Fuji

I have had the opportunity to shoot with the Fuji X-E1 bodies and primes for the last few months. If you are not familiar with them, they are beautiful cameras. They remind me of the Contax G bodies that were around in the late 90's and early 00's. There are a few important differences. The Fuji's are digital and the Contax G1/G2 were film bodies. The Fuji bodes can focus properly (and have only improved with a number of firmware updates) and the Contax bodies could never focus properly. But what they have in common is that they are both very attractive cameras that feel great when you are using them.

What was heartbreaking about the Contax G1/G2 bodies was that they felt so great when you held them and shot with them, but then were crushed with the results when you would get film back with images horribly back focused or front focused. The Contax cameras were rangefinders, but they did not include any type of split-focus or other focus confirmation in the viewfinder so you had to hope that the autofocus was focusing on what you wanted it to... and more frequently than not, it didn't.

But back to the Fuji's... the more I use them, the more I have fallen in love with the X-E1's. They are small, quiet bodies with sharp lenses, and what comes out of them rivals the quality of my DSLR's, even at high ISO. I also find that when I use them, I am able to blend in much better as a guy with a small digital camera or two versus using the Canon DSLR's and the EF-L zooms or primes. They have become my "personal" cameras. I was able to take some time after a couple of shoots in Germany and put the Canon's away and wander a few cities in Germany using the X-E1's and had an amazing time of not only really good food, but had a blast shooting... Here are a couple of images from one of the trips. I will post more images soon.

Packing to go out of town.

I am out of town for the next week on an overseas shoot. I am hoping to post during my time that I am gone... but that all depends upon how crazy the schedule gets.

One of the things that I am always trying to try to perfect is how to pack for long out of town shoots. By nature, I like to bring everything that I might possibly need with me... and then some. The problem is that ends up being waaaay more than I could every sneak past the flight attendants as carry-on.

Each shoot is also different, so each time I have to weigh what to bring, and what to leave home.
But I am always trying to thin down my load, and bring only what I will need, but at the same time not leaving anything behind that I will end up really needing... and many of my shoots are in places where there is nowhere to pick up an extra battery charger, memory cards, or rent lights or lenses if I end up needing them (or needing more that I packed.)

It is also tough because I refuse to check camera or computer gear. I want to carry it on the plane, and carry it off the plane so I know that it arrives in one piece.

I have had a few memorable experiences where my luggage did not arrive when I did. The most extreme was covering Hurricane Rita when I worked for five or six days with only what I carried on the plane... my cameras and my laptop. No clothes, no mosquito repellent (which I sorely needed... I looked like I had chicken pox by the time I was done), no toothbrush, or anything else that I had packed. It was a drag. Even worse, since it was a fairly serious storm, there were no stores open so there was nowhere to buy clothes or anything else... I was ripe by the end of that assignment.

I was on a shoot once that was in a more remote area of the U.S. and we were going to be lighting everything... so I carefully packed my lights in a Pelican case and my light stands, gels, grids etc, in a separate case. The lights showed up... the second case with everything else didn't. The nearest place to rent lighting gear was about 4 hours away and we had to start shooting in a couple of hours. The airline was reeeeeeeeealy sorry... but still they didn't make it and we had to make do. The client understood, and it turned out OK, but it was still not the most ideal situation.

So I don't even want to think about what it would be like to arrive somewhere and not have my camera gear and/or laptop. I can make due without most things, but as a photographer I need the cameras to do my thing.

I have accepted the fact that there is no way for me to carry-on lights along with cameras and my laptop (unless I am just using 580's, or have brought an assistant with me so I can use them to carry on the lights) most of the time when I have to bring lights, I just have to check them and pray that they make it.

The one thing that has totally made traveling a little more fun it is the ThinkTank Photo Airport International II rolling bag . It holds:

5d MkII's x2
50D
16-35 mm f2.8
24-70mm f2.8
70-200 mm f2.8 IS
24mm f1.4 II
50mm f1.2 L
135mm f2
580 EX II flashes x 2
small bounce cards, off camera cables, etc.
lots of camera batteries
chargers for the 5D MkII's and 50D
memory cards
flashlight and lots of other odds and ends.

It is a great bag. It has survived multiple trips to Iraq and Afghanistan along with lots of other places both in and out of the U.S.. It is one of the things that has made travel easier. It is also international sized, so I have never had a problem bringing it as a carry on... even on overseas flights. It also fits in the overhead on the smaller jets.

Along with the Airport International II, I also carry the Shapeshifter. for the laptop. Thinktank has really cornered the market in good travel gear for the photographer.

But I am off for another adventure. I have all my gear packed (hopefully) and I will be posting more soon.

Some of my favorite things.

Here is a short list of some of the things I am using that I really like.

1. Canon PIXMA MX7600 inkjet all-in-one printer

I recently replaced my office all-in-one printer. I got the Canon PIXMA MX7600 inkjet all-in-one and absolutely love it. It has a much smaller footprint than the printer I had previously, the print quality is amazing, it is quiet, and it has built in duplex printing, copying and scanning.

Yes, all three processes are duplexed. I had a hard time believing this when I read the specs on the printer.

It is the best office printer I have ever used. Another thing I really appreciate about it is that the software that comes with it actually works. With certain other popular brands of all-in-one printers, you buy it, get it home, and then discover that when the box says it works with OS X, that means it PRINTS with OS X, but scanning and faxing aren't supported "yet." All the features are supported on the Canon.

I paid about $350 for it.

2. Skype

I started using Skype on the advice of a pastor friend of mine before we took a trip to Fiji last August. Since I seem to be doing a lot more international work lately, it was always a hassle to make phone calls from other countries. You could find decent internet just about anywhere (including Iraq and Afghanistan) but you were still stuck paying $2.50 a minute on the cell phone or having to use a calling card.

With Skype, you can use your internet connection to make phone calls. You install the software and with a US account, you can call other Skype users for free. For a few bucks a month you can get a phone number on Skype that will let you call US phone numbers for no additional cost, too (so if you have a Skype account with a phone number, you can call other phones for free, too, with no limit on the number or duration of calls.)

Skype also has texting (like IM) and video conferencing which seems much more robust than iChat or AOL's video chat and seems to work at much lower bandwidth. You can also send files, photos, or other docs over Skype, too.

3. ThinkTank's Shape Shifter laptop backpack

As I rapidly rack up airmiles, I have been continuing to hone what I carry and how I carry it.

I have a closet full of laptop bags that almost do what I need them to do, but not quite. Either they are great for a light load, but won't fit everything I need for a road trip, or they will hold lots of stuff, but not be padded well enough for the bumping around that happens on the road, or they are padded well and hold lots of stuff but won't fit under the airplane seat and have no means to lock the compartments.

Thinktank Photo has created the near perfect bag with the Shapeshifter.

It holds everything computer related. It will also hold either one of my laptops (17" MBP or 13" aluminum MacBook) and all the chargers, converters, card readers, backup hard drives, and all the little bits and pieces. You can also unzip an inner area of the bag to expand its size so it can also accommodate a couple full sized DSLR bodies and lenses. If you don't need to carry that much, you can zip the inner area closed and you have a very thin, streamlined laptop solution.

It is also padded in an intelligent way. It is not puffy like the Michelin Man, but has the right amount of protection in the right places.

The outside pockets don't have a lot of padding, but I am putting the more rugged things in those pockets, pens, biz cards, headphones, card readers, cables, etc.. The laptop area is well protected, including on the bottom, (which many laptop makers seem to forget that we do set the bag down once in a while).

The pockets where you would put camera gear are very well protected with a denser foam that is quite thin, the advantage of this is that it protects what is inside (and keeps what is inside from beating up anything around it) but is thin enough that when you close that pocket, it is not a big puffy blob in the middle of the bag.

The key pockets also have reinforced zippers with the locking holes on them so you can secure them and the bag. It won't prevent a determined thief from getting to what is inside, but it will probably deter the causal crook that is looking for an easy unsecured target of opportunity. It comes in black, black, or uh, black and is about $250.

4. Drive Genius 2

There are lots of solutions for Mac Drive/Data recovery. Techtool, Disk Warrior are the two biggest. I have used both, and found both to be lacking. Techtool often finds problems that aren't really there and other times has created new problems. It also seems like it is always a step behind on compatibility. It takes them a long time to release updates when there is an OS update or a new Mac released.

Keeping up with these is important because a big part of their pitch is the ability to use a boot disk or other device to boot your Mac when it is having trouble. I got suckered in a few years back when they came out with a version of TechTool that you could install on a firewire flash drive and it never worked as advertised. It never was able to boot up my Macs and when you talked to tech support they would try to talk you into their annual subscription to get all the updates... huh? Pay for the software and then pay for updates? I tried it... the firewire solution still didn't work and so I swore off Techtool.

Drive Genius I really like. It is simple and works well, but they too are way behind the curve on keeping up with current Mac hardware. As of the writing of this, they still don't support the aluminum MacBook (which was released more than three months ago!) So if I have a problem with my MacBook, I can't boot up with their disk. What is the point?

I found Drive Genius 2 about a year ago. It works as advertised. It works will all my Macs, they seem to update it fairly frequently, or at least when there is a need for an update, and everyone else I have turned onto it loves it also. It has a simple interface, keeps things working the way they are supposed to, and doesn't offer a lot of garbage that you are most likely not going to use.

It can be found for $99

Until next time...

(The photo at the top is from a project I shot in Fiji in Aug 08. It is just a photo that I like... it has nothing to do really with photo or Mac stuff. The fellows in the image are Fijian sugar cane farmers. )

Drobo and Time Machine.. a match made on the Mac.

Time Machine... I love it. It backs everything up, keeps it organized by hour, day, week, month. It's great. The best thing is that I don't have to do anything to keep Time Machine working... uh, except for keeping a hard drive plugged into the computer that has enough room on it for all those backups.

This probably isn't an issue for many Mac users, unless they compulsively save every Youtube video they find online or take part in some other hard drive filling hobbies. For me, it is photos... which is what pays the bills. So at any given time, my basic MacPro backup is anywhere from 100-125gb depending (this is apps, music, and everything but photos) and then my photo drive is another 200-300gb depending (these are transmits and raw takes that have not been edited and moved into my archiving system yet.)

So that first Time Machine backup is about 400gb. Figure I'm using a 750gb drive and right there, I have filled 1/2 of the drive (roughly... I know that math is not one of my strengths). And from there I am able to fill the Time Machine drive up with amazing speed.

Each time I come back from a week long overseas shoot with 50-60gb of raw files... slurp... there goes another chunk of the drive... and you do that three or four times, along with the normal day to day backups and you have managed to fill up a 750gb drive in less than two months.

So then you go buy another hard drive (because I want to have a lasting backup system so that if I need to go back more than two months if I need to) and you start the process over again. First, it creates the giant backup that takes up a large chunk of the drive and then you watch the remaining space get smaller and smaller until it is time to repeat the process again.

Eventually you end up with a whole lot of drives and a bit of a headache from a backup/redundancy standpoint because in the unfortunate circumstance you need to go back to a backup to find something (and it happens... believe me) you then have to remember which disk (which two month chunk of time) the file or files are stored on.

This is when I decided to take the plunge and try the Drobo. I had always thought the Drobo systems were pretty cool. If you don't know what a Drobo is, it is a RAID array that runs its self. You just have to put in up to four SATA drives (any size you want, they don't have to match) and plug it in to the firewire or usb port on your computer and it will do its thing from there.

It seemed like a perfect solution (you put a few 750gb drives in there and it'll last a long time since you won't have to keep re-doing that initial backup). Initially I was a bit concerned and kept going back to look at the backups and make sure that it was working and there weren't errors or problems... and there weren't. The Drobo was rock solid. The Mac would hang and I had to force it to restart, it would restart and Drobo was right there ready to work... unfazed by the shutdown.

One of the complaints that has floated around about the Drobo is that it is slow... when it was USB only, that might have been true, (I never tried the first version that was only USB) but the firewire 800 version is plenty fast. If I was editing video or doing something else that required lots and lots of extreme bandwidth, maybe I wouldn't be as happy. For Time Machine and the drive works great and is plenty fast.

The other thing that made Drobo attractive is that it is redundant backup. If one of the drives craps out in the array, you replace the drive and the Drobo will get you right back up to speed... with no data loss. Nothing nicer than having backups of your backups. Remember... redundancy. Drobo uses part of each drive to backup the other drives in the array automatically. It does all of this by its self. You don't have to do anything other that put data on it.

Here is another reason why redundancy is good. Before trying the Drobo, I tried using one of the Maxtor 2 terabyte drives (follow the link only so you know what NEVER to buy... there is a reason they are always on sale) and found out the hard way that when one of those drives fail (and it is two 1TB drives in an enclosure with a very cheap built in hardware raid solution) you have to send the whole thing back to Seagate and they send you a brand new drive and your data is gone. In my case, the drive shut down all of a sudden with about 500gb of data and would not mount again no matter what I did.

And when your data is gone, you might ask ... gone where? Good question. One they were not able to answer. They promised that they erase everything that comes back as a return, but were unable to answer the question of how many times they write over the data, etc. Plus, if you were counting on that backup... its gone. All of it. They ship you a new drive in a box and will not make any attempt to recover your data.

So with the Drobo it is fast, redundant, quiet and as simple to use as a regular external hard drive. It is the perfect Time Machine (or other backup progam) solution, in my opinion. If a drive fails, you replace the drive. It does not require sending anything back to Drobo unless the actual device fails, but from what I have seen, they are very reliable.

And then I started to compare the Drobo to my existing RAID system...

SuperDuper is Leopard compatible

My favorite backup app in the entire world... no wait... the entire universe is now Leopard compatible. You would think that between family (especially with twins babies- Charlotte (L) and David) and work and church and ASMP other commitments I wouldn't have time to obsess over a backup program... but I make time for the important things ;-)

SuperDuper is now Leopard compatible. If you don't use it... buy it now and start using it. It is the best bootable backup solution for the Mac.