So I just finished the Photo Album pages for the Napa trip and my brother Christopher's high school graduation. My theory is to take a lot of photos, as many as I can. I don't use flash, which really makes taking good indoor photos hard. It helps to not use zoom, since that narrows the focused area. Anyway, so I have like 50 to 70 photos for each event, and I don't want every photo to go up on the page. That would make it too much like boring family vacation pictures. I want the 10-20 photos that represent the event.

With that criteria, what can I do? The first step is to go through the photos and toss all the blurry ones, all the misshots, all the really dumb photos, and most of the duplicate photos. When it's dark I'll take 2-3 photos of the same thing, in hopes that one will come out right. That culls anywhere from 10% to 50% of the photos.

At this point, I have to think about what I want to convey. My goal is to have four picture sets, with three or four sets for the event. One strategy is to make the sets chronological, so a set for when I arrive, a set for when we do this, a set when we do that. This is only going to work if I only did a couple of things.

The other strategy is to group them into subjects, which can overlap with the chronological strategy. So a set to show the people I met or who went with me, a set for the scenery, a set for specific items. I want to give a general idea of where I went, what I did, what I saw. A lot of marginal pictures get thrown out. Let's face it, 20 great pictures of 20 different roses and other flowers is at least 18 pictures too many.

For Christopher's graduation, I wanted to show pictures of the whole family getting ready, then another set outside waiting for Memorial Auditorium to open, then another set for the inside, a set for the ceremony, and a set for Christopher walking down the isle and accepting his diploma. That's too many sets, and I didn't have enough pictures for some of the sets.

So what I ended up with two pictures of Chris getting ready, 6 pictures of us waiting outside (and really, I wanted to make sure I had pictures of my family in one of these photo album pages), 7 pictures of Memorial Auditorium, and only one shot of the seniors assembled. But I also had two QuickTime movies showing Chris getting his diploma and the graduates celebrating.

The QuickTime capture of the CoolPix 990 is not bad. 320 x 240 movie at 15 frames per second. No sound, which I don't mind since I didn't buy the camera for its movie capture ability. It does take a while to save the movie, about as many seconds as it took to shoot. Compression varies, but it looks like it uses up about one picture per 4 seconds of shooting.

For the Napa Valley pictures, I had to have some pictures of my aunt. I really wanted to take the tour of the winery and take some cool pictures that way, but Kooma didn't want to. So I had a lot of pictures of the gift shop. It would have been nice to take pictures of another winery or two but that's my fault for not stopping.

The next event is the Memphis trip. Then Shannon's wedding. I should also take pictures of my apartment, my parent's house, maybe work. So I remember what they look like when I move on. Again, my goal is to present an idea of my life, without bogging it down with a lot of pictures. Just wait till I get a video camera. That'll really blow up the amount of stuff on my web site.