Tech Tuesday - Snow and Mexico

A little explanation: Being a digital photographer takes not only skill as an artist, but also skill in knowing how to work with the equipment that you have. Technology has been something that I have had in my life nearly all my life. I want to use these posts to break down some technical stuff into something that makes sense to the average folk. That way I don’t feel like such a nerd when I say words like terabyte, sync speed, or aperture. That said… onto the post!

It is snowing in Wisconsin. I don’t mind the snow, being that I grew up in Minneapolis and was trick-or-treating in boots and a jacket (pretty sure you couldn’t even see my sweet clown outfit), but sometimes the sun is nice. All of the lamenting seems kinda random, but it all has to do with my hard drive.

Hmm… odd logic sir. Weeelll… A few months ago I was running out of space on my hard drive and needed to find a solution to that. When you shoot photos and keep them all on your hard drive, after a few years you build up quite a bit of space. I started shooting with film when I was younger, but it wasn’t really love at first click. I had to wait for the subpar photos and pay money to see them even though I paid for the film. Kinda felt like a rip off to me (in fifth grade??). I eventually got a point and shoot digital and started clicking away. I have an archive of images from 2003 till now and that is quite a few 64 meg memory cards later. Now I am shooting on 8 gig cards with 8 meg files (soon to be 25 meg with the new Canon 5D Mark II) and the files were piling up.

For those of you who are not technically savvy here is the deal in laymen’s terms:
1000 (k)ilobyte = 1 (meg)abyte
1000 (meg)abytes = 1 (gig)abyte
1000 (gig)abytes = 1 terabyte

A lil guestimation:
A photo on 5 megapixel camera (megapixel is different than megabyte) is about 2-3 megs.
A photo on a Canon Rebel XT, 8 megapixel camera is about 6-8 megs

So now that you get the idea of how big the photos are, I had about 1 terabyte of info on several different hard drives. That is a loooot of stuff. Granted there was quite a bit of music in there as well, but the majority of them were photos.

The solution to store my stuff was to buy a Drobo. It is a lil black box thingy that you put hard drives in and plug into your computer. (I am sooo technical) I initially bought 2 terabytes because I thought that would be enough to consolidate all my photos and info I have collected over the years. I was wrong. Sad. That is a lot of stuff! So over Thanksgiving I picked up two more hard drives for a total of 4 terabytes. I popped the drives in my black toaster and they ran like a charm. Simon = stoked. I have space. I can take more photos.

All of that to say that I was going through some of my old photos (only 2007, but still) and found some shots from Mexico and thought I would post them to warm me up on this cold December evening. If anyone is getting married south of the border, let me know. I would love to shoot your wedding and de-thaw.