Volunteer Photographers Needed

I got an email yesterday on Facebook from Rachael Yeung. She is the Games Assistant for the Alberta Winter Games which will be held in Leduc and Edmonton from November 14th - 17th. They are presently still looking for volunteer photographers who would be interested in coming out to photograph the various events. It's a great opportunity to build up your portfolio and add a major event to it. It is also a great chance to make some contacts and give back to the community. Volunteers also receive a free jacket.

Details and an online registration form can be found at http://www.2008albertawintergames.com/association.aspx. I have signed up to shoot from the 15th - 17th. No word yet on where or what I'll be shooting but I think the experience will be very worthwhile.

Video Mash Up from Northern California Trip

This is a little mash up of some of the photos from our trip to Northern California. I used a great little service called Animoto to create this video. You can upload your photos from a variety of online photo sharing services such as Flickr and Photobucket, select your music and then Animoto goes to work producing a custom video. Once you've created your video, you can embed it on your website or post it to a variety of blogs and social networks such as Facebook, etc. Visit www.animoto.com for more information.

Managing a Growing Collection

So this new "digital" world of photography is great right? No more fussing with film, waiting for prints to come back from the lab, wondering if the shots you took turned out, etc. You can instantly view, share, print, upload, email, crop, rotate, fix, delete, convert, enlarge, and do a myriad of other things to your photos. What's not to love?

Well, with every new advancement in technology that comes along to solve a problem, a whole new set of problems opens up. Case in point with digital photography. It's almost too easy to get snap happy these days and you wind up with a massive amount of photos. If you're anything like me, most of these wind up living on my laptop and never get printed. Today I've decided that I need to get a handle on my growing collection and start to do something with it before it becomes so unmanageable that I won't know where to start.

First step - go through and clean up all the crappy photos that I'll never print. Start with the obvious ones - blurry, total blown out, too dark, etc. Once I've filtered down the collection, the next step is to consolidate all of my digital photos into one central location.

Step Two: Backup Backup Backup. Your hard drive will fail. This is not a prediction but a guarantee. Eventually these things just wear out and when they do you better have a backup. I'm looking at adding a Western Digital 2 TB drive to my network to backup all of my media files. Costco has this thing on for only $599 right now and I think it will be a great addition. I have a 500 GB external drive that I backup to presently and then I burn a DVD every month or so with the new stuff I've shot. This little puppy should give me some good storage space for a least the next couple of years. Merry Christmas to me.

 http://www.costco.ca/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=10305569