Got a couple of rolls of AGFA, 36 shots each. Went far a walk took photos of whatever. At night, developed the film and let it dry and before midnight I got all the developed photos drying on spread out old newspapers. That was fun.
I did not have anywhere to develop colour films so I lost control of the whole process until I adopted digital. Put a film in to be developed and only order a one page summary print, put it in again to get the good photos printed.
I was doing handheld selfies in '82. That was fun, too.
Mobile phones started having cameras, with 12 pixels. It wasn’t mega, just pixels.
Now it is all digital, I barely get any photos printed.
I am not sure that nature photography is easier now. It is a lot quicker, for sure, to take and to share but harder to keep.
I take photos of every detail, often more than I need because it is quicker than checking .
After uploading need to get through, get rid of duds, adjust light and crop. Anything I use get auto updated every week and works differently if at all.
Get them to a back up drive, burn to disk. Anything magnetic will deteriorate moving parts will stop moving. A disk will hold them for decades as long as there is a compatible drive that can read them. The cloud is becoming expensive and the sun will shine sooner or later.
The photo album is looking better and better with every passing day.
As a wildlife photographer, I can say that only recently has it gotten a little easier. I shoot real WILD animals, not zoo animals or preserve animals that are so accustomed to humans they basically cohabitate (Yes, I am talking about you Discovery and National Geographic. LOL!). I once spent three weeks trying to get video of a wild coyote in west Texas where they are constantly hunted by experts. It is not a great video, but if you consider that this is a truly wild hunted coyote and I got that close for that long, to get this shot, well…
Wildlife photography is just hard, but recent developments in AF have made it a little easier. In recent years, they have really improved Animal Eye Autofocus, that is making nailing that perfect focus on an animal a lot easier. It used to be that it did not matter how good your equipment was, if you were shooting wildlife, you were doing it with Manual Focus. The ability for the AF to pick out the eye in the middle of the chaos of the forest, is almost a miracle development for wildlife photographers like me
I feel you. I use triple redundant backup systems. I have many Terabyte of data to store, and it is always growing.
I just bought two new HDDs to replace my two-year-old HDDs. I replace all my storage drives every two years. The old internal HDDs go into external enclosures, the data is copied to the new internal drives, and the old drive are powered off, and only turned on to back up new critical data from the internal drives. After two years, when I swap out the internal drives again, these old drives are taken out of service and placed into a fireproof safe. Once SSDs become cheaper, I may switch to using them for backup, but HHDs last a long time if they are not in constant service.
Just in case this might interest you. Here is the cheapest cloud storage you can get right now. Microsoft 365 Family. It is a subscription for MS Office for six accounts. Each account comes with 1TB of cloud storage, so 6TB total. It is $99 a year. That is only $8.25 USD a month for 6TB of cloud storage, and you get MS Office to boot. Not a bad deal.
My reply was a bit of tongue in cheek… Of course cameras are getting better.
I can’t wait for the Animal Eye AF to trickle down to lightweight cameras. Hopefully they’ll have Bird Bum AF as well, that’s what I get half the time.
It’s not very flexible, but it still offers unlimited storage and most of have access to it anyhow: Amazon Photos. It’s part of the basic Amazon Prime package. And it takes every image file you can throw at it-- PSDs (multi-layeeed is fine), TIFs, RAW, etc
No video though. You hve to pay extra for that.
What I do is backup my cards to descriptively named ‘shoot’ albums in Amazon P after bringing them into Lightroom catalogues. Usually right off the camera card, and usually before going to bed (my upload speed is pretty slow).
It’s a no-extra cost insurance solution that I confess having used to recover something that somehow went missing.
For my main local storage I bought a multi-port USB bar and filled out with large flash drives and a couple of SSDs, labelling the filled ones with the time span they cover.
I did not know that about Amazon. I use Google Photos for my phone’s backup (prefer the advanced search options), and local for my Pro work. Mainly because only a very small percentage of my Pro work is archival worthy, and what is goes online for sale. After reviewing images and choosing the ones that I want to keep, the originals go into archival storage and the rest gets deleted. I live in a rural area with poor internet, so upload speed is pessimal. I might do cloud for my pro work if I had Fios or good cable.
As I see it, there are only two scenarios:
a) Either I am out with serious photographic equipment needed for the task at hand – macro lens and lights for insects and flowers / long lens with red dot for birds / wide-angle for landscapes and low-level close-ups of flowers, plus any needed accessories such as loupe/filters/tripod/monopod/sound recorder/spare cards/spare batteries/flashlight/binoculars…
b) Or the everyday scenario where I just happen to see something and all I have handy is the smartphone. This is by far the most common scenario. No clip-on macro lens, no mini tripod, nothing but the phone.
One may own the best of the best of photographic equipment, but in the end of the day, you use what you have access to at that moment.
Yes, light and not bulky, that’s essential, which is why I went for microFourThirds. BUT there is a catch: I hate swapping lenses while out and about. So I normally end up carrying a second camera clipped on my belt.
Because not everyone wants to lug this around for miles in the woods all day like I do. It is far more relaxing when all I am using is my S22 Ultra smartphone.
Indeed impressive. Amazed that it even recognized eyes of an arthropod! I mean!
(I still can’t get myself to really trust all that AF magic all the time, though.)
I’m 17, so I feel qualified to comment here. I’ve never personally used a film camera, but my mom had one when I was younger. We got the film developed at Safeway, until they stopped offering that service, then switched to Walmart. (I don’t think they do it either anymore.) I learned Rule Number One - don’t touch the negatives!
If I was interested in more reliably stationary subjects, I might try using film. I think it’s a lot cooler than digital, and it’s sad that those skills are being lost. It would not work well for my photography style, though.
I’ve never seen a film projector, a floppy disk, or a VHS player. However, several of my relatives have landline phones, so I’m quite familiar with those. I wish we had one at my house, but you can’t get real ones connected anymore, just fake ones that use the internet to make calls.
I suppose I’m not a normal young person in my attitude toward technology. I hate smartphones, and new cars (anything newer than '95, but especially the ones with driver-assist features and massive screens) and all the appliances that people insist on connecting to the internet. I’m going to have a hard time as an adult, since I already act like a grumpy old person a lot of the time.
You might be surprised to find that many in your age group are appreciating Retro things. My youngest son (21) has always been into retro stuff. He has a keyboard that look like an old NES controller. Like you, he pretty much hates what is becoming of the modern world, and longs for the simpler days of yesteryear. As one who actually grew up on a remote homestead in the Amazon jungle, in a fashion of those similar to Little House on the Prairie (I use to give a mental reference only), I can say with sincerity; Those were the good times.
I won’t be here by then, and I have prepared my children and grandchildren with the knowledge they need to survive if they need to. The world seems like it is headed for a reset, and I don’t think it is going to be pretty when it happens.
My oldest son is FEMA trained and certified. During his training, a part of his study material included a five-year study that FEMA commissioned a major university to do on the American society. This study was seeking the results to what would happen to the US population in the hypothetical scenario that the national power grid went down for a full year. The study found that, 70% of the US population would be dead in the first 30 days. 80% would be dead in 90 days, and only 10% would survive the full year. The results were so shocking to FEMA that they commissioned a follow-up study to determine the primary causation of such a catastrophic die off. That study revealed that the primary cause was that the overwhelming majority of the American society is completely ignorant of where the basic necessities of life come from and are completely incapable of providing even these basic things for themselves.
As a survivalist, I hate to say that I think that study is right on the money.
and paste ? Really?!