Digital Lobotomy

For £175 quid, I just ordered one of these in order to cannibalize its internal 4GB compact flash storage for use with my Canon EOS-300D, thus saving me about $250 on the purchase price of the same standalone 4GB compact flash card.

This solves a problem I've been wrestling with for some time, how to manage my holiday photo storage problems without having to take a my notebook with me to back-up my existing 512MB card. I've calculated that with 4.5GB of storage with me, I'll be able to take up to 1,500 photos, which works out to be more than 100 per day of our 14 day holiday. Which should be enough, I think.

Need to figure out what to do with my lobotomized MP3 player afterwards. Shame.

The Ubiquity Of Photographs

It used to be the case that only the most prestigious of events were captured in photographs, such was the scarcity of the technology required. Today you can pick up cameras for pocket money and digital cameras enable a freedom to shoot with almost limitless abandon and minimal cost per shot.

As the availablity of photography increases, so does the frequency and mundane everyday-ness of the subject matter captured. This may seem like a bad thing but this quantitative boom and the associated degradation in the qualitative value of the subject matter compared with, say, the first flight of the Kittyhawk, itself captures our world in a greater degree of detail, resolution (not pixel) and complete-ness than ever before.

Well, basically, I'm seeing lots of intersecting curves on lots of graphs and alongside the debate about subjective quality over quantity, there's another significant issue emerging from all of this, namely the management of thousands of digital photographs we'll all end up with. I've been a moderate digital snapper for about 4 years now and I've easily managed to amass about 4,000 individual shots. In the absence of a better system I've devised my own archiving and numbering disciplines but I haven't categorised and sorted the images individually. In the future there will probably be facilities for automatically facially recognising family members and perhaps systems could be developed that would recognise landmarks in the background like Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower - perhaps in-camera GPS might offer a help in automatically categorising shots by placename or location but all of these possible methods bring with them significant inherent privacy conundrums too.

Which makes me all the more keen to hear what Dr Weinberger has to say about it all in his forthcoming article for Wired.

#joiito Flash Mini-Mob / Field Art Trip

The Weather Project (which is only on show until the 21st March, so hurry if you want to see it - which I'd strongly recommend you do) at the Tate Modern, London. The full clickable image is a composite of four photographs taken using a Canon 300D, vertically stitched using Panavue and then downsampled for the web - the master composite image is a 9MB JPEG, 3000 x 5000 pixel image - i.e. not web friendly.

This was the rather austere venue for an almost impromptu gathering of various UK #joiito channel irregulars. After basking under the cool sun for an hour we walked for what seemed like 8 miles until we eventually found a pub for lunch and drinks. Good fun and interesting web/blog discussion and debate was had by all. Including giving Suw Charman a hard time about the Welsh language and about how in written form, it was hard to tell it apart from corrupt data packets.

Two new gold stars on my blogroll for bloggers, Suw Charman and James Cox.

Sean B. Palmer has uploaded his photos from the meeting here.