No camera? No pictures!

Don’t be one of those people who say “I wish I had my camera with me” after something truly spectacular happens. Carry your camera with you wherever you go! If you’re unable ot carry a bulky DSLR, grab a point and shoot with a sensor chip of at least 3 megapixels resolution and stick it in your purse or jacket pocket.

You never know when you’ll be witness to a great photo situation and, believe me, you’ll kick yourself if you can’t lay hands on something with a lens when you do.

My personal choice for a carry-everywhere camera? The Canon Powershot G10. It’s one of the few point-and-shoot cameras with RAW capability and is reasonably inexpensive. If you’re interested in something cheaper, the earlier model, the G9, is very nice too. We’re talking $500 or less, fyi. Yeah, photography ain’t a cheap hobby…

While we’re at it, set your camera to auto ISO, aperture priority (set to f/5.6) and, if you’ve got it, set image stabilization ON. Setting your camera in this manner will leave you prepared to capture photos in almost any situation

So make a habit of taking your camera along…you just might make a picture that’ll reward you for it!

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Try gold for some piece of mind

Having just discovered that several of my older cd-r disks filled with photos have become unreadable in five short years, I’m making a switch to a different brand of recordable DVD disks. Made by Delkin, these disks have a gold core and are guaranteed to last 300 years. While I’m not gullible enough to buy into that claim, I have done a bit of research and found that these particular disks are living up to their claims…so far. 

Backing up to some sort of optical media has become a must-do routine for anyone shooting digital images. The ones and zeroes that make up our photos are fragile things that need to be kept on some sort of reliable storage medium. I personally back up all my shoots first to my external hard drive (that means I’ve got a copy on my internal drive too), then to optical when I have enough images to fill a 4.7 GB DVD.

The finished DVD will then go to an off-site storage facility. I use a large deposit box at the bank. The reasoning is that what’s the point of backing up if you’re gonna store it beside the computer? Fires happen and I’ve read too many sob stories about folks who didn’t store their copies in another location.

In the very near future I’m also planning to subscribe to either Carbonite or Mozy for a fourth link in my backup chain, but more on that later. For now, I’m happy to add gold as a link in the chain. 

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