Hard DriveProblems?

As a bit of a follow on from Dave's post of yesterday, there could possibly be trouble brewing on the Hard Drive Front.

I understand that the majority are manufactured in flood torn Thailand as this story will testify.

What does if mean for us? Well almost certainly prices will rise as availability becomes scarce and lead times increase.

S, if you need more External HDD capacity get in quick, and if you are putting off getting a new PC or laptop, think hard, but think quick.

Travel back ups

A quick one to day as i am cloning my 2TB hard drives and that puts my desk top out of action for about 15 hours and its my wifes birthday and we are out most of the day-Happy Birthday Marian, So what do you do for backing up and storing images when away, I normally take my laptop and a Lacie Rugged 250GB external hardive and keep images both to the laptop and the HD, Last week i purchased another Lacie Rugged 500GB external hard drive from B+H, I have used the rugged HD's  for a couple of years now and they are well travelled, They are small and fairly light and do the job, I have just the USB 2 versions but they do firewire and USB 3 now, When i go to Japan i will take both and not store images on the laptop so as not to slow it down
I would be interested to know what and how you back up when away from home

Dave

Trials and tribulations

Last week i turned my desktop on and opened capture one, I could see the images but all the tools/sliders were greyed out, It had been working fine for a few days since i had installed the new version, Then i noticed a warning sign saying that one of my raid hardrives/ports had a problem and i needed to back every thing up before it goes pop, I went and bought a new 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black and did a C drive back up and today i removed the old 2x 500GB drives and replaced it with the new one, To my amazement it all worked from the off but i still have the Capture One problem, I have deactivated it on both desk and laptop and can reactivate it on my laptop but for some reason the desktop just wont have it, I have been tooing and froing with the tech support but as of Monday PM i am still capture oneless, Thank god i can use Photoshop, I am not blaming C1 and would not be surprised if it turns out to be a PC problem but every thing else works so i am perplexed to say the least,
On the hard drive from i have just filled another one up so i also purchased a 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green with an enclosure for my back ups. Its being formatted as i write and i will clone the other hard drive over night as it takes hours
I am off to Florida on Saturday to photograph the Manatees at Crystal river only to watch the news and find out that they may shut the springs due to the severe weather that they have been getting and leave the manatees in there in peace, There have been over 600 manatee deaths already this year and its only December, This is due to  hypothermia, The manatees have gone into the springs to stay warm and they are worried about the amount of people going into the springs to see them, Pressure may force them out of the springs and into colder water which will cause the death toll to rise, No photo is worth the subjects safety but its a long way to go for nothing, I spoke to the dive shop today and as of today the springs are still open but the weather looks set to get colder this week so who knows, There are plenty of places there to see the manatees but the springs are THE place to get good clear water shots-fingers crossed for both me and the manatees
The temperatures have fallen dramatically today and will stay bitter all week, I made sure that my bird feeders were topped up today and spent a couple of hours in the hide, The usual cardinal, titmouse and chickerdees were around and then a Red Bellied Woodpecker arrived and grabbed a peanut and flew back into the tree, I waited and watched for over an hour before it flew to my 'woodpecker' branch and in the fading light i got some decent images of it

Red Bellied Woodpecker-Full Frame

Tufted Titmouse-Full Frame

Cardinal (Female) Full Frame

I was asked the other day on how i go about shooting birds in flight and i will cover this in my next blog

Dave

External Hard Drives again

Both Martin and Myself have discussed external hard drives before, Last year i purchased a Western Digital 1.5TB Elite, I must say that i haven't been overly impressed, Every time i go to use it it goes through every image on the HD before opening the file that i want, So i other words its time consuming which is something that i don't need, I have tried to see why and if i can change it but it cant seem to, I will keep it as a back up along with the 1TB Western Digital which is close to being full and i have just ordered a Western Digital-you can see a pattern here-2TB Caviar Black internal drive with an enclosure to make it an external drive-Why do this? well firstly for future proofing, At the moment my PC only has USB2 ports so when i get a new one with USB3 ports i don't need to but a new HD i just need a new enclosure which are not very expensive, The Caviar Black and Green HD's are highly thought of-The Blacks have a 5 year warantee and are known for their long life and reliability, The extrenal enclosure that i have ordered is a Rosewill unit with a fan built in-no i had never heard of them before but there are hundreds of good reviews on them so i will give them ago, I ordered my new gear from Newegg which seem to have a good name over here and i should recieve them on tuesday-i will let you know how it goes-As i am having trouble with my internet again-thank you Time Warner i will leave it as that incase it drops again

Dave

External hard drives

My hard drives are filling up quick so yesterday i decided it was time to go and get a bigger one, I use 3 so over a period of the next couple of months i will replace the others, When you go into a shop there is a bewildering array of different makes and models so which one to go for, I have used the maxtor/Lacie models before and have had 2 go down, I read various forums and at the moment it seems that Western Digital seem to be the most stable, I have used Western Digital for the last couple of years without problems (touch wood) so i have decided to stay with that particular brand, I browsed their range and decided to go for the 1.5TB Elite model, Its USB so simple to install and fast enough for my needs, It has software that allows for easy back up so i will give that a test and see how it performs, The price of drives have come down considerably over the last few years so there isn't a reason to have more than one back up, I would refrain from having too large a drive as there isn't any point of having a drive that will takes years to fill as the chances are that it will fail before that, I tend to change mine every 2 years max

Dave

Guest Photographer - John Bulpitt FRPS

Today is the first of what will hopefully be a new features for Wildlife Photography across the Water with our first guest photographer slot on the blog.

John Bulpitt read this article I posted back in February and contacted me ahead of a trip he made to Africa earlier this year and we got into dialogue about digital storage. But before John's story her a few details and background on John.

John's Bio

I have been a keen sports photographer for more than 20 years and gained my RPS Fellowship in 2003 with a panel of athletics/track and field prints. More recently I have diversified into nature and street photography. Most action pics are taken with a Canon 1D mkII with either a 70-200f2.8L (often with a 1.4 converter) or a 300f4 IS. A Canon 40D is used for more static subjects.

I enter many National and International exhibitions and am an enthusiastic member of Cambridge Camera Club, click on the Gallery for some of my sports pics. If you can take sharp images of Greyhounds, birds in flight are straightforward!

John now takes up the story below with his article that was published in summer 2009 edition of "The Iris", the magazine of the Nature Group of the RPS.

Storing Digital Images on the move

On a recent trip to Tanzania with Mark Hamblin of Wildshots, I took about 8000 images. Some may find this excessive, but as a photographer whose main interest is action photography in all it's manifestations, I tend to hit the motordrive and only stop when the Bar opens. In any event, it does raise the question of how you back up and store digital images on a "big" trip. Over the past five years I have tried four different solutions. If I knew then what I know now my kids would (eventually) be far better off.

One could take a pocket full of CF cards. I tend to use Sandisk Extreme 11, 4GB cards and shooting in RAW on a Canon 1DmkII would need about 20 of these for the trip described above.

At the time of writing (April 1st appropriately) these would cost about £280 from Amazon. You could argue that fewer are needed because of the facility to edit in camera but I would counsel against this. You can't really see what you are doing and it can corrupt the card. However, the main drawback with total reliance on CF cards is that you can not take full advantage of the benefit of digital the facility to review a day's shoot and learn any lessons that need to be learnt in preparation for the next day. There are cheap CF cards but I wouldn't go there personally. You could also buy bigger capacity cards but I would be nervous about having too many eggs in one basket as it were.

The second possibility is a photo viewer. I think that today this is the most expensive solution. The Epson P4000 costs about £390 and holds 80GB. Other than cost I also believe that this can be the worse solution out of the four options outlined in this article. You can not back up and hard drives do fail. you cannot edit other than delete and downloading takes about 15 minutes for a 4GB card. Moreover the battery has a relatively small capacity. It will download two 4GB cards, but not three which can be a problem in places with an intermittent power supply.

Then there is the laptop. This may not involve additional expenditure because many of you may already own one. You can back up onto an external hard drive, DVD's or a number of 16Gb pen drives. it will also take imaging software, But of course Hard drives can fail..... The main drawback is that it takes a big chunk of your carry on baggage allowance and opportunist thieves can spot them from a thousand paces.

The final option and the one I have now decided on is the Netbook. Essentially this is a very small laptop. I have bought the Samsung NC10 (£380 from John Lewis with a 2 year warranty). It has a 160GB hard drive and comes with a 1GB RAM, but I have upgraded to a 2GB (about £20 from Amazon) I back up onto a Seagate external portable hard drive. £75 from PC World a few months ago but you can buy similar products today a much lower price. It all fits very easily into the outside pocket of my camera rucksack.

Of course the hard drive can fail... you know the story now! And it will not load Canon software because the screen resolution is 1024 x 600 and not 1024 x 768***. But it will take Breezebrowser pro (free 15 day trial download available). This enables me to review my images quickly but a full edit would be a bit of a fiddle and cuts down on drinking time. if you are still with me you may have concluded that there is no perfect solution and this is where i have got to, But in my view, the best solution at present is the Netbook plus a lot of CF cards.

I am most grateful to RPS Nature group member Martin Dyer for his help with my Netbook purchase and configuration. Martin co authors what, in my view, is the best wildlife photography website around.

Thanks for that John....... and of course we are most grateful for the kind words about our blog.

*** Note: I (Martin) have found a way round this now and will report in a couple of days time on how to get 1024 x 768 res. and unlock other programs.

And now for a few of John's favourite images. So for all lovers of African wildlife, here are some great images.

Taken in Ndutu where the migration reaches full swing on Jan/Feb. Shutter speed of 1/30th. Pan and blur is not easy from a Landcruiser!

Lake Manyara NP where unlike Ndutu you cannot drive off road. I think that backlighting often works well with small mammals but doesn't suit every subject.

Ngorogoro crater. Good numbers of these birds scavenge around the picnic area. The tatty tail feathers tell you that this bird spends a lot of time on the ground

Ndutu - my favourite place in Africa. We came across a mother and four cubs on four consecutive days and were able to photograph many different behaviours.

Lake Manyara. We saw the bird go into it's nest hole and hoped it would emerge quickly as we were blocking the road

Well many thanks for that great article John and the fabulous images. It looked like you had a great trip.

So finally a note to other wildlife photographers. If you would like to feature as a guest photographer, please tell us about yourself, send us some images and we will get you on the blog. Use the comments box if you want to contact us (remember we don't need to publish your contact note as the comments are moderated - so we won't be telling the world).

Thanks again John

Martin

Hardware-Hard Drives

With ever increasing mega pixels giving us larger and larger files, the PC hard drive soon fills up and every starts to run very sloooooooooooowly, which is a complete pain.

So what to do?- well the best thing is to take all your images off the PC and put them on an external hard drive. These have gone up in capacity and down in price over the last few years so there is no need not to have one. In fact you should have a minimum of two as you will need a back up just in case one of the drives fail, which in time it will- guaranteed.

I started by using Lacie 250GB hard drives and after a year or two, one failed so I replaced it and after a year or so the other gave up the ghost. Now this isn't a major problem as the images were always backed up. For the last couple of years I have used Western Digital 500GB external drives. These so far have been fine but they are nearly full so I have just added a 1TB drive and will replace the other 2 x500GB drives shortly, I like to be safe so I have a 1TB harddrive on my PC and a 1TB external drive added to this I have a back up drive and a back up of the back up which I keep off site just in case a scumbag decides he wants to take them whilst I am out or if the house should burn down I am covered-or at least the images are.

Over the top maybe but as I make a living out of photography I don't want to loose all the hard work and lovely images that I have captured over the years, I know some people burn them to disc but I have heard too many stories of DVD's corrupting over time so for now the external route is the way to go for me, Don't think it will never happen to you, PC's crash all the time and its very expensive to get somebody to recover data-easier to buy a couple of decent external hard drives and sleep at night

Dave