THIS POST WAS WRITTEN BACK IN 2018 but left in my drafts folder and it’s a shame to just bin it off so I’ll post it here now. I’m due another of these file count and camera gear change posts now also so that will be around soon.
Back in 2015, I posted about the size of my image library explaining how it came to be so large and imposing.
At the back end of 2017 I re-did the exercise and tallied up the storage used by the photos and videos on my machine, the results are not totally surprising but the total disk space used now sits at just under 1TB. (1000 GB or 1 billionth of a gram of DNA worth)
At 987GB it contains 133,610 images and videos. I’m not an avid recorder of videos so only a small amount of space will be due to these. Videos are difficult to do right and any I usually take are poor quality so just don’t bother usually.
In 2017 I kept a total of 8059 photos, bear in mind that I do delete a good few using the Lightroom workflow by inspecting images upon Import to weed out the worst of the out of focus ro dodgy images. Many of the photos that I don’t delete would likely never see the light of day either but they blurriness or problem lighting will often take me back to the location and I enjoy the memories being triggered.
There was a wedding vows renewal in 2017 too that saw me take a few photos and then duplicate them to offer alternatives to the happy couple. I’m not a wedding (or wedding vow renewal) photographer and don’t profess to understand the workings of this genre of photography but I was asked to do it by a friend and work colleague. It was tricky, trickier than I ever thought but the hardest bit is getting people to do what you ( as a result of being asked by the couple) want them to do. Lighting conditions from inside a church, to in the tree covered church yard, to the gardens and then in the reception venue were certainly a challenge and hopefully they like the images. There were some that were on my list to take, that didn’t happen as I couldn’t stop proceedings to take a photo. The rings being presented right at the last minute meant I couldn’t do anything before-hand (snigger) and group photos were tricky as people didn’t want to stand on the grass in their heels.
There was a drop in the number of photos produced and kept for the two years after 2015 with ’16 seeing 9,584 in the library and ’17 ending up with 8,059 added to the total.
A big part of my photography over the last seven or eight years has been with my volunteering activities with the national young persons entrepreneurship and business skills organisation, Young Enterprise. Up until academic year 2017-2018, I had been a volunteer Business Advisor and also a member of the Local Volunteer Board of YE. I was always taking my camera along to Trade Fairs in local shopping centres, presentation days at local colleges and awards evenings to make sure we captured the good work that was being done by students, teachers, business advisors, YE Staff, and other volunteers that make a difference with young people’s perceptions of life in the real world.
At each of these events I’d take hundreds of photos, of stock, stalls, shoppers, shopping centres, screens, students,trophies, guests, people and all manner of other related subjects. I really enjoyed taking the photos and trying to get the best image out of the RAW files that I’d created. It was a constant battle as lighting in shopping centres is very tricky, with big skylights next to dark areas and exposure and curves were an essential part of each image being processed.
As part of a few years of being involved in this wonderful charity I was also experimenting with timelapse movies, videos and even branching out into interviews, as a result of the time-lapses though I used to record thousands of photos for one small video, either using my GoPro Hero or a Raspberry Pi with timelapse.sh running on it. I did hardly any timelapses in 2017 and as I was only involved in the start of 2017 I have half as many images as I would normally , so I’m not that surprised that the numbers of photos in each year was lower.
I was also tidying up a few folders of photos for other timelapses in the last couple of years. There were other occasions were I’d taken thousands of photos and after producing the video, had kept the originals. Time to delete them though, no need to keep them.
In terms of camera gear I’d say that not a lot has changed recently, I bought a 300mm F4 Prime L Series Lens so that I could use it for some Mach Loop aircraft shots and I’d say I was using it at nature reserves and also a holiday in Florida where it allowed me to get closer to the action but was really heavy and cumbersome to carry around.
Keep an eye out for the next post, who knows there might even be some big changes to the numbers of photos I’ve been taking.
[…] of digital libraries. As of 2018 I had over 133,000 images in my catalogue as can be read in this post. AI will need to revisit the post and do an up to date write up as I now have 148,000 images and […]