Tifs or Jpegs

With just a few days to go before the end of year I find myself asking the same question as every other year end. Why do I keep all my pictures as Tif files?  50% o f the picture libraries I supply are now only taking Jpeg files and I suspect the others will follow shortly. Nearly all pictures are sent out to customers online and as Jpeg files. Libraries are saying to themselves why save them as much larger Tif files when we never sell Tifs any more; and there is no noticeable loss of quality in Jpegs.

The saving on disk or server space is huge, around 75% less space required when a Jpeg is saved at full size and the highest quality. It is time I made the decision. It means my current hard drive capacity will last for years and I will no longer have the almost annual task of changing my drives for every larger ones.

At the end of each year I take an external drive copy of my master picture disk that contains all my raw and Tif files and I freeze it, never to be used again. I have one for each year and it is incremental, meaning each one contains every year up to that point. This is in addition to my other copies of my master picture drive. I have an internal drive copy of it and two USB external drives, one of which is stored off site. I swop the external drives from time to time, bringing the off site one home to bring it up to date and taking the other one away.

This year I will start to only save my 2012 pictures as large Jpeg files. Unless I hit a snag by the end of the year I will convert all my previous Tif files to Jpegs too. It should be a simple automatic job to do.

Untitled

I have spent the last four days watching Redpolls. Mostly not carrying any camera kit as it has been too dull for photography, but just walking around finding them and noting where they were feeding. Today was a beautiful, clear, blue sky day so armed with the 800mm I spent my time hanging around the trees they frequented most. This is my favourite sort of photography. All the work is done in advance while the weather is unsuitable. Just long hours in the field watching and noting.

I picked on this particular area because all the trees are short and recently planted so the birds were often only at head height, giving me the advantage of not having to look upwards and usually having a distant wood or hedge as the backdrop, rather than sky.

Redpolls are often very static. Once they start to feed on a catkin they can be still for 10 minutes or so, before moving onto the next one.  This makes them difficult to spot amongst the branches and catkins. Even if there are a dozen birds in a tree they can go unnoticed at first. Once found though they are a very approachable species. Even with a 400mm lens I could have got close enough today.

Camera bean bags

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a confusing subject, but one that fascinates me. I often get emails from firms offering to improve my rankings in search engines, but what ranking they are talking about I am not so sure. Type “Mike Lane” into Google and I usually come up first so long as you are in the U.K. (Type it in the USA and a Louisiana fisherman comes first). If I do not come first then add “wildlife photographer” and I always do, although there is another Mike Lane with a web site of bird photographs.

What I really want is to come first with “yellowhammer picture for sale”. I used to do quite well at this in the early days of the internet, but no longer. As all my pictures are now in a PHP database rather than simple HTML coding this seems to be more difficult.

I have recently started selling camera bean bags again and very quickly did well in the search engines as I got all the right keywords in place. I am certainly always on the first page in Google, but have not reached the top of the page yet. To improve my chances I have bought the domain name www.camerabeanbag.com. I am now waiting to see how long it takes for that to appear in Google. It will be a one page web site that replicates my current web page selling camera bean bags. I shall join the two web sites together so it is not obvious which one you are on, but hopefully get my bean bags closer to the top of the page.