Photography
If you weren't already aware of it, there is another site where I write called gotakepictures.net. My aim there is to talk about the process and motivation to get out there and make images. A new post went up today called More Than a Snapshot.
I'd love it if you'd stop by!
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.
I'll start this with a preface- Gear doesn't make the good photos- your vision is responsible for that. By now, you have heard this plenty of times so there's your reminder and lets just leave it at that.
Another thing that I have found to be true - There is great enjoyment that comes from using great cameras, lenses, film and software.
I also believe in balance. I don't believe in hanging on to gear I don't use so any piece that I add better be efficient and hold its own.
There are so many different types of camera kits out there and I've come to a personal preference - at least for this time during my photographic journey. The way I see it, here are the types:
Medium Format
Film versions of all of these
Here's what I'm using: I shoot very casually with my iPhone. My dedicated cameras over the last few months have been a Interchangeable lens Mirrorless model and a vintage film SLR. They are roughly the same size, and size is a major factor in why I've chosen them.
As of today the Sony NEX 7 and the Sony Zeiss 24mm f/1.8 is my main kit. It’s a great 35mm equivalent set up. It allows me to know that there is literally no better lens I could put on my camera and very few Crop sensors that will give better performance. In fact, 1 year ago, the only way to get better technical images was to move to a Nikon D800- or perhaps a Sony RX-1. I also regularly use the Sony 50mm f/1.8 and the Sony kit zoom lens when my 24 just isn't wide enough.
I also use a 35mm film Olympus OM-1 that -as far as I can tell- was made when I was about 4 years old. My favorite lens is a wide angle 24mm, f/2.8. On this camera the 24 has a wider field of view as it is projecting the image onto a 135mm "full frame" of film. The Sony uses a sensor that is smaller, so the image from the same focal length is smaller.
Today I have two choices that I’ve been contemplating.
First of all, I love this focal length. For that reason, I’ve been considering the Fujifilm X100S. It has the same 35mm equivalent focal length and the same size APS-C sensor as my NEX 7. There are so many people that are absolutely in love with the Fujifilm cameras for their handling, and the rendering of the X-Trans Sensor. The X100s' fixed lens design makes it significantly smaller than my Sony combo, which makes a compelling argument for getting one. It will fit right into my daily bag or jacket pocket without the need for a case.
There is the thought that the Fuji might make my current kit sort of redundant and that one of them would get far less use.
I really like the Sony camera line, the feel in hand and the photo making process with my NEX. I know that the Sony A7 full frame will be a natural and familiar upgrade path and will give even greater low-light, shallow depth of field and weather proof(ish) performance. The A7 body is about $400 more than the X100s, but that doesn't include lenses that will cover the full frame sensor.
The A7 would mean a move to a new lens or set of lenses that are large enough to cover the full frame sensor. I can use my current NEX lenses with it, but they would work in crop mode, giving significantly lower resolution than on my NEX 7 and negating some of the benefits of the larger sensor. That means that even after I save up the money to purchase this body, it will work best with my older manual OM lenses until I can afford to purchase an FE prime. I could sell some or all of my current E mount lenses ( 50mm f/1.8, kit 18-55, Zeiss 24, f/1.8) to buy one of the FE Zeiss lenses or a manual focus Voigtlander Prime.
Both of these cameras serve different purposes. Because I feel so strongly about Sony as a company and an innovator, I think that I’ll likely move to the A7 (or more likely its successor) kit eventually. To me, the image quality and the raw malleability and information contained in the files is astounding. It is the way of the future. Although the pocketable Fuji kit is a little redundant paired with my NEX 7, it is a good compliment to the full-frame A7. So, it really comes down to strategy.
For now, I've decided to wait on the Sony Full frame upgrade and add the Fujifilm X100S. In fact I ordered it last Saturday and it arrived 2 days ago.
I finished my first 365 Project on October 1st which means there's a lot to choose from. I've narrowed it down to these. You can click or tap on each photo to view them full-screen. Thanks for following along this year!
Blue Eyed Girl | November 5th
Spray Park | July 11th
Emily Hawk, Christmas Tree Hunter | Dec 8th
Oceanside Sunset | October 21st
Ready for a Spaceship Ride | October 18th
Portland Rain is Back | September 28th
Shaun Desert- Alvord Salt Flats | Sept 20th
Artificial Pile | Alvord Playa | September 20th
Morning Reflection | September 21st
Van Life- Mann Lake | September 20th
Sticks | Fish Lake | September 19th
Start 'Em Early | August 28th
Overcast | August 9th
13 years | August 12th
Looking For a Pool | June 29th
Creative Amplification | E. Hawthorne | August 1st
Faces | July 19th
Growing by Sun | July 20th
Wild West Girl | July 18th
Blowin' Bubbles | July 4th
Give Me a Hug | September 8th
Ice Cream Smile | June 22nd
Licking the Spoon | June 9th
Courter | June 5th
Last Beams | June 4th
Ka-Nee-Tah Sunset | May 26th
New Face | May 26th
That's An Instrument? | May 23rd
Footwork | May 18th
Staged | May 6th
Climbing | April 28th
Haleakala Sunrise | April 21st
Tiki | April 21st
Beach Reflection | Ka'anapali, Maui | April 23rd
5 Years | April 2nd
Wednesday Weekend | April 4th
Pots | March 29th
Steam Clean | March 14th
His Middle Name is Noble | Feb 24th
Denver 16th St Mall | Feb 19th
Smeared Steel Bridge | Jan 31st
Breaking Through | January 13th
Overpass | Feb 5th
Tea House Shaun | January 17th
Sizing It Up | November 9th
Isolated Snow | January 18th
Wahclella Falls | March 4th
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.
So, now that the full announcement, previews, first image samples and first criticisms and praise for the Sony A7 and A7r are here I have a few more thoughts. The A7 is what I and many of my friends value- Top notch Image Quality but smaller and lighter than what has been previously avialable.
I'm gonna put one piece of criticism out there.
Lenses. What's the deal with Sony and lens planning?
How is it that Sony isn't just releasing amazing Primes right out of the chute for this system?
The 55 f/1.8 Zeiss is great, but why not go faster with the 35? We know it's possible because they already put out an amazing f/2 on the RX-1. I've heard rumors that the short mount distance on the RX-1 makes this lens work, but no one would have complained about an extra centimeter of length due to the interchangeable mount. And why not a 24mm and an 85mm? They could have totally changed the reputation among serious photographers regarding their lenses if they'd just done it right.
Instead, they are getting the same criticisms they've always gotten for the NEX system. Great bodies. Bummer of a lens selection.
Also,why does Sony refuse to go faster than 1.8 on mirrorless?
They need to take notes from Fuji who is pretty much universally praised for the quality of their X series lenses. That's a way to release a system. There isn't really a missing focal length in their native offerings and they are comparing favorably to the Zeiss Touit lenses. That says a lot.
Sony is saying that there are 15 full frame lenses on the way, but there aren't even 15 E mount lenses for NEX APS-C right now. There are a few more if you include third party offerings from Zeiss, Sigma and Rockinon, but they mostly duplicate Sony's own offerings.
I might be missing something…but 3 years in and they are still missing a few key lenses. No 75, no 100, no fast zooms at all. Every zoom is 3.5 and the only two that are constant are f4. Perhaps more importantly, the quality of the above lens selection is really hit and miss. There are some great lenses in that list, but there isn't the consistency to build a good reputation.
If they want to be taken seriously and convert pro Canon and Nikon owners they need to develop competitors to the long fast zooms. They might be big compared to current NEX offerings, but they should be able to make them smaller than FX and L lenses because of the short mount distance.
How about a 70-200 f/2.8, an 18-105 f/2.8 or a 14-24 f/2.8?
It seems to me that the majority of pros using full frame canon and Nikon care way more about sharp fast zooms than primes.
By contrast, almost no one uses zooms on mirror less cameras because they don't make any nice ones that are sharp anywhere but in the center.
The Sony guys are talking about using glass from other mounts using adaptors, but they need to develop native e mount lenses if they hope for people to switch. They can't make folks go elsewhere to for their go-to lenses.
So, if you've read my blog at all before, it's clear that I'm a huge Sony fan. They are pushing the envelope like no other company out there. I only put this criticism out as a fan who wants to see Sony succeed. They could really make a huge shift in the camera market and the perception of mirrorless systems in general with this new camera. I just hate to see them fumble on the lens part.
Image from Digicame-info.com
I love gadgets. So it's no surprise that I make it pretty clear what I'm using, and occasionally, what I find intriguing. About a year and a half ago I bought my first modern digital Interchangeable lens camera and as I detailed here, I chose the Sony NEX system.
Sony is a company that has shown a willingness to push the boundaries. Here are some examples: Release of the NEX (First mirrorless APS-C system), RX-1 (First Full Frame fixed lens Mirrorless camera), Focus peaking system, and the Alpha SLT system. They make the sensors used in Nikon's flagship Full frame cameras and the sensor used in the iPhone 5 and 5s.
So, with the release and subsequent success of the RX-1 it isn't that much of a surprise that Sony is only a few days from releasing an interchangeable lens Full Frame Mirrorless system. It will use the same lens mount as the NEX system and the first 2 models will carry a center-mounted Electronic Viewfinder.
Digicame-info.com posted a couple photos which have been confirmed by Andrea at Sony Alpha Rumors. To my eyes, the camera looks like a hybrid. The body and top controls are like an RX-1, the grip and mount are from the NEX bodies, and the hump on top of the body for the EVF that looks like an old school pentraprism box.
There have been quite a few exceptional photographers that have moved to mirrorless systems as their primary kit over the past couple years. Trey Ratcliff recently started using the NEX 7 for his epic landscapes. Zack Arias is a hardcore Fuji X series user. TED photographer Duncan Davidson has been using the RX-1 as his main camera for day-to-day use. Aaron Courter, who is an exceptional Portland based photographer and a long time friend has been incorporating the Fuji X cameras into his personal work, wedding and portrait business with great success.
I'm in love with the Sony NEX. I never even considered a DSLR camera because of the size, the weight and what I perceived to be its imminent demise. Up until now, you couldn't really get the same image quality and crazy shallow depth of field from a mirrorless camera, but I think the A7 and A7r will be the start of a large scale move away from large DSLR bodies for most photographers.
Sure, there are some times when the larger camera really makes sense. The Mirrored design still allows for faster focusing in sports contexts and there is certainly an expectation in event photography that will take awhile to pass. In addition, the larger bodies do have many features still missing from the new breed of mirrorless cameras and certainly handle big glass much better.
This is a moment. It feels like the rise of ultra portable notebooks such as the Macbook Air which have almost negated the need for more powerful desktops for all but the most demanding of users. I believe we are witnessing the birth of the future of photography.
OM-1 | 365 Project | August 9th, 2013 | 35mm, f/4.5, ISO 400, 0.6 sec
I just picked up a fantastic new piece of gear this past week. The Olympus OM line was introduced in the early 70's and set the bar for compact 35mm SLRs. It has a large selection of lenses available and this one came with a 28mm f/3.5 and a 50mm f/1.8 thanks to Tim Taylor.
It's about the same size as my NEX 7 and fits into my larger camera bag with my digital rig.
I've got my first roll of Kodak Ektar 100 color film on board and plan to post some images as soon as they're developed.
I just finished shooting a roll on the Yashica TL super that I mentioned a few weeks ago and will post those soon too. I enjoyed shooting film, but that camera was a little unwieldy because of it's size and weight.
The best part is that the cost to get started with a kit like this is close to $100.
I spent time shooting film before, but I never really knew what I was doing. Shooting with a completely manual camera like this makes you think, and it really makes you consider each shot. It's not going to replace digital for me, but it sure is a good exercise.
