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.

Hand Of Cards - Two More Possibilities For The Digital Shooter

We have a lot of options presented to us in photography - cameras, lenses, lights and flashes. The range of accessories is mind-boggling, and once your mind has been boggled sufficiently you are generally only fit for light duties or election to the local council...

What we tend to forget is that there are options also in the memory cards we use. Of course we sell SanDisk cards here - they have always been good and reliable in the major cameras. We have been selling Hoodman cards, and Promaster, and in each case the ratio between card success or shutdown has been wonderfully high.

I have also been testing two brands of card and can report 100% success so far - I've got Lexar and Panasonic cards in my Fujifilm cameras right now. They are fast enough for any still work I do, and would probably be fine for small videos.

The prices are sensational - cheap as chips when you think of the comparable film stowage. and as they are proof against all the x-rays and magnetic fields that I might encounter on an air trip, I can feel confident that whatever images i put on them will come safely home.

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.