These two photographs were taken on Southport beach looking towards the pier at sunset. They were both shot using the D300 & 18-200mm VR lens (I remembered to switch image stabilisation off whilst on the tripod this time!). As far as post-processing is concerned, I've just installed the Mogrify & Photomatix plugins for Lightroom. The former gives you the ability to add frames and has vastly superior watermarking abilities to Lightroom, and as I use Photomatix as a standalone application often the latter plugin means that I can export an HDR series straight from Lightroom into the Photomatix application without having to export the files to Windows first. Both real time savers, and free

I've been trying to focus this blog more on the photographic content and fewer articles. Mainly as a result of not enough time, too many other areas vying for my attention, and often by the time I get round to posting a news item, most of the other photography blogs have already beaten me to it. Today though, I'm going to break from that as I've a few new news articles to post.

I've just had some photographs in print. Manchester United Supporters Trust have used 9 of the images I shot outside Old Trafford on the night of the Champions League final in May.  They've used a selection of these images.

Calumet have announced a new service via their website whereby you can order online and collect in-store. Thus saving yourself delivery costs, and waiting around for the delivery van (that never arrives when you need it to). www.calumetphoto.co.uk

Magnum have gathered together some "advice" for some of their members for new and aspiring photographers. Quite an interesting read. Thoughts from Martin Parr, Alex Soth and many others. Read it here

A new forum has launched for film and darkroom enthusiasts. www.fadu.co.uk already has a great many informed posters detailing thoughts on everything from darkroom process to gear reviews.

The Royal Photographic Society has announced a new competition based on Rejlander's "Two ways of life". When this work appeared in Victorian times, the 32 negative "debauched" composite caused a scandal. One of it's few alleged admirers was Queen Victoria herself. The RPS's competition asks entrants to combine and alter images to create a modern interpretation of this masterpiece. www.rps.org

Went to see my old DJ'ing spar playing out last weekend. He has a residency at a bar in Manchester and still kicks it on a regular basis. I've been invited to do a set over Christmas and I enjoyed myself so much, that I may even have to dig a few ol' tunes from the garage and dust off a record box or two. Anyway back to the matter in hand, these were shot with the D3 and the 18-200 lens with the flash off camera. For the top one, the flash was placed low down to the left of the decks. For the shot below, the flash was held to Marv's right by our good friend Rich. (He made a great light stand!)

Having managed to squeeze a flurry of back-processing and printing a week or so ago, this week time has once again got the better of me. 

Just been catching up with some of my feeds and came across another blinder from Zoriah.

"There are things that U.S. soldiers are allowed to talk about with the press and others they are not. One of the things they are not allowed to voice is their political opinion, especially if it goes against their commander in chief. In the privacy of latrine stalls on military bases in Iraq and Kuwait, however, it is quite a different story." - Check them out here

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Myself and some of the other guys I was recently at night school with spent a couple of hours wandering around Piccadilly and the Northern Quarter the other weekend. I won't flannel you with excuses, save to say that my head really wasn't quite in the place I needed it to be to do this, but I reckon I got some half decent shots nonetheless. These are 2 of my faves. The rest are on Flickr.

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Finally managed to get some processing done at last. Thought I'd plough through a couple of dusk and dawn shoots I did in Accrington last month. Shot with D300 and used Nik's fantastic Silver Efex Pro.

I've been reading quite a lot lately on other blogs, Scott Kelby's and Epic Edits are two that spring to mind, about the do's and dont's of backing up photographs. This particular topic has caught my attention once again as I've been having problems of my own in this area lately. The secondary drive on my primary pc which has around 200Gb's of RAW files and scanned negs, is rapidly running out of space. My offsite backup plan has also gone out of the window. So not only am I worryingly low on disk space, I'm also not getting duplicates of my files off site anymore (at least not very easily).

Previously I was using Retrospect 7 to make a duplicate of all these files over a VPN connection to a device that I have stored in the spare room at home. This made sure that I had an identical duplicate of all my RAW files, negs and Lightroom catalogs should anything untoward ever occur at my office. The problem that appears to have arisen in this area, is that the VPN has been getting dropped with increasing regularlity resulting in the backups failing. The system does automatically recover and start over again, but as a result I am often using over my 50Gb broadband monthly bandwidth allowance - and they just love sending me invoices for it!
So I now have two problems - I am running out of space at the office and I no longer have a regular off-site backup system.

I think that I can immediately address the problem of disk space by clearing out a lot of superfluous images. When I come back from a shoot and post-process, I delete all the real rubbish - out of focus, camera shake, flash didn't fire etc, but I generally keep the rest and I think that I could probably free up several Gigs by going through a rating process and deleting the images that I know I will never come back to. Looking to the future, I also need to add additional storage space. The options for this are to buy a new external drive, which will probably get me another 500Gb, but with no redundancy, or alternatively I could bite the bullet and buy a Drobo. Though I have yet to price up a firewire Drobo and the necessary drives to populate. This would mean that I could keep copies of everything, but would free up enough space.

Unfortutantely I'm no stranger to hard drive failures as I've had more than 1 catastrophic data loss in the past so I've been through the pain of the irretreavable loss of important data.The biggest headscratcher for me at the moment, is the off-site situation. The the existing off-site regime works well for backing up webservers and exchange mailboxes etc, but the bandwidth required for photographs is the killer. Since the issue of excessive bandwidth came to a head and I had to temporaily pause the off-site copying of the photographs, I've been reduced to transporting them from  site to site on a 32Gb memory stick - which is far from ideal - I'm a big fan of automation. Another problem that I have is that I can't always get into the office to work on images, so I often work on them on a laptop at home. So ideally, what I need is a two-way synchronous back up off-site system that will look for changes and copy files in the appropriate direction!

Since drafting this post yesterday, I've had a little time to investigate Drobos. (If you've not heard of this marvellous invention - check it out here). For one of the 2nd generation units populated with 4 x 1TB Western Digital Green drives which would give me 2.7TB worth of storage space (The rest is required as overhead for fault tolerance), would come to about £700. Which ain't all that cheap, and I'd need 2....Hmmmm...