This week I purchased a pro-sumer Digital SLR camera from a well known high street chain. I was encouraged to take out their accidental damage policy claiming that I was actually buying my next camera. If it was broken, they would replace it “whatever happens”, if it couldn’t be repaired within 21 days, with an equivalent model, even if it was more expensive. It works out at around £30 a year for 5 years. So if in 4 and a half years a new model comes out and I accidentally run over my camera with my car, I should* get it replaced by the newer model. Of course it doesn’t cover loss or theft. I was thinking of getting some sort of after care as DSLRs are known to be delicate and very expensive to repair and it should give me peace of mind when using it “in the field”. I have 14 days to cancel the policy, what should I do??

* Whether I do or not I don’t know, sounds a bit too good to be true IMHO.

You may have noticed the odd photo appearing on the sidebar of my blog. I have recently started uploading a selection of my images into flickr. Its quickly becoming a habit, and a time consuming one at that. Every photo has to be lovingly touched up in Photoshop, then tagged with a description and title, tags and added to sets. Then you have to wait ages for the upload!

The thing I enjoy the most is describing each picture. It allows you to take a bit more time over each image, rather than flicking over it in a slide show. It encourages you to find out what you acually saw (e.g. the name of a statue or ship). Also, once tagged you have a great way of quickly finding images you are interested in. Flickr’s 100MB monthly upload limit is going to be very restrictive, which may mean upgrading to the pro account .

I have spent a *lot* of time recently organising and reconciling my digital photo collection and storing them in an easy-to-traverse hierarchical structure. Its amazing how disorganised it can quickly get with lots of duplicates from repeatedly copying the same images to different folders. Photography is one of those things that I would love to do more of, given the time and necessary budget!

Anyway, expect to see a lot more (if you are at all interested) in the near future.