Images of a life in the Southwest

For a long time newspaper owners on the high end of the spectrum have been gutting newsroom staff and demanding unrealistic profits. Across the country newspapers are apparently on life support. Lay-offs and salary cuts are the norm.

I cannot believe how much time I am putting in at my computer. So you are wondering if you can see the results – maybe I have been writing, or editing a major photo project. . . ? No, I have been sorting through thousands of images that I can delete. For 2008 I have over 45k images still on my one drive. A lot of that number consists of junk. Basketball games where I hit the motor drive for an action sequence. I got the shot, and then a bunch of extra stuff too. All of those can be dumped. All of the images I just dumped into the drive that were things like ads for used cars and furniture. Lots of things need to be eliminated. The rest needed to be keyworded and flagged so I can find them later on.

Right now my photo hard-drive is like the old shoe box full of negatives. In addition to the stuff from The Independent, I also have my own personal work and my family images to organize. It is amazing how quickly it packs up and gets away from somebody when shooting five or six days a week for more than 14 years. I don’t even want to begin trying to figure out what to do with my negatives and slides.

I met with my school's principal today and was told that I should not count on having Photoshop or even Photoshop Elements on the computers for my students. This left me in a panic - what am I going to do with 3 classes full of 25+ students each for an entire semester in the digital darkroom class?

Hey there! Did you know that there are great opportunities for photographers out there to earn real money (as opposed to the kind you make yourself, I guess).

All you have to do is take an On-line photography course. Like THIS ONE.

Or, you can do like the lady at the New York Times said, don't bother taking any photos - just go to Flickr and appropriate whatever catches your interest.

Onto other photo related things. I have a 1TB hard drive, and it only has 34 GB left on it. The only thing on the drive are photographs that I have taken. So now I have spent a good portion of this past week letting my desktop computer import and catalog the images (by year) into Adobe Lightroom. In the current ingest for 2008 (which I have had to do in segments to keep the computer from locking up) I have 50,641 images. Now I know that some of those photos are in multiple folders, but even if they are not, 50k images for one year is not really all that excessive. Think about it and you get less than 1,000 photos a week. Say I shoot 5 days per, and that comes in at about 200 images per day.

So, I shot a LOT of images. What does that mean? I have no idea really. Perhaps it means that it is possible to shoot 43,000 images with your lens cap on and not know it....