I just dug through Lightroom and pulled out some numbers that I thought were interesting about my last twelve months of photography.
From 7/9/07 through 7/8/08 I shot over 22,000 photos (averaging about 57 a day). I didn’t track my time (thank God), but a conservative estimate would be that I averaged at least a couple of hours a day between shooting, processing and uploading pictures. So this was probably a 800 to 1000 hour project. Please note – I tried to do more than take snapshots here!
Most of the pictures (about 70%) were with my trusty Canon 10D before I dropped it down the stairs. Another 13% were with the new replacement Canon 40D. 15% were with my Olympus waterproof point-and-shoot, and the remaining few were from my phone, a flatbed scanner or screenshots.
I got my Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro for Christmas, and shot over 4,000 photos with it. Not all of those are macros, it’s a great portrait lens, too. I also shot about 4,000 photos with my super-wide Tamron 11-18mm lens. The rest of the shots on my 10D were with a Canon 28-200mm lens (which I didn’t like, but was still sad when it broke into three pieces at the bottom of the stairs).
About halfway through the project I saw the light and started shooting everything in RAW format (rather than jpeg). My files are huge, but I have the original unprocessed data and have tons of latitude for adjusting color, exposure, sharpness, etc. in post. Total storage for all my pictures is about 100GB (33GB from last year, 67GB from this year) – well beyond my patience for burning them to DVDs, so they’re backed up on multiple disks. (I only delete really awful shots.)
My #1 source for inspiration was flickr. I know, it’s supposed to be books of photos by the masters, but hey. I also learned a ton about lighting from strobist.com, which I would say is mandatory for anyone serious about photography. I did a lot of the exercises and shared work in the strobist group on flickr.
I joined the Palo Alto Camera Club last August, and really appreciate the face to face interactions around sharing and critiquing work. I did a number of photo-field trips with PACC, and also did one with a group of local flickr fanatics (I’m planning to do more of these, too).
Photo books were very helpful, the best two being “Light: Magic and Science” by Hunter, Biver and Fuqua, and “The Moment It Clicks” by Joe McNally. I learned an enormous amount from both of these and they definitely made my pictures better.