I’ve taken more than half a million photographs and kept over 150,000 of them. The archive goes back to 1997, occupies several terabytes, and still holds the original raw files from most cameras that produced them.
I do this for fun. The scale is what happens when “for fun” runs for three decades.
How it started
I remember using a Pentax SLR in the early 1990s and trying to photograph the moon with no idea what I was doing. What stayed with me was wanting to understand why the picture looked nothing like the thing in the sky.
Early webcams and the first 320×240 digital cameras changed how freely I could experiment, since film no longer put a price on every mistake. I started taking photography seriously around 1997, and I was writing software to work with those early images at the same time, so the camera and the computer grew into the same interest.
My first full DSLR was an Olympus E-300 around 2004. Exposure, framing, timing, and eventually a sense of what I actually like to photograph all came from repetition.
Cameras
The main interchangeable-lens bodies over the years:
- Olympus E-300
- Olympus E-500
- Olympus E-510
- Olympus E-520
- Canon 80D
- Canon R6 Mark II, my current primary camera
I still have the original Olympus point-and-shoot, though its model number is long gone from my memory, along with the Pentax film SLR from the 1990s. The old Pentax glass has occasionally found its way onto modern digital bodies.
Everything else accumulated around the work: lighting, backdrops, rigging, action cameras, and the camera drones from my model aircraft. I enjoy equipment, but the camera that earns its place is the one that makes me notice something and keep it. That is usually the R6 Mark II now, with the decade-old 80D as a second body.
What I photograph
My favourite photographs are candid moments at festivals, gatherings, and group events: the frame where someone stops presenting themselves to the camera and is simply absorbed in what they are doing.
I also keep returning to:
- Events and festivals
- Aviation and aerial landscapes
- Technical projects and equipment
- Alberta scenery
- Macro photographs of insects and ordinary objects
- The occasional frame that makes a familiar thing look briefly unfamiliar
Managing the archive
I save photographs in bulk, move them onto network-attached storage, and back them up to cloud storage. Lightroom and PhotoPrism provide the catalogue and processing views, alongside custom software I’ve written for particular archive problems.
I have not lost a large set of photographs yet, knock on wood. Keeping the originals, maintaining multiple copies, and carrying the archive forward between tools has preserved material from the first digital cameras through to the current ones.
The newer problem is culling. A large event can produce 5,000 photographs in a few days, and the work becomes finding the handful worth keeping visible. I’ve started building better tools for long-term organization and assisted selection, without handing over the final judgement.
Sharing albums
Photograph.ca came out of wanting a simpler way to turn part of the archive into a deliberate album, share it, and let other people do the same without the result becoming another social feed.