool. So cheap.
And lastly, digital photographs change the way we share photos with our friends and family. It use to be that we would drag our prints around and assail the unsuspecting with our latest photos from Greece or that beautiful niece. None of which anyone really wanted to look at. If you were unfortunate enough to be my friend, not only did you have to look at bad pictures, you had to listen to me tell the stories that went with them.
For years now I’ve been trying to store all the digital photos I’ve ever taken on my laptop. I wanted to have them all with me. I never looked at them all. I just wanted to know that I could look at them all if I wanted to. Of late, that has meant allocating over 20 gigabytes to something that I seldom actually used. Additionally, no one really wanted to gather around a laptop to look at photographs, even on the rare occasion that they actually did want to see the picture.
So, I finally broke down and paid the $20 for Flickr Pro account. Now I’m uploading all of my photos to Flickr. I uploaded the first batch today. The pictures from my deployment in 2004. I will be uploading more in the coming weeks. I have about 5000 photos but I’m not sure that I’ll upload all of them. Everyone has already seen the picture of the abominable snowman in a snow storm, right?
aloha
[posted with ecto]