spiral

I know better... but in spite of it, they very nearly got me, those damn corporate marketing people.

The foray back into digital started it. The product had been improved enough to do away with pretty much all the complaints I had last time around. So when the bug bit to play in color this time, there was no excuse not to try again.

I'd only skipped one generation, about three years. But everything was so much bigger-better-faster. Maybe it's just the blinding speed of modern technological change. Maybe it's planned obsolescence. It doesn't really matter which. But everything else "needed" to be upgraded.

My ancient version of Photoshop wouldn't read the new RAW files. Easy enough, $89 upgrade, and I liked the new product better anyway. But the new version of Photoshop is too big to run on my 5-year old laptop, as is the newest version of the camera manufacturers RAW converter software. So I seriously thought about upgrading the laptop. And now, after a few months of shooting, the hard drive on my newer desktop machine is pretty much full, and that may very possibly mean some new storage.

Except that I stopped long enough to take a deep breath.. that, and doing five shoots in two weeks in Chicago has me temporarily satiated, so I'm in no hurry to fill the remaining 2.9 GB of space on that hard drive. Which gave me time to think.

I got around the need to immediately do a laptop upgrade by buying a couple more CF cards, and waiting to download til I was back at my desktop machine... $50 instead of $1700. And I'm in no hurry to shoot again at the moment, so I can take my time to think about storage options, and in the meantime I'm backing things up with what I've already got to work with. Slow, but effective. And most importantly, I've made a decision to return mostly to film for my artistic work, saving the DSLR for things where speed is essential... work things, special events, rush things. For my model shoots, there's usually no rush. And I'm getting better work in B&W anyway. As the Chicago trip progressed, I shot more film and less digital, and didn't even need to use one of those extra CF cards.

That means I can get by with my ancient 12-inch G4 Powerbook for a while longer. It's a perfectly adequate e-mail and web machine, and it's smaller and lighter (a little over 4 pounds) than anything but the Macbook Air... which really needs to go through one more generation of growing pains. I'm still going to need to address the storage issue, but now I can do it at a more casual pace, and maybe more simply than would be possible if I kept shooting at a pace of 4 GB of RAW images per event.

So my world has slowed down again, become just a little less complex. I'm back to making changes at my own pace, not at a pace dictated by someone else.