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It’s hot in Sydney today – probably the hottest day of summer so far -  reaching 40 degrees C on the coast. Got up at 5am to do the usual Saturday morning ride up to Church Point (beautiful part of Sydney) and it must have been almost 30 degrees when I rolled out of bed. Needless to say lost a lot of fluid on the ride today and as I was coming back over the Sydney Harbour Bridge and down to a little underpass I rode past an elderly man who was extremely well dressed. He was just sitting there with some of his possessions on this ridiculously hot day watching the world go by. As I rode past him I thought “I’ve got to take a photo of that Gentleman!” so I rode on for another km or so contemplating what I would do and I knew I’d regret it later if I didn’t go back and get a photo of him so off I rode back to where he was and we just chatted for maybe 10 minutes – shooting the breeze – his name is Danny, he was born in Ireland and came out here to Australia with his brother 61 years ago. He worked for Australia Post for 30+ years. Such a dignified man – even though he seems to have fallen on hard times he just had such a great disposition – a real character – took pride in himself and his appearance. I asked him if he’d mind if I took a couple of pictures of him and he said he didn’t so I just off three quick shots from the iPhone (apologies about the quality). I’m glad I stopped and took the time to have a chat with Danny and it did make me think that a lot of us are just victims of circumstance and through no fault of our own can end up in a tough situation… At the end of the shoot I gave him some money for being a great subject and to help him out. He accepted it reluctantly and said “God Bless you. I hope you win the lottery!”

Danny, I hope you win the lottery mate and thanks for sharing a part of yourself.

Danny2 Danny

Well we’re now well in to January and thought i’d see how my 20 in 2 list is coming along. I just finished reading Joe McNally’s ‘Hot Shoe Diaries’ – which provides a great insight into professional lighting techniques by basically giving you the finished product and working backwards. I highly recommend that and his other book ‘The Moment It Clicks’ for anyone looking to improve their photography through lighting.

hotshoediaries

I also registered today with the Centre for Volunteering to advise them of my skillset, interests and availability with regards to volunteering work. I got a call this afternoon from them however there is nothing currently available so stay tuned for my progress in finding somewhere to volunteer regularly.

Going to Adelaide to ride with the Liquigas-Cannondale Team would also have to be contributing toward goal #20 of being a bit more sociable so all in all i’m happy with my start to the year!

A couple of weekends back I had the pleasure of volunteering at Help-Portrait in Sydney. Help-Portrait is a not for profit event that provides professional portraits to those less fortunate right around the globe. It is run entirely by volunteers and although only in its second year, there were 170 guests in Sydney alone! I had the pleasure of assisting Grace Tham (an amazing freelance photographer) and working with Adrian Sheppard (post production).

If anyone is considering volunteer work I can’t recommend Help-Portrait enough – it is such a rewarding and enjoyable experience and I will certainly be putting my name down for next year’s event. A special mention also to the organisers such as David Haysom and Cherelle Martin who sacrifice so much of their time to make the event such a success – thank you!!! :)

Inspired by the event and the quality of the photos that were produced on the day, along with my ‘20 in 2’ goals #12, #13, #17 and #19 i’ve decided to buy a second camera flash, some wireless transceivers, umbrellas and the like in the hope of improving the quality of the photos that I take (in conjunction with further education at the Australian Centre for Photography). Here is what is on order:

1x Canon 580EX II flash
2x PocketWizard FlexTT5
1x PocketWizard MiniTT1

And on the recommendation of Bryan @ the-digital-picture.com:

2x Photogenic 60” umbrellas
2x Manfrotto 1052BAC light stands
2x Manfrotto 026 swivel umbrella adapters
2x Stroboframe universal shoe mounts

But, as I’ve said to Grace, having all the technology in the world doesn’t make you a good photographer. It is not what tools you have, but how you use them and a great photographer would still produce fantastic images using a point & shoot just as they would using today’s top of the line DSLRs. With any luck i’ll be able to use my tools sufficiently well to produce some nice images (hopefully starting with a Christmas family portrait!).

When conditions may not be perfect for shooting say a landscape shot – high noon or overcast/dull weather for instance, try converting your shot in to black & white or monochrome – often you’ll be surprised at the result! The shot below I was about to pass by until I converted it to black & white using Adobe’s Lightroom software and it brought out the moody atmosphere of the afternoon as the clouds were rolling in to Melbourne.

Bridge Over Southbank

With a lot of people now owning digital SLRs and shooting in either RAW or RAW+JPEG, inevitably you are going to run out of space on your current computer hard drive (HDD) and require more storage space. You may also just be looking for various backup options for your digital photos – because if you have them all on your computer hard drive and for whatever reason it dies, you can lose years of digital photos and memories in an instant!

I was in that first situation recently with my 60GB computer hard drive down to its last 1GB – so I either had to purchase more storage or start deleting some of my photos. I decided to purchase an external storage solution – something that could be used from multiple computers, either PC or Mac, and something that offered redundancy.

mbwe

I ultimately decided upon a Western Digital MyBook World Edition II (shown left) network-attached-storage (NAS) device. Basically you plug it in to your wired or wireless internet router/access point, follow a wizard and then you have either 1 or 2TB (terabytes) of additional storage accessible via PC or Mac. The great thing I liked about this particular device was the 3yr warranty and also that the storage by default is mirrored in a RAID 1 configuration. What does this mean? Basically inside the unit itself are 2 separate hard drives and each time you copy a picture or song or a word document across it is created once on each hard drive – so you’re immediately getting a backup copy created for you. If one of the hard drives in the MyBook crashes, you put in a new hard drive and all your existing data is copied back over to the new hard drive – and this all happens without any user input – not bad eh?

Because traditional hard drives contain a few moving parts, they will inevitably wear out – so having two hard drives means that the likelihood of you losing all your data (both drives crashing simultaneously) is very slim.

The downside to using a RAID 1 configuration is that overall capacity is essentially cut in half – so for instance I purchased the 2TB MyBook (containing 2x 1TB hard drives) however my maximum capacity for the ‘mirrored drive’ is 1TB – because all data is duplicated to the second disk. If it wasn’t mirrored my maximum capacity would be 2TB available but then I wouldn’t have any redundancy and could lose all my memories if one of the hard drives died.

The MyBook is not the cheapest storage option on the market (at around AU$420) – but if you care about your digital photos and don’t want to risk losing them it is certainly a good option if used in the RAID 1 (default) configuration.

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