The President's Photographer

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I think this is an excellent documentary, even worth a look for those with little interest in photography. I made some observations while watching that reiterated a number of the things I’ve learned over the years since submerging myself in this craft:

• Make lots of pictures. There are two conflicting quotes in the video, but I’ll go with the more conservative figures of 20000 - 80000 images taken by the photography staff per month. That’s a lot, and you can be sure that many of them are never going to see the light of day… but taking lots of shots increases the chances of capturing what you want/need. With a little discipline, you can also learn from the images that don’t make the grade… figure out what you don’t like about them and work to avoid the same thing in future 
• Good Workflow is Essential. Self-explanatory really, but with up to 80000 images a month to process, a streamlined and consistent workflow is critical
• Get it Right In-Camera. Documentary photographers are subject to very strict limits on what ‘enhancement’ can be made to an image once it’s shot. It wouldn’t surprise me if the staff in this video were shooting JPEG instead of RAW, either way it places emphasis on getting the image right in camera so little or nothing needs to be done in post-production. White Balance, Sharpness, Exposure and crop all need to be spot-on
• Shit Happens. You’ll make mistakes, fumble and gear will fail. This is a given. What matters is how well you recover when it happens
• Be Discreet. Many people are uncomfortable in front of a camera. By becoming invisible a photographer can capture natural gesture and moments far more easily
• Carry Less Gear. The more gear you carry the less images you’re likely to capture. In this video the photographer carries two camera bodies and two lenses. Simple, and with them he can move quickly and quietly
• Invest In Good Glass. The photographers in this video were using excellent lenses (list of the ones I spotted below), but they weren’t using top-of-the-range camera bodies. The lesson here is that good lenses are the best place to spend your money, as they will outlast camera bodies. Megapixels are fairly irrelevant, as are lots of the bells and whistles on modern camera bodies, which can make them a poor investment sometimes.
  
  Camera Bodies & Accessories
   - Either Canon 7D or 5D models… neither of which cost more than €2500
   - Canon 580ExII flash on-camera
   - Lexar Compact Flash memory cards
  
  Lenses
   - Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 fisheye (I think)
   - Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 L USM
   - Canon EF 27-70mm f/2.8 L USM
   - Canon EF 50mm f/1.2 L USM
   - Canon EF 85mm f/1.2 L USM
   - Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L USM
  
  Some observations on the lenses: Most of them are from the Canon ‘L’ range, which indicates high quality lens elements, fast autofocus and excellent build quality (dust and moisture resistant). They all have very wide apertures. With the exception of one they’re all fairly compact, thus less intimidating to those being photographed. 
  
  
• Details Tell The Story. The large sweeping images may cause the most impact, but it’s the smaller details that help convey a story and develop a larger body of cohesive work
• Print Pictures Regularly (and share them). The process of printing correctly takes time, but I find it so much more gratifying to print my favourite images rather than viewing them on screen. It evolves the image from a digital file, ones and zeros, into something real that you can touch and feel
  
  …and most importantly of all…
  
  
• Your Best Images are Still Ahead of You. Every single thing you’ve ever learned about making an image goes into making your next shot. Food for thought, eh?

More coming soon…

The Digital Workflow

I get asked about workflow a lot so decided to do a quick post on it. That attempt at a quick post failed miserably, so this is a much longer one that (I hope) clearly outlines my workflow and the reasons for each step involved.

Click to read more ...

Backblaze

Ok, one more post about keeping data safe, but it ought to be the last one for a while.

Being a bit of a geek (by bit I mean total) and having lost a bunch of photos to a hard drive failure before, I’ve got a pretty good backup policy in place at home. My computer is backed up to two different devices (one of those being a Drobo, which provides an extra layer of reassurance). On top of that, all my image and video files are backed up onto a fourth drive, just to be sure. All these backups are synced automatically, so they just happen in the background and I don’t have to worry about them unless something fails. It rarely does.

Problem: Despite the backups, my eggs are pretty much in the one basket. If the house gets broken into, or there’s a fire or similar occurrence all the photos are gone.

Solution: Put a copy of those eggs in a secure place, far far away.

The solution has to be:

• Secure
• Automated
• Cheap
• Fast
• Idiot proof

I toyed around with a few ‘home-made’ options, and although they worked, the speed just wasn’t there, it was painfully slow. That made me look at some online solutions, and the search ended with Backblaze. I setup a trial account and uploaded some large files, the speed was impressive (bearing in mind I’ve a very fast broadband connection). All the boxes were ticked:

• Secure: Backups are locally encrypted with AES and transferred over an SSL connection. There’s a further option to encrypt with a secure key, which I’ve done. This doesn’t seem to add much strain to the computer processor

• Automated: The backups happen in the background, incrementally and continuously. I can set and forget it. The initial backup will take a few weeks, but will be quicker thereafter as the backups are incremental

• Cheap: Storage is unlimited and it costs $5 per month for each computer. This also includes drives attached to the computer, but not networked or shared drives

• Fast: It’s speedy. In the settings I can also choose the allow Backblaze to utilize more bandwith, for faster backups, or less to keep the network fast
  
  

• Idiot proof: I can do this, enough said

Further to meeting the criteria, the software integrates very nicely with OS X, I haven’t tried it on Windows and don’t intend to, but I’d be surprised if it wasn’t a similar experience.

In the event that I need to recover a file or folder, I can download from Backblaze in .zip format for no extra charge. I can also choose to have my data recovered and delivered to me on a DVD or USB hard drive, but with extra charges.

The only thing I don’t really like is that the entire contents of the hard drive(s) are selected for backup by default. I’d prefer to specify the individual directories I want backed up and start from there… the reason being there are a lot of system files I should never have to restore, and the initial backup will take longer because of their inclusion.

Other than that I’m very happy with the decision! Give the free trial a go and see if it works for you.

More coming soon…

Daithí

Drobo

A while back I wrote a quick post about data backup, see it here. Well, the other day I suffered a hard drive failure. Normally this would be a hugely upsetting event, the last time it happened I lost hundreds, even thousands of images. Why was this time different? Because the drive that failed was in a Drobo.

Huh?

Drobo is a storage “robot” that holds basic (cheap) hard drives. The entry model that I have can hold up to 4. The data gets spread over the inserted drives so that if one fails, you don’t lose anything. What happens in the background is all very complicated, but the fact that it happens in the background makes it very very simple to use. And, as I can verify, it works. I’ve toyed around with RAID arrays before, but they’re rocket science compared to the simplicity of Drobo.  

Cali Lewis gives a good demonstration here, as she’s far prettier and smarter than me, I’ll leave it to her to explain it all to you.

I was working on some photos when the drive failed. The Drobo Dashboard software let me know of the issue, as did the blinking lights on the front of the device. I simply ejected the faulty drive and less than 15 minutes later everything was back to normal (all green lights). I tested the drive that had the issue and sure enough, it’s completely focked. Had all my data been on this drive I’d be up sh*t creek right now, minus a paddle.

The Drobo isn’t my only backup. I have two more on separate external drives and am in the process of putting an automated backup off-site. This may seem excessive, but believe me, it’s really not.

For off-site backups there are a bunch of on-line services that make the process very simple, but I prefer to build my own solution. When I’ve completed it, I’ll post a tutorial here on how I did.

I highly recommend a Drobo as a backup device, especially if it’s the only one you’re going to have.

Benefits:

- Very Simple
- Reassuring
- Comparatively cheap, although up-front cost is high
- FW800 connection is nice and fast

Not so good:

- Noise. The fan used to cool the drives is loud.

More coming soon…

Daithí

You gon' back that thang up?

Here's the scenario. You have a digital camera... it's cool. You can see the images you make straight away, delete the ones you don't like and you never have to worry about film. Every so often you copy the contents of the cameras memory card onto your computer where you have a bunch of options; Editing, Printing, Facebook etc.  

Sound familiar? 

Here's the downside. The hard drive your photos are stored on (all those priceless memories) is going to fail. As sure as death and taxes, this is 100% guaranteed. The only questions are When? and How? but by the time you know the answers to either of those it's more than likely too late. 

If, like me, you've ever suffered such a failure then you're likely to already have a backup policy in place. If not, you should. It's pretty straightforward to do and doesn't cost all that much either, all you need is an external hard drive to back up to.

You can make your backups as complex as you like, but for now lets just go through two basics. 

Mac users can use Time Machine to automatically backup everything on their computer. It's built into OS X and requires minimal setup. The software takes hourly backups of everything on the computer and syncs them to a selected external drive. The really cool part is that the drive doesn't have to be attached to the computer, if you have it connected to your home network (wired or wireless) the backups will happen automatically without you even knowing about it. 

If your computer dies, gets stolen or even if you accidentally delete something there'll more than likely be a copy of it on the external drive. 

For those of you using Windows, I recommend a free tool from Microsoft called SyncToy. It requires a little more setup but once done you can get the same results. With SyncToy you select the folders you want to backup and where you want to back them up to.

Once done you can schedule the backups or run them manually. You can benefit from wireless backups if you have a hard hard drive attached to your wireless network and mapped to your PC. 

In terms of cost, external hard drives are extremely cheap. Komplett is a good place to search, at the time of writing this I can pick up a 1TB external drive for under €100 (1TB = 1024 Gigabytes). That's not a lot for the piece of mind a backup provides... and could end up being the best hundred quid you ever spend. 

Easy Peasy!! Now you've no excuse. Get cracking. Post any questions in the comments section and I'll do my best to answer them. 

Daithí