Letting go

[ellarien]

It's funny. When I only had 256K camera memory cards, it was easy to recycle them every couple of weeks. But a 2Gb card? With two Sheffield summers and a trip to Romania and all the cactus flowers in between? That's scary, even though I know I have copies of those photos on every hard drive I own and a couple I don't, as well as the CD backups and prints of the best ones. (The first 1Gb card, full of China photos, I retired rather than clear; they're cheap enough these days, after all.)

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I'm scared every time I wipe one of my memory cards, but I am simply taking too many pictures. A full day can sees me filling a 2GB card, so...

[ellarien]

I've slowed down a lot this year -- time was when I was getting two or three dozen shots every lunch-break, and a hundred or so for a special excursion (like a walk down the main road in cactus-flower season.) These days I'm pickier, and thinking about other things. The current micro-crisis was precipitated because I started using the camera to make reading copies of yellowing old Nature articles for work -- it's easier than wrangling the bound volumes on the photocopier, and sufficiently legible for my purposes.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I did that -- photographed book pages. It was a 500-page book, and I scanned the artwork, but the indexes to the artwork just didn't seem worth all that laying-on-the-scanner stuff. And for an album cover I wanted to reproduce, it was way too much grief to piece together four partial scans.

Heh. When we got back from China, I wanted to keep one of the cards intact for a while, but having only three 125MB cards to use, I ended up cycling them into regular use again when we went to England. Even with a laptop in our room, I ended up filling all three cards on some days.

[ellarien]

The price of flash memory has dropped steeply since I bought my camera; I think my original 256K cost the same as the 2Gb a couple of years later, so by the time I needed to think about overwriting the China shots I could afford not to. (The 16Mb that came with the camera is amusingly useless.)

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, it's pretty useless. I did manage to get by for a couple of weeks with it, though, before we could nip out and get a 2GB flash card, which is its own USB (you just fold it -- it's the cutest thing). I haven't filled the present card yet, and I have the luxury of carrying things around on it until I get them onto both computers.