Warning: this blog entry is for photographers – it’s technical and boring for others.  My latest trek through Florida is coming in a blog entry soon!

Introduction

While I mostly focus on the art and human experience of photography, I occasionally reach a snag; I have to stop shooting and dedicate time, money, and energy for some serious technical upgrades, research, housekeeping, and software migration.  While frustrating, time consuming, and expensive, my mind is put at easy, my workflow is smoothed out, efficient, and safe.  Your computer system, today, is an extension of your camera, and cannot be ignored; otherwise it can slow you down and get in the way.

Shooting models, engagements, and portraits on a regular basis now, my digital workflow and file storage system was starting to become a burden, consuming too much time, energy, and frustration.  For every hour I shot, I spent 3 hours on the computer; not a good way to spend time I should be resting or shooting.  Consequently, over my last Thanksgiving break, I spent 4 days rebuilding a new workflow and file management system.

Now that I need to store and backup critical wedding shoots, I decided that I needed a rock solid system to maintain and backup my clients’ precious memories.

Along with a switch to Lightroom and less reliance on Photoshop, I now have a 6TB self-preserving raid drive, with three backups – one onsite, and two offsite that I rotate.  Everything is in one pile now, and a simple click allows Carbon Copy Cloner to perform an incremental backup: meaning that only files that changed are copied over, saving time.  And its all encrypted and protected.  This well protected, solid file management system will make its way into my marketing strategy soon.  While my solution wasn’t cheap, I spend more time shooting and less time worrying.

Prior Week: Buying and Prepping the Hardware

Computers are part of the camera system these days, and if you own a $5k camera body, chances are you eventually need to spend $1k plus on storage.  Time to blow some hard-earned cash on protecting my life’s work.

In the week prior to Thanksgiving, I ordered a Drobo hard drive enclosure, along with a pile of 2TB drives.  While it fits four drives, I’m starting with 3 so that I have enough cash for backups. I immediately stuffed inserted the drives and added some security encryption measures.

The Drobo is a self sustaining drive, performing cleanup, defrags, and disk checks automatically.  Best of all: if a drive fails, you just pop in a new one and it refills the data back on.  Further, as hard drive technology improves, I can simply pop in, say, a 4TB drive, and the available space will immediately get bigger.  The only caveat is that you lose some drive space – so four 2TB drives will have 6TB of storage instead of 8TB, but your data is protected from a drive crash.  And it looks pretty and performs nicely with Firewire 800.

Day 1: Diagrams and File Movement to One Basket

I diagramed my old workflow and file system layout – I had split my photos across multiple drives, and backed them up across multiple drives that were even smaller.  What a nightmare to track my onsite and offsite backups.  My library had grown immensely between 50 megapixel scans of 120 negatives, and my new 5Dmkii was eating space quick.

It was time to dispose of all the small drives and let go of some cash on new, multi-terabyte drives. So I hooked up all six drives, and moved everything to the drobo.  This took a while, since I managed not with Finder, but with Aperture, which took its sweet time moving the files.

Now I diagramed a new, simple backup plan.  My Drobo would contain everything, including backups of local files on my Macbook Pro.  For backup, there would be three in all; one at home, and two offsite that will be rotated. Carbon Copy Cloner, which I had used for years, would clone the entire Drobo onto the other drives.  This also freed me from having to backup my laptop’s drive to all three backups.  Nice.

Day 2: Backup of Original Configuration and Convert DV videos.

With my life’s work on a few disk platters, I decided to split across my old drives one state in time, just for piece of mind.  I will retire all of the drives and leave them as is, one state in time.

What would cause me the most frustration was converting old personal DV tape uploads, taking nearly 200GB.  Requiring constant checks and debugging, I couldn’t walk away for very long without fixing some sort of technical problem.  With my new found MP4 conversions skill with Handbrake, I finally crunched them all down to less than 20GB.  Phewww.

Day 3: Migrate from Aperture to Lightroom, and Soul-Searching

Apple Aperture 2.0 was showing its age; slow speed as my library grew, and a raw image engine that had poor support for camera profiles.  By my standards today, images came out just awful, requiring plug-ins and Photoshop exporting for nearly every picture – costing time, space, money, and subpar results.

Originally, Lightroom was a poor ripoff of Aperture, but as Lightroom improved and took off, Apple seemed to have abandoned improvements.  No curve adjustments, no advanced color profiling charts allowed, and other programs could not read your adjustments.  Skin tones were so far off Canon’s intent that I had to export everything to huge TIFF files for plugins to fix.  Even my $3000 5Dmkii looked like shit with Aperture’s default settings.  It was time for a change.

Further, I feared the death of my work through the Digital Dark-Age – a problem of changing formats, as well as Aperture holding hostage my non-destructive raw edits.  I needed to work with multiple libraries, and may have needed to move pictures from library to library with easy, something not allowed by Apple.  Adobe could convert Canon’s propriety CR2 format to DNG – an open standard – and store all adjustments within the file itself incase Lightroom became corrupted or you decided to stop using Adobe software.

You become married to your software/hardware configuration, but sometimes you have to start over and spend the time to learn new software.  I had been producing my work since last summer with Lightroom, with fantastic success.  For engagement and weddings, I found that I didn’t need to export to Photoshop unless I wanted a more custom and magical effect.  Skin tones and blemishes could be fixed and airbrushed quickly and with ease; curve control and believable fill light and brightness adjustments were a relief.

Lightroom 1.0, a few years back, was just plain awful, especially the raw converter and interface, the main reasons I switched to Aperture in the first place.  Originally, Lightroom was a crappy copy of Aperture, but now surpassed it because of image quality.  The user interface and slickness of Aperture, however, still destroys Lightroom in every way, shape and form.  But compatibility and image quality, robustness, reliability, and speed destroy Aperture.  Adobe wins.

I had to soul search if I would still use Aperture at all.  The decision came down to a total divorce, and I decided to abandon all my image adjustments, figuring that all of my best adjustments were exported to Photoshop anyway.  Plus, Aperture ate up so much of the processor for just running a few photos that I had to let go.  So bye-bye Aperture.  All of my work is now migrated to Lightroom, and my best work I was able to re-edit with better results.

Ironically, when I was using Adobe Bridge before Aperture, it saved all my images as DNG files and left in their adjustments.  Much of my older work still had their adjustments, which Lightroom recognized and used, saving me from re-editing much of my work.  Again, Adobe is the only company preventing your files from being left into the Digital Dark Age.  A happy face sticker for Adobe.

Day 4: Backup Three Times, and Play Golf and Tennis

Within encrypted disk images, I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up only the files that changed or new files that were added – an incremental backup.  Very easy now.  Hook up my Drobo and the backup drive, then select the source and destination disk, and clone all.  Each of these backups took quite a few hours and didn’t require much attention, so I played Tennis and Golf with my dad during most the process.

Day 5,6,7,8: Back to Shooting and Thanksgiving!

Such relief and peace of mind.  My work is protected and safe.  I can get back to perfecting my craft, learning simpler Lightroom editing solutions, and preparing for my art exhibitions next year.

Looking through all my photos – seeing them all in one place – allowed me to critically analyze my work in one giant session, finding my strengths and weaknesses.  Funny enough, I started deleting photos for the first time in years, which can only be done if its all on one giant drive.  For each collection, I now know what other techniques and styles I need to experiment with or improve, as well as which collections I need to bolster up and add photos.

My Day 5 to Day 8 shoot quality with my new Infrared Digital Body was incredible, which I feel compelled to blog about next.  I’ve added a few gallery-quality shots for my Florida Noir series in March 2010 during my trek through the Historic Ocala back-roads and horse-country, and I’m quite excited to share with you.

Expensive, technical, time-consuming, and irritating, I’m back on track and editing shots for my client and artwork.

On a final note, computers suck.  Lets go back to film, slides, and chemicals.

-Richard