My media monster

To the surprise of no one I'm sure, my collection of digital files has really ballooned since Simon was born. I haven't been content to just bust out the pocket Canon either; I've been using the 5D and 7D a ton. I've slowed down a little in the last few weeks (which is a bad thing, actually), but wow is my S3 account growing like crazy. I think my last bill was $27, and I'm sitting around 150 gigs or something (remember that it includes all of my music as well).

I am in the habit now of making sure both camera bodies are ready with lenses on them. The 5D has the 50mm f/1.4 on it, because with the huge aperture and the full-frame sensor, it's a killer combination. That's how I get all of those beautiful portraits of Simon. The 7D then has the 24-105mm f/4 IS L on it, which is good for all other scenarios, though I prefer to use the flash on it when indoors. To really make the 7D video thing work freehand, I need the IS lens as well or suffer from Blair Witch looking crap.

I've thought about backing off the 7D to a lower resolution when I'm only shooting personal stuff. I know that sounds like blasphemy, but the medium setting is still 10 megapixels. That thar's a lotta dots still. The raw files (no +JPEG) are 25+ MB, so if I rattle off a hundred shots, well, do the math. The 5D is a little easier to manage, making photos (raw only) around 12 to 14 MB, and it does 12 megapixels at the largest setting.

I'm still not backing up video into the cloud, because there's just too much of it. That giant USB drive I bought does sit quietly in the background though, ready to receive stuff. I'm still not shooting as much video as I'd like, though Friday's little experiment gave me the confidence to take it out to try and shoot a little mini-doc-short-thing next weekend. I'm still contemplating if the shoulder rig makes the most sense or a monopod with the short rails and follow focus would work better. Monopods are cheap enough, but I think I'll try the shoulder rig first.

And to think I'm also considering getting all of my old negatives scanned. I also want to get all of my old DV tape archived as deinterlaced H.264 files, though that shouldn't be too bad considering standard def video gets pretty small. Hard drives are plenty big these days, but I sure hope the online storage comes down in price soon!