Why I don’t depend on Time Machine (and other followups to the backup note..)

So it’s now Monday, and about 24 hours after I posted my note on my new backups and disk scheme. And I wrote that after I was mostly done setting things up and the backups were set up and running and etc.

And here we are, and I’m still trying to get Time Machine to finish the damn first backup of my disks. the data is all in there (working set size 300+ gigs), but for reasons it won’t tell me, it hasn’t decided to actually finish. It was busy purring to itself when I left for work, and here it is, busily purring to itself still.

And while I appreciate why Apple designs its stuff to not be scary to non-geeks, when things go sideways, it can be amazingly frustrating, because I have no real status info or way to figure out what it’s actually doing (or trying to do), other than watching the flashing lights on the disk and trying to decipher the insides of the .inProgress package, And that’s the occasional challenge with Apple stuff: when it works, it just works. When it breaks, it sees no purpose in helping you fix the problem. So now I’m in a quandary, do I leave it alone and see if it’ll finish? do I throw out 300 gigs of backed up (and useless) data and let it start fresh?

I compromised. I stopped it and rebooted (which I needed to do for other reasons) and restarted it. and it spent 10 minutes in “indexing backup” and is now in “backing up”, but not actually doing so and not telling me how much it thinks needs backing up. But the disk is really busy…

On the other hand, Superduper finished pretty quickly and so I have good backups, I just don’t have my versioned backups, so I’m not worried. This is the suspenders, not the belt.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball also happened to weigh in on this. He’s right, DiskWarrior is definitely something you want to have. Highly recommended. And one of the things “on my list”. He’s also right about “more copies” — you’ll notice I try to keep 3 or four copies of my key data in various places at all times, and I’m paranoid enough that I prefer some that do NOT update in real time but wait a week or so, in case there’s unfound errors that creep in. but you can buy terabyte disks for not much — $100 or less now. There’s really no excuse not to replace your drive mechanisms (there I go again!) every year or so on your high usage drives and to keep spare copies of everything. call it SneakerRAID if you want, mirroring by making copies and stuffing them in drawers and things.

He’s also right about Dropbox. It’s a nice alternative to MobileMe (and faster, and cheaper, and has VERSIONING). I have been using it for other things, but now that he mentions it, I can consolidate some stuff on a DropBox rather nicely and simplify my life in other places and save a couple of bucks I’m spending on a cloud storage thingie here and an online service there. That rocks. Not dropping MobileME, though. I like having multiple redundant email accounts in case one of them goes spung. Funny how when MobileMe came out everyone was all over it for its problems (justifiably so), but I’ve seen more gmail outages, and geeks seem to give Google a break on those. I’m Google-centric because their stuff works better with webOS for me, but it’s nice having a place I can jump to if for some reason I need to, so I don’t mind keeping two environments around, just in case…

Merlin Mann also chimes in, and he’s right on, too. Notice how Superduper keeps coming up? Because it works. and you can trust it. Trust is probably THE KEY metric for backups, folks. Not features, trust. (via Duncan).

You’ll notice there are a few of us really, hopelessly, anal about backups. That’s because we’ve all been burnt by problems that happen when you don’t, or when you think you are and they aren’t working, or when they’re happening but corrupted. And we’re really, hopelessly, anal about it because we know YOU FOLKS aren’t doing it.

Bless Apple for making backups simple with Time Machine. So many fewer excuses to not do them for people now. If I were to recommend one thing to Apple now, it’s this. Disks are really cheap. Build a mirrored RAID into every computer, so a drive failure no longer screws someone’s data. Make TIME MACHINE less necessary through data redundancy. Even your laptops. hell, especially your laptops. It’s the next step here, we should take it.

Tags: About Chuq, Photography, The Online Life

Back from vacation…

Back from my vacation and Yosemite trip. It was, in a word, awesome (except the food at the Yosemite Lodge food court is still very expensive and kinda sucks, and you don’t have many options, but that’s nothing new….)

As usually happens, I came back to a huge block of stuff that needed my attention. I’ve gotten my inbox at work down from about 600 emails to around 250, and if you haven’t heard back from me at work, I’m sorry — working on it. At home, it’s down to about 30, and ditto.

The time off gave me a chance to completely get away and shut down and unwind, and do a lot of thinking and planning, so hopefully soon there will be new and interesting things happening. it also really recharge the personal batteries, which I desperately needed, so I feel like doing something more than site and stare at the screen in the evenings. I’ve spent the last few days reworking my disks and backup strategies because it was clear I was going to run out of disk space sooner rather than later (and you can read more about that here); and I’m spending a bunch of time in Lightroom working through photos and cleaning up my library.

I’ll talk more about the trip as I have time to write it up — but until then, I’ve put some of the photos up on my new Smugmug site, which is where I’m going to be building my professional portfolio (which I’ll write more about as I have time to write it up…).

I did what I honestly think is my best photographer EVER. I still have a bunch of photos to process and upload, but the best of the ones I’ve done are now online. Here’s a sample:

and I’ve also set up the best images in a slideshow:

My complete set is (or will be, when I finish catching up) over on Flickr, but I haven’t had time to put them into sets or organize them yet..

Enjoy!

Tags: About Chuq, Photography

What to do when you realize you’re running out of disk…

One of the things that became painfully obvious during my trip to Yosemite was that I was rapidly running out of hard disk.  Being out on the road is not a good time to realize you need  a bigger disk, s when I came back, I decided to fix things before it became a real problem. Here’s what my overall “bits on things” setup looked like:

Now, there’s one obvious problem there that I hadn’t thought about — the backup disk is smaller than the main disk. I knew about that, knew I needed to fix it, and forgot. Not a huge problem, but one of those details you need to keep an eye on or they’ll bite you at an inconvenience moment. Even though I had 3/4 of a terabyte for my backup disk, Time Machine was only storing backups for about 3 weeks, which means it was no longer large enough. It was time to update and grow and upgrade.

The biggest problem — the new Canon 7D creates much larger images. That’s good, but creates ripples. It also does video, which I’m starting to experiment with. By the time I convert the 7D RAw image to DNG and store it on disk, it grows to about 49 megabytes in size. Pile up a few hundred of those, and “Hell, disk is cheap” starts ringing a little hollow. To give an idea of the change going from the 30D to the 7D, on the 30D I use a 4Gb memory card and get 400+ images on it. On the 7D, I upgraded to 16Gb cards, and I get 500 images on one. Moderate upgrade in number of images, big upgrade in amount of disk taken. Also, since the 7D shoots 8 frames a second sustained where the 30D shot 4FPS with limited bursts, the opportunity to generate LOTS MORE images quickly exists. And it definitely happens, so at the end of the day, I have more, larger images to store. This is, as they say, a good problem to have.

The easy answer — upgrade the laptop to a bigger disk — won’t work here. The biggest laptop disks now available are 500 Gigabytes. Larger than my 320Gb, but not by that much. Upgrading delays the problem by a period of time, but it doesn’t solve it. I considered doing that, then decided to bite the bullet and shift into the “it no longer fits on the laptop” universe.

I mumbled about this on Twitter, and immediately got back the “install a NAS!” response. NAS (or Drobo, or RAID, or name your favorite disk packaging setup) isn’t a solution — it’s a technology. You don’t start by choosing a technology, you start by figuring out the solution and then choosing things that implement them well.

I’ve written about backups and my philosophy on how to do them before, check out this piece as well as this followup, as well as this piece where I talk about why I stopped using an online backup solution in favor of sneakernetting an offisite backup somewhere. I am, for the record, looking forward to when the price/performance and the network broadband make this worth doing again, but not right now…)

So for me it’s time to shift my data into a multi-disk environment. I live on a laptop, which gets carried around. If your data no longer all lives on the laptop disk, then when you need that data, you have a problem. It behooves you to then think about your data and how you use it, and figure out how to store your data across your disks so that you have access to what you want when you want it.

For my purposes, “data” can be defined as “everything on your disk”, but in practice, I see no reason to think about shifting apps out of the Application folder or similar “optimizations”. You might be able to free up a gig or two of space, but why? That’s not significant, and it can lead to potential complications later, especially if you start mucking in your Libraries, preferences, caches, etc. The savings aren’t significant — or worth the future hassles or possible compatibility issues. So for me, unless you’re a font geek with 50 gigs of fonts or something like that, just worry about the data folders: Documents, Pictures, Music, Movies. (in case it’s not painfully obvious: this info is Mac specific. General concepts work for Windows as well — the nutty details are your problem on that platform).

A few key goals

Here are a few key goals of all of this:

• Scales infinitely. Or close enough I don’t have to go through this again for a while
• My data is available when I need it, wherever I am
• Easy and intuitive. I don’t want something that’s difficult to do, or I won’t.
• Reliable and easy backups: if your backups are difficult, you won’t. Keep it simple. Make it reliable.
• Fast catastrophic recovery. I don’t want to spend days getting my data usable again
• Recover a file or a disk. Some backup schemes work best for a crashed disk, others for a lost file. you really need both.
• Backups on the road are even more important, not less. So make sure you can do them. And do.

Here’s what I ended up with. It’s not hugely different than before, but the changes create significant challenges to understand:

I took the bus-powered disk and upgraded it with a 500 gig drive. This means that instead of having 320Gb available, I now have 3/4 of a terabyte I can carry around and use without needing an electrical outlet. This is a significant detail: you really mess up the concept of a “laptop” if you have to plug it in to use it… Or worse, can’t because the data you need is inaccessible because you didn’t bring it.

Digression: for those of you about to tell me “just live in the cloud”, plesae don’t. The dataset we’re talking about is measured in gigabytes trending to terabytes, and it’s not practical. In reality I am using Google Docs and Dropbox more for some things, but for the set of things “the cloud” solves for me, they also live happily on my internal laptop disk. This is about figuring out now how to scale from having 1,000 photos in my portfolio and 10,000 in my collection to having 20,000 photos in my portfolio and 100,000 in my collection without everything collapsing in a heap, and those kind of data sets aren’t going to live online any time soon, nor do I particularly want them to.

So anyway, I now have three drives going. The internal laptop drive (320Gb) is where everything I need 100% of the time has to live. The external bus powered drive can store other files that I need access to on the road — but which I probably can live without for more casual usage. And my desktop drive (AC powered) stays at home and holds the data that I need easily accessible but don’t need to travel with.

I went through all of my data and figured out where it needed to live. There’s also an unlisted “fourth category”, which is data that lives offline, or on a disk that I maybe need access to once in a while but not keep plugged in, and I spent some time pulling all of that data off my disks and sticking it in a corner to archive into a drawer. (one could also say there’s a fifth category, the “why the hell am I hanging on to THIS?” category of things that ended up in the trash. Things like the Parallel’s virtual image of Ubuntu I haven’t booted since I installed it five months ago, which deleting freed up multiple gigabytes. And why did I feel the need for an Ubuntu disto in Parallels on MacOS, which is just a different flavor of the same thing? I don’t remember, but it seemed a good idea at the time…)

I can hear some of you groaning at the thought of sorting through all of your data. I sympathize. If you don’t want to commit the time to that, I understand — but — putting some time and energy into it now helps you understand what you have and how to organize it. It also means that moving forward you’l have a good sense on where stuff belongs, meaning you’ll spend less time thinking it through and organizing on the fly. And if you do it now, you probably won’t need to do it again for a few years. It’s little more than virtually filing everything in your office, and it never hurts to do that every so often.

It shouldn’t be assumed that you need to turn “Save File” into a “Getting Things Done” adventure — I’m definitely not interested in being that anal about all of this, but it is important to understand how you want to manage your data well enough to know if it’ll do what you need it to do and how well it scales. Scaling was the big issue for me. If I’m seriously having to worry about data in terms of terabytes, I’d just as soon not have to architect this all out again in six months. Once it’s settled down, it’s back to the “that pile on the desk is in the way, let’s put it in the files” mode again…

So here’s how I finally settled on filing things. My internal laptop disk:

And here’s what my secondary disk looks like. Note that it only has Music and Pictures folders.

The Music folder is where I’m storing the video files in my iTunes library. The audio (aka “music”) lives on the main laptop disk.  As my creation of video grows, I’ll add a “Movies” folder and split it up the way I do photos, but right now, there’s not much there.

And finally, my third disk, the one that stays at home:

The blue highlighted folders are folders on that disk that I exclude from the Time Machine backup:

which is an option more people should think about if they use Time Machine (or other backups) — some stuff you can live without if you need to, so why back it up? All it does is make it harder to do backups reliably. I flag them with color labels so I don’t forget which ones were excluded — I did that once and had to restore a disk, and spent half a day freaking over “missing data” until I remembered I’d excluded that data from the backups. Oops. It goes without saying, of course, that you should only exclude stuff you really don’t need back if there’s a failure, don’t exclude it because it’s large…

A big part of how this works (or won’t) is splitting up the photo library. In general, I split up my photos into four big piles:

• flickr or better:  images I liked enough to post to my Flickr account (and the subset of those I think are good enough for my portfolio, which I’m starting to build on Smugmug)
• 2nd tier: photos which are technically fine, but which aren’t something I think should be posted on flickr. Most of these are effectively duplicates of ones that go on Flickr (think “eight frames per second burst rate”); you want them around in case you want to use them; you stick them somewhere out of the way because you have no plans to actually do so. In theory, these photos are all good enough to publish, except I have some other photo I think is better — but yo never know when you might want some specific expression or a left profile instead of a right profile, and so they’re here if you need it.
• archive and forget: photos that are clearly not as good as the candidates I’d publish, but not bad enough to throw away. To be honest, as I’m getting more comfortable about my abilities as a photographer, I’m doing less keeping photos around that “someday I might try to fix this”. Instead, I ding them and throw them out. These are flagged to be taken offline and stored, and I fully believe I’ll never look at them again and some day throw them out. More and more, I’m comfortable with my choices and simply throwing them out and saving a step…
• dings: And finally, the dings. As I do edits, the ones that are clearly flawed get thrown out and deleted. There are people who tell you to keep everything. I’m not one of those people. Disk is cheap, but it’s not free. Maybe some day those images will be usable (or fixable in photoshop, or whatever), but the reality is I have thousands of BETTER images I could spend that time on, so why bother? So count me in the camp of tossing the crap, especially when it quickly starts turning into gigabytes and terabytes of crap. Why make it harder to find the good images by having to wade through crap, or worse, create a filing system for offline images to keep around stuff you know in your heart you’ll never use? Let it go. Just because you CAN keep everything doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. It’s not.

This setup looks like it’ll scale for a good long time; I can, if I need to, move some flickr or better onto the 2nd disk and prioritize the internal drive to active projects; 2nd tier data easily moves to the “live at home” disk when I need to. I can subset my itunes library the same way if I want to, and the rest of my data isn’t going to grow faster than disk technology seems to be progressing, and as long as I keep my folder structure sane, I can tell at a glance what’s going on, both within the Finder and Lightroom. I can use Lightroom and Spotlight searching to find things if I need to, but with a bit of care the naming structure will let me browse into it quickly as well. It looks pretty solid.

I’ve spent the last couple of days migrating the data to this new setup and I’m now happy with it, at least for now. As I’ve settled in, I’ve made some changes – originally all three disks had Documents folders, I finally realized that either a document lived on the internal laptop or it lived on the “stay at home” drive; no need for a middle phase, it just complicated things. You’ll notice there are folders on the travelling disks to act as placeholders for the stay at home disk. This makes staging stuff to sweep over there easy, so I can stuff files places on the road and then go home and move them off of the travel disks. It may seem unnecessary or trivial, but I’ve found lots of peopple don’t think about that kind of detail, and when I explain it, they love the idea — it lets me make a filing decision at the time I’m using the data, and merely shove it into the file when I get home and not have to “remember” what needs to be filed days later. Make those decisions while you’re using something and then forget it — it’s a great hint for simplifying things.

And once my backups finally sync up and my data is fully redundant again, I’ll be happier. Currently, I have my superduper backups in place, I’m letting Time Machine sync up now. It can be butt slow at times…

Some technical details on implementing this

The drive I bought for the bus powered disk was the Hitachi Traveler 500G. I’ve been using Hitachi drives for my laptop drives for a while and find them pretty reliable. That doesn’t mean others aren’t, it means thse have worked well for me, so I continue to use them. The bus-powered enclosure I use is the Mercury On-The-Go Pro from Other World Computing. I’ve bought RAM and disk from OWC for years and have been very happy with their price, quality and service. I’ve used that enclosure for a long time with never a failure. Their stuff is well-engineered and solid and I feel it’s well priced, and I haven’t been in the mood to explore other vendors because this one works for me.

For my external drives, I use the OWC Mercury Elite-Pro housing. it’s solid, it’s build like a rock, it works reliably. As part of this rework, I’ve retired the last of my IDE systems and I only buy/use drives that have SATA interfaces.

Digression: Every so often, it makes sense to see how technology is moving and migrate away from stuff that’s aging and heading towards end of life — if you refresh your data onto modern storage, you won’t go looking for it some day and find out you no longer have a way to access it. I’m a big fan of refreshing all of my offline storage every couple of years so the chances of having a stored drive failed is minimized. I’m also a fan of keeping two copies of all offline data, preferably one offsite — just in case. Since I’m also a fan of refreshing my active drives on a regular basis (because the best way to never need your backups is to never run your disks until they die!), a nice way to do this is to replace your active drives every 18 months or so, then use the retired drives and copy all of your archived data onto them, and then take the oldest drives and stick them in your files somewhere.

Digression on the digression: I see no reason to ever give a used drive to someone else, either by selling, giving, or donating. I pull the drives out of computers and housings and file them with my tax papers and other files. Once in a while, I pull the really old mechanisms and “retire” them with a big hammer. That way, there’s absolutely no way someone can recover files off of a drive they bought in Goodwill and end up with your data — because it never leaves your hands. If you trust seven-way zeroing and are willing to spend the time to do so, bless you. I jut don’t think a used disk drive is worth the time and hassle to recycle for re-use…

The drive I’m using as my backup drive now is the 2Tb Western Digital “greenpower” Caviar Green with 64 Mb cache. There are cheaper drives out there, but this one has good reviews and is built for server service. In all honesty, there’s nothing quite so painful as finding out your backup drive has failed, especially if you find out while trying to restore something. I don’t want to overpay for this stuff, but cheaping out bites you down the road.

My backup drive is living in a NewerTech Voyager Hard Drive Dock, which allows you to insert and eject SATA drives easily. This means if I want to I can easily pull this mechanism and replace it with another if I need to “do something” with another disk. I’m just starting to use it so I don’t have reliability data on it, but so far, I like it. It’s solid and well-built at first use. I plan on using it for managing my offline archives as well, saving me paying for multiple enclosures down the road.

Geeky details on backups

The 2Tb disk is split into two partitions, one 500Gb and one 1.5Gb. I use two backup technologies, SuperDuper! and Time Machine. I love Superduper for system backups because it makes bootable clones. That makes catastrophic recovery a lot simpler: take your backup drive, plug it into a Mac, and boot from it (then make a backup of it before something bad happens!). Superduper runs nightly and refreshes copies of my two travel disks, which is why the 2Tb is split into two partitions. The 500Gb syncs up the 500Gb external disk, and the 1.5Tb is the clone of the internal boot disk and also is where my Time Machine backups live.

Superduper doesn’t do versioning or archival over time, it makes a snapshot of now. For the “I need that file I threw out two weeks ago” problem, I use Time Machine. It backs up all three disks (minus the exclusions I mention above) to the 1.5 Terabyte partition of the backup disk. Time Machine is useful for casual backups (it’s better than nothing and pretty good for get-single-file recoveries) but I don’t like it for complete disk recovery and after working with a Time Capsule for a while, I really don’t like Time Machine over a network. If anyone really cares why, that’s a whole different blog posting.

The good news is that SuperDuper and Time Machine co-exist nicely on one disk (thank you, Dave!) so I can do both easily, so I’m set up to clone my two key disks onto the backup disk, and then do a time machine backup onto it for incremental backups as well. If my boot disk crashes, recovery is (almost) as simple as booting the backup disk. Wonderful, since crashes almost always happen on deadline…

What this doesn’t cover yet…

There are a few details this new setup doesn’t cover yet. None of them are time critical, but all of them need to be considered and solved, and it’s important you know how to solve them before you implment (lest they blow up your work when you go “oh, damn, didn’t think of that” later). Fortunately, they all are solvable…

• The new setup doesn’t include “on the road” backups. Since I no longer can carry a bus-power drive big enough to back up my systems, the answer is to carry a bigger, plug-in drive. I’m not worried about Time Machine backups on the road, so the easiest solution is a 1Gb external drive in one of my Elite-Pro housings. Even better, that’s cheap, and if I set it up, gives me an easy “spare backup” setup, because I love having a set of backups I only update every week or so, just in case something corrupts that I don’t recognize right away. So that’s probably what I’ll do. The other option would be to carry the 2Tb backup disk with me in the Elite-Pro housing, which also works, but which limits the number of redundant copies I end up having. I don’t like carrying my backup on the road if I can help it, I’d rather carry a “road” backup and leave the main backup at home. But both are options.
• The new setup doesn’t make explicit the off-site backup storage. What I’m doing in the short term is taking my old backup disk offsite. In 4-6 weeks, I’ll buy a 2nd 2Tb disk, plug it into a dock, build it the same as my new backup disk, and run backups onto it, and then swap between the two (the other going offsite) every 4-6 weeks. That’ll fix this for a good while at reasonable cost.
• The setup for moving files onto offline disks (aka “in the drawer”) isn’t spelled out, but is pretty simple: buy a pair of 500Gb SATA drives, plug them into the dock, copy the files to each, carry one offsite. Iterate until full, and then either start another set or decide some of the files can be deleted (or both). Every couple of years, take all of your offline disks, copy them to new (fewer, bigger) disks, and store them again.

But what about “install a NAS?”

I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of NAS in my environment, but I also realize that over time, the amount of data I’m storing on my “stay at home” disk is going to grow without bounds. My plan at this time is to convert that into a Drobo at some point, but not until I need to, so I’ll hold that off until later this year. I realize that at some point the percentage of data I can keep local to the laptop, even with 1 terabyte (500gig internal + 500gig bus powered) is finite, but I’m only using about 275Gb on those two combined right now, so I have some time before I have to worry about that…

Things like Drobo and a NAS add some capabilities, but they also add complexity, cost and new ways for interesting failures, which always seem to happen on deadline when you least can afford the issues. A NAS works best if you’re sharing data among multiple machines, since I’m not, it adds more complexity than it solves problems. Drobo is different being locally hooked up (and there’s a NAS enabler you can buy for it), but adds its own set of complexities and administration — so as long as (a) a single disk works and (b) I can back it up reliably, I’ll stick with a good single disk. Once you start getting into multiple disk environments and/or your backups start being tougher to keep reliable, the addition of mirrored RAID and some of the other features of NAS or Drobo become good to have, but again, I’m not at that point yet.

Finally — speaking of Terabytes

I’ve been around long enough that the thought of buying disk in terabyte sizes amuses me. My first hard drive was ten megabytes — MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes — and I remember a time when a terabyte would probably store all of the data at Apple, and perhaps all of the data in the state of California. Today, I’m using it for backups of my personal data set. That amount of scaling in the last 30 years or so amazes me when I step back and consider it. But then, my phone has a lot more processing power and memory and disk than my first Mac did. I think my KEYBOARD has a more powerful CPU than my first home computer did….

Tags: About Chuq, Photography, The Online Life

Re-visioning an image

As part of prepping the images I donated to Images Without Borders, I decided to reprocess them from scratch and see if I could make them as good as I could given what I know about post processing in Lightroom and Photoshop — consider it a pop quiz on how much I’ve learned in producing quality images in the last few months…

I find some of the differences fascinating. My image of Morro Rock at Dawn, which is one of my favorites (ever!) got a major makeover. Here’s the image as I originally processed it, literally on my laptop in the auditorium at Morro Photo Expo waiting for George Lepp to talk:

I like that version a lot (except for the bird dots in the sky; I later removed them for the version I used to print out for christmas gifts), and the glow on the rock well simulated what I saw when I took the image; I felt I could do better now, though.

So here’s the new image:

The glow on the rock isn’t as noticable, but the coloration is more the golden tone that was evident that morning, and I much prefer the coloration of the water and sky and the better detail in the boats. And there are no bird dots or other junk in the sky…

If nothing else, it’s a very vivid example of how photos may look “photo realistic” but really are heavily tied into the interpretation of the photographer in post processing. it’s always been that way, by the way — the tools in a wet darkroom were just different ones.

Which one do I like better? I like aspects of both, actually, for different reasons. I’d kind of like at some point to take the rock in the original and move it into the image I just finished. Maybe some day I will — but to be honest, I like the new version of the rock as well…But I definitely — today — prefer this new one and how the boats have some detail visible. I was for some reason doing a lot of sillouette imagery last october when I was in Morro Bay…

Another image I redid today, the night herons, better shows how much better I am at this than I was when I originally did it (about 8 months ago):

To me, it now looks soft and grey. The new version of the image has whiter whites, better contrast and stronger blacks, and is much sharper and generally an improved image.

All in all a muc superior image, and I think in this new one the eyes really pop, and they really are the focus of this image, where in the previous version, I now think it came across rather muddled.

To me, it’s good to sometimes go back and re-vision your previous work and see what you can do with it; it can be a really positive way to see the progress you’re making in becoming a better photographer. The bones of that night heron image were always there, I think. Now, I think, the rendering I did allows you to see them.

Tags: Photography

Supporting Doctors without Borders through Images without Borders

A project I’ve been working on in the background for a while has finally all come together and I’m thrilled to be able to talk about it. After the Haiti earthquake I donated some funds to support the rescue efforts there but I realized there was going to be a long-term need there and started looking at the right ways to get involved. One of the organizations that I’ve considered donating to for a couple of years is Doctors without Borders, which fits the kind of organization I look to put my donation money into (low bureaucracy overhead, low marketing expenses, high percentage of revenues “on the ground” and not in the home office, etc..).

Then I ran into another organization trying to create a place where photographers could donate images for sale to generate revenue for Doctors Without Borders. Images Without Borders seemed like a cause I wanted to get behind, so I did some research, decided it was doing the Right Things, and contacted them to see if I could donate some images.

I’m happy to announce that five of my images are now available for purchase through Images Without Borders, and all profits for their sale will go to Doctors Without Borders. Each image is limited to ten prints and will then be retired. I want to encourage everyone who reads my blog to support Doctors without Borders, either by going to Images Without Borders and buying a print (mine or one of the other donating photographers), or by donating to the organization directly.

I will sweeten the pot further — if you buy one of my prints via Images Without Borders, I will send you a free 11×14 signed print of any image in my portfolio as my thank you for doing so. Simply email me a copy of the receipt on the purchase and we’ll work out the details.

Here are the images I’ve made available:

To help spread the word, I’ve created some free mobile phone wallpapers of these images. You are welcome to make copies of these and pass them around or install them on your phone. I will also be doing desktop wallpapers of some of my images, including these, to help support this cause — stay tuned for that.

I hope you all will consider supporting this organization and cause, either by buying a print, by donating directly, or by publicizing this and spreading the word to others. Haiti needs our help, and this organization is there on the ground trying to make a difference, and it deserves our help.

Thanks,

Chuq

(p.s. observant geeks will probably notice that my photos are being hosted on Smugmug and not flickr. I’ve been working towards creating a portfolio site where I can start selling prints and licensing images, and Smugmug was the site I decided to use for this (Photoshelter, the site hosting and donating its services to Images without Borders, came in a close second). I’ll be using Smugmug as the site for my professional portfolio the way I use (and will continue to use) Flickr to distributethings more casually and socially. I’ll talk more later about my plans for Smugmug and how this all ties together, but this situation was a great opportunity to fire up the new site and get this next phase of my photography going….)

Tags: About Chuq, Photography

When your workflow implodes, bad things happen…

One of the reasons I’ve been somewhat missing from the blog is that my photo processing workflow imploded — I came to realize it was broken beyond repair, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

That’s not a fun place to be.

The final straw was trying to integrate some more complicated processing techniques into the workflow, specifically handling multi-image processing for panoramas and HDR. The way I had everything set up in Lightroom just didn’t work for managing all of the pieces well, and everything I tried — well, all of the solutions were ugly and I realized they wouldn’t scale.

Ultimately I came to realize a decision I made when I first migrated to Lightroom was the failure point; I made a decision to use collections to store groups of photos instead of folders. Collections are a virtual grouping, folders are a physical grouping. I felt it made sense to import into a YYYY/MM/DDDD folder, and then use collections to pull related images together. Overall, that worked well (for a while).

Lightroom, however, has a — quirk — a design decision that is impacted by this, and that’s how sets can be used. Sets is another virtual collection that work within folders, but sets are incompatible with collections. that means when you pull everything together, you have to chose collections or sets (but not both). I chose collections. That works, until you need sets. Then all hell breaks loose. It really does make sense to use a set to pull all of those pieces together and tag them with the resulting image as the top image.

Unfortunately, you can’t do that if you use collections. sigh.

In researching options on how to do this (and more importantly, how to do this without tearing it down to ground zero and starting over), I finally decided the workflow I liked best was one outlined by Hal Schmitt at Digital Photo Experience as part of his Panorama screencast. But that meant — of course — starting from ground zero.

So I finally decided I needed to, and I’ve been spending my evenings recently taking everything in my Lightroom libraries and converting all of the collections to folders, one at a time. Of course, once you decide to open up the hood, you don’t just fix what’s broken, you start tinkering, and I did, restructuring my keywords, rethinking a few things in my metadata presets. Little things that flit in and tweak everything to some degree.

This, by the way, makes Time Machine crazy. That reminds me that I need to start planning to upgrade my disks to larger sizes soon. This means I have to think about my backup policies, and… and down the rabbit hole we go again. Fortunately I have a couple of months before I have to worry about the disks, and I’ve got everything back under control (well, mostly. I have a couple of thousand photos flagged with special keywords defining various “needs to be looked at and fixed” to-dos). It seems to work with panoramas:

I’m happy with the structure of the files on disk and how the workflow gets me from import to flickr, and with the keywording and metadata (to a point; there’s more detail that I’m still thinking through and implementing, that’s the “to do” on a bunch of images…).

And I’m pretty happy with the quality of the end image now, but that’s a different blog post. That also wasn’t true recently…

What I haven’t yet done is take it from “post to flickr” stage to the full portfolio, but that’s the part I’m starting to work on now. Most on that, hopefully soon…

Tags: Photography

The lens is back..

I’m a bit surprised, but my lens is repaired and back in my happy little hands. Total turnaround time is under a week. Tota cost was about $115 including diagnosis and shipping costs. According to the return info no new parts were needed so whatever broke was likely a screw that came loose and let everything slide out of position, and the tech pulled it apart, put it back together and did a full optical alignment and cleaning.

Hopefully will get out a bit tomorrow and take some test shots and see how it goes…

Tags: Photography

Mac Netbooks

Ben Long talks about using a Hackintosh (a netbook hacked to run Mac OS X).

For the last year, I’ve been using a hacked MSI Wind as a netbook, but its keyboard played havoc with my repetitive stress injuries. Something about it made me hold my hands in a way that ultimately caused pain. I recently had the chance to type for a while on a Dell Mini 10v and found that I had no pain issues at all, so I sold the Wind and picked up a Mini 10v on sale for only $275.
Compared to my 13″ Macbook, the Mini 10 is considerably smaller and lighter, making it very usable for backcountry trips – something I would never do with my Macbook. With it, I no longer need to carry my Digital Focii FotoSafe for offloading, and I’m not stuck trying to type emails on my iPhone keyboard.

Obviously, if you’re a Windows user, you can use the Mini 10v right out of the box. If you want to use the Mac OS, though, you’ll need to perform a quick and simple hack.
NetbookInstaller is an application that will take care of the hack for you, and using it is very simple. You’ll need a copy of Snow Leopard, and a USB stick with at least 8 gb of capacity. Detailed instructions on the NetbookInstaller site will guide you through the installation. You’ll image your Snow Leopard disk onto the USB stick. and then boot off of that. The NetbookInstaller application will modify the installation to allow it to work on the Netbook.
When you’re all finished, you should have a Mini 10v running the latest Mac OS (at the time of this writing, I’m running 10.6.2). The trackpad supports tapping and two-fingered scrolling, and sleep, restart, shutdown, the web camera, and SD card reader all work fine. The model I got has a gigabyte or RAM and a 160gb drive, though both of these are upgradable. The computer weighs in at 2.6 pounds.

It’s definitely a viable option if you want to depend on an unsupported computer environment, but he neglected to mention a couple of important points:

1. If you  don’t buy a copy of Mac OS X or have a family pack, you’re pirating the software. Photographers need to be really sensitive about violating the licenses of others, or else we should shut up when people ignore our copyrights and rip off our photos. Can’t have it both ways, folks, although I know a lot of people who try.
2. Even if you do buy a copy of Mac OS X to run on your Hackintosh, you’re putting it on hardware that isn’t allowed by Apple’s EULA for Mac OS, so you’re violating their T&Cs, which depending on how you want to rationalize it means you’re pirating the software whether or not you have a paid license for it.
3. If neither of those keeps you up and night sleepless over the moral quagmire of violating Apple’s legal agreements while being hard-ass about protecting your own, it’s still an unsupported and mostly untested hardware/software configuration which may break at any moment (or which at any moment Apple might choose to “make no longer compatible” with a software update, and no matter what breaks — you have no tech support except your own sweat equity and whatever friends you can buy pizza for. And you’re using this computer in a production environment on deadline?

Wherever your choose to draw the lines in the sand in the great “How dare you do that with my photos; but I”ll do what I want with this software!” moral quagmire, you should at least stop long enough to think about it so you know how to explain it if it gets brought up by a client — or by the other party if you happen to end up in court fighting a copyright and this is mentioned to the judge. Whatever you think of them, these EULAs have been mostly upheld by courts. How are you going to react if someone uses the same rationalization for using your photos that you used for choosing to build a Hackintosh?

But I’m not judging. I have enough challenge manging my personal ethical compass, I don’t need the karma of managing yours. But I felt it was important to point these issues out so that photographers understand that this is more complications than “this is unsupported hardware”.

I, personally, would hate to be in a conference room negotiating licensing terms with a client and taking notes no a machine that has unlicensed software on it, or is running software that I knowingly installed in violation of the licensing terms. That to me seems like I’m tempting the karma gods, and they already have me on speed dial, they don’t need excuses to ring me up. You know?

Tags: Photography, The Online Life

A few thoughts on lenses

Just a few quick notes on lenses, I finally sent off my broken Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5 off to the recommended repair depot. I’ll let everyone know how fast they turn it around and what it costs and all of those sordid details. Since I wanted a wide angle (you can’t shoot christmas with a 100-400 as your widest lens!) I rented a Sigma 18-200mm from the folks at Borrowlenses.com to give it a try. My experience with Borrowlenses was frankly awesome, and I plan to continue using them in the future.

I didn’t do a lot of work with the lens and I certainly didn’t do the kind of work that would let me make “scientific” evaluations. If you want lines per inch geeking, there are places for that.

Here, just opinions. Maybe even somewhat informed (maybe not).

The reason I bought the Tamron was that I wanted a big zoom ratio and a compact footprint so I could use a single lens as a carry around street camera. It normally lives on my Canon Rebel, and my Rebel lives in the Tamrac 3385 I use as my haul-around to and from work, or in a little Tamrac 3536 I use as a city bag. For this purpose, the Tamron is a nice lens. Given my propensity to photograph small things that fly away if I move in their direction, the extra zoom oomph of being able to get to a 300mm magnification helps.

But the lens has some tradeoffs, and I’m starting to really understand the compromises using it brings. For one, I’m constantly fighting the fact that (for me) that a 28mm on an APS sensor (1.6x magnification, 44mm equivalent) just isn’t wide enough. I want wider. (WIDER! WIIIIDDDDDEEEEERRR!!! BWAHAHAHAH!); by cutting off the wide aspect to get the long aspect, I’ve limited the utility of the lens for what I’d like to do at the magnification end that is the lens’ primary purpose. that’s enough of a mistake that I found myself quietly thinking to myself that the Sigma 10-20mm f/4 lens looked intriguing…

But that really defeats the purpose of having a single lens, no? (not that I’m complaining about having more lenses!), so that made me sit back and rethink the problem from the start not as a “how do I patch what I have” but “what is the right answer?”. Renting the Sigma 18-200mm was an experiment in alternatives.

I was right, the difference between the 18mm low end and 28mm low end was significant. I much prefer the wider available angle. I also prefer the Sigma build quality. Ignoring that I broke the Tamron (hey, it happens), the Tamron has the heft and feel of a consumer lens (plastic construction, light weight) while the Sigma lens feels more “professional” — I’d call it more of a prosumer style lens. It and the other Sigma I own (the 180mm macro) both impress me with the quality of the build and their heft, they feel sturdier and stiffer and generally come across to me as more able to take the kind of banging lenses that live with me sometimes go through. The Tamron is a nice lens — but I like the Sigma lenses better. The Sigma lens seems (subjectively) crisper, but I need to also remind myself that it’s not trying to be such a mega-zoom. the two lenses aren’t directly comparable in performance or intent in simple ways. But all in all, I like the Tamron, I like the Sigma more.

But having played with the 18-200, that made me ask myself how to ‘fix’ my dilemma. Replace the tamron? Supplement it? Something else? SO MANY QUESTIONS! No easy answers.

What I decided, though, was that the idea of a “street kit” made a lot of sense and the Tamron is a good lens for the street kit, but for my “serious” kit, that lens has compromises I’m not really satisfied with; it’s not wide enough or sharp enough for things I’d like to do. So I think it makes sense to plan for an upgrade to the “serious kit” to live full time with the big lenses and make the Tamron a full time street kit lens. Since I think I’m close to buying a 7D, this seems to make sense. (yes, I’m using “seems” a lot tonight, because these plans aren’t final. your feedback welcome).

One change I’d make in buying a lens to fit this need is to do away with the mega-zoom; that causes compromises in the optics that I can accept when I’m carrying a low-profile camera around a city in a walk-about, but I’m not so happy with those compromises when I’m taking landscapes on a tripod in the middle of Yosemite. I can also go wider, but if you push the zoom on the wide side, you start forcing those compromises in the other direction (and besides, I need an excuse to BUY THE SIGMA 10-20! MORE GLASS! NEED MORE LENSES!) — so I’m considering a lens with a more “normal” zoom ratio, and one that’s got a high sharpness and quality.

I’ve been researching lenses that the photographers I follow are using, and one that seems to keep popping up is the Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5 and so that seems to be my leading candidate. I need to rent it and take it out for a spin and see what I like. it gives me a tiny gap in zoom coverage (15-85, 100-400) but that’s more than acceptable to me. It’s also something I can find used if I want to. Dave Cardinal has a nice piece on the Sigma 24-70, and that looks interesting as well. If the Tamron isn’t back for my next trip, I’ll likely rent that and take it with me to try it out.

So we’ll see. No need to make this decision right away or in haste. The fun part of these challenges is that you can solve a problem in a number of different ways.

But right now, if I were to make these decisions again, I wouldn’t buy the Tamron again — I think there are better options. If I wanted to do something similar I’d use the Sigma 18-200 and give up that last ounce of zoom capability, but my general feeling now is that a better option for that street camera is the Canon G11 and not use a DLSR at all and then buy a wide angle lens just for the “serious bag” — or use the Panasonic Lumix DMC line of cameras. Laurie’s used those for years for her hockey photography because they have a great zoom and they’re compatible with the Sharks camera policies, and they really are nice units that live somewhere beyond point and shoot but aren’t quite DLSRs — but they do have two things that help them disappear from the prying eyes of the “camera hesitant”, which is they do not have removable lenses and the lenses don’t pop out far and scream “this is a serious camera” nearly as much as a DLSR, and that’s allowed her to take photos in situations where other cameras have gotten challenged. Sometimes, that’s not a bad thing to have handy…

Tags: Photography

Three rules “they” tell new photographers — and why “they” are wrong.

There are three rules that seem to be thrown out “by the pros” at new photographers all the time, ideas repeated constantly as part of the “how to be a better photographer” lectures.

• You Must Shoot Every Day. You Must Carry Your Camera Everywhere
• You Must Shoot in Manual Mode (and turn off autofocus, too!)
• You must shoot early in the morning or late at night, not in the middle of the day

And they’re wrong.

Okay, they’re not completely right — cliches are cliches because they are truths spoken until you’re tired of hearing them. These are truths that aren’t really true any more because they need to be updated to the current state of the art in photography. And so I will:

You Must Shoot Every Day. You Must Carry Your Camera Everywhere

This rule has a good intent — to get you in the habit of taking photographs and learning to see with your camera. In the day when people shot film and sent their film off to labs to be developed and printed, this rule mostly made sense.

Today, the photographer is also the lab; to be a really good photographer, you have to not only be strong behind the camera, you have to be strong behind the monitor; you have to work on both your capture skills and your processing skills — and because of this, telling people that they have to shoot images every day is a bad idea. It sets the mental mindset that the capturing of images is what matters, not the creation of the best possible images (this is, by the way, my only possible criticism of The Best Camera, and it’s a minor one as its strongest).

What we should be telling photographers is not to shoot images every day, but to work on their craft every day — although even that bothers me, because if you turn this into a grind, you’re going to turn people off on it. Weekends exist for a reason, and you shouldn’t be setting tasks that remove the joy from it.

What this rule is really trying to do is create the habit of thinking and acting like a photographer: that means spending the time to improve your skills and learning to see and think through your photography, to build the habits that allow you to be ready when a photo opportunity happens — and have your gear handy so you can capture it.

And THEN go back to the digital lab and create the best possible image out of that capture.

The core of the rule is good: becoming a better photographer takes time and commitment, you must be willing to invest in improving yourself, and that takes time behind the camera — but it also now takes time in the digital darkroom, and in many ways, the darkroom can be more important to taking that step from “pretty good” to “wow” as the capture.

Don’t just carry your camera around and take random pictures of random things and think that’ll make you a better photographer. Honor the intent of the rule, which is to commit the time and energy to your craft, both in the field and in the lab. Time spent taking pictures outside of your comfort zone and of subjects you don’t normally shoot is a good idea, but spending time honing your photoshop skills is at least important, and honestly, I think it’s more important to shifting the quality of your images to that next level.

You Must Shoot in Manual Mode (and turn off autofocus, too!)

The intent of this rule is good — if you just stick your camera in “P”rogram mode and let it make the decisions, it will save you (mostly) from taking really crappy pictures (mostly), but it will also prevent you from taking really great pictures, because it’s going to navigate the capture into the safe, conservative areas. As good as digital imaging is getting these days, no camera can make decisions that lead to the best possible images — not without help.

But the idea that photographers have to shoot in manual mode comes from the days when cameras were stupid; that’s far from the situation now, and if you follow this advice blindly you will be hurting your ability to take the best possible images because you will be cutting yourself off from taking advantage of the intelligence being built into modern digital cameras.

The more I read the writings of today’s top pros and the more I hear them speak, the more I realize that THEY are spending less and less time in manual mode. This rule isn’t wrong, but it needs to be updated.

The core of this rule is this: you can’t be a great photographer on autopilot. If you don’t let the camera control the capture, it will not try for a superior image but to avoid a disasterous one; you’ll get mediocrity. This is less true with every generation of digital camera coming out, but ultimately, it’s about who’s in charge.

If you let the camera be in charge, your images will be “safe” and safe images are rarely great.

This does NOT mean you have to shoot in manual, though. What it means is you have to spend the time and energy to learn what the camera can do — all of it. And then take advantage of what it can do and adjust it to make it do what you want. That doesn’t mean shoot manual, but it does mean know WHEN to shoot in manual. It also means knowing when to shoot in Aperture mode, or Shutter mode, or using exposure compensation or bracketing.

It means knowing when to adjust white balance and when to leave it alone, it means knowing how to take advantage of autofocus and when to shut it off and use manual focusing. It means understanding aperture and depth of field, it means knowing the noise characteristics of your camera so you use the proper ISO setting to eliminate that noise — or accentuate it.

There are a lot of capabilities in that camera body — learn them and learn how to take advantage of them. If you are shooting in manual mode, you are making your job harder than it has to be, and in fact, you aren’t putting yourself in control of the camera.

“shooting manual” is the code for telling the camera what to do. Today, there are many ways to do that beyond turning off the camera’s brain and doing it all yourself. If you aren’t taking advantage of them, you are hurting your ability to create the best possible images. In some ways, this makes your job more complex, because there are more variables and options to learn and consider. In practice, once you understand what those options can do and how to take advantage of them and once you learn the quirks of your specific model of camera, many things open up and your life as a photographer becomes easier.

What’s important is that you teach yourself how to take advantage of and control the features, so they don’t control you, and to do it so it becomes part of your habits of creating good images. It’s not enough to be able to think about how to take the next image, you have to just know and do it — otherwise, images will be lost before you get the camera set up.

It’s not about manual mode any more, it’s about not being in that green P of Program mode, and it’s about knowing how to adjust how the camera thinks so it does what you want, not what it thinks you want. Once you and the camera learn to think together, though, you’ll make many beautiful images.

Me, personally? I spend 95% of my time in Aperture mode, and 90% of the adjustments I might have used manual mode for five years ago I do via exposure compensations instead.

You must shoot early in the morning or late at night, not in the middle of the day

This is “the golden hour” rule; that time just before and after dawn, and before and after sunset when the light when you avoid the worst of the glare and shadowing and the oblique angle of light brings out the colors of your subject.

The reality is this: the golden hour can definitely enhance photos. If you can shoot then, do so. I certainly do. That’s assuming you don’t get up at 4AM to find your dawn shooting fogged out or a lack of any cloud cover giving you — well, blah, boring dawn sunrises.This also presumes THAT YOU CAN re-arrange your schedule into the golden hour.  If you are a photographer who isn’t a full-time photographer, that’s not necessarily easy and sometimes not possible.

I take a different view. For many of us, simply being able to go out and shoot is sometimes a challenge. I’m lucky to get to the Grand Tetons, spending a week of dawns and sunsets there waiting for the “right moment” is practically speaking impossible; in fact on my yellowstone trip, we got down to the Tetons for a partial day starting mid-morning. If you follow the “golden hour” rule, I might as well have not brought the camera.

Yeah, right. Fat chance.

So I turn this rule on its ear. It’s not about shooting only during those golden hours. Instead, I think of it in terms of what can I shoot that is compelling when I’m able to shoot. As it turns out, I think my Teton landscapes turned out pretty well, but there were other shots I was hoping for — especially the fall foliage aspens — where it simply didn’t work; in fact there was only one shot I took I felt worth keeping:

And that’s the key to rethinking the “Golden Hour” rule: don’t lower your standards because of the timing of your photography; instead, find the photography that works given the timing. Maybe that means going into the trees and shooting macro instead of landscape, or focusing on animals or birds instead of trees or mountains. Maybe it’s using a different filtration to cut the glare, or a different look to the location, such as my “blue” shot where I went for the distant hills and emphasized the blue haze instead of fighting it. For my Mt. Moran shots, I not only added both a polarizer and an ND, which allowed me to go with a slow shutter speed, which cut much of the ripples and accentuated the reflection — moving the emphasis away from the mountain with the fairly flat lighting. Is it a killer photo? It’s not Galen-Rowell-Alpenglow killer, but I rather like it (although I overdid the sky in post and want to fix that some day, a bit too much polarizer), and I really like the blue photo as probably my favorite of the day’s shoots.

I think they hold their own, even if they were taken mid-day in the glare of a full sun. And it sure is better than not taking the photos. This rule teaches the mindset that if you aren’t doing it “by the book”, you might as well bother. And some days,  that’s true. If I’d visited this spot in mid-June instead of late september, the lighting would have been a lot harsher and it probably wouldn’t have been worth pulling out the camera.

Which is my point. What I don’t like about this rule is that it’s defeatist. My rule is different; it’s that you should pull out the camera whenever you can, and then go find the pictures that are worthy of being taken. This rule is, in fact, in direct conflict with the first rule, which says you should be shooting every day, because it’s telling you not to shoot unless conditions are perfect.

Me? I shoot whenever I CAN shoot, given I have a “real” job and a life and all of the complexities that keep me away from the camera. I’ve been trying, frankly, to get to Mono Lake for three years now and still haven’t seen the damn thing, much less photographed it. Maybe in 2010. Think I’m going to only take the camera if I can do the golden hour dance? Fat chance. If I can get there, I’ll have my gear in hand and find shots worthy of being there for.

Or maybe not. Some days it happens. But as in my Teton’s trip, if I’d followed the common wisdom of only shooting in the edges of the day and avoiding the glare of mid-day, I’d have zero shots of the Tetons. I broke the rules going for my aspen foliage shots, too, and while I threw out almost all of the shots, I kept one, which is better than ZERO.

So here’s why these three rules are wrong: it’s not about shooting bad shots every day just to be shooting, it’s about working on your craft on a regular basis to become a better photographer, but not working so much you grow to hate doing it. It’s not about “shooting manual”, it’s about being in control of your camera and bending it to your will to get the image you see, not the image the camera wants to hand you. And it’s not about the Golden Hour (although, dammit, if you can do it, do it!), because if you wait until conditions are perfect to shoot images, you own’t shoot very often. It’s about thinking about how, when you do pull out the camera, to take images that are up to your standards.

The “Golden Hour” rule really bothers me, because there’s an implicit “it’s okay to not bother” approval given. It’s never okay to not try; it’s okay to fail, it’s okay to throw out 100% of the day’s shoot if what you try didn’t work — but it’s never okay to not try.

So here are my three rules, the ones I think “we” should be telling new photographers instead of these three rules:

• Commit yourself to being the best photographer you can be. Spend as much time as you can with a camera in your hand, but spend what time you have on practicing creating the best photo you can at that time.
• Learn as much about your gear as you can, and understand how to use the capabilities to create the image you want to create.
• There’s always something worthy of a photograph if you choose to look for it. It is better to take photos at a “bad” time than take no photos waiting for a “good” time. When you take photos, take the best possible shots available rather than bad photos of what you planned to shoot. Flexibility and an open mind wins out over giving up.
  

I mean, seriously, who in their right mind does bird photography in a white-out fog, anyway? Wouldn’t it be better to head for the Starbucks and wait for better weather?

Tags: Photography

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