We shot out first wedding a few weeks ago and I think it went pretty well.  Everyone will tell you that digital has made a photographer’s life easier, but there is a downside to digital that you quickly realize once you start to get busy.  With digital you can take way too many images.  In the past month we have shot one wedding and two events.

Great, except that now I have 3500 images. Why is this so bad, surely the perfect image is in there some place right?  

Two reasons really. Time and Storage. It takes time to sort, crop, adjust and retouch all those images. Of the 2000 images from the wedding, I  only marked 350 as rejects.  Not all the images need to have anything done but every image needs to be inspected. Storage has become a big problem. I shoot raw so an 8mp image is about 6mb RAW, do the math that is, yep, 21GB of images this month alone. It gets better though because every good computer user knows drives and media cards fail, so what do you do? Backup of course; so 21GB becomes 42GB and if you do what you are REALLY supposed to so and backup to two separate drives, thats right, 63GB this month. 

So what have I learned?

  1. Self control: don’t take 500 images an hour. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. 
  2. Buy stock in Maxtor, Western Digital, and SanDisk!
    (NewEgg has 750GB SATA drives for $120 right now!)

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