Photography News January 5, 2021
Quote: “You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.” – Joan Miro
Articles:
Ansel Adams: Making of Moon and Half Dome – 4.5m
Capturing Powerful Portraits – Photographic Tips and techniques – 51m
Camera Focus Modes Complete Guide 15m Gary Gough
Top Three Hacks for Cutting Out Hair in Photoshop
Webinar Noir: Stylish Black & White – Harold Davis 1h5m
Night Landscape Photography: From Light Painting to Light Writing – 1h3m
Thought for the day: Recording Media failures and sources
Recently I was asked a few questions by someone who was having problems with their SD cards. I feel that you should be aware of the following:
- Recording media dies. Always. Maybe after a few years usage, maybe sooner. But it will die and your usage and backup plan should include that you will loose all your images on it without a good backup system. Not one backup, but a system of updated backups.
- If a piece of media (disk drive, SD or CF card, etc.) starts having errors, copy as much as you can immediately and get rid of the bad device. Don’t save it for later.
- You don’t generally need to buy recording media from your camera vendor. For example Sony makes the TOUGH SD cards. These are fine cards but they are about 4x more expensive than the standard cards. And the standard SD cards are rugged enough to go through a clothes wash (don’t ask me how I know this 🙁 ). In a similar way you don’t need to buy a filter or intervalometer from Canon for your Canon (or from Nikon for your Nikon). Third party devices can be excellent.
- You don’t want to mix your formatting. For example you should
- Never erase images on a card
- Always format the card in the camera you are going to use it in
- Never format (for example) a card on you Canon and then try to use it in your Pentax (it may work or it may be a huge mess).
- Your recording media can effect your work speed. In particular the write speed of your SD or CF card should match how fast you want to take pictures. If you are shooting Birds in Flight (BIF) rapid fire you want to have a card that can clear the buffer of your camera quickly so you can take more inflight pictures. If you are shooting flowers on a table or similar, then something slower and cheaper will work well.
- If your camera has dual card slots you can use them in several ways. I use mine to generate a backup SD card on the fly. In the past 15 years I have had 2 SD cards die on me and I lost everything on the card (after trying recovery software). And if the card dies, after trying to recover the images, I toss it. It isn’t worth the money to try to reuse a failing card.
- RAID can be excellent, if used right. JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) can also work very well, if used right. But both need offsite backups on a regular basis.
- Remember, your CF, SD and Disk Drives are going to die. Most disk drives are fairly reliable for 3-5 years, then their failure rate goes up. How much data are you willing to lose? Does that match your backup strategy? Don’t have a backup strategy? Then you can be sure you are going to lose some images you made.
Artist of the Week/Portfolio: Lilo Raymond Biography Pictures1 Pictures2 Brief Interesting Piece
The content of this blog post done in collaboration with one of our members, Greg Edwards: http://gregoryedwards.slickpic.site