Now it's time for the hard drive
Been clearing out my hard drive again. I don't know what to do with all my early work. I never look at it and when I looked closer, a lot of it was made for Flickr (a couple of years ago) and at a size that is not conducive to print. First, I reorganized all my images in folders labeled by category. IE: people; portraits; landscapes; skies; animals, etc. and WIP (work in process). They were originally categorized by date (the way the camera uploaded to the computer). Then I went through some 7000+ pictures and art and deleted EVERYTHING that looked like crap and anything that I felt I would have no need for. I've already noticed how much easier it is to find an image by categories than by date! Holy shit. Just wish I had something to tag my images with, without installing another piece of software.
After everything was nice and neat, I said, "Now what?" So I've been archiving my older work as contact sheets that I can create with FastStone's Image Viewer. I can also archive them to .pdf format but not sure of the quality once the images are extracted from the .pdf. So I decided since most of the images that I'm archiving this way are older works, a contact sheet might be best and I can always create a photo book with them that would look like a proof book. In this situation, since most of these images are no larger than 1024 x 768, I probably won't be printing them and IF I were to use them as part of a portfolio, these contact sheet styles should be good enough to get my style and imaginative creations across to the viewer.
It's a lot of work cleaning off a hard drive. I have a 250 gig hard drive and 1/2 of it is full. The ironic part of it, is that a good part of that 1/2 is Microsoft patches and updates. You need a hard drive just for that bullshit. Really ticks me off. I'm beginning to lean towards a Linux OS. Been asking questions of some folks that are using Linux and husband and Alex use it. For me, I would need another background program that is free, that will read some of my graphics software. Other than that, I could run a dual boot system (upon boot up, computer asks if you want to boot up to Microsoft OS or Linux) or not. I think I would like to see how the Linux will work before deciding.
So I guess you could say that I'm scaling back on the garbage and getting myself ready for the professional. But had to start with the hard drive before it gets hairier. LOL Would really like a new computer but unless I win the lottery, or win a contest, it's hard to justify as an option on our current budget.
Tomorrow is PhaseOne day. Need to sign up for the seminar even though a $20+k camera is DEFINITELY outside the budget.
