Make it cost shoot 4: Lensbaby at Times Square /  by Andrew Dacey

Lensbaby at Times Square

While I was in New York I made the pilgrimage to B&H Photo. The first time I went it was pretty overwhelming because of the sheer size and the number of people, plus I really didn't have anything in particular in mind to check out.

Later on, I made another trip when I had some things in mind to purchase. One of the things I really wanted to try was a Lensbaby. I'd been really interested with the soft-focus optic and I had something in mind for a shoot for my project that I thought would work really well for it. I picked it up as well as a couple of other useful toys, like a Wacom tablet, which I'm still not using nearly as much as I should but am really enjoying when I do. 

Rockefeller Center plus Lensbaby

When I read through the soft-focus optic's instructions I noticed it said that it didn't work well in high contrast situations. I'd been doing a lot of night shooting in New York so I of course promptly ignored this advice and took it out on the streets of midtown Manhattan at night. What I got from that shoot were some really wild results where every light source revealed the aperture pattern used in the optic in a very strange and distorted way. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. 

Armed with this strange effect I instantly thought this could really shine at Times Square and I planned to head out to put it to use there. Ultimately though, I didn't get much during that shoot that I was all that happy with. The above image is the best of the bunch from Times Square but I'm still not thrilled with it. 

Lensbaby on Lexington

But, I did keep shooting with the Lensbaby on the rest of the way back to my apartment and I definitely got some better results near the Rockefeller Centre and on Lexington Ave.  It's definitely a stylized look but it can be a little fun and it's definitely not your typical night shoot.

Make it cost shoot 3: Staten Island ferry /  by Andrew Dacey

While I was in New York I really wanted to get some shots of lower Manhattan from across the water. The Staten Island ferry proved to be a great vantage point, especially just after sunset. I timed my trips so that on the way across the sun was setting and on the way back it had set.

Unfortunately, it ended up being horribly windy on the trip, especially on the way back and it was very difficult to get a steady shot. This is one is my favorite from the trip but I would have liked to have gotten some more keepers. 

Make it cost project shoot 2: St. Patrick's Day Parade /  by Andrew Dacey

As mentioned for shoot 1, work sent me to New York for 6 weeks in 2012. I happened to be there for St. Patrick's Day so I was excited to try to check out the parade as one of my shoots for my challenge.

In the end, I has missed a lot of the beginning of the parade but I ended up catching the later parts from alongside Central Park. I wasn't really happy with any of the shots of the parade that I took but I did really like this candid shot I got of one of the police officers at the parade. All of them were very friendly with me and were very courteous and even made sure that other people didn't block my shots! 

Not my best work but the point of the challenge was to get me shooting more regularly and this was something I really wanted to cover while I was in New York. This became a bit of a recurring them during my challenge that some of the shoots that I had envisioned ahead of time ended up being nothing like what I thought they might be. 

Make it cost project shoot 1: Manhattan at Night /  by Andrew Dacey

Manhattan flower shop

These updates are a long time coming. I'd really wanted to get on top of these earlier but, better late than never. 

I ended up being very late on getting started on my Make it Cost project last year. I finally got started when my work sent me down to New York City for 6 weeks. That really reinvigorated my creative energy and I got into taking a lot of street shots at night, since I was working during the day. I stayed in an apartment in midtown Manhattan and even just walking within a few blocks I could find so many interesting subjects. 

I saw this man looking at the flower shop and I framed it up and just waited for him to move in to look closer. Finally when he leaned forward I knew I had the shot I was looking for. I felt the colours of the flowers were distracting and that it worked far better as the black and white here. I liked it so much that it also made it into my Urban portfolio. 

Relaunched site /  by Andrew Dacey

This has been a bit of a crazy year for me in general, for some reasons I'll be sharing in the near future. Because of that I've been quite remiss in updating the site. But, during that time I had been investigating moving to  SquareSpace for my hosting. I'd heard a lot of good things about them and while I liked using Wordpress, I didn't like having to manage everything myself. The big killer feature for me though was the responsive design aspect and that it will handle mobile devices out of the box. That was a big area I wanted to address with my old design and had just never gotten around to it.

So, over the last month or so I began a complete overhaul of my website and I've finally gotten it to the point where I'm ready to push it out with the new design. The domain name transfer has been processed so hopefully by the time this posts it will hit the new site, if not it should be within a day at the most.

I've completely redone my galleries, the old links should still work but I'm not publicizing them anymore. I've cut things down to 2 main portfolios "urban" and "rural". The urban one is a little bigger for now as I've done far more of that type of work but I'm hoping the rural will grow as well. Ideally, I'd like to keep these portfolios as living documents of my best work and I'd like to limit them to no more than 20 images at their peak. 

I'd like to promise more frequent updates in the future but I've made that promise in the past and it's fallen through. I'm still struggling with getting a good update schedule in place and at this point I think it's better to just prove things with actions rather than promises up front. Once I've hit on a good schedule and stuck to it for awhile I can start making more promises about keeping it up. 

Feel free to let me know what you think about the new design.

 

Site problems /  by Andrew Dacey

Noticed today that I was getting some odd errors from SmugMug today so I've had to temporarily disable the SmugMug plugin. That's broken the images on 1 post but has fixed the rest of the issues. Apologies for any inconvenience, I hope to have this fixed up more permanently in the near future.

Are you a maximizer when it comes to photography? /  by Andrew Dacey

I've been reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin and last night I finished off the July chapter which focused on money. In that chapter there was a section which talked about 2 different styles of decision-making processes for buying; what Gretchen refers to as a "satisficer" as opposed to a "maximizer":

Satisficers (yes, satisficers) are those who make a decision or take action once their criteria are met. That doesn't mean they'll settle for mediocrity; their criteria can be very high, but as soon as they find the hotel, the pasta sauce, or the business card that has the qualities they want, they're satisfied. Maximizers want to make the optimal decision. Even if they see a bicycle or a backpack that meets their requirements, they can't make a decision until after they've examined every option, so they can make the best possible choice.

In reading the description of the maximizer I burst out laughing because it described me to a tee. My girlfriend had read the book before me and I asked her if she thought the same thing and she nodded vigorously as I read aloud that description. I like to make informed decisions, I like to know about the things I'm going to purchase before I purchase them. Now just said like that it doesn't sound too unreasonable, but I tend to take it to extremes. I'll spend months doing research deliberating over the pros and cons of different choices, I'll do extensive online searches for information, I'll pour over reviews, I'll try to check out each option in person (sometimes more than once). How bad can it get? A few years ago when I was thinking about buying a barbecue I got to the point where I was reading through reviews on a charcoal review site.

After I put down the book for the night I started thinking that maybe I'm a maximizer in other parts of my life too. I've been spending a lot of time trying to figure out what's been holding me back in pursuing my photography more seriously and I think this is a big part of it. I'm a geek by nature anyway so it's not too surprising that I lust over all sorts of expensive photo gear and it's really easy to say to myself that I need "the best" gear. I also spend an tremendous amount of time reading photo books, watching online training videos and listening to photography podcasts all in order to learn more about photography. While the learning is great and I've certainly expanded my knowledge I'm not applying it, am I waiting for some magic point where I "know it all"?

Taking it further, I struggle a lot with expressing what my vision is and finding my voice, both photographically and even with this site. I don't post as often on the blog because I haven't figured out what I should be talking about. I don't shoot as often as I should because I haven't figured out what I should be shooting. I don't pursue paid photography work because I don't know what paid work I should be pursuing. As a "maximizer" this becomes paralysing because I'm used to not making a decision before I've weighed all the options. What I need to do is remind myself that none of these things have to be permanent decisions and that I may just have to be willing to try something and then change directions if that doesn't work because waiting until I figure it all out may mean that I never figure it all out.

Looking online I'd say there's a lot more people like me out there. Browse any photo site or forum and you'll find tons of people spending hours upon hours of time debating every technical aspect, which camera is "better", what's the "best" lens, which camera has the lowest noise at high ISOs, etc, etc, etc. Instead of going out there and shooting with the equipment we do have we chose to sit in front of our computers in the never-ending search for that best possible choice instead of being satisfied with what we have, which more than likely meats all of our criteria.

2012 Challenge - Make it cost /  by Andrew Dacey

Okay, I'm a little late on posting this. I had the idea just before New Years but then I let other things keep me from posting this a little earlier. I started even second-guessing myself about posting it at this point but the entire goal of this post is to challenge myself for the upcoming year and to hopefully inspire others to do the same. The other important piece of this is that this is about setting goals and challenging yourself and while New Year's is a typical time for doing this there's absolutely no reason why you can't start at any time in the year with any time frame that works for you. I've been thinking a lot about what I want to achieve photographically in 2012 and really it all kept coming back to the idea that I want to shoot more often. The other piece of this was I wanted to make sure to give myself a strong incentive to follow through with this goal. Last year while attending Dane Sander's Fasttrack Photographer workshop Dane talked about when change happens and what it takes for it to happen. One of the pieces for making change happen that he talked about is what is it going to cost you. If the status quo isn't costing you anything then you're not going to change. This is often where New Year's resolutions fall apart, how often do you make a resolution and even while making it know that you're not going to keep it?

I knew that I wanted to shoot more but I needed to come up with something more specific that I could measure. In the end I decided to settle on the number of shoots that I'd do in 2012. I didn't shoot very often in 2011 so this is a good measure for me. I've decided to aim for 15 shoots in 2012. Now to clarify, what I mean by a "shoot" is not simply going out for an afternoon shooting but I mean something where I've come up with a specific concept and then shot that concept. Alternatively, if someone is paying me to shoot something then that session will count as a "shoot". 15 may sound low to some people but by that criteria I only did 1 or 2 shoots all of last year so this is a big increase. I also have a full-time day job so I'm most likely going to be limited to evenings and weekends for this unless I take time off.

So with my goal covered the next thing was to come up with a cost for this, what was failing going to cost me? I decided to go for the "all or nothing" approach. If I fail in this goal this year I will be giving away all of my camera gear. Should I fail I will setup some type of contest for determining who will receive my Nikon D700, 24-70 f/2.8, 50mm f/1.4 and any other equipment I currently have or may acquire this year. Basically I'm saying that if I can't make shooting a priority in my life then shooting won't be in my life.

Now obviously this is a contest which I have no intention in having to follow through with but the point is this is creating a motivation for me to get out there and shoot more often. To get 15 shoots done this year I'm going to have to average at least 1 a month and then manage to swing 2 shoots a month at least 3 times to make up the goal. I hope to post status updates throughout the year to keep you all apprised on how things are going and what challenges I'm facing.

Now for the inspiration part, I'd really like to put this challenge out to you as well. Are you willing to set some goals and make failing cost for you? What goals do you have, what will you make it cost? If you're willing to take up my challenge (and it doesn't even have to be photo-related) then I encourage you to share your goals publicly as well as what you'll do if you fail. To help track this I'm going to encourage people to share their stories on Twitter and Google+ using the hashtag #Makeitcost. I'm really hoping that I can inspire others to challenge themselves to do more great things and to stick to it. It doesn't matter what the goal is or what the cost is, but make it something that will challenge yourself and that costs enough that you won't want to fail.

Incidentally, you can follow me on Twitter at @AndrewDacey and on Google+as Andrew Dacey.

Shooting through a problem /  by Andrew Dacey

Back in October I flew down to Florida to attend the Vanelli and Friends Bahamas cruise photography workshop. I hope to have some more details about the workshop up soon but I wanted to share one of the images from the shoot as I'm really happy with the shot. However, I think it also helps illustrate some of my personal approach to dealing with problems you encounter while you're shooting. I've shot plenty of times in colder weather so I'm aware of the concerns about condensation when coming in from the cold. As many people can tell you, this also works in the other direction in hot and humid climates when going outside from an air conditioned space. I've shot in SE Asia before but when I was there I wasn't staying in heavily air conditioned rooms and it was also toward the end of the dry season so condensation wasn't much of a concern. Nassau, however, was a completely different matter and when I pulled my camera out of my bag it fogged up badly. When I put the camera up to my eye all I got was a huge amount of blur. As I mentioned, I'm more used to shooting in cold weather so I'm used to having my viewfinder fog up when I'm outside. I'll admit that at the time I mistakenly thought that it was just my viewfinder and LCD that were fogged up, it just didn't occur to me that the front element of my lens was fogged as well. Perhaps because of this, I simply didn't let it get me down and when I saw shots I took them, I just kept shooting through the problem. Because of this determination to just keep shooting in spite of being barely able to see what I was framing I took this shot.

As you can see, things are pretty fogged up (and this was after my lens had started to clear up). But, I loved the look of these side streets and when I saw that man walking towards me I knew I had to grab a couple of frames.

Now I do really like the mood of the fog that's created in this shot but there's just so much detail lost. Thinking it might be worth salvaging though, I played with the sliders in Lightroom a bit but just wasn't very happy with it. On a lark, I decided to see if it might work as a black and white so I swung over to Photoshop to use Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro. Playing with some of the presets, I found that they did pull out a lot more detail in the shot but I wasn't happy with losing all of the nice colour. I quickly realized though that this would be a perfect application for the technique I'd described in my Making Montreal posts. The fact that Vanelli had recently talked about using that technique as well may have played into it being in my mind. I found a preset that I liked and blended it using the luminosity blending mode and I was amazed with what I ended up with. I went back in and further tweaked things like brightening up the man's face a bit and playing with the structure sliders. I liked the look but found that I'd lost a bit of the glow to the highlights so I went into Color Efex and applied the glamor glow filter to bring but some of that look to the highlights. On the advice of Vanelli, I burned down the edges a bit and also corrected the slight tilt to the image. This is the final result:

What was most impressive about this was that I got to about 90% of the look in this image in probably less than 5 minutes of work thanks to Silver Efex Pro. By applying it as a smart filter I kept things in a non-destructive space and that allowed me to go back in to tweak things based on the feedback I got, and even allowed me to fix the rotation in camera raw. I think this shot really shows the power of the workflow I described in my Montreal posts. But more importantly, I think it also shows how important it is to not give up when you're faced with a problem but instead to work through the problem and just keep shooting. I could have easily written off my camera as useless until the fog cleared and if I'd done that I would have missed this opportunity. Instead, I shot through the problem and I ended up with a great happy accident.

How do your filters keep you from getting the shot? /  by Andrew Dacey

This past weekend I participated in Scott Kelby's Worldwide Photo Walk. We had pouring rain predicted for the entire weekend so the walk leader had come up with a rain plan to shoot in a local museum, The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. I hadn't visited that museum in years so it was fun to walk through and look at all the nautical displays. I had fun shooting some abstract shots of a light house lens and also working with some detail shots of the displays. I tend to enjoy shooting abstracts so this was a lot of fun for me. I even tried some handheld HDR shots as the lighting was a little challenging in some situations.

However, other people in the group found the location to be more challenging and this made me think about how our own filters can really limit ourselves from getting the shot. One example of this was that one of the participants commented that he was having a tough time because he was trying to stay at 800 ISO on his camera because the noise wasn't great above that. Now I can't comment on the noise performance for his particular camera (a Nikon D5000) but this really stuck with me. Yes, maybe the noise does get worse above 800 on his camera, however it might also open up possibilities in the difficult lighting. I can't say for certain if he did pass on shots because of this but I did catch myself thinking that way from time to time. I was also trying to stick to around 800 as my "base ISO" in the shooting conditions and I did catch myself thinking at times that my shutter speed was going to be too low to handhold the shot. However, what I tried to do was to catch myself whenever I thought that way and would adjust my ISO. In some parts of the museum I had to go as high as 3200 and arguably could have gone higher. Now I shoot with a Nikon D700 which has incredible high ISO performance but the point is that I decided that getting the shot was more important than the noise. Are the 3200 shots noisier than the 800 shots? Absolutely, but I actually have a shot. I could have easily dismissed the possibility because I'd have to increase my ISO above what I considered "acceptable".

Since the walk I've thought a little more about this and applied it more broadly. Settings are one thing, but what about subjects or entire locations? How easy is it to dismiss a scene as not having anything worth shooting? Once you've put that filter up how likely is it that you won't find anything worth shooting? Even something did present itself would you catch it or would your filter keep you from seeing it?

Don't get me wrong, sometimes that filter is based on experience and a serious evaluation of the scene (conscious or unconscious). However, sometimes that experience can be a double-edged sword. Sometimes we just need to silence that internal critic saying that the shot won't work and be open to the possibility that there is something there. Will it always work? No, but sometimes by opening yourself up to the possibilities presented by a scene you can end up surprising yourself. I know I'm going to try to be more aware of my own filters and giving myself permission to experiment, even if it does mean I fail miserably.

HDR mistake /  by Andrew Dacey

Okay, this one may be obvious to some, especially if you have more HDR experience. But, I figured I'd share it here figuring that if I've made this mistake then someone else is probably unaware of this too. So what was this mistake? It's pretty simple but if you're setting up your HDR shot using auto-bracketing then make sure to pay attention to what your Camera's meter is going to use for the base exposure. I was shooting in aperture priority mode and shooting into a light. Because of this my camera was tending to pick a very high shutter speed to start (exposing for the light). This was a great exposure as part of the bracket but should have been the highest shutter speed in the bracket, not the middle. Adding shutter speed above this wasn't bringing in any further detail. In some cases I even ran into multiple shots in the bracket being shot at 1/8000 since that's the maximum shutter speed on my D700. Obviously that defeats the purpose of the bracketing and this usually meant that I didn't have the slower shutter speeds I needed to bring in the shadow detail. What I should have done was picked a good middle exposure (either with exposure compensation or by switching into manual mode) and started my bracket there.

It happened to me so it could happen to you too, pay attention to your exposure!

Back in action /  by Andrew Dacey

Well the splint came off a few weeks ago and I think my recovery is doing quite well. My hand is still weak and stiff at times but overall I'm feeling pretty good and have been happy with my recovery. The one thing I am finding tough is getting back into the routine with some things after such a long break. Fortunately, I am building up a list of ideas I'd like to post on and I have some other new developments that I hope to share with my readers in the next few weeks.

More to come.

Slight hiatus /  by Andrew Dacey

Going to be taking a bit of a summer hiatus for the blog. I'm currently in the middle of renovations on my house and this last week I broke my hand which makes typing a lot slower. My recovery should take roughly 5 more weeks or so. I'm hoping to still get some posts out during that time but the posting frequency is definitely going to be reduced.

Thanks to all more readers, I hope to have more for you soon.

You backup your files, what about your power? /  by Andrew Dacey

I've been talking a lot about backup lately, and it's an important subject. However, one area tends to get overlooked and that's power. You might be backing up your files but what happens if the power goes out and you lose a pile of work? Surge protectors can be good for protecting you against power surges but if you want to survive a power outage then you need a UPS (uninterruptable power supply, not the courier company). I'll admit that this is one area where I'm a little weaker in too. Finding out good information about how big of a UPS you need is pretty tough. You don't want to have to buy more than you need but you definitely don't want to underestimate your requirements either.

I solved the problem of how big of a UPS I needed by buying one that has a display on the front that shows me how loaded the UPS is, as well as other handy things like the current voltage coming into the UPS. This is great for the piece of mind as I can visually see that I tend to hover below half way on the UPS, telling me that I have plenty of headroom. If I start running some other peripherals then I do see the graph go up higher but so far I seem to be well within the safety zone.

One thing to also watch out for is that most UPSs have a mixture of battery protected outlets and surge protected outlets. Only the battery protected outlets will stay on in a power outage so make sure that you understand how many outlets of each type your UPS has. I thought that I had enough battery protected outlets but it turned out that the power bricks on some of my peripherals blocked some of the outlets and that limited what I could put on battery. In my case, that means that if the power goes out then I'm going to lose my internet connection. Ideally, I would have liked to have that on battery but choosing between it and my external hard drive was an easy decision.

That does bring up the point that not everything needs to be on battery, and that's where the surge protected outlets come in handy. For instance, in a power outage I'm not going to be too concerned about my scanner being out of commission. The main point of a UPS is not to keep you up and running indefinitely, it's meant to give you the time to save your work and shutdown safely. This would be why I opted for the external drive rather than my internet connection, right now I don't tend to work under tight deadlines where I'd need to transfer files so I'd much rather make sure my Time Machine drive was safe.

Aside from the obvious power outages, a UPS can be great for protecting your gear against voltage drops as well. In my case, I live in an older house and when some appliances turn on the lights will dim. I used to not think anything of it but once I plugged in my UPS I started hearing it kick in briefly whenever this would happen and I could see the voltage drop on the display. I'm not certain if I was potentially doing damage to my equipment before this but it's certainly reassuring to see that my UPS will react that quickly and is protecting my computer now.

So invest in a little piece of mind and look into getting a UPS for you machine, it's not a glamorous piece of hardware by any stretch of the imagination but the first time it saves your butt when the power goes out you'll start singing its praises.

So when do you re-sample? /  by Andrew Dacey

A quick follow-up to my post a few weeks ago on dispelling the 72dpi myth. In that post I mostly focused on the intricacies of resolution and why 72dpi doesn't really make sense. The one thing I left off from that post is when do you need to worry about resolution? Or more accurately, when do you re-sample? One of the comments from my post on the 72dpi myth talked a lot about images being resolution independent. As long as you're not changing the pixel dimensions (either adding or discarding pixels) you can freely change the resolution of the image, with no degradation of quality (or change to the file size). The point is that it's all about dimensions. When you're working on screen, you only have pixel dimensions to work with. When you're printing, then you can start thinking in terms of inches (or centimetres if you work in metric). The resolution only becomes an issue then when you're printing.

I think most of the confusion around resolution comes from the idea of re-sampling. Throw that into the mix and suddenly things seem to get really confusing when they shouldn't. Re-sampling really only does 1 of 2 things, it either makes up pixels  or throws them away. So when do you use it?

Making something bigger

Sometimes you may need to increase the number of pixels for an image. Maybe you're trying to scale up the image on screen larger than the original. Or maybe you're going to print a very large print and have determined that the resolution will be too low if you don't scale things up. In both of these cases, re-sampling is your option. There are other tools available for this but they essentially all do the same thing, they increase the image to a target size while maintaining a target resolution.

Making something smaller

These days probably the much more common case will be that you want to make an image smaller. If you're shooting full-res images with your camera you almost certainly want to shrink them down before posting them on-line. For making things smaller we're almost always talking about pixels, you rarely have to worry about an image being too high resolution for printing, unless you're sending the files to a lab and they have a file size restriction.

Save your master files!

That's really about all there is too it, don't worry about re-sampling unless you're making something bigger or smaller. Even then, simply worry about what is important to you. If you're reducing the size for the web then it's only the pixel dimensions you'll have to worry about. The last thing is though, make sure to save a copy of your file in its original resolution before you re-sample. Whenever you re-sample you're going to degrade the quality so you're going to want to make sure to keep your master files untouched when you do this. Make sure that you're saving a copy of the re-sized file.

Lightroom makes all of this easier

Adobe's Lightroom does make this a lot easier, you're not touching your original files for starters. Plus, you only deal with resolution when you export or when you print. If you're exporting for the web, just set the pixel dimensions you want. If you're exporting files to send to a lab, then just set your physical dimensions and your desired resolution. In both cases, Lightroom will do the appropriate re-sampling if necessary during the export process. I don't have any experience with Apple's Aperture but I would imagine that things work similarly for it.

Department of redundancy department /  by Andrew Dacey

Today's post is all about redundancy. Today's post is all about redundancy. Okay, I think I've beaten that joke to death. Seriously though, I've already hit on RAID and that is one form of redundancy but when you're running a business and time is money there's still a lot more to think about in terms of redundancy. Big businesses tend to get pretty paranoid about redundancy. At my day job, everything that's in production is supposed to be fully redundant. We install our servers in pairs that are in different physical buildings, which are often quite a distance apart (if not in a nearby town). My understanding is they even go as far as making sure that the fibre optic cabling from the data centres to the ISPs (and yes, they use more than 1) don't have any points in common. The idea here is that 1 of this buildings could completely go offline and we should be able to have things up and running at the other location as quickly as possible. The other piece of this puzzle is to ensure that whatever took down the first site should not impact the other.

Now this may sound like overkill, the company I'm under contract for is a large financial services company in the US, they have literally millions of dollars on the line if there's an outage so they need this level of protection right? You're just a small self-employed photographer so you don't need something that elaborate right? Wrong. While you may not have to get as paranoid about redundant fibre links and such consider the impact of an outage to your business. While it may not number in the millions it doesn't have to in order to bring your business to its knees. You might only lose out on a few thousand dollars from a missed deadline but how easily can you absorb that loss? So what's your plan if something goes south?

Computers

Let's start with the basics, what happens if your computer dies on you? I've already covered backup options previously but this goes a little further than that. Suppose you're under the gun on a big deadline and the power supply on your computer dies. I'll assume here that you've got a killer backup strategy so you've only lost any changes since your last save (you do save frequently don't you?). Okay so your files are safe but that doesn't do you any good if you don't have a computer to pull them up on now does it? If you're a larger studio then you probably have more than 1 computer in the studio so that's a viable solution. Or how about a laptop? Worst case scenario, do you have a home computer that you could press into service (you are keeping your work computer separate from your home computer right?), does it have all the necessary software installed? Can it get the files you need?

Internet Service

It's a couple hours until your deadline, you just need to upload them to the client's server, but your internet connection has just dropped. You call up your ISP and find out they need to send out a technician to investigate the issue and since you're a residential customer that's going to be 3 days from now. Okay, first of all, what the heck are you doing running your business on a residential internet connection? Yes business internet accounts tend to be a lot more expensive but they usually carry with that expense a higher priority when it comes to outages. Even if you have a business account maybe it's still too long to wait to get it fixed. Do you have a 2nd internet connection with another ISP? If you have a studio separate from your home can you use your home broadband connection? If so, is it with the same provider? What do you do if the outage isn't a problem on your end but is due to a backhoe cutting the ISPs main fibre connection, cutting off the entire city's customers? Sound far fetched? I've seen it happen. Okay, so work and home internet connection are out of the question. Well, can you use your cell phone's data plan to upload the files (probably painfully slow but I'm talking desperation time now)? Or how about the coffee shop's wi-fi connection? Again, probably not the fastest option but could work in a pinch.

Physical location

This one is really tough for the small business. If you have a separate studio then the obvious option is to work out of your house. More importantly though, this really hammers home the importance of having at least 1 offsite backup for your files. If a catastrophe like a fire hits you most likely have other immediate concerns on your plate but you've also lost your livelihood if you're a full-time photographer. How long until insurance pays out? How do you keep your cash flow running in the meantime. Getting back to work might be the furthest thing from your mind but it may be a necessity in order to keep the money flowing.

You

I'll wrap up my thoughts with asking what happens if you're incapacitated or worse? Obviously if you're a one person shop then you're future bookings are more than likely off. But, do you have an assistant that can fill in for you? What about your partner or spouse, how much of the books do they know in order to sort things out if you can't? For that matter, are they even authorized to do so? Worst case scenario, if you die how well protected is your family in terms of not being burdened with a huge debt from you and how able will they be to make a living off your legacy of images? I know it's not a fun topic to think about but how would your feel if your family had no way of benefiting from the wealth of the images you've created over your career?

Test, test, test!

My final closing words will be that whatever options you deem necessary, make sure you test them! With my day job we're required to completely power down each of our major data centres on an annual basis. This is a literal powering down of the building. This forces us to make sure that nothing have slipped in that only runs in 1 data centre or can't be easily failed over. Similarly, it forces us to prove that we can keep fully operational while 1 of the data centres is out of commission. Similarly, this policy can even extend to key people in the company, it's not as frequent but many staffers are required to go on mandatory vacation. During the period of mandatory vacation their access is turned off so that they can't log onto any systems. There are some safeguards in place that can allow them to get it back if necessary but the purpose is to demonstrate that they can be gone for a period of time and things won't fall apart without them. I'm not saying you have to go to all of these extremes but make sure you do test out your redundancy plans before you find yourself having to rely on them.

Dispelling the 72 dpi myth /  by Andrew Dacey

I first wrote my article explaining the difference between DPI and PPI around 10 years ago. To put it in perspective, it originated as a post on Usenet. I posted that article mainly to help clear up the difference in the terms because I was frequently seeing them misused. Way back then I'd always planned a follow-up article on what I like to call the "72 dpi myth". This week's Tech Tuesday instalment seems as good a time as any to finally complete the follow-up piece to that article. Okay, so what the heck is the 72 dpi myth? It's really more of a collection of incorrect ideas about resolution and how it relates to screen display. One of the more common places you'll see it is people recommending to save your images at 72 dpi when posting online. The usual reasoning for this is so that the images are only good for screen display and don't have enough resolution for a good sized print. There are other variations which often quote 72 dpi as the resolution that all images are displayed on screen.

First things first, strictly speaking we're talking about pixels per inch (ppi) not dots per inch (dpi). I'm calling this the 72 dpi myth because that's how I most often hear it. But this post isn't about the terminology, I already have an entire article devoted to that. My concern today is how this myth perpetuates a misunderstanding about resolution. At best, this spreads ignorance and confusion. At worst it can lead people to think that their web images are too low resolution to be of any use from a would-be image thief when they're actually posting very high quality images.

Readers of my DPI vs. PPI article should already understand the issue here; pixels per inch only matters when you're printing. On screen the only thing you have to worry about is the pixel dimensions. The ppi setting does absolutely nothing on-screen! If you're concerned about posting images that can't be printed very large then all you need to do is worry about the pixel dimensions. Do some quick math to figure out what size you could print the image at an acceptable quality. I'd say 150 ppi is about as low as you can go and get any kind of reasonable quality for a smaller print. So with that figure in mind, an image that's 600 pixels on the wide side would only end up being 4" on the long side. I don't think most people are too concerned about people making postcard-sized prints so this can be a good starting point. I'm not trying to throw out any hard and fast rules though, I post my pictures on my stie at larger sizes than that and I'm not overly concerned. Some people are worried even about this size and won't go above 400 pixels on the long dimension. Figure out your comfort level and go from there.

My point here is that on the screen it's all about pixel dimensions, not the ppi setting. The ppi setting is just a small piece of information that goes along with the file to say how large the image should be printed. However, that can be changed at any time without any loss of quality as long as you're only adjusting the ppi setting and not re-sampling. For example, if I were to post a full 12 megapixel image from my D700 it's not going to matter whether I set the ppi to 72 or 300 or something even higher, it's still a full-size image!

If this is still unclear let's look at this from the other direction, screen displays. The statement that all computer screens display at 72 ppi is dis-proven with a simple examination. Look at standard monitor resolutions; in the old days of 4:3 monitors you had resolutions like 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1024. In these days of wide-screen displays you see resolutions like 1440x900, 1920x1080, etc. Notice that in all of these examples I'm only talking about pixel dimensions, not the size of the screen. Suppose you have 2 wide-screen monitors, a 19" and a 24", if both are using the same resolution of 1440x900 then clearly the larger monitor is displaying at a lower resolution. Perhaps the best way to really hammer this home is with televisions since they're displays just like computer monitors. "Full HD" is 1080p (1920x1080). Walk into an electronics store and find the smallest 1080p TV you can find, it's probably going to be somewhere in the 30" sizes, now compare that to a 60" TV or bigger that's still displaying at 1080p, or how about some 100" projection screen that's 1080p too. Are you honestly going to say that all of them are displaying at 72 ppi? Clearly they aren't.

More recently I've even stumbled across a new version of this myth that's specific to the iPhone and iPad where higher resolutions (132 ppi for the iPad, 326 ppi for an iPhone 4G) are recommended for these displays. Hopefully by now you can dismiss this advice based on your understanding of resolution. Again, all that matters is the pixel dimensions. If you're concerned with iPhone or iPad display then just go by the pixel dimensions and figure out what you want to use from there (remember though that higher resolutions will allow for zooming). I think some of the confusion here comes from Apple publishing the ppi specs for their displays but recognize that's only useful for comparing with another device's display if you're interested in which display has the higher resolution.

Rollback /  by Andrew Dacey

What do you do when a "routine" upgrade goes bad? How about a "minor" change to your website that breaks the whole site? How quickly can you recover? Can you even recover? This week's Tech Tuesday feature is all about rollback options. I've spent the last few weeks talking about back-up options. That's a topic that should already be pretty familiar to most people. This week I want to talk about something that's probably a littler further afield for most photographers and other small business operators, the concept of rollback.

In my day job I work as an IT consultant working on a contract for a very large financial services provider in the US. In that environment all changes to the production environment are highly controlled. This is both for regulatory reasons and to ensure that the change won't have an unforeseen affect on trading operations. This means that every change has to be very well planned in advance including when the change will be made and the steps that will be performed. This change request then goes through several levels of approval before you're finally allowed to make the change. Even then, that change is only approved for the time that you said you would do it and should only include the work that you said you would do. Can this be very bureaucratic? You bet. Does it eat up a lot of time? It sure does. But, when a change going wrong can cost the firm millions of dollars it makes sense.

I'm certainly not going to suggest that this level of planning or scrutiny is necessary for a single photographer or a small studio, it just doesn't make sense. However, there is one big piece of this process which does have a lot of value for even the smallest businesses. Aside from describing the steps that will be taken in the change we're also required to provide a backout (or rollback) plan. Essentially, for every change request we have to say what we'll do if the sh*t hits the fan. No rollback plan? No approval. No matter what size your operation is, this is a mindset you need to start adopting. It's one thing if your home computer is out of commission for awhile but if it's your work computer then that's lost revenue.

Let's look at a current example, Apple recently released Final Cut Pro X. You take a look at the features videos and think it looks awesome and gleefully install it. Then you find out that it won't work with projects from Final Cut Pro 7. Oh, and your plug-ins don't work any more either. Now what? That's when you decide how much of a big deal that is to you and make the call on whether you can live with that or if it's time to initiate your rollback plan. You did make a rollback plan right? No? Well then I guess you're stuck with living with it.

The thing is, rollback doesn't have to be anything elaborate. If you always keep a bootable back-up drive then it can be as simple as making sure that back-up is up to date prior to making significant updates or other big changes. That way if anything goes wrong you can simply boot off that back-up (remember to test this first!) and then use that back-up to restore back to that good state.

Or, if you have multiple systems then maybe you just need to try out an update on a system that you can afford to have out of commission if things go south. If you have both a desktop and a laptop then figure out which one is more important to you right now and try out the update on the other one first. If things don't go well then at least your main system isn't affected and it buys you time to fix the other system. Strictly speaking, that's not as good of a rollback option but at least you're thinking, "if things do go bad how do I keep working?"

Rollback is all about having a quick way to get out of trouble. If you can't handle being down for a few hours to a few days while you reinstall everything (and really, who can these days?) then I strongly urge you to start thinking about how to protect yourself when making changes.

Mirrors, snapshots and incremental back-ups /  by Andrew Dacey

Following up on the back-up theme from last week's Tech Tuesday post, RAID is not Back-up, I'm going into a little more depth on some back-up options and what each of them offers. This week I want to talk about 3 very popular options; mirrors, snapshots and incremental back-ups.

Mirrors

This is really a bit of a follow-up from last week's discussion on RAID vs. back-up. One very common RAID level is RAID 1, also known as a mirror. This involves taking 2 identical disks and setting them up so that whatever is written to 1 is written to the other disk at the same time. As mentioned last week, this is great for reliability and that's why I'm including it here as part of a back-up strategy. The idea is 1 of the drives can fail and you'll still be up and running with the other drive. As mentioned last week, this is great for protecting you against drive failures but it doesn't help you recover an individual file. If you accidentally change or delete a file it's going to be changed on both drives.

There is another type of mirror that doesn't involve RAID. Rather than setting up a RAID you can keep a second disk which is an automatic back-up of the main drive. The idea here is very similar to RAID 1 but the copying would be less frequent. With RAID 1 all changes are written to both disks at the same time. Instead, you could setup your mirror drive to be written to every hour, or possibly just at the end of the day. The big advantage is that if you do accidentally delete a file you can still find it on the mirror drive. The other advantage is that you can turn off that mirroring when you are making major changes (such as installing updates) and want to make sure that you can back out of the changes if necessary (more on this next week).

Ideally, you should be able to boot your computer from this mirror. That's extremely useful if an update goes catastrophically wrong and your main drive is in an unusable state. I don't want to get into a Mac vs. PC debate but this is one area that is significantly easier to manage on a Mac since you can always startup off of any drive that has Mac OS X installed and you don't run into any issues with drive letters changing or similar. I'm not saying it can't be done on a PC, there just may be more involved in setting it up.

The big downside of this variation is time. It takes a lot longer to copy over all of the data. In order to ensure that all of the data is exactly the same the mirror should take a complete copy of the original disk, you can't really reliably just copy things that changed. The idea is that every byte on the back-up drive should be identical as the first drive and that requires a lot of time to copy and verify.

Snapshots

A snapshot is pretty much what it sounds like; it's a back-up strategy where you take an exact copy of the drive as it is right now. Depending on your back-up software this may be a compressed copy or simply a full copy of all of the files stored in a folder on another disk. The big advantage over a mirror (especially a RAID 1 mirror) is that you should be able to recover a file that you accidentally changed, just grab it from the snapshot. The exact steps involved with this will depend on your back-up software.

Obviously one of the big disadvantages for this strategy is disk space. If you have 2TB of data and take a full snapshot of that data every day then even after a single week you'll need 14TB to store that! That's one of the main reasons why back-up software will normally compress the back-up. This will add some time in creating the back-up and in restoring any particular file but the savings in storage space may make it worthwhile.

Typically, when working with snapshots you'll setup some type of strategy for rotating out old copies. One common strategy is to take a daily snapshots and then only keep 1 snapshot from the previous weeks going back a month and then only keep a single monthly snapshot going back to whatever period you feel you'll need. A lot of this can depend on how much data you have and how far back you may need to go. Yes, this can take up a lot of space but don't underestimate the value of being able to go back a few days, or even weeks, when it's some time before you realize that you deleted the wrong file.

Incremental back-ups

Incremental back-ups are often combined with snapshots. As outlined above, snapshots can take a lot of time to create and eat up a lot of space. Instead of creating a full snapshot every day most back-up software can instead create a full snapshot less frequently and then simply save a back-up of any files that have changed since the last back-up separately.

Obviously this can save a significant amount of space, how much will depend on how many files you change (or new files you create) in between back-ups but it's always going to take up less space than a full snapshot. The big downside is you don't have a full snapshot of the state of your disk as often. This can prove to be a major issue if the last snapshot turns out the be bad. For example, suppose that you take weekly snapshots and then do incremental back-ups throughout the week. If it's day 6 of your incremental back-ups when your disk fails then you may be faced with losing a lot of last week's work. The other downside is that it can take your back-up software a lot longer to restore all of your files as it first has to restore the snapshot and then step through each incremental back-up from that point.

So where does Time Machine fit into all of this?

So far I've tried to stay more theoretical but since every recent version of Mac OS X includes Apple's Time Machine software for backing up I thought it was important to touch on it a little bit, especially because it doesn't really fit into any of the options I've outlined above.

Essentially, Time Machine does a bit of a mix between a snapshot and an incremental back-up. When Time Machine runs for the first time it makes a complete copy of the contents of the drive(s) you're backing up. After that, it runs periodically (hourly by default) and makes a new copy of any files that have changed since the last time it's run. So far this sounds a lot like an incremental back-up right? The big difference is that due to the way Time Machine stores the files you will always be able to get to all of the files as they looked at that particular point in time, even those that haven't changed. This makes it look a lot like you're taking full snapshots every hour since you see all of your files.

The important thing to realize is that while you can see all of your files for each time that Time Machine ran, it only writes a new copy of files that have changed. This means that while all of the unchanged files show up for that time period they aren't a separate copy, they're the exact same file as was written to the disk when that particular file changed, or potentially going all the way back to the initial snapshot. This does save a ton of space and it's a great piece of engineering to make restoring files easy but it's important to realize you will only ever have 1 copy of any change for a file.

When you get right down to it, Time Machine is really a system where a single snapshot is taken right at the beginning and everything after that is an incremental back-up. Don't get me wrong, Time Machine is a great back-up solution because of how simple it is and because Apple has done an incredible job of making back-up simple enough for everyone. The big thing to realize is that it should only be part of a complete back-up strategy that employs other options like those I've outlined above.

It's probably easiest to illustrate the potential issue with an example. Suppose you accidentally delete a file that you last worked on over a month ago. When you go back an hour in Time Machine and restore the file you discover that the file is corrupted. You don't panic right away because you think, "that's okay, I'll just go back further". But, you're sunk, the last time this file was written to Time Machine's back-up drive was a month ago when you last worked on it. While it will look like you have several copies of that file since then each of those will be the same corrupted file that you restored the first time. If you're lucky then you'll have another back-up in Time Machine from before the last set of changes that you made but then you're going to lose whatever those changes were.

Test your back-ups!

A final word on back-ups; if you're not testing your back-up strategy periodically then you really don't have a back-up strategy. A proper back-up strategy should always be tested. That doesn't mean you should format your main hard drive every week but at times you should be testing to make sure that you can restore your system from your back-ups. It's a terrible feeling to think that you're properly protected when your system fails only to discover that your back-ups are missing crucial files, or simply don't work. Better to discover this before you have a problem so that you can address any shortcomings ahead of time.