The Stack Of Pancakes From Lexar

On a high shelf at our new Murray Street shop is a row of Lexar boxes that fooled the heck out of me.  But now that I have researched what they are, I am mightily impressed.

Firstly, the mistake I made; I thought that they were a set of multiple RAID-drive boxes like a Drobo array. AS I have a Drobo that has been working flawlessly, I was not interested, but i took a picture anyway...

Secondly, the truth revealed through a Google search; these aren't exactly a RAID array - they are a reader and storage tower. let me explain.

We all have some sort of input and output jumble on our computer desks. The maker of the computer has put a half dozen USB or other ports on the back or sides of the thing and we have duly filled them up in a twinkling. Mine has 10 things fighting for space. Wires snake over the desk, even if the mouse and keyboard are wireless - it is just like an electric jungle growing...

The Lexar Professional Workflow HR1 is a vertical box that will accommodate 4 devices on the front and lead them in and out from the back. That means you can stack in separate modules for CF, SD, and USB input. You can read fast as there is Thunderbolt and USB3.0 capability.

Bless me, you can also store from this tower if you plug in Lexar Portable SSD boxes in. It's not doing what the Drobo does, but it will be a lot neater than puting anther external hard drive down and trying to find space for another USB plug and cable!

Note also that on a lower shelf we have a selection of pretty big, pretty small Lexar memory cards. Reliable and good value.

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Brush, Palette, Mouse....Ready For the Louvre

Last year I was black-balled from entry into a Facebook group of artists - condemned for being an "events photographer". I suspect it was also because I was unable to speak Artish and would not get a tattoo or a man-bun.

Whatever, it set me out on a quest to become an artist in spite of the critics. I thought long and hard about what art I would pursue. Making miniature scenes was all very well, and taking pictures of weddings and hot rods and pretty girls might be a good training ground, but something more was needed. Something that would say Art loud enough and in a condescending enough manner to allow me to sit in a coffee shop and fill out Centrelink forms...What to do...What to do...

Then I had it. Digital art. Prints derived from images that I have taken, suitably modified until either they resemble other media or I resemble other artists.

Armed with that determination I ordered this book:

Focal press books are generally good, though they have had some authors who seem to have spent too much time in coffee shops filling out Centrelink forms. But in this case, Susan Roddick Bloom seems to have hit upon just the right level of communication to help the novice. And fortunately , Camera Electronic equipped me with the rest of what I needed.

Of course, I needed the images in the first place, and I've a Drobo full of them. And a Wacom Intuous tablet - CE had those too -  and a new iMac computer. I also had the Epson printer I got from CE and it is calibrated with the Spyder Express, so I was nearly all set. Final piece in the chain was the image editing program...and I went with my faithful Photoshop Elements 14.

It proved to be a good choice. Ruddick's book is several years old, but the basic procedures that she outlined in Photoshop itself are now quite do-able in the latest Photoshop Elements. There have been no procedures or techniques mentioned in her text that cannot be done in PE, and very few of the references she makes to specific things need to be translated to another wordage. Adobe have been decent enough to keep the same things in the same drawers in the digital desk.

Ms. Bloom covers sketches, pastels, cont, oils, watercolours, and illustrations. She has a chapter on some of the commercial plug-ins that also simulate drawn art...and she is not too prissy to admit that they can be a good jumping-off point for fast starts. I've tried a little from many of the chapters and found her advice to be excellent. it was money well spent.

The Photoshop Elements 14 program was also money well spent - and if you are at all interested in getting into digital shooting and manipulation I can recommend it.

Now it will be a case of experiment, practise, and time. One day I hope to be refused entry into ever more prestigious art groups. If I can be ejected from the Hermitage, Tate, or MOMA I shall consider myself a success.

Uncle Dick

Physical Security For Photography

A recent column that dealt with stolen cameras seems to have garnered a great deal of interest - so I've decided to add some thoughts on the matter of further security for photography.

The original column mentioned stolen cameras and suggested increased security measures for equipment inside cars. Now it is the turn for the same security inside the home.

A. Equipment safety. You may have anywhere from $ 400 to $ 40,000 invested in cameras and lenses. If you put them into camera bags and cases and then put those cases inside the wardrobe your security level is that of the MDF board on that wardrobe. About 3mm of pressed wood pulp. Perfectly adequate to protect your 1980 safari suit against moths but no help if a burglar with a habit breaks in and looks for saleable items.

Look up locksmiths and safes. If you have space in your home for the wardrobe, you have room in the wardrobe for a safe or storage cabinet. It doesn't need to be Fort Knox - it just needs to deter the casual criminal. I've got one that bolts onto the floor and the wall and has two mutually exclusive locks on the face. It would require far more time and trouble than the average home breaker cares to expend to breach...and this means that the cameras and lenses inside are safe enough.

B. Image safety. My digital images are safe enough as well on a Drobo multiple drive unit - the shop sells them and they are a good technical answer to the failing hard drive. The drives in the Drobo will fail, granted, but never at the same time and always with enough time to save the data. The Drobo also lives in a steel box - vented to let heat dissipate - but again secure enough to stop casual theft. The computer is Kensington-locked to a massive steel shelving system. Cheap, cheerful, awkward, and effective.

C. Computer safety. I'm fine. Every week people with Scandinavian names ring me up from Microsoft in India to tell me that I need to perform safety procedures on the desktop computer. I just press the buttons they say to press and then tell them my password. It all seems so civilised.

D. Photographer safety. Manfrotto make a fabulous monopod. Metal or carbon fibre, it has metal leg locks and a metal head. If you add a Manfrotto 234 metal tilt top it is about the size and weight of an Anglo-Saxon war mace. The thing to do is not try to use it with a downward cut as this requires you to rear back an hold it over your head prior to striking. Hold it with both hands and hit up or sideways like a baseball bat. It is also very useful for holding cameras steady in low light.

E. Moral safety. If you are at all unsure whether taking a photo might be sinful, tasteless, or harmful, it will be, and you can proceed accordingly - your conscience as your guide. Be prepared to accept the consequences later.

F. Financial safety. Never walk into a camera store with a bag of $20 notes and nothing to do for an hour. The staff know plenty to do.

Save Everything - Whales, The World, Old Soap Wrappers, Jpeg's

Everything.

Save it on your computer drive, back it up to your Time Machine hard drive, then back this up to your Drobo, then burn CD's of the files, then print them out on an Epson printer, then rephotograph the prints with a 35mm copy camera and archivally process the film. Then store it in acid-free sleeves in a fireproof contaner.

Then take the discs and the film and the prints and any spare pixels that have fallen out of the back of the machine and put them in a safe deposit box down at the Bank of New South Wales.

You may want to ask the bank to sandbag the St. George's Terrace entrance and post guards armed with Stirling SMG's there - better safe than sorry.

After you have done this, go back and look at the images you started with. Are they really all that good? Is your student portfolio of 365 daily images of a banana on a plate really the stuff of your dreams? Have you advanced? Would it be a good idea to keep one picture of the banana and clean the rest out of the drive?

Just this thought occurred to me some time ago when I noted that the content level indicator on the Drobo drive I use got past half-full. Now the Drobo is a wonderful device for keeping things safe, as long as you keep it safe. I can re-disc it to far more capacity than it bears now...I'll do that eventually, but decided to look into the thing at present to discover what was in there.

Well, I didn't find the missing sock but I did find damn near everything else that I had dumped into it. Including jobs that had a set of RAW files, jpeg finder files, working psd files, and finished jpeg output files. Plus a few tiff's and something that looks suspiciously like a tram ticket. It was like an overgrown garden of pixels.

I set aside my ruth and weeded relentlessly - gaining back valuable disc space and concentrating each division into work that I am happy with. I did allow some wiggle room with RAW files that I may re-work...but even there I have been realistic with what was actually worth re-working. Let's face it folks, we usually get better as we go along, and it is retrograde to go back and try to make silk purses out of our sow's ears. They are never good and it annoys the sows.

Spring cleaning is not just for the carpet - try it and see.

Ya Not Wrong, Narelle...

Do you suppose that whenever someone browses onto the Arnott's, Unibic, or General Foods websites they get cookies? Something to chew over...

Likewise when we go to the rumours ( or rumors) sites that deal with the different camera makers or onto the innumerable forums that deal with angry photographers abusing each other over internet rumours...are we marked for all time in the great register of the JCII? And will we remove our JCII stickers or leave them on*.

You can tell it's Friday again and the blog writer is casting about for a topic. He's avoiding thinking about the pile of computer work that is sitting on the Drobo at home - material from the latest hot rod car shows that needs to be attended to.

Fortunately he took advantage of the Fujifilm Rumors site to read up a number of pieces of advice from Rico Pfirstinger - he's the Fujifilm X-pert for their X-series cameras. The things he writes are short, but he illustrates the concepts with examples from his Fujifilm cameras and if you follow the series they can be quite enlightening.

Intrigued with his style of writing, i went o Boffins Book Stor in Willaims stret last year and purchased one of his books on getting the best out of the X=Pro1 and X-E1 camera. Then I got an older issue from Amazon that he had written on the X-100 camera. And not to miss out on the electronic revolution, I managed to purchase and download one of his E-books of hits and tips for the X-E2. ( Note that I did this all by myself without needing guidance from the family computer experts. It was successful and only started one small fire...)

This plethora of advice obviously contains some duplication - as the X-series cameras share many features and some ideas have developed onwards from the early models. Also each of the X cameras has had some form of firmware upgrade and I have applied these as they became available - a practise that I firmly endorse. But each book has had specific advice for the model featured, and I have benefitted downstream from it.

Specifically, Pfirstinger has convinced me to record many of the events that I cover with a small 2:3 jpeg as well as the raw RAF. file. This is necessary when using the X-E2 and the X-pro1 as their RAF. configuration does not open in my Aperture or Photoshop Elements programs directly. For these I use the jpegs as sighting rifles for the Silkypix Studio Developer 6 program. The X-100 RAF. files do open in ACR Raw and Aperture but that is just a bonus.

Readers who use different software on their different hardware may point out that all this seeming confusion could be resolved with a newer computer and new programs - I shall be glad to do this as soon as they send me the money required. I promise to be suitable grateful. Until then the Silkypix DS6 route is actually quite a lot of fun...if a little slower.

One big advantage for the little jpeg/RAF. settings - occasionally the lighting, atmospherics, paint jobs, and people are just perfect in the small jpeg. This is particularly noticeable with Fujifilm X cameras with the way the X-Trans sensor renders colour. If this is the case, I can use the jpegs directly for my purposes and save them to the Drobo - and remove the much larger RAF. files. Of course, if I got it wrong or changed my mind as to the rendition I wished to make, the RAF. is the great saver.

So - there's Friday. Pfirstinger is a good writer and you can follow his train of thought readily. Recommended.

* Older photographers will know exactly what the JCII sticker is...

Photo Storage - A Cautionary Tale For You

Images - paintings, photographs, drawings - have always presented a challenge for the preservationist. They are subject to fire, flood, mould, rodent and insect attack, as well as theft. Sometimes the best pictures only last a short period of time.

Witness these poor relics that were found in a shoebox yesterday. Coffee cups, physical damage. fading, fugitive colour dyes...well, it is lucky that we can see anything on these.

The same can happen with your digital images, whether they are files on a computer or finished prints. Hard drives crash, computers fail to start up, files mysteriously corrupt. You might have put the images n a disc but discs go missing or fail to read.

The real answer is the Drobo system. Imagine an electronic box storing 5 industrial-grade hard drives that share the information constantly and monitor themselves. If one starts to look dodgy you get early warning and can replace the drives and the machine just repairs itself in a week.

I have mine locked in a ventilated steel box so even if thieves ransack the house they can't get my pictures of kittens and sunsets. The price is reasonable and the sense of security is priceless.

Note: I am going to try to restore the three examples in the future. It'll be a lot of work, but worth it. Those cars aren't made any more.

Share Seamlessly Amongst All Your Devices With Drobo

I love advertising. I can't pass a billboard offering worm powders for budgies without experiencing a thrill - and the desire to spend money on worm powder. I don't have a budgie but wouldn't it be great to be prepared for one - just in case...

The same can be said about camera advertisements. I still keep a stack of pictures of 35mm systems from the 1970's under my pillow, and pull them out and stare at them. I cannot focus on the bellows close-up system for too long - I have to peek at it and glance away. The image is too powerful and I have been known to faint and fall to the floor. I'm sure a lot of the clients of our shop feel the same way.

Given this susceptibility, can you imagine how the advertisement for " Share Your Images Seamlessly To All Your Devices " affected me. I looked around wildly - the television, the computer, the mobile phone...the toaster, the vacuum cleaner, the croquet set...the world whirled. Digits everywhere.

I am terrified. What if I cannot escape the march of the images? What if every time I look into the mirror I see something different in the background. I am just now getting used to the old balding guy in there ( and he's getting more HDR as the years go on ). If he starts being backed up with a paddock full of ghost gums or a harbour full of French fishing boats all hell will break loose.

Will the images from my Drobo sneak out of the hard disk and seep over into the neighbour's house? Who knows - I can't watch over them all the time. They might be going out and having a better time that I am. they might come home late and covered with chromatic aberration.

I have long become resigned to having every blessed thing I do monitored by management, the CIA, the NSA, Mossad, The KGB, and Coles-Myer. Which reminds me, I must look out my KGB card as they are doing a 2 for 1 sale this weekend in brainwashing. I've seen the state of my brain and it could certainly do with a rinse. But I do hope that the pictures can be left alone.

How Cute Is This - Drobo Mini

 Statement of Interest:  I own a Drobo storage unit. I paid for it with my own money. I installed it into my digital system myself. It has worked flawlessly since. It is likely to be all I need to safeguard my digital images.

Now that we have that out of the way, here is the latest cute-as-a-bug idea from Drobo. They have made a mini version of the big Drobo FS unit I use for people who want security in a smaller space.

The unit operates very much like mine - Up to 4 SATA hard disk drives are slotted into the unit at the font and configured with the software. They then receive the data and parcel it out amongst themselves so that no one unit has the entire key to the liquor cabinet. Should any one of the hard disk drives look like it is going to fail, the Drobo alerts the user to replace the dodgy disk before it is dead and the data marches merrily on. No loss, no risk.

Mine uses big disks, this one uses small disks - but as time has advanced the sport, this unit can work even faster than mine - it is fitted with USB3.0 and Thunderbolt entry ports. It will work fine for USB 2.0.

There is good provision for cooling round the back of he unit and you'll notice from the back view that there is a lock on the power supply socket. In my case my biggie is locked into a vented steel cabinet, so ( hopefully) no-one can run off with the unit and the data.

$ 730 will get this one in your home or office, and then add the SATA drives. The box does contain the Thunderbolt cable and the setup is deliciously easy. Hey, I managed it, and I trained on Fisher-Price computers...

PS: Apple not included - that is my lunch.

Uncle Dick

Show Me The Money - Harvesting The Drobo

Have you seen the prices that printed ephemera of the 1950's commands on eBay? It's fantastic! I'll bet it is even better at Christie's or Sotheby's. Why, there must be fortunes to be made with old magazines out in the back shed - and who knows what men's magazine gold has been tucked between the mattresses of teenage boys since then. Provided their mothers did not find them, they might still be there.

Mind you, so might the bedbugs. So to avoid that sort of trouble I decided to make my own vintage retro magazines - I'll be sending them in for auction as soon as the Epson printer gets through the stack of files.

Of course it s not all just profit - there is a fair amount of work involved in getting the girls into the corsets and girdles and the props needed are never cheap. IKEA always seems to have something that is nearly right but not quite so, and the antique stores are run by descendants of Henry Morgan. Fortunately many old people have period furniture in the shed so it always pays to beg.

The articles for he magazine are easy to write. Sex sells, and as long as you can remember to hint rather than explain, all is well. These are the 1950's after all. Germans and Japanese are also good copy as this was just after they were beaten and before they rose again. The Commies as well - if all else fails find a red star and stick it on something and suggest that there are more under the bed. Hey, It worked for Senator Joe, it can work for you.

I am still a little unsure as to how to age the paper and the pictures to simulate the real article sixty years on. I have no problem spilling coffee on myself but so far the stains on the images look a little fake. And there is nothing so false as reality rejigged. I wonder if I can get someone to pay in Pounds and Shillings?

Deader'n A Maggot - with Drobo

There can be few more heart-stopping moments for a digital photographer than seeing nothing on the screen of your monitor - even when it is just the disappearance of a small icon.

I worked away for a small time this morning on my iMac before I thought that I needed a file from deep storage - I use a Drobo storage system. I looked to the space that normally has the little black icon and it was blank. So I opened the desk drawer that contains the Drobo - and the characteristic green and blue lights on the front were not alight. Cold and dead.

I did not panic. I moved the plug of the 12V 7.5A power supply box to a different socket behind the desk. Cold and dead.

I did not panic. I tried that same socket with a desk lamp. Light.

I did not panic. I unplugged the Drobo and the power supply and brought them into Ernest here in the shop. He applied the voltmeter probe to the end of the cable from the power supply. Cold and dead. High five - the failed part was the cheap one- the power supply. Thank you SEC... The data was safe.

I shall obtain another power supply today and will be up and running this evening.

This scenario has a happy ending but in the past some of my cold and dead episodes did not. I purchased El Cheapo portable hard drive units from chain stores and entrusted images to them. Fortunately just before they went to electronic heaven they made enough of a rattle to alert me and I was able to save the data just in time. The big hard drive units in the Drobo can take a great deal more than the little flat packs and fortunately the Drobo analyzes the state of the storage constantly and will alert me if one of the drives is funny - I have set the criteria in the Drobo dashboard to press this information on me whatever I am doing.

In addition, should I manage to fill the Drobo to capacity in its present form, it allows me to dramatically increase the storage by just plugging in bigger drives while it re-distributes the contents. I think it will be safe for a good long time.

But it will all depend on giving it the 12V and 7.5A. I no complain - I am going to get out of this easy.

Faster Robots

My favorite data storage company has just announced some new products for photographers in a hurry.


Drobo have introduced the Thunderbolt Drobo Mini with 2 1/2 inch disk drives and provision to use solid state storage as well - all linked with auto tiering and capable of being daisy chained for multiple storage units. The new news is that this can be done through the Thunderbolt and the USB 3.0 systems so that the data transfer is really lightning fast.

Sometimes I stop to consider this speed thing. In my later film days I considered it pretty fast when I could process the negs from a shoot one night, bang out proof sheets the next night, and show them the third. Then orders printed in a week and who could want more...

Actually I remember rolls of film dropped into the chemist one week and back in a fortnight. But that was when chemists sold medicine instead of jewellery and chocolate bars. Let us continue.

Drobo also have a new bigger machine using the 3 1/2 inch drives that also will be Thunderbolted and USB 3.0'd and will be capable of coping with SSD's.

I use the regular Drobo - I haven't filled it up yet, but the reassurance that it gives me each time that I switch the system on and it tells me that all is well is priceless. It frees up my main computer so that I can make silly mistakes on the desktop and it will faithfully store and show me those follies for ever more. It is like having a built-in brother-in-law but without having to provide beer.

Sleep Easy with Drobo Digital Backup Solutions

Does the idea of failing hard drives keep you up at night, the thought of all those images lost forever due to a hard drive which has spun it's last?  Everyone is always telling us that we should backup everything and prepare for the worst, but who really has the time to spend on the laborious process of backing up to multiple drives only to have to do the same thing in the not to distant future?  It's pretty easy to back up to a single drive via data syncing software readily available for all the O.S systems but this solution has some obvious and annoying drawbacks and backing up just the files on your computer HD is only solving part of the problem.......what about the shoot you did 18 months ago?.....the one that's stored on the HD buried under the trash that collects in your bottom draw!

The Drobo is like your old fashioned RAID data syncing backup systems but then so much more!  It's network compatible, it's photographer proof (a.k.a easy to use), it can easily expand storage capacity as your needs grow, it looks really cool, it keeps everything in one easy to access place on your system and best of all....it does everything automatically without disrupting your access to your data or bothering you with reminders. 

Check out this video for a great example of how the Drobo system works with your currant computer set-up.