Why Weather Sealing on your Camera is worth it!

This Nikon D3 still works!



And this is exactly why photographers buy cameras with weather sealing. I dropped my Canon 1D Mark II into the Merced River in Yosemite Valley. The only thing that broke was the battery because that's what landed on a rock. Dried it off, replaced the battery and it worked like new ever since. I wouldn't do that on purpose, but accidents happen and sometimes you have to get the shot.

Getting too Close

If you are close enough to a moose to smell it you are too close. I was way too close when taking this photo. Way too close. After this I went out and got a 500mm lens.

Aperture

When Aperture was released I picked up a copy and instantly loved it. I had been wanting something like it for years. After installing Aperture I didn't use Photoshop nearly as much. Everything goes through Aperture first. Now that Aperture is $80 bucks, every purchaser of a new camera should pick up a copy. Head on over to the Mac App Store and pick up your own copy, I highly recommend it.

Backups and Archiving

In the last few days left of 2010 we reviewed the business expenses and what we needed and decided to enhance our back up strategy. The picture above is a photo of four 2TB g-drives we purchased to accomplish part of this. It is always good to review one's backup and archiving strategy and continue to improve upon it.

There are two rules to live by when it comes to backup:

1. The best backup is the one that you do.
2. You don't have a backup strategy if you don't test that it works.

The backup strategy must be simple and easy. RAID is great but it is not a backup.

Our backup solution is pretty simple. We run MacPros with every slot loaded with drives. The main drive is backed up every two weeks to a complete duplicate using Carbon Copy Cloner (we used to use Super Duper but ran into a few problems with it) and automatically with Time Machine. Two more drives store the data and are in a RAID 1, with a Time Machine backup and two of these g-drives are for complete offsite duplication.

Archiving happens in two ways. We make copies of all outgoing disks and two complete copies to external hard drives. One is offsite and one is onsite.

We also use an online service for redundant offsite storage and for delivery.

Extreme Unicycle Photography

I have dabbled in sports photography a few times over the years and have found it can be a lot of fun, if the sport is extreme enough. My latest bit of dabbling has certainly been extreme. Unicycling, extreme unicycling that is. This is my friend Corbin Dunn, World Marathon Unicycle Champion. He rode 26 miles on his unicycle to win that title. He does some amazing things on a unicycle.



The photograph in this post is a composite of four photographs taken at high speed. The trick to making a photograph like this is to use a camera that does high speed and use a tripod. The tripod is key because it reduces the amount of photoshop work later. All photos were processed in Aperture 3.0 and finished up in Photoshop CS 4.

Aperture 3 Review

I've been using Aperture 3 since it came out. Apple sent me a copy to work with and give them feedback. I will have a review up in the next few weeks along with some tips on using it and getting started.

If you want to buy it or upgrade then Amazon has the best price in town so click the link below.

Simple Camera

This photo is currently featured on the Nature Photographer Magazine website. It was taken in Yellowstone on a very beautiful morning with a very simple camera: an old digital 3 mega pixel Canon Elph.