My camera is still kaput, and I know which one I'm buying to replace it (thanks, Consumer Reports!), but I haven't bought it yet. Why? I find I'm enjoying going slow for awhile. When my camera was working, my inner complaint was, "I've got a whole album of photos to load onto the computer, then back up, and I still haven't gone through the last 3 sets I shot!" Obviously, the universe listened and broke my camera....
I started sketching and painting more, and even did some cartooning:
I made birthday cards out of some of my photos that had been languishing for months:
Birthdays and Babytoes seem like an obvious pair! And I took out some photos and started painting them. I call these my "altergraphs":
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| Lantana altergraph, MR 2013 |
Finally, and maybe most importantly, I started organizing my photos in earnest, and made sure the newest ones were backed up on CD and on the cloud I subscribe to. I had several emails from concerned gardeners who recommended several sites. There are some very good ones out there now, some free, some for a surprisingly low cost. Storing one's work on a cloud is a fairly new way of preserving digital data. I like to have a CD/DVD backup in hand, but knowing everything is stored at a distance (ie: far away from hurricanes) is a real comfort.
What do all of you do with your photo files? Are they super-organized, or languishing in digital piles in a far corner of your computer? ;-) I'm generally somewhere in between, and I'm having fun taking a little time with them this summer.
I don't like the thought of my stuff residing on some funky server farm out in the middle of nowhere, so I keep it all on my laptop and when I'm feeling in an obsessive-compulsive mood, I'll back it up on an external hard drive.
ReplyDeleteThe most important thing I've learned is NOT to store photos on iPhoto. I don't know how many photos I've lost through its periodic and inevitable bouts of malfunctioning. It's OK for downloading and keeping second-rate stuff, but any photos I care about preserving, I export, process using Photoshop, and store in real digital file folders.
Yes, I like to have clear control over the photos, too. So I've got them on a hard drive, external hard drive (most), and the best ones go onto a CD. Then Norton backs up the files monthly. These days, copyright can go into a gray area, particularly with e-galleries and social media like Facebook. You have to be fluent in legalese to figure it out (every family needs a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property!). So, again, CDs and external hard drives are very attractive options.
ReplyDeleteI dig your swamp monster.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad, I like him, too!
DeleteBeautiful artworks Marla. Love swamp punk lady too & babytoes star bloom card is beautiful. :)
ReplyDelete