Photography

Moore Family
of Arizona

Photography:

We have always taken lots of photo's of our vacations etc but when we moved to the USA we started taking this more seriously with better cameras, especially so after the children were born.

Our early pictures were taken with small format instant cameras - and they look like it now...!

Soon after we moved to the US we transitioned to 35mm film point & shoot zoom cameras - a big improvement. Next I bought a manual-focus SLR kit with a basic Zoom lens - wow huge improvement, next I got a fully auto-focus Minolta SLR (HSTi) with an auto-focus general purpose zoom lens. I subsequently purchased much better lenses - a Vivitar1 300mm AF Zoom and a Minolta Super Wide angle 24mm.

Since then we've both moved to digital point & shoot zoom cameras (Nikon & Canon) and have gradually transitioned to more and more digital - although I still have my Minolta SLR and used it for extreme wide / telephoto subjects since I had much better lenses on the Minolta for these cases.

The next and most recent upgrade at the end of 2006 was a Sony (they bought out Konica/Minolta technology) A100 digital SLR body compatible with all my Minolta lenses, flash etc This camera is superb! I love it - all the flexibility of the film body & lenses and instant feedback!

In addition to family pictures I also like to document my projects at home and on my car - digital is great for this - instant feedback and the ability to take lots of photo's and weed out only the good ones.

Also my work on the Scout Troop Website keeps me clicking too!

Fortunately my interest in Photography meshes well with Marlene's interest in Scrapbooking! and when we are on vacation - while I'm taking video Marlene is usually shooting digital stills...

Film Storage - Marlene manages the film archives - both collated into scrapbook albums and in archive boxes. We have the occasional purge so we don't keep everything we shoot & print - but we do keep all the negatives collated by date.

Digital Storage - I have set up a storage system for the digital prints mainly consisting of a dedicated NAS storage server on our home network. This is configured to be accessible from all our PC's and is the single central location for all our photos. This make it easy to access and upload picture files from any PC and still have access to all picture files from any PC. It also addresses the backup issue since this server is run in a mirrored RAID mode for redundancy. I also perform periodic backup to DVD's.

The picture files are stored in a simplistic native chronological mode - numerical sequenced folders with date by month or activity. This makes it particularly easy to do incremental backups manually as well as automatically. Album browsers then allow other organizational methods on top of this (e.g. tagging, grouping etc).