Photo Processing
So...this is an older photo. Taken 5 years ago today. I originally porcessed it with an app called Camera Bag on my iPhone 4. The preset is called Plastic Camera.
I found it while going through some old photos, but that version was less than 1 megapixel. So, I rebuilt it in Lightroom!
This is a 91 Megapixel pano made from 17 images. Here's a peek at the detail
The kids and I hiked up past the upper observatory deck of Multnomah Falls to see the two waterfalls that most visitors never see. Dutchman falls is a smaller cascade over a mound of basalt chunks and then a gentle pour from the pull beneath. There's been a log in front of the falls for a couple years now, but hey, that's nature.
There's nothing quite like the view through a Hasselblad viewfinder. The kids and I took turns framing things up. I'll share those shots when I get them developed.
This is a 76megapixel pano made from 22 images. Click here for a peek at the detail
The trail continues to wind up into the forest, but not before a beautiful view of Weisendanger Falls. There are a bunch of logs to climb if you want to get right up near the falls, but it's pretty easy even for my 7 year old. Weisendanger can fluctuate quite a bit, and this photo shows it at a particularly light flow. I'm looking forward to coming back once the rains start up again and we get more snow pack.
So, I'm not sure how cool this is gonna be, but I've loaded the Lightroom Mobile app onto my iPhone and it's currently syncing my camera roll to Lightroom on my Macbook and of course, Creative Cloud.
So, what I'm hoping this will help with is the loads of snapshots I take with my iPhone, but never remember to import into Lightroom.
I have the Photography plan which give you 20gb of cloud storage. I've avoided turning on and relying on Dropbox syncing for awhile simply because I still don't pay for my Dropbox. It's big enough due to referrals for my regular usage, but not quite big enough to sync all my photos - but this is enough dedicated space that I feel I can rely on it.
I'll update as I learn more about it. I'm hoping that it has some more cool features. I love the idea of having some of the great editing tools from Lightroom right there on my phone for quick edits.
Gavin and Aislynn had a joint birthday party a couple nights ago with a few friends. To keep things simple, we did it at Chuck E. Cheese, which isn't too far from home. Amazingly, Gavin managed to snag the 1000 ticket certificate in there.
...and yes, I hate this place as much as all sane parents, but sometimes you need to keep the crazy outside of your house.
This gif was made in Photoshop from 13 RAW frames taken with my Sony NEX 7.
I've had a few friends ask about hard drive backup/ photo library management in the last few weeks and as I was thinking it through I realized that I hadn't evaluated and updated my own setup in awhile. So I did. I sat down and mapped it out on paper. I thought about redundancy, making things automatic, efficient and offsite. I made a couple changes and I'll share it with you.
First let me give you some background so you can see how my particular needs may differ from your own.
I don't use my home/ photography machine for my day job. I'm a banker and spend my 9-5(ish) hours on a realtively new, but terribly set-up corporate PC laptop. What's that? You feel sorry for me? Thanks. My real computer more than makes up for it.
My home machine is an early 2013 13" Macbook Pro with Retina display. I've got the 256gb SSD. I use Adobe Lightroom as my primary photo managing app and I shoot all of my photos in RAW format. That means the data grows very quickly. For music I use iTunes connect and have most of our non-iTunes purchased music on my wife's computer, a 2011 15" Macbook Pro. She's backed up, but we also have physical copies (CDs) of all the music that wasn't purchased from iTunes - and iTunes connect has digital copies of it too. All of my writing happens in a text editor and all of these text files live in Dropbox.
I also shoot a resonable amount with my iPhone and like to keep those images safe incase my phone takes a swim or something.
So here's my storage setup-
This is pretty basic. I have an iPhone so I use iCloud backup of my phone and I have Photostream turned on. Photostream saves every photo you've taken over the last 30 days on the server and if I open Photos on my Mac, it downloads all of them. I also plug in my iPhone regularly when there's one I want to share here on the site and it goes through my Lightroom workflow and is backed up there.
There are a bunch of services you can use to backup all the photos on your phone automatically. Apple has iCloud Photo sharing which is a more robust version of Photostream that stores all your photos on the iCloud server. This can work well, but you will need to pay for a larger storage limit. Flickr, Google and Amazon all have services that do roughly the same thing. I have Flickr's Camera Roll Backup turned on too. It's free and has a 1 TB limit.
My RAW images are saved to the SSD on my machine and managed by Lightroom. iTunes content is stored on this drive as well. At the start of each year I start a new Lightroom catalog and move the previous year's Lightroom catalog to a 2TB external LaCie Porsche Designs drive. This drive contains my previous few year's LR and iPhoto catalogs as well as all video footage and iMovie project data. I store movies (not that many) here as well.
I have a free Dropbox account which is around 9.5 gb in size (Thanks friends that have signed up!). I save all documents and finished Images in my Dropbox folder. This is my first backup and not everything is covered, but because Dropbox creates a local folder on my machine and it is all saved to the Dropbox servers, all of my documents and final edited images are backed up once. I really like this setup because I can get to the stuff I'm working on from any computer with an internet connection and I can just log in to Dropbox when I get a new computer.
For the next step I chose an automatic offsite backup in the cloud. This second backup accomplishes 2 things. First it is automatic and secondly it is offsite. There are a few options, but I really like Backblaze. They have a really great native interface that runs in the system preferences area of your Mac and gives some great control for upload speed and scheduling. Backing up one machine and attached drives costs $5 a month. That is not a typo. Cheap, fast and complete. Did I mention that they backup attached drives?
I have my entire machine and my 2TB external drive backed up with Backblaze. One of the other great features is that they have a really well made iPhone app that allows you to access most of your saved files remotely (as long as your iPhone has a way to open or view the file).
This backup option is pretty handy for downloading individual files and it also takes care of one really specific scenario. Backblaze keeps up to four weeks of file versions so if you've deleted or modified a file you can still get it back for a month. You can also download a complete copy of your data, but it will take awhile. I have another option for a situation where I need a copy of everything.
I've already got offsite covered. I've got multiple copies of my most important documents and it's all happening automatically, but I've still got one more backup. I have a second LaCie 3TB drive where I've created a clone of my computer and the main external drive. I update this drive at least once a month and it usually lives at my office, so it is also offsite. I treat this as my bail-out for catastrophic failure. In other words, I don't have to download anything, I just plug this one in and everything is there and ready to go.
Quick Update: A few folks have asked what software I use to copy my data for this clone. I use SuperDuper, but I do it manually instead of automatically as it is usually offisite.
There's a certain level of comfort in knowing that you have a physical redundant copy of everything.
So, to wrap it up, here are the basics:
There are Four important pieces to having piece of mind with backups. Automatic. Efficient. Off-Site. Redundant. This setup covers them all.
A couple quick notes-
Why not Time Machine? I used it for awhile, but it is slow, there is almost no user control and it has always bogged down my system and hogged hard drive space. No Thanks!
You might be thinking that I don't have a lot of storage space for a photographer and you'd be right. I am pretty ruthless with the editing and probably only keep about 4x what I post to the world. I am starting to think about what to do when the archives and my current year are too big for a standalone drive, but I haven't settled on anything yet. I think that I'll likely move away from doing a cloud based backup for older stuff and just move to offsite clones of the archives, but that could change. Could be an array instead. I'll update when the time comes.
Jim Goldstein, on being picky about what you put out there-
No critic can be harsher about your work than you. The tougher and pickier you become the better the odds the work you show will be your best. Personally I think 98% of what I have in my library is “crap”. I find I sit and stew on my work more than ever.
Every person I talk to who is just getting started hears this from me," Be ruthless when editing photos."
I stole this post from my other site Gotakepictures.net Because Jim's post was so good it deserves a couple links.
Great article today by Randall Armor on PetaPixel entitled Who’s Your Dada? This isn't just another stupid Instagram rant He makes the comparison of photo filters to pre-distressed jeans.
Jeans used to be a journey, not a destination; a promise, not a product. In the way they shrank, faded, and eventually ripped and disintegrated, they reflected the accumulation of our life’s adventures, our authentic experience.
But like so much else in our post-modern smorgasbord of infinite choice and empty meaning, fashion jeans have traded the journey for the destination, the promise for the product. We want our jeans, and perhaps by extension ourselves, to look like they’ve been somewhere without the inconvenience of actually having to go there. We want them to look that way NOW and at whatever cost. With our fashion jeans, we are buying our own back story.
That’s how I have always regarded the manufactured character of Instagram and its kissin’ cousins. Authenticity seems to have become aspirational instead of just a state of being that exists for no other reason than that it can’t exist any other way. Sound familiar?
I'm not against Instagram and other photo apps of its kind, but I do intentionally avoid trying to make a photo appear to be aged when it's brand new. I'm not a fan of fake light leaks on digital photos or the yellowing that comes from years of chemical breakdown creeping into photos of something that happened last week.
I started shooting with film again this week. I'm anxious to see how they turn out, but a large part of the excitement has to do with the process. There's something different about loading the film into the back of a camera and winding each frame forward. Choosing aperture and shutter speed with a chart or a meter. There is an intentionality and an unknown about the process that you can see in the prints. But you see, that's just it. These prints are the result of this process.
I prefer that photos retain the character of the camera and process that produced them. l have to also mention that I do use Instagram and VSCOCam and need to ask you to overlook the occasional slip up if you catch me posting a photo that looks a little too pre-distressed...
I had the honor of chaperoning Caedon's fieldtrip this week to downtown Portland. One of the places we visited was the First Congregational Church which was built in 1891. All of the kids were pretty fascinated by the giant arches, the ornate wood carvings everywhere, and of course the amazing stained glass.
That's an Instrument? | 365 Project | May 23rd, 2013 | 18mm, f/3.5, ISO 400, 1/30, Developed in Lightroom
Of course, like any good church, there's a lot of symbolism built into every nook and cranny and though it was a fieldtrip for our public elementary school, we got to talk about what it all means.
Stained Glass | 35mm, f/1.8, ISO 400, 1/250, Developed in Lightroom
Come Unto Me | 35mm, f/1.8, ISO 400, 1/400
These images were all taken with the Sony NEX 7. The first wide angle shot is the kit lens as wide open as it goes. The other two are with the 35mm prime. As with most all of my photos, they were developed in Lightroom and the RAW files from this camera are fantastic! So much detail in the shadows!
