Quay and Tree, Willapa Bay
Project Managers love to do those lessons learned sessions when every project is completed. What did we learn during the project that we can apply to the next project? Well, here is the start of about a dozen things I learned on this year’s photo safari. Profit from my experience.
1. Big Memories are really great. I bought 8 Gb cards for my new camera. That’s not big enough. I should have bought 16 Gb cards. I forgot that my new camera creates bigger files that my old camera. While I thought I was getting a higher capacity card, I did not. The card was twice as big as my previous card and so are my new files. No real change in the number of images per card. That’s not real smart. Oh, and that new “high speed burst mode” that you thought you would never use? You’ll use it. A lot. It will make your lack of card capacity even more acute.
2. Since I skimped on card memory, I figured I could download to my computer and make up for the lack of card capacity. This worked really well until I ran out of hard drive capacity. Old laptops do not have really big hard drives. So, in addition to a computer, an external hard drive or USB memory sticks will be on board before the next extended photo safari.
3. I blogged earlier that I had to figure out which 20 pages of the 145 page camera I needed to learn how to use my camera. This is incorrect. I have to go back and learn the entire camera manual. This is so I can learn how to deal with the unexpected things my camera does when I mistakenly touch the wrong buttons and the camera does odd things. (See the blog post rom September 8.)
4. Technology is a very good thing and can be used to keep you from wasting time and gasoline. One “app” that we relied on was an electronic version of the traditional Solunar (aka tide) table so we knew when low and high tide occurred. The second one was the “sun tracker” which calculates where on the horizon the sun would rise and set and the corresponding time. That app allowed us to pre-visualize where the sun would be, where the light and shadows would be and how much of the cocktail hour would be missed if we stayed to photograph.
Stay Tuned for next week's installment of Lessons Learned.
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