My primary line of work for the last 18 years is computers, networks and data storage. I now work for a state agency that has to keep some records for a very long time. To say digital does not deteriorate is questionable. This is a problem that IT professionals have been aware of for years but have been powerless to do much about it. Because of entropic decay of magnetic storage media, the mission data collected for the Mars Viking and Mariner space probes is at risk and at this point it is estimated that nearly 40% of all that data is lost. This is in less than 40 years. To read the tapes they had to commission a company to build a tape drive unit because none were in production and none seemed to exist in working order on the surplus market. This project started several years ago, and is still ongoing. the movement now to keep data fresh is to keep copying it from one media format to another and just make sure to gets read from time to time. the data integrity issue is still there. if the files are not readily human readable, you can't easily tell if they are useful files or just wasted bits taking up space.

I have digital images from the 80's that are fine, the standards used to scan those images then are still readable today. i am not sure i can say that years from now. we are already seeing .jpg images being replaced by .png on the internet. JPEG replaced GIF but yet we still see .gif files quite a lot. standards aside, the issue of deterioration is a problem because all computer systems have some critical flaws. one of those is the concept of data integrity. you can look in a folder and see hundreds of files that are reasonable sizes, but unless you open each one you don't know if they are valid or not. digital images are quite fragile. it only takes a single bit error to damage a file such that it is no longer readable. to know if or when one of those bit errors has occurred whether it was a copy that didn't happen correctly or if it was a "bit rot" issue because of entropic decay of the signal on the hard drives. The software to babysit this kind of data loss is either expensive made-for-enterprise stuff, or it is something you have to use manually and it is rather complicated. Computers do make mistakes, storage degrades and is prone to errors, and you won't know it until after the fact.

Those old images in shoeboxes do bring up an interesting problem. i have photos that are over a hundred years old. they look fine. i have some less than 10 years old that look horrible. i have been in museums where they had Matthew Brady prints from the Civil War that were still perfectly usable. this points out something pretty important about analog. While it does degrade over time, that time may be a very very long time and you can still see a picture of great aunt Ethel taken in 1906, with coffee rings and cracks on the surface. degraded but usable. if that had been a digital image, all it takes is one bit in the wrong place and that image is gone. digital may not degrade, but it is all or nothing.

Our original poster posed the question, what of all the digital images we have stored around and what will those mean to historians of the future. To me, 100 years from now, the images i may have had stored on a computer or shared on the web might be searchable because of a lot of development happening now for data classification, there are essentially computers along with the search engines we use for text based searches, that analyze images. for now, it is mostly gathering exif data and contextual comments. these correlation engines are being used to assemble pictures of all kinds of things. there are also computer vision programs that will build up metatags for images that identify a horse, even if there was nothing in test that said you had a picture of a horse. as time passes this will get better and more useful. unless something happens to our storage systems, some great breakthrough in technology that speeds up both access times and increases capacity at reasonable costs in hardware and energy, we might not see progress for a while. Even though our computing power is increasing, our volume of information is increasing even faster, so searches seem to be slower and less effective than they were just a few years ago.

My shoebox with old photos in it will still be passed around to family members long after i am gone, and chances are, they will remain just as unreachable to historians as they are now.

You can suspend the realtime scan in AVG from the systray icon for just this reason. You of course want to restart it after the installer is done.

Could easily be your antivirus suppressing a file used in the installation process. some of those are hypervigilant. I know ClamSentinel sure gets in the way of software installation. also if you have your windows user access control settings suppressed, you won't get the windows prompts to give the installer service permissions to install the software and add needed registry information. telling UAC to never notify does not turn it off, it just never tells you so it always tells guest applications "no."

Also if you are trying to load this on your work computer, unless your account is a local administrator, you won't be able to install most applications.

It has been said that photography was invented as a crutch for frustrated painters. Process extremists like Ansel Adams and William Mortensen seem to support this to a degree. Note that these two each regarded the other as the antichrist. It's funny how often warring camps end up proving the same point.

I rarely use Consumer Reports for advice on cameras or electronics. I have has better luck using the ratings on Crutchfield.com for stereos, and will read purchaser reviews on Amazon and Newegg.

Specifically for Nikon gear I will read up Ken Rockwell and Thom Hogan. I am not Ken's biggest fan, but his technical background often shows through the rhetoric with some helpful insights. My dad was an engineer, so as an adult, I seem to be a prety adept "Nerd Whisperer."

This seems to divide the accolytes a bit. There are some that arrive at this point almost naturaly. Others can be trained, encourage,mentored, and cultivated to what we might think of as a finished product. There are others that have what seem to be mental blocks that will prevent them from ever developing to the point they can sharpen their own sword.

My standard answer to all of this as a teacher, a parent and as a student is "Practice makes permanant. Only perfect practice makes perfect."

For my own experience i find that shooting regularly keeps the wheels greased, but i do better when i am teaching someone else. If it is just me, i do tend to get sloppy or lazy. So far as learning styles i am one of those middle folks that will never be an artist, but can be a great technical illustrator.

Good list, and pretty much just what the OP was looking for.

Two philosophical differences I have here.
Image area, I agree there is no reason to leave this to the 1.3 crop all the time. For sports action shooting it does increase your frame rate and that crop can act as a "digital zoom" so your effective full frame equivalent focal length is 2x rather than 1.5x. So there are times i would definitely use it. The loss of information is another problem but even at this crop you are still getting more pixels than the D200 i used for years without complaint from me or my customers. since this crop is similar to the 8x10 or 5x7print proportions, some commercial portrait services stick the cameras in this mode on purpose because there is no point in collecting and storing information you will never print.

High ISO NR. This is a tricky one. i can see the obvious logic, why not reduce noise. I am still experimenting with how much damage this does do to my images. setting it to High, essentially means the camera is applying a function to the images to Blur the noise so it will blend into the surrounding information. this has the effect of rendering the image softer overall. the other fun part to this is that is seems to only effect the output in .jpeg format, but because this setting is retained in the raw/NEF file, Capture or ViewNX software automatically try to apply those same filters for noise reduction and sharpening. I'm not sure if lightroom or aftershot would do the same, i don't use either of those. I usually turn the noise reduction off or low knowing that i get punished for high ISO, but i have post process tools that work as well or better than the camera routines. For the jpegs, it's not a big deal. On the raw files, since i have no choice but to PP those, cranking up the noise reduction usually costs me time because i have to fight what the camera recorded as metadata in the NEF file and to start from a raw file without prejudice.

There is another quirky function for long exposure noise reduction that does seem to effect the raw files. that feature takes a second exposure against closed shutter curtains to map out noise or hot spots and uses that almost like a dust reference photo to map out the areas of noise. This does not soften the image the way the High ISO Noise Reduction function does, but it needs to be used when sober because if left on it will flat screw up your night shooting since it takes every exposure twice that makes a big dent in your frame rate.

makes me think it would be good to fill that with a white crayon or china marker then take a good pic of it visible for your records. that's pretty weak marking.

Sadly the only advice i have is to read as much of the manual as you can stand, and since this camera has been out a while you might do well to search for how-to videos on youtube. These duz-all miracle multi-wrench cameras give me a headache just looking at the buttons. maybe 10 buttons on the camera and each one has at least 3 functions. Some marked, some not marked, some using color coded icons that are difficult to discern from the color of the camera body.

Most of what you will want to do will be buried in the menus to turn off all the "let me do it for you" BS. The zoom is a little twitchy, it has two speeds so you have to sneak up on the buttons to avoid it going into panic zoom mode where it overshoots your zoom goal every time.

good luck and be patient. that camera can produce some pretty remarkable pictures of still objects, and even moving objects at a distance. for chasing kids or pets around, the lag in the image stabilization, flash charging, and zoom and focus functions will frustrate anyone. There really isn't a point and shoot that i know of that is up to that challenge.

Did anyone actually read the original question? She said an "L810" this is a super-zoom bridge camera, not the D810 DSLR.
http://www.nikonusa.com/en/Nikon-Products/Product-Archive/Compact-Digital-Cameras/COOLPIX-L810.html

You guys might find this amusing. While poor old Canon can't get it up, Minolta was putting cameras in space as early as 1962. I remember these "Mir Edition" kits when they were in stores. Later on Minolta continued to sell some random white bodies cameras. I think I saw the 800si in white shortly before Minolta merged with Konica.

http://photogearheads.com/minolta-dynax-8000i-own-a-camera-thats-been-to-space/

So when you are asked "What is the red ring around your lens?" I suppose the answer is "Your Mother's lipstick."

I was thinking a skip loader could be modified a bit and work nicely for this. just gotta remember to put down the landing gear jacks and turn off the motor to take a shot.

Good thing i have a waterproof watch. It's gettin' deep in here.
;)

Just for the insanity of it all. It looks like canon made an industrial/military telephoto lens that was 5200mm at F14. http://www.canonwatch.com/meet-the-canon-5200mm-f14-tele-monster/

So do we call this one the absurd-O-scope?

and for those serious hobbyists that like a nice long low light lens, Zeiss made a 1700 f4 a few years back.
http://blog.uniquephoto.com/ridiculous-lens-of-the-day-zeiss-apo-sonnar-t-1700mm-f4-lens/