Since I aquired a Canon G9 back in November it has allowed me on a consistent basis to take pictures where I usually wouldn’t take my 30D or 5D. Recently this happened on a trip to Mt. Washington for the day.

I realized that I couldn’t afford to lug around a giant camera, I opted for the pocketable G9. Tossing it in my front coat pocket and hitting the slopes. It proved to be an amazing resource for capturing the beautiful views a top the Mt. Washington ski hill. To my surprise the G9 held up quite well to the cold air. The LCD responded very quickly in the minus 10C conditions. My only complaint…small buttons. Even when using biking gloves it was hard to select the proper button. Though this is a minor detail, it can get very frustrating when attempting to capture a skier/snowboarder going past and all you’re doing is fiddling trying to find the proper buttons.

Shooting with AV and On Camera Flash: A great trick I realized with the G9 when shoot in AV mode with the on-camera flash was to bring the exposure down -2 stops. I find the G9 often will want to overexpose certain areas of the image and with the flash it just looks awful. So if you want aperture control but still want to use the flash, use this trick, it will help create much smooth images when using the flash.

Just over a year ago I began to build up my harddrive capacity to handle the next couple of years of pictures. Well it has come to the point where they are approx. 3/4 full of images now and beginning to cause me issues.

Over the past year these HD’s have been used almost every single day from 1-14 hours straight. In the summer they are being used to their max in a hot environment (usually 30-35C). They ran very well for what they have gone through. Until recently when they have been starting to show signs of aging and over use. For example I was about to backup my main photo library HD and I got a warning saying that my backup HD had completely crashed. ACK! After some disk utility magic I was able to recover the drive back to a useful but limping state. So things brings me back to my original decisions when purchasing my externals…

What was I willing to sacrifice? Price point or Quality? Now to be honest, I did sacrifice quality for a better price so I could get more HD space. Now that decision has come back to bite me in the butt. My original decision was to purchase two Western Digital MyBook Pro’s at 500GB each. One as a main drive and one as my backup. The other purchase was my Western Digital Passport at 160GB for my MacBook Pro bootable backup. Since these purchases my Passport has died, one of the Pro’s has gone haywire and my main Pro is showing signs of kicking the bucket within the next couple of months if I am not careful. So this brings me back to the decision…quality vs. price.

When I continued to think about this so many other factors also came into play. Is it better to go with a desktop setup? Do single disk HD’s do better then RAID externals? What are my long term goals, spend more money now to save money later? Financially can I even afford this?

In what seemed to be an endless pit of external options out there, there have been a few options stick out at me. One of which is the coveted RAID external HD setups. Giving two to four HD’s in a single enclosure for multiple RAID options. A few that have caught my eye in the RAID market is the IOMEGA and LACIE drives. Each external offers almost the exact same features at a very similar price point. Each can run a RAID 0 (stripe) or RAID 1 or JBOD.

Everyday I look at my externals and hope they last another week. Being a starving college intern is not the best place to be when you are trying to stay on top of technology. But from this adventure I know now that quality is what we shoot for. As with camera equipment, save the money and get an L lens, because in the end it will work out better for you.

Just this past weekend I had the privilege of heading over to Vancouver with the students for the renowned Missions Fest. A place where hundreds of missions organization get together and pitch their unique ideas at you and it’s an amazing place to get reacquainted with old connections.  

After being there for a full two days, I now realize that I have met and greet thousands of people, and talked so many different organizations about what they do. Some very interesting prospects have come up for myself in the realm of photography through going to this festival. But I won’t go into that at this time. 

If you ever get the chance, I would suggest heading over to this conference to see what people are doing around the world. 

This past week has been such an amazing week in the mountains of Vancouver Island. We took 5 days to stay on the hill at Mt. Washington ski resort. Just before we got there it had been snowing close to 2′ every day, but the time we got there, there was a cool 14′+ feet of snow at the base. With all these good conditions it was the perfect chance to get some amazing images of the trip. This specific image above is of one side of the large log lodge we stayed on right off the beginner hill. 

If you would like to see some images from our trip head over to this LINK.

I don’t do this often and I feel I should do this more, I am going to give a quick shout-out to a fellow photographer who I have been reading about and talked to. David duChemin has created an amazing space in the area of humanitarian photography, and recently he was featured in Photoshop User Magazine about this work and his workflow. Seeing this man go from comedy work to photography has been such a great experience for myself. Seeing all the different steps he takes to get from A to B to C and beyond is a great tool for myself and other photographers. To check out his work and his blog head over to his website! 

A while back I got a monitor calibration tool called the Pantone Huey. A great little device to make your gross looking monitor into a great colored monitor. What it didn’t have was dual monitor support, and with the growing desktop real-estate it caused some issues. But, being crunched for money on such a device I had to just deal with it. 

14 months later I was doing some random researching on the Pantone Huey and to my surprise they had released an update to the Huey, to match it up with the Huey Pro. This included more advanced features, dual monitor support and gamma adjustments. All that came at a cost of $40 (US). I had to jump at this, mainly because I still can’t afford the better monitor calibration tools yet, and I had two monitors that were fighting for my Huey’s calibration. 

To all those out there that have a Huey and have dual monitors, here is the perfect update for you!

So, I pretty much have to use Aperture over the next 6-8 months in order to sync with the camps system. What that means is that all the metadata in Lightroom will not transfer over to the Aperture, so I will have to retag, reorganize and re-edit the images.

Which brings me to my main point, why? Who was the one that decided that they wouldn’t work together. Why is it that there isn’t a universal meta data system or a universal RAW mode? It really makes no sense to me.

All of these programs work so great, if you only use their specific software. But as soon as you try to sync with another program it all goes downhill.

grumbles on without end