2010 February | Kajo Photography - Fineart Landscapes and Panoramas

Archive for February, 2010

Sync your Photos with ChronoSync

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

I am using a lot of hard drives. Lots of Terra Bytes. Usually when I upload my images from my camera to the Macbook, I back them up at the same time to two additional hard drives. Those drives are two 500 GB Mercury on-the-go drives 500 GB Mercury on-the-go drives with FireWire 800 connections. They are lightning fast and can be daisy-chained so you really only need one FW 800 plug at your computer. It is really amazing and the transfer speed of FW800 makes USB 2.0 look very bad. I am really looking forward to the new USB 3.0 to be released. It is supposed to be 10x as fast as USB 2.0 (in theory).

But I digress… what I wanted to tell you about is how I keep track of all those files on several hard drives. It sometimes happens that I forget to backup my photos automatically when I upload them, or I only have one of the two additional hard drives handy. Also due to disk space issues, I only temporarily upload those photos to my main hard drive inside the Macbook Pro. Shooting RAW, you will notice sooner or later that your drive is full of photos, so that’s when I sync all my hard drives to make sure I do not miss any photo, then delete them from my main hard drive as well as from the two Mercury’s. I do this every time those 500 GB have filled up. I then sync them with my two 1 TB drives for permanent storage.
When I go on holidays I also take one of those 1TB drives containing all my photos off site and give it to a person I trust.

Ok this was the short story of my backup plan. Without syncing, you can quickly lose control over all your photos on all those drives. This is where Chronosync comes in. It simply checks two folders against each other and copies left to right, right to left, or both ways.
After several days of research and testing multiple syncing software products, this is the most sophisticated one that I found. After all it is an important task and you would not want to lose any photos, which may happen all too quickly without a good piece of software. It also allows you to analyze the folders and files before giving the go.

Make sure you have a sound system figured out for yourself. This is the one I use and I am very happy with it. Simply using the finder and keeping on top of all those files and folders on multiple hard drives is an almost impossible feat and prone to errors which may result in accidentally deleting photos, you had not yet archived.

Don’t let disaster hit you – use software like ChronoSync and always have at least 2 copies of every photo that you take.

chronosync Sync your Photos with ChronoSync

Posted in Geek Talk, Software | No Comments »

Finally a nice sunrise

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

I was overdue for a cracker sunrise, and although I would have hoped for some more clouds, the colour in the sky was simply amazing. When we arrived at 5.30am, and the sun was still one hour away from rising, there was some pretty pink colour in the sky already.

Processing:

None of the colour in the sky got enhanced. I simply darkened down the sky with the grad tool in Lightroom.

At the time of shooting I used a 2 stop ND grad. The lighting actually required a 3-stop ND which I had in my bag but forgot to clean the day before. With a sunrise like that you cannot afford to lose any time cleaning your gear. I made sure I would not blow out the sky (by checking the histogram on my screen), so I would have no problem later on in LR to bring down the exposure another stop.

I added more detail in the water with some local sharpening and contrast adjustments.

The splashing wave in the frame was pure luck. I had a few shots with splashing waves, but this was the only shot which had most of the elements the way I wanted them to be.
Sometimes I am too lazy to spend one hour in photoshop, to enhance a shot by 5% when I am very close to the result I wanted to achieve in the first place.
I prefer spending less time processing and more time shooting lol

Posted in Locations, Software | 1 Comment »

New tool: Fluidr

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

If you are anything like me and you can not fall asleep occasionally, what I do is turn on the laptop and browse the flickr galleries of my friends, always looking to push my photography and get some inspiration.
However everyone who uses flickr knows, that it can be quite a bright expierence – the white background is not particularly contributing to viewing images well. Especially at night when you are half asleep.

Here is the solution: www.fluidr.com turns flickr’s lights off.
It is a lot of fun to browse flickr via fluidr. It’s free and easy to use. Just let it allow to access your flickr account by loggin in and you’re set.

Give it a try, you may just like it even more than the original flickr

If you click on the link below you will jump straight to my photostream on fluidr.

Posted in Geek Talk | 1 Comment »

Different perspective

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Just wanted to show you Brent’s shot of the same morning. His theme was about the photographer (me) struggling with wild weather conditions to get THE shot.

What I like about shooting with other people is the variety of images that you come home with as well as the different way of processing.

Brent Pearson - Man vs. Wild

Posted in Locations | 2 Comments »

Of storms and photographers…

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

The alarm rang at 4.15am. After a very short night, I made my way up to the Northern Beaches – about a 45 min drive from where I live – to meet up with Brent. Our destination was Long Reef (see map below) to get some photography done.
On the way there it was raining cats and dogs and Brent had to take a detour due to a collapsed tree blocking the road.

I was looking forward to some wild conditions – always good for very dramatic photos.
Armed with umbrellas, tripods and cameras we made our way down to the reef. Low tide allowed us to cross to the top end of the reef – always shooting away from the almost horizontal wind to keep the lenses away from potential rainfall.

The waves were huge and crashing on the rocks, splashing high up and, shortly after, hitting Brent and me. And our tripods.
I have a very sturdy tripod – a Gitzo 2540 – usually nothing makes this tripod move. However the surging waves had so much force that I had to hold it down with some of my weight.

We had a blast! Not only is it a good thrill to battle the storm and the waves, you also get rewarded with very special photos.
We could hardly believe our luck – for a full 1.5 hours not one single drop of rain fell down.
How is that for a great start into the weekend