My Nikon D300 DSLR "rolled over" yesterday: the photo counter hit 9,999 and started fresh. I began using it in August 2008. My Canon S5IS superzoom rolled over on Sept. 19 this year, a bit over two years after I bought it in July 2007.
My first digital camera was a Kodak DC4800 with which I shot the first photo on March 30, 2001. That camera still works but has been retired. It was followed by a shirt-pocket-size Canon SD400 that died in February this year, being replaced with a tiny Canon SD780 for everyday carrying around. I took the SD400 nearly everywhere in pockets, belt packs and briefcases, and it did yeoman's work for about three-and-a-half years before succumbing to the regular battering with a dead LCD screen.
The D300 and S5IS 10,000-shot milestones got me thinking about my digital photo statistics, so I did some poking around my hard drive.
As of today, I have 45,330 files in 960 folders under the My Photos directory, totaling 221GB. That includes perhaps a hundred photos scanned from film pictures, and a few dozen short movie files shot using the movie function on my Canons. I have no idea how many rolls of film I've shot since I began taking pictures some 40 years ago, and that's another project - to scan the better slides and negatives into digital files. . .
That means that since I shifted to digital photography, I've been keeping about 5,330 photos/year. As I explain in the next paragraph, that means I've been shooting about 6,500-7,000 photos/year. Not bad for an amateur, eh?
When I transfer digital photos from my various cameras to my computer, I immediately cull the worst of the lot - the badly underexposed or overexposed, the out of focus, the motion blurred, etc. I also usually zap severely unflattering shots of people, near duplicates of the same scene, and so on. I figure that I trash 15-20% this way. But I need to do more.
While my photos are fairly well organized in chronological folders and topic folders, I've never used a tagging/archiving program to keep track of them, and with 45,000+ images that needs to change. Since I returned to SLR shooting last year after about a 15-year hiatus, I've also gotten more serious about my photography again, and need to keep better track of my better work.
I've started using Nikon Capture NX2 and Adobe Bridge CS4 to do some basic tagging over the last few months, and am investigating digital asset management options such as MS Expression Media, ACDSEE Pro 3, etc.
As time allows, I aim to go back and do more culling, while adding metadata to my old photos. I ought to be able to cut at least 10-20% of that 45,000. And more importantly, tag the best 0.1 - 0.5% (1 - 5 out of a thousand??) that may be worthy of printing for display, or attempting to sell.
It will be interesting to revisit this topic once this gargantuan project is done, and see how the numbers turned out.
Posted by Paul at October 19, 2009 08:16 AM