Down Day, Down Week
It’s amazing that something so virtual can have such a physical world impact. Last week one of the drives in my Drobo reported as being bad. I couldn’t replace it since the replacement drive just went in to upgrading the total capacity. So I ejected the drive and began moving and removing files I didn’t need to take it from a 4 disk array to 3 until the warranty replacement came in. Right as I was about to reach the threshold for the redundancy to kick in, there was a file system corruption and the Drobo was locked. I could read the files, but could no longer add, edit or delete. So my Drobo has been locked for 5 days while waiting for the replacement drives. Today they came in and I’ve learned the following from this experience:
1. I have a lot of files, 162 thousand of them are just photos.
2. It takes a lot of time to copy those files from one drive to another. 12 hours just for the photos, the total time will be close to 3 days including video.
3. I’m very glad I have multiple backups of my important and not so important files.
4. I need to spend some serious time cleaning house, both virtual and physical, because when the Drobo is down, the office and the house gets seriously messy.
Sorting through all the photos I found the oldest digital photo I had, which turned out to be a picture of me right after the long flight to Switzerland, taken with an Olympus D360L by Doug Morris (no relation) on May 18, 2000. That was over 10 years ago and I feel drained like I looked on that day. That was a great camera for a point and shoot even though it was slow. It had wonderful low light sensitivity, ran off “AA” batteries and could fit in a pocket if you didn’t mind a huge bulge that made people stare at you with weird contorted faces.
The Photography Tip of the Week #070
Photoblock Challenge – One Shot
070 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
The shot I waited for during my challenge.
There are many benefits of digital photography over ye-old film days. Instant feedback being the primary benefit, but the second important benefit is the ability to take a limitless number of photos for relatively no added cost. If you shoot in JPG, you can get thousands of photos on a single memory card. And if you shoot RAW, thousands of photos are still achievable. I like this ability, because I know that not every shot is going to be great and this gives me a lot to choose from. Yet there in lies the problem. We can amass a huge library of photos in relatively a short period of time with the bulk of the photos being junk. A few years back I showed my portfolio to a mentor and he thumbed through it really fast and said, “You walk too fast.” I instantly knew what he meant and we all fall victim to it during first years of the digital photography craze. Since we can photograph nearly indefinitely, we think it’s our duty to do so. What made photographers great years ago still holds true today, they took their time to make a truly great photo. So the challenge is to turn your digital camera into a film camera for a short period of time.
Scott Kelby had a version of this challenge a month or so ago. In his challenge, he stated that you could only shot 36 exposures, you had to cover up your LCD and you couldn’t look at the photos for at least 24 hours. I have a short version of the same challenge and that is to:
Set aside one hour and only take a single photograph.
Since you can only take one shot, you will find rather quickly that you will want to make that shot count and you will do everything you can to make a truly great photo. If you don’t know what to photograph, then do something like the sunset. At what point is the best photo going to happen? You’ll have to wait for it and see. But once you make the shot, pack it up. Don’t sit around and see if something better will come, you had the one shot, now see what you can do with it.
So why should you do this challenge? As you learn to control when you press the shutter button, you will reduce the amount of time it takes to dump the photos off your memory card. You will severely cut down on the number of images you need to cull, and cut down on the hard disk space required to store that amassed digital dogpile. Not to mention the transfer time required for backup to an online service like backblaze. All-in-all your digital photo life will be much simpler and you will have much more note worthy photos to share.
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I am a top photographer in the Mocksville, North Carolina Professional Photographers guide on MarketingTool.com.
