It’s the count!! I don’t mean Dracula either!

Loose End

It’s a Sunday evening and I find myself reflecting on the number of photos I’ve taken since having a digital camera.

Before digital I was used to not taking photos at all, only requiring the use of a camera about four or five times over my life time until I met my girlfriend, who later became my wife. Once I’d established a need to take photos, not dodgy photos you bloody pervs, but scenery and photos of Jo holding teddy bears won in Rhyl or Barmouth, or our holiday to Paignton etc.. I had to buy a reasonable camera.

It was a Canon Sure Shot Max, 35mm camera and I had many wonderful photos out of it over the few years I had it.

Unfortunately, upon arriving home from my brother’s house in Glasgow after a short visit, I realised that I’d left it behind. Mike said that he’d put it safe for me, that was the last time it was ever seen again. I was gutted, but it was also a great excuse to start down the road of digital that had recently kicked off.

Digital Beginner

This requirement saw me invest around £300 in an Olympus C960Z in April of 2001, is that really 14 years ago, sheesh.

At a massive 1.3 mega pixel it was already exceeding the resolution of the first few digital cameras that I’d seen, these were at work where we had some early Kodak digital cameras. I think one of them was a Kodak DC40 which had a 0.38 Megapixel sensor and looked like a high tech pair of binoculars.

This camera used the Smart Media card and I had a 16MB card for a while until I bought a 64MB card which allowed me to have around 250 photos on there at the same time.

This camera would stay with me until November 2002 when it would be replaced by another beast. I sold the C960Z to a chap at work and he used it for many years also. When I released this Olympus it had been used to take over 2500 photos, quite a lot, you’d think but if you check out the graph lower down you’ll see that it’s not a huge number..

30 Canon Salute

The device I purchased to replace the Olympus was a Canon Powershot S30 which cost around £300 again but it was brought down as three of us all bought one at the same time. This camera had an even better resolution of 3.2 Megapixels and was fantastic to learn more about the art of photography as you could change settings to manual and play to your hearts content. This camera was the first I used for lightpainting owing to the ease of setting the shutter on 30s exposure.

This camera stayed with me for four years and was producing some really nice photos, I had no desire to change it really until it started becoming a bit unreliable with the batteries. It was simply too energy hungry so I looked for an alternative and in the December of 2006 I returned to Olympus. This was after the Canon had helped up the total cumulative number of photos in my library to a huge 14,900. The media of choice for this device was a Compact Flash card and I think I had a 16MB and  64MB cards for it over the years.

Count Olympus

Returning to Olympus would cost me around £200 at the time I bought the Olympus mju 400 in December 2006 and the improvement in CCD sensors looked to be slowing down as this tiny compact camera had a 4MP sensor. While I used this camera for a long time, I never really liked it. The menu was clunky, the markings on the buttons rubbed off and I never really thought that the pictures it was taking were much of an improvement, if anything I thought that the pictures were of a worse quality, and not just because I’m a crap photographer…

It was a handy size and fitted nicely into a pocket but was taking enough pictures of our children as they grew up through their early years. When this camera was superseded by the next purchase, it had added around another 9000 photos to the library.

Canon Return

In February of 2009 I decided to return to Canon as I missed the menus and the overall usability of the Powershot series. I purchased a Powershot A470 for around £180 if I remember correctly. It’s a cracking camera with a 7.1 Megapixel sensor that has also taken some nice photos over the years it’s been used. In fact, it was still in use on the odd occasion that my other camera was busy, up until last year 2014. The card for storing the pictures on the new Canon was an XD card and I bought a 16MB card with it then progressed through 64MB, 512MB to a 1GB at the end of it’s life.

It’s the solid quality I’ve come to expect from Canon and it never let me down in it’s entire lifetime.Over the two years it saw most use it added another 11,000 pictures to the already straining hard disks on my PC’s. This camera also had some manual setting capability and I used it to practice all sorts of different techniques. Again Lightpainting was an activity I could have fun with again.

Level Up

The next purchase, in March 2011,  was of an entry level DSLR in the form of a Canon EOS 500D, this camera was a massive leap for me and cost me around £600 from Jessops  and held a 15.1 MP cropped sensor in it’s heart. I stepped into DSLR as I was starting to enjoy my photography and thought that my bonus from work would be well spent on allowing me to expand into the hobby.

It’s still going and I use it a huge amount for all different sorts of tasks. It’s done air shows,family portraits, weddings, school plays, lightpainting, pinhole, macro and all manner of other stuff. It’s my main camera and it has a kit 18-55 lens, a 70-300, 10-20, and a nifty 50 in the bag to keep it all together.

This camera goes with me almost everywhere and has taken a few really good pictures, if that’s not too conceited of me to say that. With the increase in use and the increase in photo file size, (I shoot in RAW most of the time) my hard disk real estate is starting to get eaten up at a rate of knots. I’ve got several cards, all SD Cards, from 8GB to 32GB to allow me to shoot for hours without running out of space.

Dodgy Disks

Over the years I’ve seen many people lose all of their photos to disk failures, without a reliable backup so I backup all of my photos to a separate drive on my network and also a second separate disk, just in case the other two are damaged.I wish more people would do this too, as I’ve been tasked with rescuing a few in the past.

How many?

If you look at this chart you’ll see the number of photos for each year(green) and the file size taken up (red).

These aren’t cumulative, just points for wach year joined up. The cumulative charts wreck the scale as the number of photos I have on my disks are, at the end of 2014, 81,918. These photos take up a whopping 357GB of space.

I suppose I should go in and reduce them a bit by removing the photos that I consider “rubbish”, but I simply don’t like deleting anything unless it’s blurry or super bad.

I’ve recently purchased a GoPro Hero for £94 and done a few time lapse runs where it will take thousands of photos, one every half a second and allow me to stitch them into a movie. I do delete the photos when I’ve finished creating the movie file as the number on the graph would be shooting through the top of your screen by now…

Last year on holiday I also bought a Fuji XP waterproof camera so I could take some photos safely on the pedalo in Menorca and of the kids diving into the pool! This has done a few photos but isn’t worth mentioning in the overall statistics. It still gets used today when I haven’t got room for my DSLR or we’re going somewhere wet like a theme park or Blackpool.

Gallery

Here’s a few photos of my old and current kit with the memory cards etc.

If you have any questions or reminiscences feel free to leave me a comment.