My photography portfolio, PeterBaker.net has been in serious need of an overhaul, and today, after numerous never-to-be-seen-by-anyone-else revisions, the one I finally went with was also the one that took the least amount of time. I wish I had figured this version out at the beginning.
So have a look, let me know what you think. Is it an effective photography portfolio? Is it something you’d show to prospective art buyers? Commercial buyers? Your mom?
With more and more people downloading their entertainment, and photo files getting bigger and bigger (especially if you scan them), a massive amount of hard drive space is becoming a necessity for even the least of us. Fortunately it’s also dirt cheap and plentiful. I’ve been adding hard drives, peace-meal over time, expanding my capacity in small increments; just enough to satisfy my immediate needs.
The easiest solution is to add an external drive, with it’s own enclosure, over a USB (hopefully 2.0) or Firewire connection. These are usually single disk drives, using the same hard drive you’ve got inside your computer, but in it’s own box with it’s own power adapter and data connection (usb or firewire). Some of the bigger drives cram two physical disks into the enclosure, and use a built in controller to combine them into one virtual drive (the volume you see on your desktop). These are the one’s that go up to 500gb and up. Until recently, the largest physical hard drives capacity was 500gb, so any external drive that you could buy that was bigger than that combined at least two smaller drives.
These are great for casual needs; lot’s of space, nothing to think about or configure, and portable to boot. The problem with these drives (and all hard drives) is reliability. Every hard drive will crap out, at some point. There’s a saying that there are two types of computer users: Those who have lost data to hardware failure, and those that will. So why’s that worse with these kind of drives? Because there’s TWO (or more) drives in there, DOUBLING (or quadrupling) the chances that a drive will die and take your data with it.
I had planned on writing this big long diatribe about why this site (and all others on my server) have been down for 5+ days and how my hosting company did less than nothing to help recover them and how Mercury is in retrograde but I’m sick of thinking about it so I’ve decided to move on.
I will just point out these few things:
- Backup your sites right now. Files, databases, email, everything. Right now, and as often as you can remember.
- If you also happen to host someone’s site who generates a bit of blushing, especially amongst egyption-islamic-extremist-hackers, maybe put it on a separate server from the rest of your sites.
- Don’t count on your hosting company’s nightly backups to be available if their customer service takes 4 days to respond to requests for said backups (I’m looking at you Site5).
- Back up your shit. Again.
- Don’t expect your hosting company do to much of anything to help you recover anything (still looking at you Site5).
- Back up your shit.
One of the biggest headaches and consistent issues I’ve had with Aperture, and one of the only things keeping me from having to open up Photoshop on a regular basis, is file exporting. Aperture insists on sharpening the hell out of it’s exported files, with no way to dial it down or just shut it off. It seems to be a blanket sharpening too, as exporting at large pixel sizes has a much less noticable sharpness than when you export at small sizes (like the size I use on Treemeat). At small sizes it’s pretty much unusable.
On the right, exported from Aperture at this size
The only way around this that I’ve found is to export the image as a TIFF at full size, open it in Photoshop to resize and do a normal, modest amount of sharpening. This overzealousness also happens with Aperture’s web gallery export, where the TIFF export workaround is not an option, so every web gallery I’ve exported from Aperture has unusable images. Obviously this depends on your perspective, and some images end up looking fine with this sharpening (as I probably would’ve sharpened them to some extent anyways), but I’d at least like the option to turn it off, or at least down.
A few other people seem to have noticed this as well. Anyone else know a way around it?
Michael David Murphy, from While Seated, has been conducting a series of insightful interviews with notable street photographers at his text blog, 2point8. The latest is a discussion with Gus Powell.
“I have always liked the extras in the background of movies… that little bit of humanity playing out in a landscape and informing what happens in the foreground. I have wanted to make pictures that are without an obvious protagonist and that become interesting as photographs while being made from insignificant moments in real time.”
See more of Powell’s work at TinyVices and his own site. And be sure to check out the rest of the interviews.
Since first getting my Hasselblad over a year ago, my digital camera has been getting left behind more and more often. I’ve only got one decent lens for it (which the sensor crop makes even less fun), and unless I’m taking pictures for posterity (parties or other events where I’d want lots of pictures), I generally want anything worth taking a picture of to be on big, glorious film.
So when I bought a Hasselblad-lens-to-Canon-EOS-mount adaptor from Shanghai, I initially thought it’d be a bit of a novelty, but it’s a surprisingly useful thing to have. I took some comparison shots on a Canon 20D, using a 50mm CF T* , an 80mm C, and a 150mm CF T* Hasselblad lens, compared to a Canon 50mm f1.8 and a Sigma 70-300mm lens. The best EOS mount lens I’ve got is a Canon 17-40mm L, but I wanted to have comparable focal lengths so I had to use my less than stellar lenses; not exactly a fair match up (though the 50mm is pretty decent).
I went to the Hayward Camera Show a couple weeks ago with Justin without any real intention of buying anything. I had recently picked up a 150mm lens for my Hasselblad 500CM, and a few other accessories, like a Hasselblad Lens to Canon EOS Mount Adaptor (more on that later), so I wasn’t really in the position of spending any more money. But I did bring along all my gear, planning on taking some pictures after.
As soon as I was through the door, vendors were asking what I was selling, what was in the bag, how much for your women, etc. I had been recently toying with the idea of getting a 50mm CF lens and selling my gigantor 40mm Distagon. The 50mm lenses are much more compact then the old cone-style 40mm lens, which at times was just too large and cumbersome to bother getting out. When I mentioned I had a very clean, recently serviced, old-style 40mm Distagon, one of the vendors got really excited. She offered me $750 for it (I paid just over $800).
Now, the 40mm was my first lens for my beloved Hasselblad, and some of my favorite photos were taken with it, so I wasn’t too sure I was ready to give up my first and favorite lens, especially since I hadn’t done enough obsessive research into a lens that would replace it (I wouldn’t be able to get by on a maximum wide angle of 80mm for long).
Then Justin found a sweet Foto Snaiper, and got me feeling like I needed to do something at the show, even if it meant walking out with LESS gear. I went back to the lady, with hopes of maybe getting more money out of the deal, then noticed she had a mint 50mm CF T*, in the original bubble-style case. She was asking $795 for it, and through some crafty bargaining (ie. begging and sniveling), I got her to trade my 40mm (plus my very perfect fitting Sigma lens case) for her 50mm, lens case AND $50, cash.
I’ve now got what I think will be my Hasselblad setup for a long time to come; a 500cm body, 2 A12 film backs, a 21mm extenion tube, a 50mm, 80mm, and 150mm lens, all of which fit in my bag now. Sweet.