Alright, we've covered some serious ground: we've played and practiced photographing in the How To No. 1: Comfortably Use Your Camera and in the How To No. 2: Gain Experience Photographing, we've plowed through the basic setup needed in the How To No. 3: Computer Skills and Such.  Let's review our hardware needs in a tiny bit more detail as we make photographs, save the photographs, delete, and repeat.


Computer


You know, you could just use your phone's camera or a computer camera and make quite an interesting portfolio.  So let's start with your computer.  You need processing power in your home computer.  If e-mail is slow, photograph saving will be painful.  I'm not planning on hammering out specifics (can you imagine how quickly those specifications would change?!) especially because your computer power is entirely dependent on how many image you make and the size of those image files.

A computer ages pretty quickly.  If a camera has significant upgrades every two years (unbelievable, right?) your computer could stand to be replaced every 3 to 5.  And we're talking generalities.  The more you use it, the more you'll benefit from an upgrade.

Rule #1 for buying a new computer: know what you are buying.  If you don't, you'll probably not benefit from the upgrade (you didn't need it yet).

Camera


Whatever you have now is great.  We're talking digital photography, so a film camera is not the quickest nor least expensive option.  However, if you're in love with rolls of 24 or 36 exposures, feel free to buy, process and scan film.  You'll be able to work with the digital scans in a similar way to an all digital capture.

Rule #1 for buying a new camera: know what you are buying.  If you don't, you'll probably not benefit from the upgrade (you didn't need it yet).

Card Reader


Assuming that you're not interested in the film idea, you'll need a card reader.  Find out what size card you have in your camera (is it a mini SD, micro SD, SD, Memory Stick Pro, Memory Stick Micro, Memory Stick Pro Duo,  or a CF or a xD card?) and purchase a card reader that interfaces with your computer.  For example, I have a CF card reader is a USB device.  These guys are possibly the least expensive part of your gear, under $30 a unit.

We touched on it earlier, but it bears repeating, this is a very important step.  Move your images directly from your memory card to a folder on a hard drive (preferably on your computer's hard drive instead of from the card to an external drive).  This is the most sensitive point of your data management.  File corruption can be avoided by this simple methodology.

External Backup


Review: How many places does your data need to exist?  Answer: 2 or 3 places.  Seriously!

So, armed with that juicy bit of information, we discussed in the last post how to put together a potential pattern to make sure that those images do exist in two places (before we delete or reformat the memory card).  External hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and online backup are all potential components to this backup plan.

And if we're going through the effort to make sure our duplicates are safely tucked away in different locales, it behooves us to make sure it's the original files that we're copying.  So an online service that uploads a smaller version of the photograph that came straight out of your camera doesn't count as one of our 2 places.

Another rule of thumb with the backup plan is that you have to know where everything is ... it can't be a virtual messy office space or you won't be able to use the archive when it matters.  Consistency is very important.  Be consistent in your file naming and be consistent in making routine backups.