Crazy Tech

In preparation for the weekend (primarily after deciding to go to The Rock on Thursday) I decided to pick up another memory card for the camera, and finally take the plunge for a 1TB external hard drive to dedicate to photo storage.

Bare in mind all of my actual traditional photography training was back in the day when a D-SLR was a remote "coming soon" product and 35mm film reigned king.  My first "real" camera was a Nikon FM10 and being young and low on cash, I had to be real careful about taking pictures (film = money.)

Now I have a Nikon D40, an FM10 level D-SLR, that uses HCSD memory cards for storage.  I can get about 1000 photos on an 8GB card.  Even using 36 exposure rolls, that would be 28 rolls of film.  28 rolls of film compressed down into something that takes up about the space of a quarter.  I know I'm not that old, but it's still really cool to me.  (Really!! I'm under 30, I swear!)

There's even bigger cards out too, up to 32GB, but the 8GBs are available for less than $20, and I'd rather have two 8GB cards instead of one 16GB in case I decide to drop it in a puddle or something.  I've got far fewer pictures from Afghanistan due to an equipment failure (shattered the lcd screen on my first digital camera during a convoy...)

The side effect of this is that now with digital storage, for the price of a pack of film, I have the above amount of space on board my camera, and I don't have to pay for developing it.  That means I tend to take a lot of pictures.  The four "daily photos" last week were out of around 300 taken that range trip alone.  If I can get out of Alcatraz Thursday and not have 1000+.  I dont' even want to think about what the total will be after the weekend is over, especially with a wedding in the middle of it.

Going on the same note, I got a 1TB Western Digital Passport to dump the photos on.  The thing is the size of my wallet, and I carry a small wallet (no wheelbarrows full of cash around here.)  I don't even know how many photos that'll hold, but it should take a while to fill it up.  All in a space much smaller than what the equivalent in negatives and proof sheets would take.

Lets not even get started on Photoshop compared to an actual darkroom...