It's Good to Have Goals

One thing always leads to another.  Which is why it's good to have goals!


The past two weeks I have been working on a long-term goal:  I now have a store on Etsy with Jewelry items to sell!  Yea! 

Etsy itself is easy to maneuver.

Taking GOOD pictures of small objects in at least five "poses" takes an inordinate amount of time.  Lighting is crucial.  It takes a lot of experimentation to find pleasant backgrounds and props.  In fact, I don't think you ever stop experimenting or trying to take better pictures.

Unless the media your camera stores pictures on becomes obsolete... or your expensive digital camera starts getting fussy...

My digital camera is a Sony Mavica that I bought 8 or 10 years ago.  It uses mini-CD's to record pictures--which in and of itself is not a problem, but it really prefers CD's that were manufactured specifically for the camera.  Unfortunately, you can no longer buy Sony Mavica CD's.  Of the stack of 50 Sony CD's I've had for the last 5 years, only a third of them would successfully format using the camera. 

Last week, I started taking pictures of my jewelry using a CD that had a few pictures on it already.  After I had taken 40 or 50 pictures, the camera started getting fussy.  It made repeated grinding and whirring noises.  The light that indicates it is reading the CD stayed on, but I could neither take more pictures nor look at the ones I had already taken.  Another idiosynchrocy of the camera is that you have to do a "finalize" step to format the CD so that it is readable by a computer.  Once you finalize a CD, you can no longer write to it via the camera.

I tried using a couple more CD's that had pictures on them.  I took a few more pictures.  Then I found another CD that was unreadable by both the camera and computer. 

When my PC crashed in December of 2009, I lost all the pictures that were on my hard drive.  I had made no backups, of course.  So last week I copied all the pictures from the readable CD's to the computer.  Then I finalized all the CD's that were full and marked all the CD's that still had room for more pictures where the camera made normal successfully-reading-a-CD noises.

I organized my pictures (on the PC) in folders by year.  I have nothing in the folder marked "2008."  Unfortunately, a couple of important things happened in 2008 where I took enough pictures to fill two CD's.  I can only guess that pictures from my in-laws' 65th wedding anniversary party, pictures of relatives from out of state who were here that week, and a picture of the 12-inch "zipper" from the middle of my forehead to my right ear after having brain surgery (the staples looked like a zipper) the following week are on the CD's that are no longer readable. 

The camera's CD-reading and -writing ability seems to be gradually deteriorating.  Cameras do not last forever.  I can accept that

For now, I'm still able to take pictures of my jewelry using the CD's that still have room.  So I am posting them on Etsy as I go.

I also added a few more goals to my list:

1)  Back up the pictures that are on my PC.  Knowing how reliable my CD's are, and having lost my hard drive once already, this is something that should become a priority.

2)  Figure out if my 2008 CD's can be recovered.

3)  Start saving for a new camera.

Hope you are accomplishing some of your goals in 2011!!

Laurel