Any of you who have read this blog for a while know I am just a little obsessive about my storage needs, and the means to back ’em up…. just in case. I’ve been rethinking my strategies lately, especially in light of putting the new eight-headed monstrosity under my desk.

I talked with someone at work — one of our storage guys — around Christmas about my hard drive strategy. He’d just bought a DSLR, and was looking for suggestions. I think he was surprised that I had spent so much time and effort to ensure that my files were safe. A storage guy was surprised at how I was approaching storage? That must mean I’m doing something right.

So tonight, I started catching up on a billion newsfeed entries — I’ve been a little lax in keeping up with feeds over the last month or so — and I found a great piece by Michael Stewart that talks about drives, specifically, although it also gets into RAID configurations and drive enclosure technologies.

I didn’t read anything in this piece that I disagreed with. I love the idea of big drives for archival storage, and the more devices those drives are in, the better. I think FW800 rocks although eSATA really has my attention, despite having no eSATA gear. I’m also kinda intrigued by using fast, small drives for system drives and cache drives. With eSATA on the outside of the box, having the smaller drives eating up the space inside the case doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. And frankly, if there’s time in an emergency, it’d be very easy to pull the eSATA drive array(s), tuck ’em under my arm, and run away with them. It’s harder to do that with the Octoputer.

So, if you’re paranoid about your drives (like me), read this piece, look at some of my old rambles about storage and backups, and protect your data! Once I get my new strategy figured out, I’ll write about it, and give you more to chew on.

In the wee hours Sunday morning, I finished scanning Elma’s flats. 1500+ scans, a little over 30GB of storage, and many, many hours have been poured into this project… I am thrilled to have it complete. There’s still some post-production work to do — file naming, and eventually sucking it all into Lightroom for managing — but the biggest part of the work is complete.

Now I can turn the attention of both scanners to Roaul’s slides, and try to get them finished over the next few weeks. You’d think that would be the end of the line for the big archival projects, but Mom’s still looms out there, along with a medium-sized batch from my grandmother, and a big ol’ batch of my images.

I think there’s about 4000 family images preserved through my work so far, and I figure there’s easily another 4000 in the images I mentioned above. Perhaps I can have all that done by the end of the year! 🙂 Now if I could just figure out how to put them on the web…..

So the other day, one of my Engadget-entrenched Canon buddies sent along a blurb about a new lens from Sigma. This pup is a 200-500mm f/2.8 lens, really seeming to be built for wildlife shots, although I’d guess it’d do well for sports shooting too. There’s also a teleconverter to take it to 400-1000mm at f/5.6. This little dude weighs in at a svelte 35 pounds, and can be had for a cool $25,000. It’s a beast. It also seems to be sporting a green paint job, which frankly, I kinda dig.

One of the threads talking about the Sigma lens started a shooting match of bigger, better, faster, more (again, apologies to 4 Non Blondes).

One of the posters to the Sigma thread pointed at the grandaddy of all Canon lenses (sorta; more on that later). That’s a 1200mm f/5.6L. It comes with its own tripod, and weighs in at a mere 36 pounds. It’s cost? Only $99,000 from B&H. This lens is so legendary that it has its own Wikipedia page, spouting specs, info about the lens including who owns some of ’em. It’s that rare.

Another lens mentioned in the Sigma thread was an unusual Canon 800mm f/3.8 lens. Supposedly this thing was rare, rare. Weighing about 32 pounds, the only reference someone made to it was an eBay sale about two years ago, selling for just about $4500. It looks like there’s more info here, along with mention of a 2000mm f/11 lens, and a mention of the next monster on the list.

Next up, a really unusual Canon lens…. 5200mm f/14. I have no idea about pricing (although there’s a reference to someone selling one for about $23k), or even when this lens was built, but the document referencing it indicates that it’s also got a tripod supplied with it, and it only weighs 220 pounds without the trike. The closest the thing will focus is about 360 feet, and supposedly can shoot in the 18 to 32 mile range. It even has sighting scopes to train the lens on the target. Now that’s a lens.

Or so I thought.

Carl Zeiss AG also has a big lens. I mean big. It’s a 1700mm f/4 lens. Big. I mean, really big. It weighs over 500 pounds, and the folks at Zeiss claim it was designed for long distance wildlife photography. Duh! I sorta get the impression this was a one-off lens for someone with a Hasselblad 6×6 they were just dying to use for nosehair examination of beasties on the plain. Can you imagine having a lens that big custom-made?

So, as you sleep tonight, and vision of gray lenses dance in your head, remember that there are bigger, more lumbering lenses out there. They can’t dance, and they can’t hardly be carried. But man, do I bet they can shoot! 🙂

So I was reading through some stuff in Newsfire, and found a blurb about a new Casio Exlim camera. You can see all the details here.

So what’s so special about a point and shoot. Well: 6Mp (not bad), RAW, 12x optical zoom (great), 60fps.

Waitaminute… SIXTY fps?

Yup, 60fps. And it’ll shoot HD movies from 300-1200fps at full widescreen HD resolutions. Wow is all I can say. Of course, this beauty comes with a hefty price tag just shy of a grand, but the capabilities are amazing for this little camera. Certainly, the performance for the money is well in line with other high-end cameras like this one.

The website sports a bunch of details about the little beastie, along with sample HD movies and loads of specs. The HD movies are fun to see, as is the explanation of the 60fps shooting system, and how it can capture an image before you press the button (and no, it’s not telepathy).

As I was telling Beck this morning, if I was to get another camera brand in the house, this camera might be the one to do it. I don’t believe it’s quite out yet, but once they are out, you can bet I’ll find one in town to take a look at!

The trick I’ve never quite been able to pull off is getting all these family photo scans up on the web where the far-flung family members can comment on them. Ideally, I’d have something where they could add comments about the who/what/when/where for these images.

Another requirement would be to be able to post big batches of photos all at once. It’s not unusual for me to scan large groups of photos and slides, sometimes totaling over a thousand images. I’d really rather not have to put something together for each individual photo, as that could really be time consuming!

Options for doing this seem to be slim. Seems like they are:

• 3rd party code, like Gallery or JAlbum
• something out of the web galleries in Lightroom
• something out of the web galleries in Photoshop
• some kind of WordPress plugin
• use of some Apple utility, iWork or iLife, for example
• perhaps some kind of Apple-based scripting

Truthfully, I like the idea of keeping stuff within the realm of WordPress. It buys me the ability to do searches, and extend the functionality of the web photo gallery to other things that I haven’t thought of yet. I expect I’d still keep the data about the image in some kind of EXIF or XMP format, but if the gallery piece was smart enough to pull the EXIF/XMP data out, and display it in real time, that oughta give me some ability to do some searches.

WordPress has some CMS features to it. If I could figure out some way of leveraging that functionality, that’d be ideal. However, it appears that the “pages” feature in WP doesn’t support comments.

Ultimately, I figure I’ll probably have to do some combination of “roll yer own” and use of other plugins.

Any WP folks out there who’ve tried tackling this problem?

For the family and friends who’ve been wondering where the photos had gone, I have FINALLY gotten up-to-date, and everything up to now is in the photogalleries.

Enjoy the wandering!

One of the newsfeeds I get daily included this photo today. It’s got to be one the better photos I’ve seen in a while. I’m trying to get my head around how it was shot, and I figure it must’ve been taken near the Arctic Circle (or Antarctic Circle) through one day of the sun’s movement.

Or, it could be an incredibly good piece of work with Photoshop. No matter — it’s a beautiful piece of work.

I just got word last night that one of my pieces, Dark Crystal, has been accepted for the Soulard Art Market and Contemporary Gallery “Winter Peace” exhibit. Woo-hoo!

The exhibit runs from December 13th through January 2nd at the Soulard Art Market. Address is on the mailer below, and on the sidebar. There’s a “casual preview” on Thursday, December 13th, from 7-10pm, and a “formal reception” on Friday, December 14th, from 7-10pm. It’s my understanding that there will be a live band, and the events are free, and open to the public.

This is my first work with this gallery, so I don’t exactly know what to expect. I’m absolutely thrilled though!!!!

Today was the first day of a two-day show sponsored at the high school up the street. This is the biggest show I’ve been a part of, with about 150 vendors. I’ve been printing and matting images like crazy over the last couple of weeks, and that’s kept the blog mighty quiet lately.

The show today drew a different crowd than what I’ve been used to. There were some photographers in the crowd — folks who were not only conversant about gear, but printing too. In fact, I talked with a lady who prints with an Epson 2400 (a printer I’d love to have) and talked about her son’s high-end Epson 7800 wide format printer. Wow. Most folks that I run into at these shows are looking for me to help them with point-and-shoots and other things photographic; these folks today could definitely teach me a bunch of things!

In all, it wasn’t a bad day. Since these shows attract vendors selling everything from Tupperware to painted skillsaw blades, the crowds don’t necessarily respond — with purchases — to the work I show. I always get a bunch of compliments, but compliments don’t buy new lenses! 🙂 Well see what tomorrow holds, but I found enough business today to pay the bills, and that’ll do, pig. That’ll do.