"Help my HD is filling up fast"

A good 'ol friend of mine took a picture of his condo to put online, and I spent about 2 minutes doing basic editing to make it look more "homey" by warming it up, sharpening foliage, and adding more definition to the mid-tones while recovering a little bit of details in the highlights:

Later on he asked:

BTW, how do you save/backup your pictures? Currently, I just copy them into two HDs.

But with my new camera, the space is filling up quick. Also, what about sharing? Do you upload your orignial pictures? 7M each?

If you just got a brand new spanking XXX megapixel camera and if you're filling up your HD fast-- you're most likely machine gunning your camera. In another word, you're taking too many pictures. Let's say you take 100 full size resolution pictures per session. For a typical [2009-spec'ed] 15 megapixel camera, that is 20MB in raw and ~2 to 8MB in JPG (depending on your setting), or up to 2GB/session. If you have a 100GB HD, you'll fill up your [2009-spec'ed] HD in a short period of time.

Are all of those pictures "usable" pictures? When I say usable, I mean are they good enough that someday, you'd be willing to spend $20/frame to print them as posters? Most likely, the answer is no. In all likelihood, you're not going to use every single one of those 100 pictures to print and to publish on the web. In all likelihood, more than 90% of those pictures will end up on the hard-drive, sitting there forever, never to be seen again.

In the old film days, people thought very carefully about their shots-- composition, lighting, color, timing. Each frame needed to be developed and printed, and each frame had a substantial cost to the photographer. Not surprisingly, for a typical photographer in the old days, each roll of film had many good looking shots (compared to today's DSLR shooters) because each frame had a cost, so a lot of thought was put into each frame before the actual shot.

Today however, people think digital is free, so they machine gun shot their digital cameras. They take one picture. Then take another. Then another. To make matters worse, camera makers today advertise that their cameras have really high frames per second, and many macho guys love it (they tend to also the ones that love BIG ZOOMs). They like to show off with their super fast click-click-click-click-click camera. It's as if they're screaming "I am a super cool sports photographer and I can make lots of photos! Listen to the super cool click-click-click-click-click sound my super camera makes!" Yeah, whatever. Maybe these guys like big zooms and fast frames-per-second cameras because they compensate for their small penis or something. I don't know. Anyways, after the session is over, people upload hundreds and thousands of bad looking family photos on Picasaweb, and share it with people who don't actually have time to look through every single one of the thousands of boring looking photos. They do so, because it's so easy to machine gun cameras, and it's so easy to upload to Picasaweb.

Unfortunately, there is a cost of taking too many pictures. That cost is time. One needs to spend initial time managing (picking/filtering and editing) pictures. If the photographer ever needs to find pictures to use in the future (wedding slide show, baby shower, etc), then he/she will have to spend a lot of time sorting through thousands of pictures. If each picture takes 1 second for the brain to parse, then 1000 pictures will cost 16 minutes, not counting software lag. If the average layman machine guns 10000-20000 pictures per year, then the future cost of time would be HOURS and even days. Lastly, there is also the time a photographer incurs on others when he/she shares bad pictures to others. I can't tell you how many times people upload 3000 [really really bad] pictures from their vacation and ask me to critique. They're incurring HOURS on me, and to their friends.

1) My first useful advice to storage woes is-- think more, shoot less.

2) Pretend that you're using a film camera. Pretend each frame costs $0.50. You need to nail your focus and exposure correctly. You have one shot. You think carefully, and make that one shot. Alternatively, if you're a macho machine gun kind of guy, you can pretend that you're a US Army Sniper. "One shot, one kill" is their slogan. You have one chance. So slow down, breath, think carefully, and make that one shot. By doing so, you will A) ensure that all your shots are well thought out, and therefore, will be spot on and B) you'll gain intimate knowledge of your camera settings, and gain knowledge of lighting in general.

3) DELETE BAD PICTURES while you're shooting. Ask yourself "Is this picture good enough that I'm willing to spend $20 to print on a poster?" If the question is no, delete it. Also ask yourself "Does this picture have good sharpness? Does it have good colors? Does it look like something that I can put up in my kid's wedding slide show? Does it look like something I can put in a yearbook?" If the answer is no, delete it. Delete delete delete.

4) DELETE DUPLICATE-LOOKING PICTURES. People often take a shot, then take another. "Smile! Click. Wait let me take another one just to be safe. Click. Wait one more." When you have a bunch of similar looking shots, there will always be one shot that looks better than the rest. If you're going to print or share the best one, you're most likely never going to use the ones that aren't as good. Therefore, delete the rest. Why keep anything that is anything but the best?

5) Share less pictures. People in the 20th century have ADD and get bored after looking through 50 pictures. In the old days 35mm film had 24 or 36 exposures-- people didn't get bored after looking through a roll of film because they had enough attention span for up to 50 pictures. But people today get really bored with today's pictures, because people shoot too many! So instead of mass uploading 3000 pictures (yes I know it's super easy to do in Picasaweb), pick out your top 20-30 and upload those.

6) If taking JPG, downsize the resolution. If your destination print is the internet, then 1600x1200 is way more than sufficient. So why waste 4700x3100 pixels on a typical 15 megapixel sensor? Taking 4700x3100 is over SEVEN TIMES the size you need for your normal 1600x1200 size. You may be thinking that you need to make big prints (300dpi). First of all, megapixels is just one equation on making good prints-- 100 lousy megapixels will look worse than 10 good megapixels (other factors affected by lens quality, lighting, etc). In general, 8MP is more than enough for 8x10 print, so no need to use 15MP if you don't need to. Downsize it.

7) Backup backup backup. Storage is cheap, but get the right type. People are now just finding out that burned DVDs only last 10-20 years. Even hard drive quality isn't what they used to be-- many break down in a matter of 3-5 years.

I personally use a consumer grade RAID-1 network drive (two mirrored 1TB hard drive) as a primary drive, and a 500GB+200GB external drive for backup. I know one of these disks will fail in a few years, so it's imperative to use RAID-1 and/or backup. Here are some datapoints: this year I had a 750GB Seagate fail after 10 months, a 1TB Seagate fail after 3 weeks. In the past I've also had a catastrophic failure of the famous IBM 60GB Hitachi Deskstar (aka Deathstar), and a EIDE Maxtor drive failure. Devices fail.

For a given price, hard drive capacity doubles every 12-18 months. For example, last year, the cost of 1TB was $200. Today, it's less than $100. As long as the rule of doubling is true (and it has been for ages), then you can buy whatever storage you need today, and buy double the capacity when you need more. For example, if you filled up your 1TB this year, just get a new 2TB this year ($200) and copy everything over to the new 2TB. Next year when your 2TB is filled, buy a new 4TB next year ($200) and copy everything over to the new 4TB drive. When your 4TB is filled, buy a new 8TB ($200) and copy everything over to the new 8TB drive. What do you do with all the old drives? Safe-format (secure format 4-8 times) and eBay. There's no point keeping a bunch of old drives that'll become paper weight in less than 5 years. High-tech means "obsolete very soon." Keep your data, throw away technology.

In short, hard drive may be dirt cheap today, but the cost of management is not. The best way to use your digital camera is to pretend that it's a film camera... every frame has a cost to it, so think more, shoot less. By doing so, you'll end up with a lot of good pictures, and save a lot of management time, while gaining more knowledge and appreciation for photography.

Nicer body vs nicer lens?

A typical conversation starter with another photographer is "What kind of camera do you have?"

Many people take pride in their $2000-$4000 camera body. More often than not however, I see people with a really nice prosumer $2000 camera fitted with a $300 subpar zoom kit-lens. The best analogy to this I can think of is buying a super fast Pentium Quad Core fitted with only 512MB RAM running Windows Vista; this is huge component mismatch. Likewise, when you fit a nice camera with a cheap lens, the limiting factor to achieving high image quality is the lens; you're not utilizing the camera to its full potential; most of the pixels will be recording imperfections from the lens. I suspect people use cheap lenses on expensive bodies for the following reasons:


Cheap lenses are lighter. People using cheap lenses don't have to worry about damage/lost.

Yes, these are good reasons to use cheap lenses. If you need something light or compact, by all means buy consumer level (plastic) lenses because they're lighter, and the cost of losing or breaking them or losing them is nearly none compared to owning pro lenses.


Cheap lenses are good enough on a $2000 body.

Noooo! The lens takes in light as input and outputs light on the film, or in these days, a digital sensor. The camera is simply a box that records what the lens sees. If your lens has imperfections, those imperfections will be recorded in the box (film, or digital signals->files). Cheap lenses are full of imperfections, and with a high megapixel camera you will record all the imperfections.

One may argue that in the digital age, you can correct some imperfections using software. This is true for simple to correct imperfections such as vignette. Distortions can be corrected as well, and to some extent chromatic aberrations. However, there are other aspects that are difficult to correct with a badly designed or badly built lens, and in some cases, a corrective procedure may not be desirable or even possible. Below are a list of problems caused by cheap lenses, and the corrective procedure (if any):

• lenses with not enough resolution; the camera film/sensor captures more lines per millimeter (lpmm) than your lens can project sharply. In another word, your lens is too "soft" and can't resolve as many lines as your sensor can. This is as bad as up-sizing an image-- you're not improving image quality. Corrective procedures: downsize your picture (waste resolution) or resharpen (but add noise) or both. Also try stopping down (f5.6-f8) while adding shutter (blur) or ISO (noise)
  
• lenses with certain tint. Corrective procedures: turn it into B/W. Play with tinting.
  
• lenses with badly looking bokeh. Corrective procedures: use Alien Skin Bokeh and Photoshop and spend 15-30 minutes per picture... pain.
  
• slow lenses (with high f-stops) which causes your camera to auto-set the ISO too high (or worse, or that causes your camera shutter to drag). Corrective procedure: not much.
  

A cheap lens+expensive body will produce pictures with very visible imperfections that the lens produce. On the other hand, an expensive lens+cheap body will produce magazine quality pictures.

Money is better spent on the body than a lens?

Noooo! A financial metaphor to a camera equipments is that the camera body is like a computer, and the lens is like a monitor. Both will depreciate in time, but the computer will depreciate much faster than the monitor. Like a computer, a digital camera is equipped with the latest bells and whistles and will depreciate 50% in 2-3 years. Next year, there will be a better camera; with higher ISO, more mega-pixel, more FPS for the same price or even less than your camera current one. Moore's Law rules in the digital world.

On the other hand, pro lenses (Nikon gold-rim and Canon L red-rim lenses) do not depreciate as fast. After the 60s and 70s, glass and optics innovations and breakthroughs haven't been as life-changing as microprocessors have been. Sure there were defining moments in integrated lens technology like auto focus, IS/VR, flouride coating, nanocoating, so on so forth, but in general, the field of optics is a very mature field compared to electronics. The laws of optics doesn't change every year like computer does, good glass also retain their values well. Case in point, let's say 10 years ago you were interested in the 80-200mm focal range (and you don't care about size/weight). You could shell out money for a consumer plastic version Nikkor 80-200mm f/4.5-5.6 for $200, or a professional 80-200 f/2.8D for $1200. The professional version is over 1 stop advantage at 80mm, and a whopping 2 stops advantage at 200mm. It's also a lot sharper. Let's say the $1000 price difference is too significant and you end up getting the consumer [plastic] version. After 10 years, you'll have lost many potentially good shots. For example, let's say on stage, a shot that would suffice with a professional 200mm lens with f/2.8 1/200 sec at 800 ISO, now you'll need to use it at f/5.6 at 1/50 sec at 800 ISO on a consumer version. When aperture is open wide on the consumer lens, the image quality is very soft, and the increased in time exposure will usually result in too much hand shake and/or motion.

With this same example, you may be surprised that a pro lens doesn't cost much more than a plastic lens simply because a pro lens will not depreciate much. The true cost of ownership is really the cost of purchase minus the cost of the lens (minus 0-8% transaction fees) when you sell it. Professionals buy and sell all the time. Going back to our examples, after 10 years, you can sell the consumer 80-200mm lens for about $70 on eBay today. On the other hand you can the professional 80-200mm for about $900 on eBay (2008 price). The consumer lens doesn't retain its value well, but the pro lens does. In the end, your final "true cost of ownership" in this example is as follows:

1. Consumer Nikkor 80-200mm f/4.5-5.6 initial cost: $200. Selling price: $70. Cost of using the lens for 10 years: $140. High depreciation.
2. Professional Nikkor 80-200mm f/2.8D initial cost: $1200. Selling price: $900. Cost of using the lens for 10 years: $300. Low depreciation.

In the end, your true cost of ownership is $300(the pro) vs. $140(plastic lens). In another word, if you picked the professional version you'll have spent only $300 in 10 years, or $10/year that produced amazing looking, magazine ready pictures. On the other hand if you had picked the consumer version you'll have spent $140 in 10 years, or $14/year that produced many lousy shots. You may even end up so discouraged with the consumer lens and not use the lens at a later point.

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In short, a good quality lens will always retain its values for a long time. It has been that way for decades, and will be that way for as long as the laws of optical physics hold. On the other hand, prices of fancy electronic camera bodies and cheap plastic-feel lenses will drop as fast as computers. They're horrible "investments". A common problem I see today is that people buy nice bodies fitted with a cheap lens. This combination has the worst of both worlds: 1) a cheap lens will not resolve details as well as the body, so megapixels are wasted 2) an expensive body will depreciate 50% in 2-3 years.

A better combination is to fit a super cheap body with an expensive pro level lens; you'll get magazine ready photos, and you'll save more money in the long term because the lens will retain its values well.

You know how photographers often ask each other "What kind of camera do you have?" They really should ask "What kind of lenses do you use?"

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Notes:
1) Cost of lens prices based on observations from historic prices from eBay and CraigsList, and cross referenced with Ken Rockwell's website.

2) Cost does *not* take inflation into account

3) More datapoint backfill in 2009:
June 15th 2009 marked the 10 years anniversary of the the first professional Nikon DSLR - the Nikon D1: 2.7 megapixels were selling for $5850 back in 1999 (in 2009 the D1 sells for less than $ 200 on eBay). In 10 years, the price dropped to 3.4% of its original value.