storage issues for wedding photography

Not 9000 keepers - 9000 frames I take, which I archive

smorter wrote in post #18085039
Not 9000 keepers - 9000 frames I take, which I archive

I don't think wedding videos have that many frames.

smorter wrote in post #18085039
Not 9000 keepers - 9000 frames I take, which I archive

Ah, there's your problem. Why would you keep the images you don't show to the customer? I keep them for at most six months after a wedding, after that they go, and in ten years I've never once regretted it. I discard probably 2/3 of the images I take, you must be closed to discarding 9/10?

Why do you keep them?

For posterity, but occasionally a client tells me a guest or family member passed away and if I had any other photos of them besides the ones delivered - I do a rummage through and try and find more

But mostly for posterity

I'm thinking one day I'll be more famous than Ansel Adams and archivists and historians out there will want to see how my photographic style and abilities evolved over time - that raw data of every single frame I ever took in my life would be an amazing study into the mind of the world's greatest photographer

smorter wrote in post #18085174
But mostly for posterity

I'm thinking one day I'll be more famous than Ansel Adams and archivists and historians out there will want to see how my photographic style and abilities evolved over time - that raw data of every single frame I ever took in my life would be an amazing study into the mind of the world's greatest photographer

Most likely they will look at your drive and wonder which museum still might have a computer with working USB interface....

So if your wedding day is 6 hours (wedding and reception), thats 360 minutes.
You take 8000 images for the day.

8000 / 360 = 22.22 images per minute. (for six hours)

Really?

i just bought a 1TB HD or 54 dollars. In a USB 3 enclosure. Off the shelf at the local office supply store.

back up a few years and i use to give a buddy crap about the fact that he had sooooooo many HD for back up. Now I see what he was doing, albeit things are much cheaper now. At 54 bucks you could easily build that cost into a wedding package, buy two for each month of weddings, and have one onsite and one off, PLUS you could probably keep all the originals, all the edits, and all the albums for a months worth of weddings on one HD.

did i mention the 54 dollar 1TB HD was a notebook drive? so it's freakin' tiny.

finally, i'm a fan of all that geeky RAID and NAS stuff. I'm old school, right? But why mess around with that when you can have on/off site back ups for so cheap?

I can fit the raw, psd, jpeg, and album files for the 125+ weddings I've done in the past 10 years onto a 2TB hard drive. It's easy - just don't keep the rubbish.

tim wrote in post #18120314
I can fit the raw, psd, jpeg, and album files for the 125+ weddings I've done in the past 10 years onto a 2TB hard drive. It's easy - just don't keep the rubbish.

i completely agree, the buddy i was talking about does video and buys a drive for every job. Most of them are half empty.

ive never bought anything over a 32 gig card because, why?

Left Handed Brisket wrote in post #18120319
i completely agree, the buddy i was talking about does video and buys a drive for every job. Most of them are half empty.

ive never bought anything over a 32 gig card because, why?

There is a good reason for that... if you shoot high MP cameras it's probably better to keep two cards in the camera and not change them than risk losing cards. You have to be pretty careful with the camera of course.

as a counter to that,
If you use one big card and it becomes corrupted you loose the whole shoot, using seperate cards allows you to at least have some photos safe! lol

urbanfreestyle wrote in post #18121316
as a counter to that,
If you use one big card and it becomes corrupted you loose the whole shoot, using seperate cards allows you to at least have some photos safe! lol

If you're photographing weddings, get a camera that does RAID 1, like the 5D3. Corrupted card? Pull out the duplicate.

frugivore wrote in post #18121330
... get a camera that does RAID 1, like the 5D3. Corrupted card? Pull out the duplicate.

not sure what RAID 1 is...

i googled it but it seemed over my head...

urbanfreestyle wrote in post #18121316
as a counter to that,
If you use one big card and it becomes corrupted you loose the whole shoot, using seperate cards allows you to at least have some photos safe! lol

Yes, that's why I referred to "a camera with two cards".

Cameras don't do RAID. Some do two independent cards that you can treat independently. You have the option of writing the same files to both cards. In effect it's similar to RAID1, but it's not RAID.

Ltdave wrote in post #18121423
not sure what RAID 1 is...

i googled it but it seemed over my head...

Well, is RAID 1 in spirit - copying data to two storage devices simultaneously. There more advanced DSLRs do this. I wouldn't shoot a wedding without such a camera.