ben, is there a reason why you went with 8GBs (or anyone with 8GB+ cards)? i know tech has come a long way in the past few years...memory is still electronic and id hate to have a card that big fail and lose EVERYTHING
personally, i fill a 4GB, transfer them onto a hard drive, format the card in camera, take it out, get a different card, format it in camera, and use the second one...kind of rotate the subs in to keep em fresh. overly paranoid? possibly...maybe even OCD-like. thats just how i roll...OCD ftw...
I initially sort good/bad photos from events. With my old lens that killed well
over 50% just at first glance. I don't ever look at or process them, but for
some reason I still have them around. Probably because 500GB drives are like
$70 now
BUT there have been times that someone will contact me after an event
asking for photo's of themselves from a specific game, etc. They're willing to
pay for an individual shot, even though I thought it was terrible. Sometimes
in an event situation the content matters a lot more than the total IQ.
If I were walking around and taking pictures of flowers and cats and stuff I
sure would delete unwanted pictures! When I go take photos of my car or
other inanimate objects I will often pick the top few (sometimes as little as 1 or
2 photos) out of the many taken, and just delete the rest of them. As long
as it's something I would have no problem going out and reshooting the next
day, then I couldn't care less.
Your backup/format method is basically identical to what I previously have
done. The reason for getting 8GB cards is that Sandisk had a limit of 3 cards
on the rebate, and I wanted to get enough so that I wouldn't have to delete
any photos off my cards for my upcoming national event, until after I get back home and
can do multiple backups
I'm completely agree with the "only show your best" dogma, but I personally dont show a lot of photos and I keep everything. Of course I don't show everything, my Sanibel thread is only like 15/750 photos I still have.
And I have the same worries about cars, which is why I only got 4gb ones. I don't make money, but my photos are priceless and mean a lot. Have dSLRs started supporting dual writing to 2 cards simultaneously? That's would be a great feature to pros... but not those studio bitches that shoot right to their laptop hard drives
I really like the "show your best" idea, but I just can't help myself
I post
way too many mediocre shots. BUT when they are of people that may buy
them, I think more is better. I can go to recreation play, post a couple
hundred shots of random people and sell 5 or 10 of them at $5-10 or more each.
That's when it's worthwhile to try and get at least a shot or two of everyone,
despite what my better judgment tells me.
The 1D series has supported dual cards (simultaneous write) since the
beginning I believe. That would be an AWESOME feature to trickle down to
lower level models, but probably never will.