I thought I’d go back and post some of the better photos I’ve taken since getting the Canon EOD 40D DSLR back in early December.
Canon digital cameras have automatic file numbering starting at 0001 and wrapping when they get to 9999. Our first digital camera – a Canon S50, got up to 0293 … the second time around!. That means we took 10,292 photos with that camera in the 1585 days since August 2nd, 2003 when we bought it in Hong Kong (the last photo I’ve taken with the S50 was on December 3rd, 2007. That’s an average of nearly 6.5 photos per day every day for over 4 years!
Since I got the 40D on December 5th, the file counter is up to 798 photos already! I must admit though, many of those photos were experiments, especially when trying out the burst-mode continuous shooting (6.5 photos per second!)
I’m starting to get quite good at deleting photos too – something I’ve always struggled with. I’m now taking a lot more photos than I ever have before – so I am becoming much more fussy about the quality. I’ll tend to take 2 or 3 or even more photos of something, with slightly different settings or framing, and then only keep the best one or two. As such, I actually only have 596 photos in my collection since I got the camera – I’ve deleted nearly 200 of the photos I’ve taken!
Still, that means between the 5th of December and the 26th December (22 days), we’ve taken an average of over 27 photos per day. Actually – if you consider that there were only 10 days that we took photos, that’s actually an average of nearly 60 photos per day.
I’m shooting in RAW+JPEG mode, which saves a raw CR2 file plus a smaller JPG file for every photo taken. This takes a lot more space, but gives me a lot more flexibility with processing. I have an older 4GB Compact Flash card currently in the 40D, while I’m waiting for my 8GB card to arrive later this week. I can store around 250 photos on the 4GB card, which means over 500 photos on the 8GB card. The most I’ve ever taken in one day was just under 300 photos (filling up both of the 384MB and the 32MB cards I carried with the S50). It will be interesting to see how I go on this trip – I’m a little worried that 500 photos will not be enough on some of the days where we’ll be seeing a lot of diverse wild life and scenery. I will take the 4GB card with as backup – that gives 750 photos maximum capacity for a single day’s shooting, and I’ll have about 60GB of disk space on my laptop with another 80GB drive as backup (I’ll keep two copies of all my photos). I also have the 60GB iPod with about 30GB of free space if I get desperate for more storage capacity, and I’m sure I can find a 2.5″ notebook hard drive somewhere (or another high capacity Compact Flash card ?) if I run out of all other options.
Anyway, I’ll start posting a few of my better photos. Here’s the second photo I took back on the 5th … depth of field is something I’ve had to learn about with this camera and lens – it has a very sharp photos, but tends to use a very narrow depth of field if you let it make all the decisions itself.
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