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...
I mentioned some time ago that I’d
got myself an Epson
R2400 stylus printer which uses the 8 point Ultrachrome cartridge system
and will reportedly produce outstanding quality monochrome prints up to A3 in
size on high quality acid free fibre paper. I could get great results on the
standard Epson Matt Fibre paper, but it was a tad flimsy for my liking and I
heard great reports about the Harman
Matt Fibre which is 320gsm.
Some time later, having wasted nearly an
entire box of this expensive paper getting rubbish to mediocre results
slavishly following the detailed instructions that came with the paper and on
Epson’s website, I decided to throw Harman’s instructions on set up
and configuration away, and apply a little intuitiveness, and lo’ and
behold I’ve managed to make 2 outstanding black and white prints on my
last 2 sheets of paper! I’ll definitely be getting some more of this
paper for prints as I’m really quite impressed by the result, though it
ain’t cheap!
Back to the printer, the downside is
it’s ink usage. I’ve made maybe 50 prints and I’m nearly out
of ink. Also when you change the different blacks in order to print on gloss or
matt paper, the printer seems to go through a particularly lengthy routine
which seems to waste undue quantities of ink. A full set of cartridges retails
with Epson for about £100! I think I’ll be investigating one of those
bottle feed systems….
For some time now, I've been looking for a photoblog application that I can host myself, and more importantly will give me some protection for my images. Being a little web savvy I know just how easy it is to "steal" pictures from any html driven web site. So to this end i've been looking for a Flash / Flex or Silverlight application that will give me the protection i am looking for. I currently post some photographs to my main blog, but sometimes this makes me nervous.
So I've been chatting with a friend of mine who happens to be a bit of a Flash guru and it just so happens that he's been developing something along these lines on the sideline for the last few months.
After a bit of a natter over the weekend, it looks as if this may be something we could have a go at, and if it works the next stage would be to try and turn it into a marketable product.
However, if there's anyone out there who is already aware of a Flash based photoblog application, then please let me know...
Due to a recent bereavement in the family, we have a 2003 (03) Honda Civic 1.4 Imagine for sale: 
 
2003 (03) Honda Civic 1.4 Imagine (Petrol)
Mileage: 31k
Doors: 5 (Hatchback)
Colour: Silver
ABS
Drivers airbag
Electric mirrors
Body coloured bumpers
Electric windows
Power steering
Central locking
CD player
5 months tax
Price £3495 ono.
Call 0161 870 6181 Location: Altrincham, Manchester
Even though I'm from over the pond, you'd pretty much have to have your head completely in the clouds as a photographer to have missed all the hulabaloo about the pending Orphan Works Act stateside. As I Understand it the act has been killed of, but only temporarily as it is likely to be re-presented, if not in a slightly different format. Although this obviously doesn't affect me directly, in this inter-connected non-stop data flow high tech age, aren't all us photographers worldwide potentially affected by this? If a US based magazine for example prints one of my images that somehow electronically appeared in their hands and claim that they fulfilled "a fair and reasonable effort" in trying to track down the photographer, but don't actually get my permission to print, how does this affect me?
Well hello there blogosphere. It’s been a while! I’m
just back from a 2 week family vacation to Mallorca. As roaming data charges
are so prohibitively expensive in Europe, and I wanted to spend some quality time
with my kids, there was no blogging to be done.
I also currently have VERY restricted internet access at the
site I’m currently working at and I’m out of the house for 12 hours
a day, spending 2 hours a day in the car, so I need to find a alternate method
of blogging. Those 2 hours a day spend tearing up and down the motorway are the
valuable hours that I would have spent blogging and twittering. I’ve
bought myself a Freedom
bluetooth keyboard to use with my HTC Touch Cruise, and I had planned on
using Darren Johnstone’s Travelling
Blogger. However after lots of configuration, tweaking and head scratching
it looks like the DasBlog system that I
use needed a third party component (costing $400!) to work, so I canned that
idea off. I’ve now managed to get MailToBlog working with DasBlog and can
send emails to my blog straight from my phone, and it’ll parse them and
whack them straight into the blog!
So I can now sit outside, have a fag and blog away… I’m
happy and back on it!
And instead of tearing up the motorway at 100mph every day,
I can slow down a bit and use an old dictaphone to compose posts whilst I’m
driving and type them up at a later date.
So back to the holidays… As I was saying, I’ve
just spent 2 weeks staying in a villa just outside the old town of Pollenca in
Mallorca. The town consists of 2-3 storey buildings carved up by a maze of
extremely narrow streets. The problem I found shooting in this environment is
that making photographs during the traditional morning “golden hour”
is pretty much a non-starter as its long after the sun has broken the horizon
that it starts to filter down these narrow streets and any kind of shadows
start to appear.
Towards the end of the holiday we visited the town of Soller
which is very similar to Pollenca in its make up. The weather on the day we
visited was fine, but unfortunately as the entire family was in tow, there weren’t
many opportunities to shoot. So I made the decision to return early the next
morning only for it to rain pretty much non-stop. As I’d travelled for an
hour to get there, I decided to shoot anyway. I figured that most photographers
who shoot this island probably only get to see it when the sun is shining and
there were a few interesting options presented by the wet streets, brickwork,
umbrellas etc.
I’ve yet to process the results, and as usual I still
have a backlog of stuff to process, but rest assured the results will appear as
and when.
Check out this behind the scenes video by Vincent Laforet and here's a link to the final video. It was shot using a pre-production version of the Canon EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR - in a similar vein to the new Nikon D90. But for me, the question has to be why? Why do you need to have video on a high end DSLR? It cheapens the whole thing in my opinion. I mean if you shoot video, then you use a video camera right? And, if you're a stills man (or woman), then you'd use a stills camera. I just don't get it...  Now to kit, my favourite choice of topic ;-). I just got a very jazzy email from www.lensbaby.com which will appear here shortly (though this page doesn't work in Chrome, Firefox or IE7!). Basically they've re-launched the range and added a new product called the "Composer". The words smooth & precise "describe focusing the new Composer selective focus SLR camera lens. With this lens, you don’t compress to change your focus. The Composer’s ball and socket design allows you to just tilt and then rotate the barrel focus ring with one hand, providing an unprecedented level of ease and precision."
The Original Lensbaby, 2.0, and 3G have been reintroduced as the Muse and the Control Freak, updating our classic lenses with the new Lensbaby Optic Swap System. The optic swap system "lets you change your optic to get the look that fits your creative vision. When you want to change the look of your photographs, simply pop the optic out of your Lensbaby and drop in a new view. The Lensbaby Optic Swap System includes the Double Glass (the optic from Lensbaby 3G), Single Glass (update of the Original Lensbaby optic), and the all-new Plastic and Pinhole / Zone plate Optics." .
I've long been an admirer of the Lensbaby products and the results that these remarkable lenses can produce, but I've never actually gone down the path of owning one - though I think that may be about to change!! For more info, go here
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