Digital Shutters

with a digital camera, you will save a lot of money on film. It is always a good idea to have a few backup disks on hand.
Especially if you are planning to be on vacation or have family around for the holidays. As a professional Photographer I can easily go through 2 to 4 1GB Disks in a photo shoot. around 100 images per disk depending on my settings. Most of my disks have lasted 5 years (1000’s of photos per disk) before the quality of the saved images starts to deteriorate. (More on that later)
So when buying extra disks check to see what the manufacture recommends and the maximum size disk your camera will read. This is important when buying extra disks. Not every camera is the same. A good article about this subject is at C/net Review
there’s a simple break down chart that’s a good reference guide.

When using any camera read your manual to find out how to adjust the file size, this will determine how many pictures you can get per disk. The more pictures you want to save to the disk the smaller the final print size will be. I personally always save my photos to the largest print size and have extra disks on hand. You never know when you will want that special picture made bigger. Your camera manual should have a chart that will tell you the resolution and file size for each setting. One thing to remember is that the pixel count set on the camera is not the same as the final image file size. Pixel count is how big your picture will print, File size is determined by the content of the image.
Example I bought an 8MP camera and the most mega pixel jpeg I’ve been able to get on my 1G XD Flash is a 6.3 file size. But my camera is able to take photos in Jpeg, Raw, and Tiff file formats. My tiff file with the same camera at the same settings as the JPEG will come out at around 23 MP. (I’ll talk more about pixel count, compression and resolution later)
Also take into consideration the subject you are shooting.

I took a picture of a seagull flying
Pixel Count is 3264 X 2448
File size is 667KB

Yet using the same settings on the same day I took a picture of wild flowers in a field and the

Pixel Count is 3264 X 2448
File size is 4.79 MB

All these things determine how much space it takes up on your disk. If you look at the pictures the seagull it has a white background and just the bird not a lot of content to take up room on the disk. Yet the flowers are busy with background and color. It takes up a lot of room on the disk.
General rule the more color and objects, the more room it’s going to take up on the disk.