Digital Storage Questions

Here are a couple of questions posed to me recently by a family member:

Memory cards - is there a best brand or are they pretty well all the same for quality?

Stay with a name brand and you should be fine. The brands I’ve used are Lexar, SanDisk and Kingston and I’ve literally put thousands and thousands of images through these with out a single card failure that I can remember. From a preventative standpoint I do pitch them after about 2 years of use - maybe that’s why I’m so “lucky”. Every time I get a new card I write the date on the back of the card with a permanent marker (as seen in the photo here) so I’ll know when its time is up.

If you ever do have an issue with a card, there are a variety of image recovery software products out there. If you keep your eyes out, some manufacturers package their versions of this kind of software with their cards. I’ve gotten SanDisk and Lexar’s version at no charge this way. If you ever format a card (“erase” it) with images on it before you have a chance to download it, image recovery software will be your knight in shining armor!

What do you think is the best long-term storage for these digital files, so years from now I don't have a mess and they will still all be viewable?

So your options are basically:

• Leave your images on your hard drive. Not a great idea – you could end up with a drive full of photos with no room left for anything else – that is if it doesn’t crash first.
  
• Burn them to CDs/DVDs. When I first made the switch to digital I went this route. Boy, what a hassle. The time it took to burn the CD/DVDs, file them, retrieve them later, etc., I’m glad I’m past that now. Add to this the arguments of short life span & the potential short life of the technology (hello, VHS?) - pass on this option, believe me.


• Upload to an online/offsite storage service. Do you really want to trust a DotCom somebody in who-knows-where with your precious work? Not me.
  
• And finally, external hard drives. This is what I’ve been using for over 3 years now and here’s why:

They’re easy to use. Plug ‘em in to a spare USB or FireWire port & you’re ready to upload tons of images. Your photos will be there whenever you need them and you won’t have to go looking through pages of CD’s to find that one photo of Uncle Frank that everyone wants.

They’re cheap. For the amount of storage you get, it’s crazy how low the prices on these things have dropped.

They’re reliable. I own nearly 20 of these things and have had only one ever go south on me. That being said, they are capable of failing (everything is for that matter) which is why the next point is important:

They’re easy to back up. Whatever your method of archiving, you need some kind of redundancy. Hey, if it’s good for NASA, it’s good for me. I’ll discuss in detail in a future blog how I organize and archive my images, but here’s a preview: While a job is still active (the finished photos haven’t been delivered to the client yet) I’ll have copies of those images on my main hard drive and on 2 separate external hard drives.

Keep it secret, keep it safe. Good advice for getting the One Ring to Mordor AND for protecting your images. Whenever I’m away from my main computer, one of those two external drives I mentioned goes in a waterproof, shockproof case that gets stored in a separate location. Again, I’ll share more on that in a future blog.

If you’re saying to yourself by now, “wow, that Bret guy is really paranoid”, you could be right or it could just be me protecting my livelihood. Either way, I’m gonna have all my images at the end of the day and I hope you’ll still have yours too. I may need that photo of Uncle Frank some day.

One last thing on external hard drives – they come in basically 3 different flavors:

The small, portable variety that gets powered off your USB or FireWire port (I love my LaCie Rugged Hard Disks, pictured here. When I travel, I have two that go with me).

The larger book-sized type that requires an AC adapter to power them (Western Digital’s My Book series are a good value & have worked great for me).

The multi-hard drive RAID versions like Drobo’s (This is going to be my next external drive purchase!).

More on the pros/cons of these 3 later but in the mean time, if you’ve used one or more of these, how did they work out for you?

Some Thoughts On Lighting

What a wonderful thing we photographers do! We get to re-present the best of what the Maker has created and we get to expose the worst of world’s injustice. When you boil it down, that’s pretty much what we do.

HOW we do it has really gotten cool lately. The world of digital has brought a huge amount of change. It’s made photography so accessible for so many people in creative ways that couldn’t be imagined just a few years ago and that’s AWESOME.

One thing that hasn’t changed though is the language we speak. As photographers we speak the language of light - the original language of the universe.

Think about it, the earth was formless and void until BAMMO! “Let there be light!” and that, my friends, was the very first thing that the Lord said was “good”. He created the heavens and the earth, but it wasn’t called “good” until He properly lit His subject. He’s been doing that ever since, placing His creation in the best light possible. Adulterous, lying, murdering King David is “lit” by God and called a “man after His own heart”; Sarah laughs at God and is called “faithful”; you and I have our own history, yet He calls us “His beloved”.

A classically trained portrait photographer is taught to use light to draw out the subject’s strong points while using selective shadowing to de-emphasize the parts that are best left in the dark, if you know what I mean. A landscape photographer will be in place long before the sun comes up so the light will be perfect and is rewarded with an image that inspires “ahhs” from all who see the final print. A commercial photographer sculpts and crafts light for hours with scrims, snoots, gobos, flags, spots, softboxes, reflectors… and the client has her $5 product looking like a million bucks. What do all these photographers have in common? They’re all playing God, speaking His language, making His creation look its best.

Physicists are even making the case these days that we, the earth and everything that we see & touch, is composed of nothing more than light itself. That’s way over my head, but it sounds really cool.

My point in all this is (yes, I really have a point!) is that as photographers, wouldn’t it be awesome for us to really master our language? The better our vocabulary, the more eloquent our speech becomes. The better our speech, the more clearly we’re understood, and that’s really all we want, right?

Now I’m not down on all the jazzy Photoshop actions, plugins, filters, etc, etc – I love ‘em all, in fact I’m pedaling hard to learn them all! But what I’m dying to hear in conversations between photogs is “how’d you light that?”, “what time of day did you shoot that?”, “was that a fill-flash or a reflector?”… you get the point.

So, maybe we can have some of those conversations right here – I’d love to learn some of YOUR vocabulary. What do you think?

- Bret never seems to get up early enough for the killer landscape shots, never seems to have enough lights, gobos, etc. for the commercial shoots, and can never figure out why his portrait subjects always want to look like someone else! :)

Equipment questions from a concert photographer

Bret, I met you at Grace Center a few weeks ago and am looking at camera possibilities. I take low light concert shots of Christian bands and worship outings (and play on worship teams). I am currently leaning toward the 50D over the XSi but wonder if I still need a fast lens to go with the 50D...like below f3.5. Your thoughts? My humble website is http://www.ahlive.com/ and I have hundreds of concert shots on there. Doug

Hey Doug,

Great questions! Hey everybody, be sure and check Doug's site, the photo above is his.

Usually I would recommend going for the best lens you could afford, sacrifice a little on the camera & upgrade your body when you can afford it. But as a concert shooter, I’d recommend going a different direction.

First, on the cameras, one of the great selling features of the 50D is its ability to handle low light situations. According to Canon: “the new sensor's design (new manufacturing processes, redesigned photo diodes and micro lenses) mean that despite the higher resolution image noise has improved “. The ISO settings on this puppy go all the way to 12800! That’s just nuts. Now, I haven’t seen any results from this model at that altitude, but I imagine you will still have to deal with noise. Using a plug-in like Noise Ninja or Noiseware will help with that. Although the Xsi is half the price, as a concert shooter, I think you’ll be glad you pony-ed up for the big brother.

For a full-on comparison of these models to include some sample images shot with them, check out at dpreview.com

As far as lenses go – I look at them as even more of an investment than my camera bodies. Bodies wear out, but lenses are just about forever and they really hold their value. My usual philosophy is to buy the best glass you can afford. If you can spring for a sub-f3.5 Canon lens, go for it.

To answer you initial question, with the 50D I think you could get by with an f3.5 but if you can afford a f2.8 or lower you’ll be glad you have it.

Hope this helps!