Digital Shoeboxes,

Every time I take a personal picture these days it puts me a few more megabytes in the hole. What I mean by that is, Debbie and I have tons of pictures (prints) from the film days that have been printed and organized into albums. We both have similar archives of images from prior to us getting together, most neatly bound in convenient to view albums. I’m not sure about her but I know that I also have a good sized box filled with a few hundred pictures that never made it to an album for whatever reason.

When we first transitioned into digital we were Debbie was pretty diligent with the process of getting our keepers printed, organized, and installed into albums. Well we got busy with things for a while, and next thing you know the images are piling up in a few little digital shoe boxes known as portable hard drives. Now every time I take a personal picture I’m thinking of this, and it is most definitely affecting my personal photography(more on that later).It doesn’t have the same affect on my business photography because there is no pile of business pictures. Every one of our professional shoots is handled and delivered in order and with priority. Which is exactly the state that we want our personal pictures to be in.

Let me clarify the state of my digital shoe boxes. They are not in the same disarray as the box of older prints that I referred to earlier, which is barely better than being in a pile on the floor. The images in my digital shoe boxes are organized in a folder/sub-folder hierarchy that often includes brief descriptions. That is of course up until I started using Adobe LightRoom now they are still in a similar folder/sub-folder system with the added benefit of keywords, attributes, and searchable meta-data.

How is this affecting my photography? I don’t know whether to classify it as a positive or negative, maybe it’s niether, maybe it’s just an “is what it is”, but it has the affect of lowering the number of shots I take. My initial take was that this was a good thing, not for the digital shoe box reason but for the being more deliberate about what I shoot reason. Like twenty years ago when you went on vacation and took five rolls of 36 with you and had to plan your shooting around that. It was a negative for me back then, because I would always come back with at least two rolls unexposed wishing I had grabbed a few of the shots I passed on. Same goes for processing that film, we didn’t want to waste any exposures because we had to pay for them regardless of how worthless the image was. After turning all of this over in my head (the odd things that keep us up at night), I’m leaning towards it being a good thing. I say that because it really hasn’t had that drastic of an affect on me, I’m still taking plenty of pictures, I’m still experimenting, and learning, I’m just not “willy nilly”. Well sometimes I am…

Anyway, we have talked about a few different plans to get this under control and to get back into a routine of getting our memories into some tangible form. Things are so awesome now, photobooks, digital picture frames, online slideshows, and amazing print opportunities. As we start to tackle this task more options continue to present themselves, how about guaranteed lifetime storage for your pictures? wow.