Back it up, baby

Nothing like a few blue screens of death to remind me to back up my work laptop! I've got an external hard drive so it's pretty easy to do a quick-and-dirty backup of the files that I have semi-organized on my desktop.

It reminds me of something interesting though: having a phone with a decent camera and an easy upload option has really changed how I take and share pictures.

Back in the dark ages of 2012 and earlier, I'd:
- take pictures on my digital camera
- eventually boot up my laptop (2006 and still working, largely because I don't use it for anything anymore but the occasional print job) (from 2006-2010 or so I'd often have my laptop up and running when I was home from work, but once I got an ipod touch connected to my home wifi network, my laptop time dropped dramatically)
- pull the memory card from the phone and insert it into my computer
- copy all the pictures onto my hard drive
- spend some time ruthlessly culling only the best pictures ("best" being a bit generous, but not for me ten pictures of essentially the same thing)
- use software to add tags and titles and descriptions to all the picture
- upload the pictures to my flickr account
- and finally, delete all the pictures from the memory card and re-insert it into the camera.

Now I've got a camera with me at all times, but I don't spend much time at all with metadata or deletion. I never understood how people would have reams of pictures on their phones, and yet here I am with 1,073 after nine months of owning my smart phone.

I do still upload things to flickr, but I have to remember to go in after the fact to cull and to add metadata and create albums. I email and text pictures more easily, but any photographic skill I had is atrophying.

Some of the history of the building and how its artist tenants worked with the city to pioneer legal use of
industrial buildings for artist - click to read, it's fascinating! 

I got to spend some time in an early 1920s industrial building yesterday, and was so glad I had the camera on my phone, yet wished for a great camera and better light. On balance, I think I'll take what I have now - and it IS one less thing to have to back up!

Fun with tagging

Now that I'm working with a designer, sorta, I'm looking at some of the many (so many!) pictures I've taken over the years. I'm thinking about printing and framing a bunch and making a hallway gallery or something.

I started by going through my flickr albums and tagging anything I was considering with the tag "print" - this will let me then look at all those photos together.

Of course it was like a billion too many pictures, so I started adding tags, like wood, fire, water, nature, landscape, beer, stone, train, transit, bike, flower ... you get the idea. Then I can look at all the pics that are grouped by a particular tag. You can click each group below to see a bigger screenshot.

 Tag = art

  

  Tag =bridge

  Tag = graffiti

  Tag = landscape

 Tag = red

It's been fun! I don't think I'm a LOT closer to picking what I print, but maybe I really am. 

Happy spring!

It's been spring for a couple of months here in the Bay Area. I took these two pictures on February 7th (thank goodness for digital data):

And these pictures are from this weekend (March 14 to be precise):


(I've put these photos in at large sizes, so you'll see more if you click them.)

Oakland = Awesome