The Amateur Photographer
Hello everyone and welcome to The Amateur Photographer this month. Our previous columnist, John Garrett, has packed up his gear and followed his heart into capturing moments.
My name is Mark Abiodun and henceforth, I will be your companion in the world of photography. I have taken over this column because like John, I love taking photographs. We also share an interest in making some money from our art, to pay for the expensive toys that go with our particular interests. Unlike John, I do not have so many years of experience, but I’ve had an EOS for the last 11 years.
I remember that first EOS IX, it was beautiful. Lovely champagne coloured metal body. Just beautiful. Nostalgia over, 2007 is here and having played about with a couple of cheaper digital cameras, I have invested in the EOS 400d. The beauty of that choice is that I am able to utilise my existing lenses and accessories to produce the quality of images I wanted in no time at all.
My favourite lens is 24–85mm USM lens with a 67mm diameter, the colour even nicely matched my silver 400d body which was an unexpected bonus. So, I now have a digital SLR. I have a 2GB CompactFlash card. I have time. I have subjects. I have my eye for a shot. I start generating pictures - weddings, parties, events, conceptual pictures, portraits, landscapes – name it, I’d snap it.
I upload it to my notebook, edit, publish to web, print, email – distribute. Then what? I am left with thousands of pictures on my notebook. I decide to archive on DVD as it is probably one of the most cost effective ways to store your pictures. However, this is an offline method that poses a problem if you want to retrieve your images because one snap you took and discarded becomes a hot image for some unforeseen reason.
So I trawl through the stack of DVDs, cursing and muttering under my breath that I should know better. I work in I.T., I present solutions to problems like this to the government and security organisations and then it arrives. Enlightenment (cue heraldic music). External hard drives for the prosumer have become one of the fastest growing arenas in storage sales.
Consumers have become fashionable again! The amount of digital media that is being generated, distributed and collaboratively refined is revving up demand for storage. Data, images and video content are getting more and more byte-intensive. With your average entry level camera at 5 Megapixel and your camera phone at 3 Megapixel, you can see how the growth in storage requirements is being fuelled by advances in technology.
The great thing is that these technological advances are also bringing down the cost of storage as well. Over the last 10 years, the cost of storage has dropped substantially. The cost of your average solid state storage has similarly dropped. In certain segments, the prices paid for storage have almost crashed with prices for a 2GB USB key at under a tenner.
So, your requirements are rising, costs are decreasing, but the solutions are getting more sophisticated. Which do you choose?
Perhaps that choice comes down to what kind of imagesmith you are. How intensively do you work on your images? How much scratch space do you need to have available? Which of the plethora of solutions would suit your particular style of
working?
Well, I am fortunate to be of some assistance. I have my grubby little mitts on a Lacie d2 Quadra drive with 320GB lurking under the hood and I am not afraid to share my findings. But first, I must state my first rule of kit, technology kit especially:
Manuals are for when things go wrong. In my opinion, you should be able to plug it in, drop the CD/DVD in the drive and it is plain sailing from there. Typical man, I know, but being of above average intelligence, one must acquire things that just…well, work. It was to my delight that the Lacie drive seemed to do just that.
Housed in a sturdy metal enclosure, it felt at home in my studio surrounded by my other toys. The Quadra in the name points to the USB 2.0, FireWire (400 and two 800 ports) and the funky eSATA connection. You are versed on the other three connections I am sure but one of the main advantages that eSATA has, lies in it’s performance when you start looking at greater resilience in your external storage. Which I’ll touch on later.
Powered and loaded, the drive itself was found by Disk Utility and that was pretty much it. Away it went to merrily format the drive ready to be mounted. Once completed, I wanted to perform an immediate backup of my notebook. The Retrospect software was very easy to configure, 2 clicks later we were happily backing up my desired folders.
Time for a cuppa.
Now let’s use this baby as an external drive. Easy enough, especially with my trial of the new Extensis Portfolio 8, which has as main features the ability to archive, catalogue, sort and publish your portfolio to the web if that is what you fancy. The interesting thing I found, was the Smartgalleries option which allows you to group images into sets of your own choosing, much like you do in Aperture but a lot more intuitive. So I started the process of addressing my sloppy collection into something more manageable and productive.
The drive, once formatted, is plug and play (see rule1) so that made it easy for me to hop from machine to machine and retrieve files that had been kept all over the place – including my DVD archive. The ease of tidying so many images, the fact that you can migrate up the capacity chain and still interface with what you started with just makes me just love this drive. So, I have achieved what seemed impossible at the start of this journey.
I have my images tidy, catalogued, ready to be more productive. These drives allow you to utilise the fact that eSATA drives do not share a bus and are able to achieve blistering transfer rates upto 3Gbits/sec in a reasonably idiot-proof way.
You can setup a RAID array quickly, cheaply and at some of the fastest transfer rates you can get because of the eSATA capabilities of these drives, although you will need to add a card like the Sonnet Tempo as no current Macs ship with eSATA.
As I draw to the end of this article, I am thinking ahead to what issues you as photographers would like to see addressed by MacLife and this column especially. I’d like to invite your feedback on the content and direction of future articles.
I’d also like you to write in, if you have any tips to pass on. Please contact me at photography@macwarehouse.co.uk Thank you for taking the time to read this far, I hope you have enjoyed it and will read the next edition.