Author Archives: Alan V

Photo stats galore

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Today is a special day, because it’s the day when I’ve been taking digital photos for half my life. To celebrate the occasion, life has been updated, and also here’s a ton of different photo stats. :D

First off, some numbers (updated from here). I currently have 360,233 photos tagged in Photoshop Organizer.

Here are the dates on which I took each 25,000th photo as well as the number of days between each 25,000th photo.

25,000 50,000 75,000 100,000 125,000 150,000
January 12, 2004 October 20, 2004 April 10, 2006 April 20, 2007 December 4, 2007 February 7, 2009
282 days 537 days 375 days 228 days 431 days
150,000 175,000 200,000 225,000 250,000 275,000
February 7, 2009 July 4, 2009 April 14, 2010 September 4, 2010 June 23, 2011 December 23, 2011
147 days 284 days 143 days 292 days 183 days
275,000 300,000 325,000 350,000
December 23, 2011 August 24, 2012 June 2, 2013 February 17, 2014
245 days 282 days 260 days

Here’s updated stats for my two cameras, plus the D50 (for comparison with the shutter counts below):

Nikon D50 March 22, 2006 – November 15, 2009 1334 days; 3.655 years 105,067 photos $570 (+$250 repair cost) 78.8 photos per day 0.54¢ per photo (0.78¢ per photo including repair cost)
Samsung SL30 July 27, 2009 – June 13, 2014 1782 days; 4.88 years 20,266 photos $70 13.5 photos per day 0.345¢ per photo
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 – June 27, 2014 1582 days; 4.33 years 158,801 photos $780 100.38 photos per day 0.49¢ per photo

I found out recently that the EXIF data of photos includes how many shutter releases the camera has made, which is more accurate since I delete many photos I take now. I also found the information for my old D50. Unfortunately my crappy SL30 does not track that data (and the filenames aren’t much help; the first photo is SDC16333.JPG, the most recent is SDC17918.JPG). My Kodak DX6490 also does not store that information (which isn’t entirely unsurprising).
(The D50 seems to store shutter releases as an unsigned 16-bit int, so it wraps around after 65535, so I had to do some maths. The 65535th photo was j4cbo at the Haight-Ashbury Fair on June 8, 2008.)

Nikon D50 March 22, 2006 – November 15, 2009 1334 days; 3.655 years 106,916 shutter releases $570 (+$250 repair cost) 80.15 shutter releases per day 0.533¢ per shutter release (0.77¢ per shutter release including repair cost)
Nikon D90 February 26, 2010 – June 27, 2014 1582 days; 4.33 years 197,675 shutter releases $780 124.95 shutter releases per day 0.39¢ per shutter release

I guess the lesson there is that I delete many more photos now than I used to. It would have been interesting to have numbers for the SL30, since I feel like I delete a lot of those shots given how many come out crappy.

Costco prints 4×6 prints for 13¢ each. To print all 360,233 photos would cost $46,830.29. Also, at a weight of ~2 ounces per photo, the entire stack would weigh 45,029 pounds, or 22.5 tons.

Also here’s some updated graphs.

Number of photos taken by month, log scale y-axis:

Same thing but with a linear y-axis (second graph only includes time after graduation from CMU):

Total number of photos taken through time (second graph only includes time after graduation from CMU):

And amount of time between 1000 photos (second graph only includes time after graduation from CMU, so it starts at 131,000):

Adventures in Houses

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So remember the house I mentioned a while back that we turned down because of the potential for the fans in the adjacent grocery store to be too loud? Yeah, turns out they’re pretty much silent, so the house would have been totally fine.
That said, I still think we made the right decision. Given the potential for badness there (and the difficult resale that would come with it), we did the best we could with the information we had. It’s just a shame that the house didn’t come on the market a month or so later.

But I think that house is now destined to become the house by which we measure all other houses, because it really was the perfect house. (Certainly everything else we’ve looked at since then has been compared to it and found to be lacking.)

We ended up signing a new lease on the current apartment, so we’re good through next July. Which means we now have more time to look at houses without being pressured into buying due to our lease being up soon.

We looked at another one yesterday (a few blocks West of us instead of North). It had all the right features: 4 bedrooms (actual usable bedrooms), a garage, a reasonable (but on the small side) yard, 1.5 bathrooms, the most amazing kitchen… but for some reason it just didn’t click. There was a while where we were tempted to go for it anyway, because it was certainly “good enough”, but I think our agent ultimately talked us out of it because it wasn’t “right” for us, even if it would probably have been fine. (The shared driveway to the garage and the need to repaint pretty much the entire downstairs were the main negative points for me.)

Speaking of which, I want to call out our agent, Joan Elko, because she is really the best buyer’s agent ever.
We’ve been looking for things with her now since February, and in that time and the many houses we’ve seen, we’ve never felt pressured into anything; really, the opposite… she’s better at talking us out of decisions that probably ultimately aren’t right than trying to talk us into buying or looking at things that aren’t right. (Like how she talked us out of the house yesterday, saying that we “shouldn’t settle” but should instead find and buy the house that we really want.)
Besides that, she knows her stuff. I feel like she has an excellent sense of house values (given that we’ve seen final sale prices now for some houses that we looked at with her, even though things have been crazy this year in the seller’s market with a lack of supply), and she also has really good knowledge of houses… like we’ll walk into a place and she’ll start rattling things off about the house and windows and floors and things that need work.
I also feel bad for her given how much work she’s done for us (over 4 months), and we’re no closer now to a place than we were then. We’re probably the worst clients ever. :P (Certainly one of the pickiest.)

So we’ve had nothing but good experiences with our agent, even if the search itself has been less than ideal.

The house hunt continues.

ITG, 7 Blunders, BBQ, and Keith Manor

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Life has been full of stuff recently. In roughly reverse order:

The ITG machine at the storage facility in the South Side exists, and it is awesomely full of charts I love. In the year-ish absence from ITG, it seems my reading has not suffered at all but my stamina is gone. I can’t even make it to the jacks in Perfect Cherry Storm anymore, and probably generally can no longer pass an 11 (although I didn’t try). The fact that the place is a small, enclosed space with no cooling other than fans probably doesn’t help either.
It’s good to have ITG machine access again, even if it means a bit more work than previously to access.




7 Wonders is one of my favorite board games, and it gets played around once a week. I already have the Leaders and Cities expansions, as well as the promo leaders, wonders expansion, and extra fan-made boards from board game geek (for a total of 23 wonder boards). We decided to try a variant of it last games night that Max affectionately titled “7 Blunders”. The goal is to get the lowest score possible, but you’re subject to the 2-player-style rules where you can’t sell a card unless you are forced to, cannot buy resources if you could make them yourself in some way, and must build for free if you can. It makes for a very interesting game, especially depending on whether your wonder gives you lots of points or not… do you save the wonder stages for burying large-point-value age 3 cards, or do you take care of them early so building is harder for you due to lack of resources?
We’ll certainly play it again and see how that goes.

Chris and Rob hosted a last-minute Memorial Day BBQ, and it was tasty.


In other other things, Keith’s kitchen is sad. His ceiling had been cracking (I guess one of the screws holding the ceiling up came out or something…?), so we spent a Saturday helping him remove his kitchen appliances and stripping the wallpaper from the room (which ended up being quite the experience due to the painted double layers of wallpaper, going as far as 4 layers deep at the top where there was trim). Apparently his ceiling came crashing down on Monday (which was the alternate day for wallpaper removal), so it was a good thing we did it when we did.




Also here’s us being crazy after midnight at IHOP, attempting to recreate various bad stock photo scenes.





Life, Washington, Kickstarter

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life has been updated. The photo journal is now current to today, and the stats page includes updated photos from the last 4 months. I feel like I should probably add more Pittsburgh people into stats (like Austin, Michael, Yubin, and Max), since I’ve known them for long enough now that stats will actually be somewhat interesting.

In any case, we got back yesterday from our trip to Washington, D.C. Photos are here.

The trip was primarily because Greg wanted to see Eddie Izzard, and the closest place he was performing was Washington. (The tour later added Pittsburgh and Cleveland locations, so we probably didn’t have to make the trip out… but hey, D.C. trip!) Headed out on the Megabus Thursday evening and came back Sunday afternoon.

We stayed with Mark, Greg’s friend from undergrad, and his wife Christine. They had cats. The cats were adorable.



The Eddie Izzard performance itself was pretty awesome. This was my first time seeing him perform, but he was a lot better than previous comedians I’ve seen.

Interesting thing I learned: Apparently the place is not “Washington D.C.” but rather “Washington, D.C.” as it’s the city of Washington in the District of Columbia. For some reason I’d always assumed that the entire place was just the district, whose proper name was “Washington.” (Apparently D.C. was supposed to have had some other cities it in, that either were returned to Virginia or gobbled up by Washington itself? So the entire district is one city, so I’m not entirely off in thinking that.)
Whee.

In any case, we weren’t there too long, so we didn’t really get to see very much. But we did take up a lot of time (most of Saturday afternoon and all of Sunday) seeing the Newseum, which was quite interesting and awesome to visit. Greg and I lamented over the lack of exhibits for editing and layout, but what was there (covering all forms of reporting and media) was well done. I particularly enjoyed the exhibition of Pulitzer-winning photographs. It was also interesting to see front pages from papers from all 50 states. On Friday, the most popular front-page news item seemed to be Spiderman 2 (followed up by Obamacare enrollment articles).


There was also, of course, time spent photographing… in particular, we wandered around the Tidal Basin at night photographing the Washington Monument (unfortunately still closed) and the Jefferson memorial (which apparently has a museum in its base O_o).



The low photo trend continues, with only 644 photos from the trip (representing 911 shutter releases).

In other, totally-unrelated-to-anything stuff, there is a new Kickstarter for art. Because art is awesome. (Also my friend David has art in this anthology.) So you should back it.

Yay for life.