One of the things about getting a digital SLR is that the number of photos you take goes up — waaaay up. I could fill my 512-MB memory card in an afternoon’s shooting (a bit more than 200 photos, shooting at JPEG fine).

So last Saturday I picked up a four-gigabyte SD card at WePC, the computer store in town. It cost a hundred dollars, about as much as the 512 did two years ago — or as much as a 128-MB card did a couple of years before that. I love falling flash memory prices.

Now I can shoot up to 1,100 photos at a time — which should hold up well on weekends and vacations — or, conversely, shoot in RAW format without constraints.

I must now look nervously at my remaining hard-drive capacity.