Excess button pushing...

[Lee Rust]

I'm very impressed by the extreme restraint of RichC... just 400 exposures in 14 years!

Myself, I rarely make more than 24-36 exposures in a day. Familiar numbers & old habits.

 

[Timmyjoe]

I find this to be a bigger problem as time goes on as the newer cameras keep making bigger and bigger picture files. The 12MB D700 got replaced by the 16MB D4 which got replaced by the 20MB 6D, and I've briefly looked at some of the 30+MB newer cameras. I always keep my "digital negatives" as RAW files, so you start to eat up hard drive space rapidly.

Seems like my boxes of negative strips store a lot easier (and feel more archival to me) than my 500GB and 1TB hard drives which store my digital negs.

Best,
-Tim

 

[PKR]

I agree completely.

Editing (image selection, not post-production rendering aesthetics) requires practice and discipline. This is an important part of photography and it is hard work.




I am about to replace two, 2TB external drives of original raw files (main and a back up). For raw-file archives, I am about to upgrade to the next generation (for me) of USB transfer speed. This will cost about $200 (two, 3 TB, USB3 external drives). My current drives will be repurposed as off-site backups. My oldest (slowest) USB drives will be securely wiped and recycled. So far, not counting electricity) raw-file storage hardware cost me about $50 a year for two, 2 TB of raw-file storage.



When I was doing gigs automatically saved every a copy of every raw file upon import to LR. When I stopped doing gigs that became a bad habit.

Now I take a close look before import and do not save obviously flawed raw. I often auto-bracket three exposures at base ISO. During post-production rendering, I only keep the one with optimum exposure (usually judged by highlight retention).

My winter project is to cull a lot of the images in my current LR catalog.

Willie & Bill; Am I really an odd ball? The only RAW I save are of my picks. All others are bit dust. I save an unadjusted RAW, an adjusted RAW + JPG of any image that makes the cut. I don't trash the out takes immediately, but within a month or so, they're gone. Never had a problem. With portraits, I tend to save more images, but only ones the client has seen. I save to HDD and 2x optical, stored off site.

 

[Michael Markey]

Doesn't sound like a very satisfying endeavor, but it does put food on the table.

Can`t speak for the pro photographers but for me .... no because I do it for free to support the groups or the event.

If there is a pro working when I arrive I`ll just take shots for who ever I`m with and not get in the way.

People do offer to pay me .... the going rate is about £20 for a 10x8 but I don`t need the hassle.

There are easier ways to earn money I would have thought

 

[Dogman]

I've never been a heavy shooter. Even as a newspaper photographer in the days of film, my frame rate was rather low. I never saw the logic in machine gunning a simple assignment like what we used to call "soc shots" or studio product photos or mugshots, yet there were photographers I worked with who always had the drives set on continuous. At the end of the day, it was too much crap to review and weed out. If you had to do contact sheets for a photo editor, they would usually miss the best shots among dozens of frames so what was the point? Overpower with quantity to impress? The equivalent of the old adage, "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS."

No longer a working photographer, I still shoot conservatively. But with digital I shoot looser and I do shoot more, depending on subject matter. I also review images on the camera LCD and delete bad shots before ever downloading to the computer. Once in Lightroom, I review again and delete duplicates and extraneous images. I don't keep a lot of pictures to clutter up the files. Sometimes out of dozens of original frames taken of a single subject, I end up with only three images in my Pictures file--the original Raw, a DNG export and a JPG that I will print.

 

[willie_901]

I find this to be a bigger problem as time goes on as the newer cameras keep making bigger and bigger picture files. The 12MB D700 got replaced by the 16MB D4 which got replaced by the 20MB 6D, and I've briefly looked at some of the 30+MB newer cameras. I always keep my "digital negatives" as RAW files, so you start to eat up hard drive space rapidly.

Seems like my boxes of negative strips store a lot easier (and feel more archival to me) than my 500GB and 1TB hard drives which store my digital negs.

Best,
-Tim

The increase in raw-file size is offset by the decrease in cost per MB. Additionally, file transfer speeds (USB-3/USB-C) for consumer level storage have increased significantly as well. In my view the magnitude of the problem is constant.

Physical storage of negatives and digital storage do appear to be different. Both are vulnerable – but in different ways.

To me, digital storage seems more archival than physical records.

I started dealing with digital data back up strategies in 1978. Data archiving became more important to my employment in analytical science every year. When I retired our lab archived data from almost 30 Unix workstations. The data were generated and used by about 300 scientists. A relatively small fraction of these archived data were used for international patent registration and litigation as well as international product safety registration. Corporate-wide, even laboratory notebooks were scanned, digitized and archived. For all I know, by now physical lab notebooks could be replaced by digital products.