I have a problem. I’m a photoholic. Well … when I have a camera in my hand and great subjects to take photos of I am.
I don’t really like taking pictures of people. Perhaps those of you who frequent my blogs have noticed that there aren’t very many people photos in my posts. However, there are lots of photos of gardens, flowers, plants, nature/ landscape, and city scenes. Oh and I guess photos of my puppy are starting to build up as well.
Whenever I’m out with my camera at a photo worthy event -say Woofstock in early June, or our walking tour and hike at The Brickworks last Saturday or perhaps even our trip to Cherry Beach last Sunday with our dog (who swam for the first time ever!) I just start clicking away and the next thing I know I’ve got two or three hundred photos stored on my cameras memory card!
The amount of pictures I take isn’t a problem as far as my camera’s memory card capacity, it’s dealing with those photos once I’ve taken them that’s the problem.
Storage of the photos is becoming a problem. My laptop was slowing down quite a bit a month ago and I realized that for the last year I’d uploaded almost all of my photos (3 to 5 mb each = 30 to 40 gig of photos!) to the laptop and that the hard drive was quickly filling up. I literally spent a few days transferring the photos to my desktop computer and deleting them from the laptop and that seemed to have helped my laptop performance somewhat. However I think I’m going to have to find a better storage solution.
If you take a lot of photos I’d love to hear what you do for storage. If you use an online storage system or a portable drive or if you transfer the photos to CD’s or if you have some other solution.
My other problem is lack of time. I have several blogs and I also have health issues so I work on my blogs when I’m feeling well enough to write. Working on the blogs takes a lot of my time. Barely leaves me enough time to network with other bloggers let alone transfer photos from the camera to the computer, edit them and perhaps upload them to Flickr. Going over 200 photos takes about two hours or more as I crop them, adjust their size and occasionally adjust the color balance or other levels.
Now if I only took a few photos at a time this wouldn’t be a problem, but since I take like 200 at a time I feel compelled to deal with each and every new photo that I’ve taken before I upload the good ones to Flickr (my main online storage system at this time).
This means that sometimes my photos are a week or more old before they make it into one of my posts.
So are you a Photoholic too? How do you deal with it?
There’s nothing wrong with being a photoholic. I wish I could get myself to take more pictures. Usually I”m too lazy to lug a camera around with me 🙁
I don’t know if you’ve heard of Eye-fi? It’s an SD memory card that automatically uploads your photos to services like Flickr or your computer using wifi.
The only problem might be the Canon you use. Because I think the SLR that you own might use Compact Flash to store the pictures and they only have SD cards at the moment.
Oh, I’m in touch with this problem. 🙂
I try to bring one of my cameras with me where ever I go (Canon 20D and Panasonic TZ1). I take pictures almost every day.
About two years ago I bought a WD 250GB portable hard drive, with the card reader built in. Whenever I take a new batch of pictures, the first thing I do is transfer all the raw files over to a folder on the portable.
I normally don’t edit every single picture I take. Usually if I take 100 pictures and end up with a dozen or so that I like, I’m a happy camper. That being said, I only delete raw files that are really unusable (out of focus, unfixable exposure, etc). So even though I don’t use all of them right way, I now have literally thousands of raw images that I can go back and play with if I ever get “bored”, and/or improve my photoshop skills.
I rarely keep pictures on my laptop … unless I know that I’m traveling and won’t have the HD with me.
As far as the editing goes, like you, I find it easiest to just plan on a 1-2 hour editing session … knock em all out at once … or if I’m pressed for time, I’ll at least edit the images that I need right away (for my blogs, etc).
Hope this helps,
Todd
It’s a great experience to capture an image of something that maybe someone else doesn’t see. Most people won’t see the beauty that you see in the captured image for instance a slow burning candle with wax slowly dripping down it’s sides now that to me is beautiful. My friends don’t think the same way as me. Keep taking your pictures it is a wonderful hobby that you must continue at all costs. Only problem is when will you look at them all?
There are two issues with being a photoholic:
1) always carrying a camera around sucks
and
2) having too many photos on your harddrive/stickdrive/CDs/DVDs – Ug!
For the first issue I leave my camera in the car so I have it everywhere BUT I don’t like to leave it in there on hot days nor do I like leaving it in there in the winter. So I almost always forget it when I just go for a drive – which is where I like taking photos.
The second issue is one that I think I’ve beaten. I now store my photos online. By using a free online photo sharing website I can free up my hdd and CD racks. I also like that I can access them anywhere by just logging in.
My favorite photos to take are of nature scenes. I like trees and the changing maples are gorgeous this time of year.
I hope all is well with you, take care.
-Clara
Hey! I am experiencing the exact same problems right now. I don’t know what to do I filled up my laptop and four small flashdrives and stuck with two cameras filled with pictures. I really liked this post because unlike everyone else who brags about their huge external flashdrive you are helping the rest of us. So thanks for the post!