What is 5,000,000,000 ?

Flickr just announced they have reached 5,000,000,000 picture uploads yesterday. What does that mean? Nowadays, you can purchase 2TB hard disk drives for less than $200. How many of these drives would you need to store 5,000,000,000 pictures, assuming each picture is minimally about 2MB on average.

Well, I threw the numbers in the calculator, and this is what it means. You would need 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of storage space so you would need to buy 5000 of those 2TB drives to hold 5 billion pictures. They are probably using various storage configurations which would require more than 5000 drives but roughly speakingCool!

Airshows

Just in case someone is wondering what lens to bring to an airshow, I'd recommend you bring something like a Tokina 80-400mm lens. This is an FX lens so it's equivalent to a 120-600mm DX lens. A bigger lens would be nice but having done some shooting at the Toronto airshow this past weekend, I find the 80-400mm range to be perfect for this purpose. There was somebody there that had a prime 500mm lens but that was too restrictive I thought. Sometimes, I wanted to zoom out to 80mm and often I'd like to zoom in at 400mm. There was one moment I wished I could zoom out to 18mm but that was only one time so 80mm was fine for all intended purposes.

Here was a couple of shots from this weekend airshow: