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.

Sometimes you take photos and get excited what you captured, but then you return home and instantly get disappointed once you look at them on your (calibrated) screen.

One of those moments I had just recently upon returning from a 4WD trip through the Outback of Australia.
We went up north to Northern Queensland to shoot the rainforest.
I waited for the sun to shine through a whole in the canopy of the rainforest and was rewarded with some really nice sun rays (caused by the 100% humidity up there).

However back home these rays were almost invisible when looking at my raw files in Lightroom.

In those instances I need to recreate what I saw. This is when photoshop is really handy.
Some call it cheating – I call it recreating what you saw – or what you felt.
The camera with it’s 5-6 stops of dynamic range is a pretty primitive tool compared to the capabilities of your eyes which have a dynamic range of about 25 stops.

So I have no problem to utilize photoshop in those cases. Maybe eventually photoshop will become obsolete for me, however as long as we deal with cameras which have very little dynamic range, it is a necessary tool for me.

The below photo has been run through photoshop using the following steps:


• copy background layer
• Filter > Blur > Radial Blur
• Amount: 100, Select Zoom, Select Best
• Move centre point into the appropriate place where the gap in the canopy is
• Recreate the same effect one more time by pressing CMD/CTRL + F
• Set Layer Blending mode to Screen
• Create Layer Mask and take out the effect where you think it is overdone


I am quite happy with the end result and it reflects very closely what I saw when I was in this special place far away from civilization.