Originally Posted by Shannon

The add-on to this is that digital photographers as a whole, and myself and Justin in particular, need to learn to be just as selective about the images we keep as traditional (negative and slide film photographers) have been about throwing away all but their very best work. Being a web designer & developer in addition to a photographer is a pain, though, because images I know are never going to be published because they are inferior (poor composition, not sharp enough, bad depth of field, etc.) are still sometimes useful as basic illustration shots for a free informational website like WildTexas.com. So I find myself looking at thousands upon thousands of our photos and thinking, "I could use that. I could use that. I could use that." Ahem.... so we have a serious storage space challenge, and keep shooting more photos making it only worse.

That said, the savings we make by not shooting print or slide film and having to pay for processing, duplicating and scanning still greatly exceed the costs of ever-greater hard drives to store our digital work. My brother mentioned to me the other day that a 120GB hard drive (generally about $100 retail or so) was on a one day sale for $60 recently! Amazing, considering Justin's first SCSI ("Small Computer Serial Interface", as opposed to the cheaper and more common IDE) hard drive for his old Commodore Amiga 500 cost over $800 in the late 1980's* and it was a paltry 10 or 20 megabytes, total.

*Yes, I knew him even back then -- we met online.