Digital photography

When we had dinner with friends in Denver last week, one of the things that came up is the having too many digital photographs to deal with. I mentioned, as has occurred to me many times, how different it is that when I had to carefully compose every shot, think about the aperture and shutter speed, depth of field, and so on.When you had 12, 24, or 36 shots to work with, and then had to drop it off at the pharmacy or photofinisher, or develop and print it yourself. Develop the film, examine the negatives, maybe print a contact sheet, print some or all.

Point being, you really had to think carefully about each shot. Now with digital cameras, you can just take five (or twenty) shots, and hope one of them comes out.

Some flies in the ointment, though: organization, storage, and just never going through the gazillions of photos you now have.

Case in point: I just downloaded 273 photos from three CF cards from my DSLR. Many of them are duplicates of a given shot. And now I'll have to go through them, delete the ones I don't like, maybe crop some, upload them to this blog, or just let them sit indefinitely.

Another example: my Pictures folder on this computer has 21,425 items in it, totaling 43.1 gb. And this isn't my only Pictures folder.

Ugh. On which note, here is one of the 273 photos:

These are stuffed mushrooms I made last night: the filling is the stems, garlic, jalapenos, and sun-dried tomatoes. This is the dish I refrigerated them in; the rest of the series includes my usual play by play cooking photos, which will likely get their own blog post later. Which tends to lead to, well, needing to download 273 photos.