I’m sitting here in the airport in Milwaukee*, off to the beautiful Southern Tier of upstate New York to visit my girlfriend. I spent all last night trying to reconfigure the computers to the new regime, in which I’ll be using the new laptop* docked at home and detached on the road. It’s not easy going from a 2TB onboard drive to a 512GB one.
Here’s the read on disk space for me: the old iMac with its 2TB drive had 800GB free (I’m rounding the numbers a bit). Once all the music and video files were transferred to a 2TB WD Passport drive (and a backup), the main computer said there was 1TB free. After copying the main folder containing the lion’s share of my pictures, the iMac said 1.75TB free. Swinging my formidable arithmetical skills into play, I calculate that I have 200GB of music and 750GB of pictures.
And if you’ve been reading right along, you’ll recall a salient fact that I brought up recently: I’m a light shooter. And another pertinent post was the one in which I asked people about their heaviest shooting days. Which gives rise to a small question in my mind: what the heck do heavy shooters do with all that shooting? How do you archive 10, 50, or 100X the paltry amount of shooting that I do?
I’m curious as to whether people actually keep it. Do you edit heavy shoots and discard everything that’s clearly unpromising? I don’t, or at least I haven’t. I just dump everything in a folder and there it sits. Or do you tend to maintain large numbers of redundant external hard drives?
I think if I do my digital OC/OL/OY project, I’m going to use the opportunity to revamp my habits and bring them up to something like modernistic 2007 standards. I just don’t pay as much attention as I should. (It hurts me when I’m searching for images too. You won’t believe this, but I file everything according to what camera I used to take it. Might not make much sense, but it just happens to be what my brain remembers—I can picture the photograph in my mind, and I’ll remember what lens it was taken with. Then I can deduce that camera and that’s how I go look for the picture. I don’t suppose many other people have such an idiosyncratic filing method. Nor am I recommending it, I hasten to add!)
Speaking of the digital OC/OL/OY, I think you can use any lens you want to—just as I think you should modify the exercise to fit your needs, your capabilities, and your life in whatever way seems to make the most sense to you. We’re havin’ fun here, after all. I could do the exercise with any of the 35mm or 40mm (or equivalent) lenses I have, for example. But my ambition is to do it with the A7 and Zeiss 55mm—that’s far enough away from my comfort zone that it would challenge me. And maybe lead to new kinds of work. As I said before, I really don’t know if I can do this exercise myself. But I’d like to.
This is a working vacation, so you’ll be hearing from me regularly this week.
Mike
*Posted later. Speaking of 2007, the Milwaukee airport doesn't have free Wi-Fi.
**It’s a 13-inch MacBook Air with 8GB RAM and a 512GB solid-state drive. Good enuff.
