The fall of the CD/DVD is near!!

Yahoo has an interesting story on technology that won't be around in 2020. It looks like the CD will be one of those items soon to go the way of the VHS tape. A lot of people, myself included, use the CD as a second backup of the contents of a computer. The CD is usually my third backup of a set of images. One on the hard drive, one on the external drive, and one on a CD or DVD.

Going forward it looks like more will need to be moved onto the Cloud or some other yet announced media. It looks like the DVD and CD will go the way of film. You might be able to find some but you need to look a lot.

Go ahead, try to find a roll of film. I dare you. I double dare you to find a roll of slide film.

Here is the link to the story: http://shopping.yahoo.com/articles/yshoppingarticles/717/7-gadgets-that-wont-be-around-in-2020

Nikon Super Coolscan 9000 ED Scanner

If you look on the used scanner market you will find a few Nikon Super Coolscan 9000s on EBay. With out a doubt this is the best scanner I've ever used. Alas, Nikon no longer makes or supports the scanner so getting it connected to a new Mac will be an issue.

I believe it also requires Rosetta in order to run in the new Mac environment and OS 10.7 doesn't support Rosetta anymore. It's also Firewire 400 so it doesn't take advantage of the Firewire 800 speed newer makes offered.

If you have one sitting around I'd recommend putting it on EBay. There are selling for more than when they were new. If you have one and are using it then keep it happy. Odds are there isn't a replacement in the works by Nikon.

Not only did they take our Kodachrome away they even took away the best way to digitize it!!

"Leave your boyfriend far from home.....momma don't take my Kodachrome away...." Paul Simon.

Man, I'm getting old.

Keeping backup copies of your work

A recent HDR image.

At present I've been doing a lot of HDR (Hyper Dynamic Range) photography documenting some of the abandoned places around the Piedmont, Virginia area.

It go me to thinking that when you have multiple copies of an image you need to keep a good backup as you work.

Most of my HDR work involves combining three images and then three or four edited Tiff files before I make the final prints. What this means is that I will have somewhere around 12 different images before I arrive at the final print. If I ever want to restart the process I need to keep everything!!

What this means is it's important to backup at least once or twice a week in order not to get into a jam.