Backup Gear is Vital.

February 28th, 2011

Everyone who has ever requested a wedding or commercial quote from me knows that one of the first things I harp on is a line charge for backup equipment rental. And I say that that’s important regardless of which photographer they choose. Some people wonder why I have 3 lenses that cover common portrait lengths.

Here’s why: My personal story for the weekend.

As most readers know I’ve been spending the bulk of my time working with my wife’s yarn shop Sheep’s Clothing. I’ve been moving my focus back to photography the past few months and have been doing pretty much exclusively in-studio portraits. With nothing that can’t be rescheduled I loaned out a spare camera and lens set to a friend’s (another photographer) daughter who doesn’t live close.

Long story short I’ve been shooting the past few months with only a single camera in the studio with the option of having another one show up overnight FedEx from one of the various rental houses or, if necessary a new one from one of the major shops. This is a great scenario if, say, the camera gave out Monday – Thursday. I say gave out because while I’ve lost strobes, lenses, radios, etc from dropping I’ve never lost a camera that way. Never until Friday night.

Thursday night, after an exhausting shoot,  I knocked the camera, 24-70 f/2.8 lens, and pocket wizard FlexTT5 off of a stool that I should never have left it on. 6-7lb dropping 36″ to hit a hard floor did bad things… but other than the sheared off FlexTT5 everything seemed to be working. I didn’t test a Plus II at that time, though. Saturday morning… not so much. Camera wouldn’t power on and even after diagnosing and fixing that problem a Plus II on the camera wouldn’t fire.

My shoot on Saturday went off wired to the lights and with the camera literally taped up (with white gaffer’s tape since I couldn’t find the black) and went well. Thank you to everyone who offered to loan me a camera for Sunday. The camera won’t fire a PW Plus II anymore that I was planning to use on Saturday but it will fire the FlexTT5 and MiniTT1 and with some work I got it to accept batteries Saturday night so Sunday went off without a hitch (and without tape!). There are some advantages to my past career and electronics hobby.

In the end replacement parts are winging their way to me as I type this but the moral stands. If you are ever on a shoot that will be expensive or impossible to reschedule (weddings come to mind) carry backup equipment for everything. And from now on even during light times in the studio I’ll always have a backup camera.

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Site Refresh In the Pipe

February 20th, 2011

Some people have heard me lament my search for an iPad capable portfolio software since we now use the iPad extensively. I won’t bore you with the number of solutions I’ve looked into or tried the past few months. Those that have worked with me before you know that I both back up and deliver images via PhotoShelter. It’s a fantastic service that I always recommend to both other professional photographers and prolific amateurs.

Rejoice for PhotoShelter now offers a non-flash (ie iPad capable) portfolio system. I’m in the process of finalizing the new site and, as I always do, it will come with a graphical refresh and will include a new navigation system. I’ll be rolling it out in about 2 weeks with the new photo packages that will go into effect in April.

To check out the site in the mean time visit hyak.photoshelter.com. Please be aware that it is not complete either from a photo or text standpoint.

Queued up blog posts about recent photo shoots will continue to be queued up until the new site is live.

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The Photo Archive Solutions

May 7th, 2010

This post is mostly geared at other photographers, but it’s available for anyone who wants an insight in some of the backend solutions here.

As all of our clients know, we store digital negatives indefinitely. We can run off prints of images from 2005 (our switchover to digital) and hope to be able to say that for many years go come.

As cameras have gotten more advanced it’s gone from approximately 1GB per shooting hour to 4-8GB per hour currently. This means that I abandoned DVDs and DVD-DLs some time ago as a back up solution except in specific circumstances. All storage is currently done using magnetic hard drives. (I don’t feel that flash-based SSDs are, as of early 2010, ready for general use).

The current workflow is as follows:

  1. CF cards out of the camera are stored during a portrait session, or backed up on site to an Epson Photo Viewer with a 100GB hard drive.
  2. After the shoot CF cards are read into the photo processing workstation (currently a 15″ Macbook Pro for portability).
  3. All CR2 (Canon RAW) files are backed up to a network share and stored indefinitely.
  4. CR2 files are converted to Adobe DNG (Digital NeGative). DNG is an open format suitable for long-term archiving and suggested by the library of congress.
  5. DNG files are imported into an Apple Aperture library where shoot metadata is added, shoot metadata is added and basic editing is done.
  6. The workstation is backed up hourly using Time Machine and Aperture libraries are regularly backed up to the network share.
  7. Photo delivery to clients is done by uploading shoot picks to Photoshelter for the client’s web gallery. I upload full-resolution jpeg images so that even in a worst case scenario printable images are stored on by Photoshelter on both the east and west coasts.
  8. After delivery the digital negatives are exported out of the Aperture library as referenced masters on the network share. I keep the thumbnail (1024px) images so that I can look images up as needed and I can work on the images any time I am on the network.
  9. The network store is backed up to the off-site storage using rsync on a regular basis. For very large updates the specific new files are transported by hand on other media. (Hard drives, DVDs, etc).

Why is my backup workflow this complex? I worked in computers for years while photography was a hobby. In that time I saw a lot of hard drives and other media fail. It is not a question of IF it will fail, but when. While doing photography and other tasks I’ve had hard drives fail all around the world and I feel that the current system lets me keep as much data intact as possible. I also believe that the structure I have set up makes for a simple and relatively inexpensive upgrade path where my data follows along.

Why am I posting this now? Well… hit the part after the break to find out the trials and tribulations of last week’s series, yes, series, of hard drive failures and the specific pieces of hardware I am using right now. Read the rest of this entry »

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