I just got in from shooting a wedding on an incredibly warm, sunny day for early March. Here are just a few sneak peaks of Holly and Jeff's wedding...





Thanks to Rich Pizzuti for being a model human lightstand!

Hair & Makeup: Salon Saveria - Walpole, MA
Dress: Allure Boutique - Westwood, MA
Reception and Ceremony: Granite Links Golf Club, Quincy, MA
Event Coordinator: Linda Blackmore
Music: Boston Music Works
Florist: Judy's Village Florist - Foxboro, MA

I learned about Lindsey and Adam through Suzanne and Todd who's wedding I shot back in '08. Back in late Autumn, Lindsey, Adam and I headed out to the Minuteman National Park and then into Beacon Hill for their engagement session. There wasn't one serious moment and that definitely set the tone for their wedding!

It was a cold, grey January day as I drove up the hills south of Boston to the Granite Links, with the clubhouse perched atop a northward facing slope towards Boston. I met with my assistant Doug (second photographer and man-with-the-light for the day) and we scoped the place out before meeting with Lindsey, who was relaxed as ever!

As the getting ready, ceremony and reception were all being held at the club, the preparations proceeded at a calm pace with no stresses about time or worries about traffic. Adam arrived downstairs at the bar, so Doug headed down there while I took some photos of Lindsey with her very attentive bridesmaids, before Adam popped out of the lift. Breaking with tradition, they decided to make use of the day and get some of their formals and couple photos out of the way before the ceremony, so after a non-teary, and funny first-meet, we dragged everyone outside into the cold for some shots on the hillside. 

Alas (and for some reason often the case with winter weddings) the pathways to the best views weren't clear, but we found a good clear view of Boston with the bridal party on the grass and us shooting and lighting from a deep snow bank. I'm not really sure if snow in my shoes is the best way to start a wedding, but sometimes to get that angle you've just got to make sacrifices! With bad weather on the way and a rather damp chill to the air, we knew we wouldn't be outside for long and the party braved it for just enough time before we all headed back in as guests arrived.

A lighting-fast paced ceremony ensued with tears and a lot of laughing (do they ever stop?) from Lindsey and Adam as the sun went down. With plenty of time to spare after group photos, everyone headed off to enjoy their cocktail hour before making a very different entrance to a packed reception room that surprised their guests and ourselves.

After some cracking speeches the party and food ensued. I experimented a little with the 5DMKII's HD video capabilities and put a little surprise in the slideshow for Lindsey! During the course of the night, we headed out with the newlyweds onto a windswept balcony as the wintry elements rained down around us, before rounding out the evening.

Congrats to Lindsey and Adam and we wish you all the best on your journey together! To see all of their photos and purchase prints, click here.



To view the slideshow below, enter Lindsey's maiden name for the password. You can also see all of the photos in their online gallery by clicking here.

Happy Valentines everyone!

As the wedding bookings flow steadily in I thought it would be great to offer a HUGE giveaway for future and past clients...

Well I said giveaway, but you do have to do a bit of work... just join the contest on Facebook (details below) and upload a photo of yourself with your better half. The little twist is that it has to be taken by yourselves... yes that means arms outreached, camera on a tripod or rock or whatever else you can find to rest it on (just not someone else's hands!). Of course it is tough to tell sometimes, but I trust you'll be good honest peeps and humour me with the best shot you've taken of yourselves. Your Facebook friends vote, then the winners are announced on April 15.

You could win one of these:
- Grand Prize: Custom Wedding Photography Package worth $4150!
- Second Place: Engagement Shoot plus a 9x12 art book.... worth $1000!
- Third Place: Online print credit worth $300!

The really cool thing is that if you win, the person that referred you on Facebook also gets $300 of online print credit! So even if you don't win, but you referred someone who did win, you could still get the $300 print credit as a referral prize!

These are the steps:
1. Become a Fan!
2. Enter the Competition and upload a photo of you both and read the Rules. Don't forget to mention who mentioned the competition to you, so they can win something too!
3. Get your friends to vote on your photo... they can vote only once per submission; a maximum of 10 votes.
4. Sit back and wait for the results on April 15!

So why a self portrait I hear you ask? Well I was scratching my head about how I could engage competitors' artistic side and try to get a feel for who they really are and allow people voting to immediately see who they were voting for. Words just seemed boring and a standard photo competition had been done, done and done some more... and I wanted something challenging.

So something I always have trouble with photographically is one of those 'reach out with your hand and shoot yourself' photos, especically with your other half in the frame. My wife actually has an uncanny knack for it... see this shot she took of us in 2006 when we were dating:

Yep, likely better than I could do, though I did shoot this with my hunker-lunker Canon 1Ds in one hand out of the window of a friend's Austin 7 driving around the Cotswolds...

So it doesn't matter what camera you take it with, you just have to take it yourself and get a ton of your facebook friends to vote for you in order to win one of these amazing prizes! The more you spread the news about the competition, the greater liklihood you have of winning the referral prize!

The sooner you enter, the more votes you can get, so get snapping!

Submissions for photos will be between today and March 14 2010
Voting starts today until April 14 2010
Winners announced April 15 2010

Just click here to enter the contest!
 

For rules: click here

I have a number of different readers to my blog and they mostly fall into two camps: other photographers and my clients / potential clients.

My clients are of course rightly concerned that their precious images are held securely; my peers are often interested in the technology I use to store images on.  So I thought a post about how I store my images would be useful. I won't talk that much about my actual procedures of backing up (that would bore most people senseless!), but more about the actual hardware technologies that I use. As a photographer, I am also an image librarian, ensuring that the images I take are kept safe and to do that I always ensure I am on top of the latest technology that will deliver the safest, most efficient solution.

Data storage is pretty cheap these days and you can almost guarantee that next year the same amount of storage on a hard disk will be half the price. Now, while folks at home and those shooting for fun may get away with just storing the images on their laptop disk or external drive, things get a little more complex and expensive when you regularly shooting two or three thousand images at a wedding. Not only does one have a huge amount more data to contend with - especially when shooting RAW with 17 and 21 megapixel cameras - but one also has to think about how to keep those images safe.

So there's the obvious problem of fire, theft or other physical loss and we can simply prepare for that by keeping our images duplicated on a backup disk(s) that we keep off-site. When I shoot a wedding or portrait session, after downloading my cards to my computer, I make an immediate backup and take the disk out of the house. So we've immediately doubled our storage cost.

Then there's the problem of data loss on disks. Now whatever medium you use, be it the classic magnetic hard disk, the newer 'solid state' disks, or on a CD or DVD, your data is never really completely safe. Just as your film or slides rot in the shoe box, data on a disk is not impervious to tiny errors that can cost you big.

Let's look at the method most of us use for storage: the magnetic hard disk. These disks have been with us now for what seems like an eternity, and while there have been a few changes to the basic interfaces, underneath the way in which data is stored on a disk as ones and zeros (a bit) has not changed. Each bit of data (see this description of how it works) is stored as north (0) or south (1) and with millions and millions of these bits being stored, one of them is bound to go wrong! Slight shifts in the earth's magnetic field, close placement to a radiator or loudspeaker, or someone dumping something magnetic right on top of your hard disk and you could be in trouble.

So here's where most of us go wrong. We use single disks to store our data and when that disk fails, either in a glorious puff of smoke or more commonly with just a few bits being messed up on the disk we run into problems. Sure, some of us run backups right? Well that's fine, but what if you run a backup each week, overwriting what you had on your backup disk... what if you overwrite it with data that's gone bad?

Enter redundant storage drives. Now these drives have been around for a while and are commonly referred to as RAID (redundant array of inexpesive disks). A bunch of disks the same size and type are stacked together in an array and a RAID controller, configured to one of several different options will allow you (under the right setting) to store your data across all of the disks as if they were one drive, plus offer redundancy. So if one drive goes down, you stick in a new one and carry on. Or if data goes bad somewhere on one disk, it can be rescued automatically from another.  There are a couple of problems with RAID: 1. You have to know a little technical junk to get the thing to work for you in the right way 2. As you are limited to using the same sized disks, when you run out of room you are forced to buy a new RAID system (or a very large single disk), then copy the data over, then start again with larger disks.

Enter Drobo. This rather interesting device has taken the digital creative marketplace by storm. As people that often have huge files and many of them, we commonly require extremely large storage drives, but with a way of growing them. Very often we don't have a big IT support group backing us, so a) we don't have the money for a lot of storage up front b) we commonly don't know what a RAID is, but we hope it isn't a raid by the IRS c) even if we did have a RAID we just don't have time to administer it... and just what the heck is it anyway? So as a photographer a few years back and struggling with storage options myself (back when digital photographer had already taken off but the storage hadn't caught up) I came across a video on youtube about the Data Robot (Drobo) and instantly knew this was going to make waves in the photo community. It took a good few months in 2007 before it was available, but as soon as I could I purchase one, with four 500GB disks (each one a couple of hundred $!). I didn't want to throw in too much storage; I couldn't AFFORD too much storage, so 2TB it was, which gave me 1.5TB total storage with 500GB of protection.

A few years later (as in last week) and my Drobo was showing an orange light and it told me to replace the disk with the least space. I ignored it and the other day it turned red (meaning I was really running out and I'd better do something about it!). So I headed down to Micro Center in Cambridge, bought a couple of disks and set about replacing them. Below is a video of how I did this:


Edit:

• As you saw, you have to hold the lever aside when inserting a new disk (duh!) - always read the manual, as they say :)
  
• My 1.5TB Green Disks actually ran at $120, not $80 (getting confused with the 1TB price).
• Also, when you replace drobo disks, do them one at a time only!
  
• A solid red light denotes that you're lack of storage is critical; a failed drive flashes red.

So the Drobo is a pretty cool device and I've trusted it for a while to protect the important images of my clients. It isn't an entire solution - you still have to back-up off-site and you will most likely want to use the drive inside your computer for editing as it isn't that quick (at least the USB2 only option that I have isn't!). However, it does hold EVERY bit of data I have created since 1997 on it and it works away, even while the computer is turned off, constantly ensuring my data is safe from the dreaded bit-rot. When it comes to making an off-site backup, I can rest easy knowing that the original data on the Drobo is completely intact as it had started out life, making the off-site backup a lot less worrying

Drobos now run at just $350 for the standard Drobo with USB2 and Firewire 800 or for $795 for the Drobo S with those same interfaces and eSATA (50% faster than firewire 800). If you have a need for even greater storage, they also have rack mounted versions. You have to purchase the disks seperately, but with 1 to 2 terrabyte disks running at extremely low prices (between $80 and $200), you really don't have to worry too much about a big hit. My suggestion is to buy enough storage for a year, then when drives get less expensive next year, just buy a couple more when you need to.

Bottom line: Drobo is the best archiving solution for professional photographers in my opinion. Low cost in the long-run (you can mix and match drives), simple maintenance (you just leave it plugged in; you don't need an IT background), easily upgradeable.

... and my clients can rest easier at night knowing that I've invested a lot of thought and money into the premier storage solution for creative professionals.

Happy February (dribble dribble)!



It is a good job you're cute Oli, because we're not getting much sleep around here!