amosis55

I am still kicking and still taking pictures. Sometimes I take so many pictures that it is overwhelming just looking at them.  Then there is the problem of picking a few favourites, editing them and then there is the long drawn out process of filling in all the little boxes and posting here. So I haven't posted on here so much. I've been on Facebook as my self James Kelso www.facebook.com/amosis and I have an art page there with the name TheArtofkelso. www.facebook.com/TheArtofKelso Last place I've been spending time is on Google+ plus.google.com/10660895970929… Interestingly since getting my Google+ account my name comes up in a Google search Top Dawg in a total of 33.000.000 results. Do you have an account there yet?

What have you all been up to and where else do you post?

After months of waiting. I finally got a new computer. A Gateway NV5942u laptop. It comes with a 500gb hard drive, 4Gb of DDR3 ram and 1Gb of dedicated video memory. For 6 years I had been using an old Compaq desktop that came out in 2001. After a couple of hard drive crashes and extremely low cash flow.  I was reduced to using an old 30Gb hard drive. Also, it only had 768mb of ram. As a result I had to keep most of my images on cd's and dvd's. I rarely got to browse through my pics. Now I have most of them on my new computer.

This has brought a new set of difficulties. My last two cameras have been Pentaxes. The file names are named, from IMGP0001 and up to IMGP9999 then it goes back to IMGP0001, in both cameras. I took over 12000 pictures with the first Pentax. At this point I had to start renaming files. So the first 9999 were renamed IMG00001 and up. They were backed up on CD`s because I didn`t have a DVD writer. Each disc only held 800megs of data. Which isn`t much when you have Photoshop files mixed in there.

It took a few months before I could afford a new Camera. As I said, It was another Pentax. My first SLR. As a side note: (The day after i bought it. I went to the Deviantart World Tour in High Park, Toronto. I would have loved to have had a few extra days to learn how to use the camera before going, but that wasn`t possible. Here are some pics from that day. amosis55.deviantart.com/galler…)

Anyhow back to the problem. With the new camera It also named files IMGP0001 and up. So I had to change the file names. I added a K and another 0 to the front. This allowed me to name files up to 99999. I acquired a DVD writer. It seemed like a good idea to put the images from the cd`s on to the DVD`s so I could browse through more images. The DVD`s held 4.3 Gigs. The problem at this point is the old slow computer. Once the pics where on the discs. It took forever to read the discs and see what was on each disc. You can only put so much info on the outside of the disc.

Now I have 50,000 images on my computer. Scans, pics from two Pentaxes and also pics from my old 1 Megapixel Kodak. When I started putting the pics on DVD`s, I began by calling them disc 1, 2, 3 and so on. At disc 9 For some reason I started to name them by the date I burned the disc. In a given month I could have 4 or 5 discs. When I put all the discs on to my hard drive I put them on in folders named after the disc they came from. I made folders for each month and put all the pics from each disc into their respective months. So what happened here was Pics that I took one month may not have been burnt until the next month. So some April pics would be in the May folder, some of Mays pics, would be in the June folder and so forth. I went through all of the folders and moved all the pics into proper month.

With the old computer. I could only run Photoshop 7. Now I can run CS5 with Bridge and other programs working. Yahoo for multi-tasking. Having just started to use Bridge and a laptop, instead of a keyboard and mouse. I thought it would be prudent to use the old program that I used for organizing my files and folders. ACDSee 3.0. It`s not compatible with Windows7. I run it in compatibility mode but it crashes with regularity. It doesn`t seem to crash as often when I don`t have other image programs running, like Photoshop and Bridge. It`s a little inconvenient to say the least. Yesterday I spent hours pouring through files and adding keywords, with ACDSee. Only to find out later that the keywords I added don`t show, when I search for them in bridge.

It`s always something.

I would just like to wish a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to those who don't celebrate Christmas, to all of my DA friends. I wish you all Health, Joy, Happiness and Good Fortune in the New Year.

Happy Tenth Birthday DA!

My Groups: In the order that I joined them.