Agreed. (Especially via ADSL - people tend to forget what the A stands
for until they have big uploads to do!)
That's OK, _if_ the material is something you trust Dropbox with. (And
I'm not just talking pron or similar. We all have different levels of
trust of such companies.) Certainly, if you're wanting to share the
material with more than one or two people, and not going to see them so
you can pass them a stick or disc, then uploading is better.
Dropbox was just an example of a popular service. There are lots of
alternatives. If you're concerned, create a password-protected archive
and then upload the archive. Send the download link and the password
in separate emails. ;-)
(I share choro's "wow"! That's 600/day; assuming a 12-hour day, that's
50 an hour, or nearly 1 a minute, every minute, for the whole day.)
Digital cameras are amazing, if you think about it and compare them to
what came before. With a film camera, you were likely limited to 12,
24, or 36 shots per roll of film, so every shot had to count. You'd
agonize over the framing, the lighting, and every other aspect of
composition to make every shot as perfect as it could be. Then, it
could be hours, days, weeks, or even longer until you'd get to see
what you captured. Digital cameras changed all of that.
I behaved the exact same way when I first got a digital camera, but a
friend who had spent 26 years as a military photographer opened my
eyes to a whole new approach. He estimates that he shot 10,000 rolls
of film during his tour to Vietnam back in the 1960s. His approach was
that he was first and foremost in an environment where he couldn't ask
soldiers to go back down the hill and charge again because he had been
busy framing the shot, so he quickly learned that taking the shot was
better than fiddling with the camera and missing the shot. Take enough
shots and you'll have some real gems, while the guy beside you who's
still messing with his camera will have missed it. With the military
supplying him with endless rolls of film and a team of others tasked
with developing everything, his task was relatively easy. Hence, the
reason for burning through 10,000 rolls of film in something like 18
months.
That friend was the one who taught me the same approach with digital
cameras, except now there isn't film to deal with. My 16GB memory card
holds about 8000 photos at max resolution, and the number goes through
the roof if I were to step it down, but the higher resolutions seem to
allow me to crop later without doing serious damage.
Speaking of post-processing, that has become quite easy these days, as
well. Let's say my collection of 6600 photos has 200 keepers, to use
round numbers. It's not much trouble to run those 200 through your
favorite software, (I like Photoshop), to adjust the framing, the
lighting, the colors, the sharpness, etc. If you want to do a little
more, you can take two photos that each have pros and cons, and make a
composite using the best of both. You can open someone's closed eyes,
close their mouth, turn their head, change the color of the clothes,
and almost anything else your imagination allows. At one point I got a
great shot of Old Faithful, the famous geyser in Yellowstone Park.
Immediately after, the guy standing next to us offered to take a shot
of us with the geyser in the background. Great, except at the moment
that he snapped it the geyser wasn't doing anything. So I used my
photo as the background and his photo as the foreground, creating a
beautiful shot of us in front of the active geyser. I don't feel like
it's cheating in any way; we were there, after all.
Did you organise them in some way on Dropbox? Choro's contact wasn't
particularly literate.
I didn't use Dropbox, I used a photo hosting site since that allowed
others to thumb through the photos online and only download what they
want.
Burning to disc doesn't have to be babysat either, really.
My burner only accepts one disc at a time, so it requires babysitting.
For as little as I use it, I can't justify getting a multi-disc
burner.
