Arizona, Photography

What do you do with all those photos?

by Ingrid

Can you believe I shot over 4,800 photographs during our five week stay camped near the Arizona – Utah border? That’s almost 1,000 photos a week. Yikes! Thank goodness digital photography is free, but then again, if I were paying for film I assure you that shutter wouldn’t have clicked nearly that often.

I’ll admit, I am bad at culling and deleting photographs which does present a problem for my poor laptop. So as the hard-drive on my computer fills up, I transfer the files to a couple of external drives which frees up the laptop … much to my computer’s delight.

During the past week, I’ve been hard at work performing this task of photo file transfer, and while at it, I started reviewing some photographs from years past. Oh what fond memories, and I realized I need a reason to sift through these photos more often.

slot canyon

Question of the day

So the big question of the day is what should I do with all these photographs? What do YOU do with all your photographs? Since I live in a RV, space is obviously an issue. Therefore, I rarely print out any of my photographs, but I do like to share them. Although I have shared a great number of photographss here on the blog, there are still bunches of photographs that haven’t been shared, and photos I’ve even forgotten about. Hmm! The wheels in my head started turning ….

Through the Lens

Looking at life and landscapes through the lens of my camera has made me more observant. I see and notice things more acutely. My camera and this blog have given me added purpose … reason to explore, reason to photograph, reason to visit new places, reason to connect with YOU.

With that in mind, I’ve decided to make Wednesday’s my day to post photos with a theme in mind … kind of like the photo challenges and prompts we’ve been exposed to via blogging on WordPress. I’ll come up with an inspiration and share photos from either my archives or go in search with camera in hand – a purpose. I’m hoping you’ll join in and share your own photos pertaining to the weeks inspirational subject.

taking a selfie with the self timer on a digital camera

Let’s share and connect … join me in sharing photographs every Wednesday. Feel free to link back to this site, and/or leave a comment, but be sure your Gravatar is linked correctly so we can easily pop over and visit your site!

If you don’t write a blog, that’s okay, I’d still love for you to join in the Wandering Wednesday photo inspiration and hopefully leave a comment. Perhaps the inspiration will give you purpose to pick up your camera or smart phone for a little shutter clicking or maybe it’ll serve as the impetus to go through your own collection of photographs.

Shutter Time

For my first photo inspiration, let’s post a photograph (s) of an animal / wildlife. This could be a simple photograph of a cute little bunny rabbit in your backyard, or your favorite pet, or that of a wild animal seen in nature or at a zoo. More than anything else, I hope the photograph is an image that’s special to you … an image that provokes emotion, or a fond memory, or the making of the image challenges you in some way.

Ingrid’s Inspiration

We’ve been camped in a RV Park in Prescott, Arizona for the past six weeks and I’ve barely touched my camera. Far cry from my shutter clicking in April, huh! RV Parks are usually not my preferred method of accommodation. I’d much rather be in a national park, national forest or state park surrounded by nature, but sometimes life dictates otherwise …. and those full hook-ups are awfully nice…. oh yeah, love the hook-ups!

pronghorn aka antelope in Arizona

Even though a RV Park is not normally at the top of my list, I’m extremely happy with my summer ‘home’.  I’m beyond pleased with my RV site as well as my view here in Prescott Valley, Arizona. There’s a fenced open field just across the road from my RV site where cattle and antelope graze.

pronghorn in ArizonaTaken with Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ200   106mm (35mm equivalent 590mm)

I was ecstatic to capture a couple of images of this sweet pregnant gal grazing. Antelope (proper name is pronghorn) are usually skittish and capturing a closeup image can be challenging, but with my zoom lens and a very slight crop, I think this photograph of her turned out well. Check out those eyelashes!

The day after these photos were taken, I didn’t see her again. I’m sure she delivered her little one by now and is staying hidden. But trust me, I’m forever on the lookout.

Wandering Wednesday’s Photo Inspiration

I’ve put together a list of upcoming photo inspirations (or should I call them themes, challenges, prompts 🤔) for the next few Wednesday’s. I hope you’ll join me by sharing your photos.

  • Water
  • Flowers
  • Patriotic
  • Food

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94 thoughts on “What do you do with all those photos?”

    1. Thanks Lu – they are one of my favorite animals. Hope you’ll join in from time to time and share more of your stunning photographs.

      Where will you be spending the summer?

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I may consider it. We won’t be leaving this summer as I have 10-12 weeks of hand therapy in Poway. We had to cancel our plans. 😦

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  4. I feel your pain on what to do with these tons of photo! great idea since I know I would have something to share for every theme you list. I’ll join as soon as I get caught up with my postings😊

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    1. Every time I pull out that big external drive to backup my computer, I think of you and know you have an equal amount of photos to share. I do hope you’ll chime in and share some of your photos with my weekly theme. It’s easy posting since you don’t have to work too much on verbiage – it’s all about the photos 😃

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  5. /Users/dalelisalyons/Desktop/IMG_1408.jpg
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    Nothing like your fabulous pics, but we saw a mountain goat while at Royal Gorge, CO; had a deer pose for us along a bike trail at Army Corps of Engineers RV Park in Marquette, KS & saw a longhorn along the road in MO that looked more like a moose because of where his horns were placed next to a tree (hee, hee).
    Your post could easily come from my own experience. I’m a shutterbug, too. I wish I had given in to digital sooner. We’re full-time RVers (as of 6-2-18), too, & I often take pictures just to share something with others & then delete. I have an affinity for specialty license plates so I have a large collection of pictures of them along with all the sightseeing photos. I’m liking the idea of having others share their photos with me on a theme basis as I recently started a website/blog about our adventures. I look forward to following your adventures in the future, Ida. Keep snapping away! The treasures, like the ones you shared here, are worth it…totally!

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    1. Welcome to the world of living the RV life. Hope you enjoy it as much as we do. Photography is such a fun hobby. Hopefully you’ll share your photography and RVing journey on your blog. Thanks for stopping by.

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  6. And I thought I took a lot of photos! 🙂 I’m pretty good at deleting (about half of the pics I take), and sometimes get burnt out “having” to shoot photos all the time, while we travel. Still, I have massive archives of photos, especially from when we were living on our boat. I sometimes wonder what to do with them all as well.

    Great idea to start a weekly photo feature on your blog. I like the name of the “challenge” as well. In the past, I attempted to make printed photo albums, even when digital photography took off, but with constant travel and more photos every day, I couldn’t keep that up. Plus, I have no room to store albums either. So, digital slideshows of special collections is what it will be. I do think creating a folder of my favorites of every destination or trip will help with future selections.

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    1. Obviously, the location has a lot to do with how many photos I take. Since we arrived in Prescott on May 1st, I’ve barely taken 200 photos. I guess it all evens out over the year.

      Yeah, living a nomadic lifestyle with limited space can present challenges. Once day we’ll move back into a sticks and bricks house and I’ll be able to print photos again.

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  10. When I travel, especially to the National Parks, I shoot in both .jpg and raw image type. This allows me to upload my .jpg files to Google Photos for backup and sharing with friends. My raw (.nef) images are much larger so I back them up to USB hard drive. My best photos I print after any editing and frame for display in our house. Being in the RV, you don’t have to worry about that.

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    1. Yeah, being in a RV does present some problems … one of which is limited internet. I don’t shoot in raw yet. I can’t even image how quickly my laptop would fill if I had raw files. I think next time we visit a stunning location, I’ll shoot in both modes and see how much space is taken. Gotta learn sometime 🤗

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      1. Yea, raw takes up so much more room. However, that’s the only way to edit pictures in Lightroom or Photoshop. Your pictures are so good, you don’t even have to worry about editing. The only ones I edit are the ones I print for hanging on the walls. Keep up the great posts.

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        1. Awe, thanks … I do peak and tweak a bit in Lightroom, but I agree with you, if I were going to print and hang, I would shoot raw for more editing control.

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      1. Will do 🙂 I am thinking I will try your photo challenge some weeks. I also thought I would mention this site: https://ceenphotography.com/for-the-love-of-challenges/ I’m not sure if you have been to Cee’s site but she loves photography and challenges and she is setting up a page of different challenges that are out there now that WordPress Photo isn’t. If you were interested, I know she would be happy to include your info. Just a thought, Cheers, Amy

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        1. Thank you Amy and yes I’m aware of Cee. I’ve been following her blog for quite sometime and I may ask to add my Wandering Wednesday to her list. Right now I’m dealing with finding reliable internet. We seem to be gobbling up data on our Verizon hot spot 😥 Puts a crimp in my blogging habit!

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  12. Sounds like a plan Stan! Shoot me a text to remind me! I’d love to post on Wednesday!

    Right now I currently store photos a wee bit different. Google photos and Shutterfly grab every picture I take with my phone.

    When I use my LUMIX and upload to laptop Google and Shutterfly will grab them from there as well. (I will put extra faves on an external drive.) I also make albums right then and there on google photos. When I need something I can do a word search. And wa-la there’s the picture in seconds. Also when I want to make a coffee table book of a vacation… Shutterfly has it all right there for me.

    Great post!

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      2. I know, I know …. I really should embrace Instagram. Since I’m spending almost every Saturday with my daughter, I may get into it yet. Although she’s a Snapchat junky!

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    2. Sounds like you got your photo storage down to a science. Unfortunately, since we are data restricted, I can’t use cloud based storage programs.

      I like the idea of a coffee table book. My daughter has made several books via Shutterfly which turned out great.

      Liked by 1 person

  13. Oh how I know this problem. Not only do I take a ton of pictures with the DSLR, but I always take some “back-ups” with my phone just in case I lose the DSLR ones, PLUS I am a compulsive picture taker with my phone because it helps me remember things. Every month I clean out my imported phone pictures so that I have no more than 400 in any given month…. which is pretty absurd when you think about it.

    Anyway, computer memory is cheap, but I find that if I save EVERYTHING, I can’t find ANYTHING.

    I like your weekly posting idea. Another good option for all those old, awesome photos is to throw them up on Instagram. It’s a fun place to share photos and get inspiration!

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  14. Digital cameras have certainly taken us a long way. Just imagine if we were paying for developing all those photos. I’ll have look up how to do Pi gbacks, and how to link gravatars for this project.

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  15. With that number of photos it must be very hard to decide which one to use. But because your composition, image quality and subject matter are outstanding it probably becomes even harder. Its a good thing you don’t shoot much video, we backed up just over 700 GB of video just this last winter alone!

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    1. Yikes, that’s a lot of video content, but then again, you do such a nice job. One day I hope to start adding video to the portfolio but I get so focused with still images that I forget my new lumix 70 takes excellent video 😏
      Thank you for your kind words regarding my photographs … I’m pretty hard on myself and rarely satisfied with my photographs. Perhaps that’s why I keep working at it 😀

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  17. Pingback: Favorite Alaska and Canada Wildlife Photos – Wandering Dawgs

  18. I always regret having deleted photos because of the lack of space. We figure the hard drive is getting cheaper these days, so why just buy a bigger hard drive and keep every pictures. As time passed and memory faded, pictures are what left to remind us of the places we visited. I recently hiked the same trail we did many years ago. What I thought I remembered about the trail was from the pictures I took. I forgot many beautiful parts of the trail that I didn’t have pictures. So, keep on releasing that shutter.

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    1. I can relate and therefore rarely delete photographs. I love going through my photos from years past – really helps jog the memory. Agree – keep on releasing that shutter, especially since it’s free 😁

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  19. Beautiful Captures 🙂 I would love to get a monitor and create a slide deck to display my photos visually within my home. This would save monies in printing and framing too. Happy Day – Enjoy!

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  20. Your slot canyon and pronghorn are fantastic! Love the pictures. I find that in the process of taking pictures and looking at them afterward that I notice things I never would have – therefore enjoying nature all the more. I love sharing pictures with other people, and maybe even inspiring them to get out and see some of our beautiful parks too!

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    1. Thank you Pam. The southwest is a beautiful place that I don’t believe I’d ever tire of exploring. It is indeed fun to share our photographs 😊

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  22. Get yourself an external cloud drive to store your photos, I have! It’s about the size of a small lunch box (or smaller depending on size) and it keeps things stored nicely and safely.

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    1. How is an external cloud drive different than an external hard-drive? I have a couple of Seagates and Passports. I keep one of the hard-drives at my son’s house. I refuse to use ‘the cloud’ due to data usage. When your on a data diet, one has to constantly monitor data usage 😥

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  23. Thank you so much for starting your Wednesday inspirational themes! Ingrid, I can relate to the 4,800 photos in a short time span! When I’m taking wildlife photos I may take hundreds of the same animal or bird with different poses. When I go back through them I have a hard time deleted any of them! I archived a lot of my old photos onto a terabyte external hard drive to save room on my computer’s drive. Looking forward to your Wednesday inspirations.

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  24. Pingback: glimpses of wildlife in the four corners – ~ wander.essence ~

    1. Thank you Debbie. I appreciate your vote of confidence on my amateur photography skills. During our stay along the TX Gulf Coast in ’17, I did do a post on bird photography, but maybe I could do an update on that. Hmm … love getting new blog ideas – thanks 😊

      Liked by 1 person

    1. Thank you for the idea. Have you had many of your photos sell? I’ve bookmarked your link – appreciate the comment and idea!

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    2. I’ve had some sell, but I usually shoot things that interest me instead of researching what clients of a particular stock site might want. I’ve had one of my photos of Bryce Canyon NP sell to a newspaper in the UK for single use in a travel piece in their paper.

      Liked by 1 person

  27. Good morning, Ingrid,
    I can ver well understand that you came back with that many pictures and the problems that causes. Mary and I took quite a few on our recent “RailTrailsRoadTrip”, although not as many as you by far. I have the same problems as you as regards culling pictures. I’m very reluctant to let any single ones go. But, thanks to 3-TB hard disks, oth in my desktop computer and on an external drive [WD as a home cloud] in my office, I have not yet run out of disk space – not by far – even if I have all my digital picture from as far back as 1998 there. My main problem is the time it takes to archive the pictures properly [with pertinent file names], catalogue and tag them, and then, for quite a few, edit them. That’s what I was sometimes “dreading” when I took them on our recent trip.Oh, btw, my wife too quite e few, too. Something else that will now take up a lot of time is writing about that trip in my blog. But I’ll get it done – eventually.
    Thanks for all tour pictures and interesting articles.
    Take care, and enjoy your travels,
    Pit

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    1. Yes, the organizing and archiving is the most time consuming and least fun when it comes to photography. Fortunately, external drives are readily available or my poor laptop wouldn’t have the energy to process all my photographs.
      Keep pulling away on those posts and perhaps you’ll turn them into a book via Blurb… something I’ve thought about doing.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Thanks, Ingrid, for mentioning “Blurb”. I need to check up on this as I’ve been thinking of turning (some of) my blog posts into books, too.

        Liked by 1 person

    1. Loved this post of yours and the photos. What great timing! When I’m birding in Texas, I can shoot 2000 photos in a day, but then again, the camera is on burst. Lots of deleting when it comes to bird photography. Thank goodness for digital. Thanks for sharing!

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  30. What do you do with all those photos? My husband takes most of our pictures. He grew up in a family of professional photographers and he says that if you take enough pictures you’ll get that perfect shot. I rough edit them when I import them. Doubles, out of focus, etc just get deleted. If he takes ten great pictures of the exact same thing I pick on or two and delete the rest. That way they don’t accumulate too quickly. We currently are up to 35gb and we back them on line in addition to disks. For display we got one of those electric photo collection displays. I put in the highest gigabyte card I could find and it runs, changing pictures every 30 seconds or so whenever we are in a place with electric hook up. I have trimmed and updated the collection a couple of times. That works for us.

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  31. Ah, I’m so glad I found your Wandering Wednesdays. I like the wildlife theme, although I’m horrible at capturing any wildlife. So can we post on another day and then link back to this?

    It doesn’t surprise me at all about your 4,800 photos. I had over 4,000 from my recent Four Corners trip, which was 25 days total and 6 of those were driving back and forth from Virginia to Colorado! I’ll see if I can find any wildlife to post. 🙂

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    1. During your trip, did you ever find yourself surrounded by so much beauty that you didn’t know which way to point your camera? I think that’s why I took so many photographs during our time at Lake Powell …. too many compositions and I loved every minute.
      Next Wednesday’s inspiration is “Water”. Perhaps you’ll have some photos to share next week 😉

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          1. I’ve got so many thousands of photos, I’ve barely touched the tip of them yet. It will take a long time to go through them all! That’s the problem with taking so many photos. It was a beautiful land atop that Colorado Plateau.

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  33. Great photos! I make a Shutterfly album…one or two per year, but that doesn’t use all the photos I’ve taken. A better alternative for the space-challenged is a digital photo frame. Put all your photos on a flash drive, plug it in and voila..constant slide show on display.

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    1. Thank you …. what wonderful ideas. I used to scrapbook but that was when I lived in a house with lots of room. Now all I have to do is sit down and get to work 🙂

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      1. Lol, I had to stop scrapbooking the paper crafting way when I moved into a small house with no storage. I still order a hard copy of the digital scrapbooks from Sf (they fit in one bookshelf for now) but you don’t have to print the albums. The link to the album can be shared in social media.

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  34. Great idea, Dave loves throwback days. Not much data left for this cycle, using what we have left mainly to find another position or to develop a travel plan for the rest of the summer.

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    1. We’ve been spending a lot of time at the library or RV park building using their data. We were on a data diet during our last week in our data cycle. FB seems to gobble up data more than any other platform I use. So I’ve limited my FB time to ten minutes a day and that has helped conserve. Hope you guys find a place for the rest of the summer. Any chance on returning to Durango once that fire is 100% contained?

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