Photography

He's a Mac, I'm a PC {photo storage}

I take a lot of photos.  I almost think that might be a bit of an understatement, that’s how many photos I actually take.  Truth be told, I don’t even share half of what I take.  I couldn’t or I would inundate you with photos.

Before I bought my dSLR and before I took photography classes, I still took a lot of photos, but definitely not nearly as many, so it was fairly easy to keep track of my photos.  I run a window’s based system that has a folder in the start button called “Pictures”.  How easy is that.  I would create a new folder.  Give it a name and dump them in, but even before that I would just dump them all into that pictures folder.  Toward the beginning of the digital age I didn’t take “that” many photos {but I still took a lot, don’t get me wrong}. 

When I started dating hubby, he had a Mac laptop.  They have this whole special software system thingy (very technical name) that sorts all your photos for you and does face recognition, etc.  Well that was about the same time I started taking gobs of photos.  I couldn’t very well put them off on his laptop because that would overload his hard drive.

So this is the system that I’ve created for myself.  I know there is software out there for photo storage, but….

I keep the current years photos off on my laptop.  January 1-December 31.  Once we hit January of the next year I go through and dump them off (in the dead external hard drive, or until it died I did) on the desktop I have for photo storage.

I try to keep the folders on my desk top and the folders on my laptop the same so it makes moving them over/off easy.

{click on photos to make bigger if you’d like}

So it’s on the hard drive of the desktop.  In the drive labeled Photos.  There I have my big main folders: Down on the Farm, Our Home, Birthday’s, Cheerleading, etc.

Then you click on {example} Down on the farm and they are broken down into sub folders based off topic & date they were taken.

And Viola, you open up a sub folder and here’s all the pictures taken on that date.

Now some folders {ie} Blogging topics are broken down by year.

Then broken down by what happened in that year on a particular date.

Open the folder, and there you have it.

I really have no method as to why some are broken down into sub folders by year and then broken down in to the topic at hand and others are just dumped in by topic at hand.

Sometimes I have photos of the dogs & the horses & people in a Down on the Farm folder, so if I ever wanted to go hunting, I’d have to remember where we were to find the particular item being looked for {ie person, dog, horse, etc}.  I know there has to be an easier method out there.

One of the ladies I work with sorts all hers by date.  Nothing other than date.  I think I would get really confused by that, but at the same time, different things work for different people.

I just wondered how everyone else sorts their pictures so you know where to find things you are looking for?

Camera History

When I say I’ve had a camera in my hand my whole life…. well that might be a bit of a stretch but not by much.  So I thought I would take you through a stroll of memory lane via cameras :).  Sounds like fun doesn’t it!

You may say I’m young, but most days I swear my body would beg to differ with you!  I was born in the early 80’s.  Back then, digital cameras were still non-existent, anyway as far as I was concerned.  My first camera was a 110 mm film camera that looks very similar to the one below.  I’m sure if I dug, I still have it somewhere.  One difference, mine was red & black. 

**via**

Then I finally graduated to my dad’s 35mm camera.  That basically got me through most of junior high.  You have no idea how many photos I took with that sucker.  And the sad thing is, digital still wasn’t around, so what you took, was what you got.  Our 35mm looked very similar to this and I know this is still sitting at my parents house.

**via**

Come along about 7th grade my grandparents had an Older Polaroid camera that I was absolutely in love with.  How cool was it to take a photo and it spit it out at you and within minutes you had your photo in your hand.  My parents bought me one of these before 7th grade (don’t actually remember the year) because I took it on a trip I went with my grandparents to Charleston, SC.  Although if you know anything about the film for these cameras, it was expensive!

**via**

Then came the era of the Advantix camera.  You know, the camera that would take narrow, normal or landscape photos.  Oh this thing was awesome!  But for some reason mine died.  So my parents shipped it back to Kodak along with my grandma’s that died shortly before mine did and

**via**

they replaced both of our cameras with an upgraded Advantix camera, that looked just like this.  And I still have mine although I’m not sure it works anymore because about 5 years ago it fell off the steps at my parents house and hit the marble floor below.  Now when you lift up the lid (which turns it on) the back is very hard to discern what it actually says.

**via**

Circa 2002, I wanted a digital camera.  Now at that time my aunt & uncle had one that used a floppy disk for the memory (if that tells you how long ago!) but my parents got me one that looked like this (although my face was purple).  This used a Compact Flash memory card.  At that time I had no idea what that was and didn’t know they made card readers for it.  So I put the program on my computer to be able to pull photos off (b/c the memory card that came with it held 20 photos) and it ALWAYS made my photos black and white.  I HATED this camera for a long time.  Then for college graduation (2005) I got some money to buy a bigger memory card for it.  I absolutely fell in love with digital right then and there.  I went to NYC (grad present from my mom) and took 500 photos and still had room on the memory card.  Plus I had a card reader and it made getting the photos a breeze.

**via**

Eventually I decided I wanted a better digital camera.  The Nikon was only a 2.0 Megapixel.  So mom and I went on a hunt and I came home with this beauty (although mine had the IS (image stabilization))  I got to the point that camera went EVERYWHERE with me.  It stayed in my purse unless I was using it.  But one day the lens cover pried apart and the lens got scratched.  Boooo

**via**

So my mom took me out and bought me a new camera for Christmas (about 2 years after the first one) because she was tired of listening to me complain about the scratched lens.  I also got a camera case to protect it from the insides of my purse :).  I still have this camera today.  It still works and everything.  But it eats batteries!

**personal photo**

In 2009 a couple friends and I decided to take a photography class.  I could have used my trusty point and shoot, but I decided I wanted a Big Girl camera :), so I went to researching cameras and came home on Labor Day weekend with this, a Canon Rebel XS.  This sucker went everywhere.

**via**

In the mean time, I graduated from my Canon Powershot to my husbands Nikon Coolpix.  The primary reason, it has a rechargeable battery (although I lost the charger to it for a while so it didn’t do me much good).  That and it is a smaller camera than what mine was so it takes up less room in my purse.  This sucker has been halfway around the world and back.  Hubby had it when he was in Afghanistan.

**personal photo**

Then in October 2010 at a work meeting, a friend was up here from Cape Girardeau, MO, and she had a Nikon D80.  Hubby really wanted a Nikon, but when I bought my Canon, we’d just started dating and he didn’t want to tell me how to spend my money.  While Donna was up here she let us play around with her Nikon and hubby fell in love.  I’m not going to lie, I think I kind of did too.  So we started looking into the type of camera we might want to upgrade too.  I personally was ready for a step up anyway.  So I put my Canon Rebel up for sale and took that money and upgraded to the lovely Nikon D5000.

**via**

And not really an upgrade, but we’ve added the Kodak Play & sport to the line up because, come on… how fun is it to be in the water and be able to shoot photos!

**via**

So thanks for taking this walk down memory lane with me via Cameras 🙂

And just a side shot, my great grandpa lived to be 10 days shy of his 108th birthday.  He died in 1998.  Can you imagine all the cameras (or events but camera’s since that’s what we’re focusing on) he saw in 107 years?

Learn from our "MISTAKES"!

So as you know we have recently had an issue with the hard drive containing all of our precious photo’s.

I would like to share with you some solutions to avoid making the same mistake we did. I had been looking in to a back up solution for quite a while, being an IT guy I am very picky about hardware and I was looking for something specific. I found it about a week before the catastrophe but we didn’t get everything copied over in time.

My suggestion

  • use a external hard drive that has built in mirroring also called RAID-1 this allows 1 hard drive to go bad and you can replace it and not loose any data. LaCie makes several of these. 
  • I would also suggest that this be a desktop unit placed so that it cannot fall off of the desk.  If you want to take pictures with you copy them to a smaller drive and take them with you, this will ensure that there will be no loss that is out of your control (IE: bumped and knocked off of a desk causing the internal parts to jolt.) 

If you have any questions please feel free to comment and I will try to answer them.  Some of these options are a little expensive but if you value your photos as much as we do it is really worth it.

PC

The Death of the Hard drive

Let’s just say, “I had a week last week.”  Obviously people probably wound up with worse weeks than I had but seriously it was one thing after another it seems went wrong.  But when I got back from lunch on Friday, that was just the icing on the cake.

I walked in and sat down at my desk.  I had my external hard drive sitting on my tower so I picked it up and put it up on my desk and went to getting caught up on work related events that happened over lunch.  I had my hard drive sitting on my desk like so and partially had my back to it when all the sudden I heard it crash to the floor.

Hubs has told me more than once not to drop this thing.  Unfortunately last week one day I knocked it off my computer tower, so that’s why I moved it up to my desk.  I thought I was going to croak.  It is my hard drive that has 50K+ photos on it.  (For those of you who follow me on facebook, when I brought it home I found out I was closer to 50K than 40K.)

I picked the thing up off the floor, placed it back on my desk and felt a lump in my throat.  Something about that freaked me out.  I then tried real quick to test it out and this is the error I got.

Oh crap.  It didn’t recognize the drive and wanted me to reformat it.  Yeah right, I’ll definitely lose everything then.  So I immediately called hubby freaking out.  A while back I wanted a back up of this and we didn’t get it done.  Bad juju right there!

He told me to bring it home and he’d try to work on it but no guarantees.  Then he said he’d put it in the freezer to try that.  I was like do what?!?!  He said there was a metal piece in there and the freezer would help that contract.  So I told him I could put it in the freezer at work.  He said that’s fine, but I’d put it in a plastic bag or something.

I didn’t have anything like that, but I had a drink mix box so he told me to try that and just tape it up really well.

And then he told me to leave it in the freezer for 2-3 hours.

When I pulled it out sadly I got the same error as above.  Again I thought I was going to croak.

I called him back to let him know.  He told me to bring it home and he’d look at it.  So he hooked it up to the computer and did something to it.  Well we were able to get the computer to recognize the drive & all the photos.  So he started copying all the photos over to the desk top where they should have been originally.

It will only copy over the ones that aren’t “messed up” so when it hits one of them it sticks and takes a while so I’m not even halfway done copying over AND so far we’ve lost 1,500 photos so far.  So I guess the point of this post is, learn from my stupid mistake!

TGIF!!!

I’m ready for the weekend!  This photo I snapped driving down the road with my iPhone, don’t worry my eyes were on the road, I’m lucky I got the right things in focus, of the beautiful sunset I saw in my mirror on December 29th, 2011

And just for the record, I don’t text and drive.  

Ending 2011 with a Bang

Well I did it.  1 Year of photos. or at least 1 a week for a total of 52.  Not sure if I’ll find or create a new list for 2012, but I survived this list! 🙂

I hope everyone has a safe & Happy New Year!  See you back here next year 😉

Week 1 – Black & White

Week 2 – Food

Week 3 – Self Portrait
Week 4 – Reflection

Week 5 – Ennui
Week 6 -Time

Week 7 -Red
Week 8 – Pink
Week 9 – Patterns
Week 10 – Morning

Week 11 – Round

Week 12 – Hands
Week 13 – Shine
Week 14 – Envy
Week 15 – Soft
Week 16 – Perspective
Week 17 – Love
Week 18 – Start
Week 19 – Free
Week 20 – Texture
Week 21 – Toys
Week 22 – Downtown
Week 23 – Summer
Week 24 – Heat
Week 25 – Fantasy
Week 26 – Water
Week 27 – Shadows
Week 28 – Light
Week 29 – Night
Week 30 – Macro

Week 31 – Nature

Week 32 – Clothes 

Week 33 – Green

Week 34 – Map

Week 35 – Laughter

Week 36 – Child(ren)

Week 37 – Yellow

Week 38 – Candy

Week 39 – Pets
Week 40 – Never Ending

Week 41 – Sports

Week 42 – Books

Week 43 – Blue

Week 44 – Letter of the Alphabet

Week 45 – Innocence
Week 46 – An Important Thing in Life
Week 47 – Heaps

Week 48 – Family

Week 49 – Favorite Spot

Week 50 – Metal

Week 51 – Three
Week 52 – Fun

Slow Going

So… I think I might be crazy.

I want to learn photoshop.  I don’t know why, but I do.  Oy, I think I’ve actually flipped my lid!

I started out with Photoshop CS4.  I haven’t had much time to learn it or even play with it.  The other day though hubs was telling me to start with Photoshop Elements.  Learn that first and then proceed on.  So he loaded PSE8 on my laptop and away we went… but it’s not quite that easy.

I downloaded a few actions to help me out and they are fun to play with, but let’s get serious… How in the heck am I going to learn anything.  So I bought a book.  A lot of people recommend Scott Kelby so that’s where I went, plus I’ve bought some of his photography books and they are easily read and understandable.

So, in my mission to start learning PSE8 I chose a photo.

Subject A:

Don’t ask me why this is the photo I chose, but, it is.  Simple as that.

This wasn’t even taken with my big Nikon, but the Nikon Point and Shoot that we have.  My mom took it in Hawaii while we were waiting to go parasailing on our 1st anniversary.

So Here is the photo after I got done playing with it…

I think it looks better… at least we all look like we have a tan, right :).

Here’s a second photo:

And… now edited….

Now, do we think I’ll remember how the heck I did this come tomorrow?

What do you think of this photo, did I do ok? or was the original the better choice?

Pictures

So I’m not going to lie… sometimes I can be a nerd.  Sometimes I actually like studying!  Although I had to learn the Axial Skeleton {your cranium + face, your ribs & your vertebrae} the for a test I took earlier this week, yeah by Monday night I was sick of the axial skeleton and that’s how these photos came to be…

What can I say, I should have been studying, but I kind of already knew the bones, processes & foramen of that particular skeleton that I was getting bored studying it.  Anyway now I get to go on and learn the Appendicular Skeleton {all the rest of your bones basically… namely your limbs because well that’s what’s left}.  Whoohooo! so you might get some fun pictures come next week too, I’m just sayin 🙂

So lately I’ve gotten into LOVING Collage photos.  There’s just something about it.  You can tell a story with them:

Or you can let them tell their own story:

Or you can use it to make a Chronological time line: {Thanksgiving}

You can just randomly throw photos together and call it art:

Ok so maybe that’s not art… but you get the picture, right?

So as of lately, I’ve been on the hunt to find pictures to make my different collages.  See I told you I’m a nerd!  Yesterday though, while looking for a specific photo (the first one I’ll show you) I ran across two photos that I absolutely love.  Obviously I told you one I was looking for, the other I ran across while looking for this one.  There is something about these two photos that I absolutely LOVE!

The first one was just playing around with hubs {friend at the time} Nikon Point & Shoot, where my arms were stretched as far forward as they’d go, hoping I’d get us both in the shot and the other was right after I bought my first dSLR and he agreed to help me learn how to use the dang thing.  That one was done with a 10 second timer.

We’ve taken a lot of photos since first hanging out, remember we were just friends right at first, to the point we upgraded my dSLR {which I’ve had that one since um… sometime before Thanksgiving last year}, yet there is something about those 2 pictures that I always go back to because I just love them.

Out Take with a Story

A couple weeks ago we worked on taking some family photos.

We got some cute ones.. We got some weird ones.  We got some funny ones.

But this one… is GREAT!

My mom conjured up a story for it even… {Hubs don’t be mad at me please!}

My mom said it looks like Hubs farted.  I smelled it.  And Tbug was blaming Audrey for it.

Now in all honesty, hubs had the remote so he knew the camera was getting ready to go off… I really can’t explain me… and Tbug was yelling at Audrey for jumping up on her. and I just noticed the slight almost non-existent bunny ears hubs is giving me… Thanks hunny!