While this is a topic that applies to just about every one, photographers make heavy use of many online services that sits on the cloud. Online storage and sharing services such as Flickr, Photoshelter, Livebooks, Photobuckets etc have enjoyed increased use. But what happens when these services go dark?

Macworld addressed this today which is interesting given the fact a few days ago the giant Google’s cloud came down hard... They also gave some advice.

It might sound obvious, but take ownership of your data. Not obvious? With services like Photoshelter - more and more photographers are using cloud services to store data and use it as a backup. In fact, online backups services are much more prevalent and many make use of these services. If your own computer dies - then the cloud service remains right? I actually know a photographer that uses these services as a main storage device. Travel photographers will shoot and upload their images to free space in the laptop/HD in the hopes the images will be there when they return home. Don’t count with that.

Images are not the only services you have or count with. Services like Box.net allows you to store other files, such as documents and spreadsheets. They are very convenient services, where a person could keep an online copy of edited PO, contracts or margin analysis on a project.

I guess all I’m saying is: keep a copy. Make a backup. Have control over you data. Don’t count that by giving it to a corporation, they will keep it safe.

Not that I’m keeping tabs... I know its hard to be original. Inspiration is found everywhere and sometimes we get inspiration from other forms of art or even from our fellow photographers or friends. But to copy your own magazine cover (it could had been a parody, I mean - the same colour tie and everything) is kind of boring... You might not agree with me but hey, that does not make it less true.

I know... trust me... I have not updated my blog in such a long time... but for the last several months work has taken over and I have not had as much time as I would had liked. So I will try to do this more often...

After all... I do have a blog so I can blog...

I love large tearsheets... This is the latest public print of my work. Right in the centre of the upscale shopping district in Toronto. It’s a frame from my shoot with the Entertainment Tonight (ET Canada) hosts. We shot with the whole cast but on this particular one it shows Cheryl Hickey and Rick Pampanelli. They are all very nice people. The whole crew and talent. While it was fun to shoot with them, it was a lot better to just walk down the street from where I live and find this billboard just above ones head.

Billboards sure are a heck of a tearsheet....



I also I had liked their original idea as well...

My last backup problem has revived an ongoing problem that I have been facing for a long, long time; Digital storage and archival.

Back in the days of film and slides (and its not like I spent a lot of time kicking the can during those days) things were simple. I would take a trip to an exotic location, I would take a few bricks of Velvia - expose them, develop them, edit them (with a real trash can next to me btw) and then save them on sheets. 20 slides per sheet, organized in folders and labelled. Simple stuff. They still sit on my files.

Digital photography means that I generate a few gigabytes worth of images every time I shoot. So where does that go? Where to store them? All media have their own problems. Hard drives fail due to usage, mechanical problems, surface degradation, heat and vibration (not to mention writing errors, errors on checksums etc). CDs/DVDs have surface degradation due to chemical reactions and instability to light and air. CD/DVDs made with specific archival chemicals and gold surfaces are better suited to withstand the passing of time, but finding archival CD/DVDs is getting more and more difficult. Even if you find them, DVDs are now unsuitable (or at least inconvenient) to be used as backup media for professional photographers. I mean, my standard - smallest CF card is 4GB in space. So one CF card equals one DVD. You think Vincent Laforet burned 120 DVDs as a backup from his Olympic coverage? I don’t think so...

When it comes to media, this is what we find ourselfs in:

• Hard-drives (HD) are mechanically fragile. Heat, vibration, surface degradation error prone even with most systems. They have a relatively short lifespan (at least shorter that I like my pictures to last) and
• SSD-drives are a little unproven, but they clear most of the mechanical concerns we have over HD. We just don’t know how archival and how long would they last.
• CD/DVD - 99% of them are not archival in nature. Gold DVDs are getting harder and harder to find. Even if you find them, they are small in terms of today’s needs for storage. Blue-Ray disks are not manufactured in Gold (yet) so while BR-Disks can hold quite a bit of storage, archival BR media does not exist.
• I’m not even going to mention tape. If I address tape, I might as well address punch-cards.

So we find using what we have available today. A 1978 technique to strip data with or without parity across many disks to mitigate with device failure. Today we continue to know it as RAID. I won’t spend much time ranting as of why the world’s most critical and sensitive data in the 21 century still protected on a standard made when every one was more concern on dancing “Saturday Night Fever”. I mean, we should be using 3D crystals ala Buck Rogers... But that is what we got.

Big, fast and secure. You might only choose two... (and after you choose I will tell you how much...)

I would love to have a couple of Promise VTrak E-Class RAID Subsystem with a SAN and run ZFS RAID-Z2+0 to get it over with. Equivalent systems are the dream system of many prolific photographers such as Laforet or Chase Jarvis - but I can’t justify the cost given the rate at which I produce work (not to mention that ZFS is not available in OS X).

So my rant is.... where is the new storage technology? Lets face it, disks are too old of a technology with too many problems - most of them still present. SSD drives should had been here much earlier. Even so - the most sensible way to back things up are to double up on storage? Yeah - that makes sense. Lets buy twice as much disks in the case a disk fails. We are all buying more disks and using more disk as a backup medium. While computing has seen some fantastic innovations storage has somehow stagnated. It is the area of computing with the least amount of innovation. Re-packagaing and re-branding has work very well for a long time its seems. I remember the days of reading articles on new holographic devices made by IBM and other mediums... I wonder what ever happened to those. I’m just surprised that when I look at new storage solutions I see nothing new in the last 20 years. Same magnetic disks, same RAIDS (any DBA would tell you RAID 5 is terrible and RAID 10 which is the most logical but the most costly solution), same FileSystems. I mean, it’s not until recently that someone created an updated FileSystem with the hopes to fix many of the problems of management, volume partition, storage growth, redundancy and error prone devices as disks. Still, ZFS is the only one of its kind in the last 22 years.

So that is what we have today.

What do I currently use? Well, I host my main Aperture library on an external eSATA RAID 1+0 and use a pair of external FireWire drives for my vaults. But after the weekend incident and my growing storage needs I might have to look at a larger solution... The joys of computing...

I have always heard, “when bad stuff happens - it could happen all at once”.

Had a client this last few days - TV station who needed simple headshots of their news anchors and reporters. 30 people in all. We had to break up the shoot and held sessions on different days as its hard to schedule (due to the nature of a news reporter job to be everywhere, specially in the middle of elections) all of them at the same time.

On the last day, ready to import the last set and ready to start generating contact sheets and start making selections - the drives on my main library took a left turn and just basically died. The imports, the last few days of shooting... All the sessions I had done, all gone. These are news anchors on their way to different locations (Baghdad for example...) so its not like you can call them back and say “sorry, we need to re-shoot... my drive died on me”.

Disaster!!

This had never happened to me before. In all the years in computers, I had only heard about people having drive problems, I had never experienced one. Never to me... So after the initial shock of noticing the library not responding I calmed down and said to myself - “No worries - I have a backup”. Fired my trusty library vault. I use Apple’s Aperture which allows me to set-up a vault drive where it stores a copy of the library as well as a copy of the deleted images in the case I made a mistake and need them back. Every one should have a backup right?

But something was not right - The second disk, the vault, has problems mounting, its taking a really long time... the data is all weird, the lights are all flashing like a crazy christmas tree (only, its September and somehow I feel Santa is not paying attention)... what is happening to the system? Then the realization of losing both my main Library, as well as the backup really hit me.

Disaster^2. I’m toast.

What are the odds of your main drive (whether a single drive or a RAID to form one drive - in my case a RAID 10 enclosure) as well as your backup drive failing AT THE SAME TIME are? At the time, I really didn’t care about the technical details and the statistical odds of this scenario happening - all I wanted was my data back so I can deliver to my customer. At the end of the day, that’s all that matters. See, when you are asked to do a job (photography or otherwise) you are really entrusted with the data, with time, with an artifact, a final product that a whole team is counting on so they in turn can do their job. Your deadline is the basis of their schedules. Any slowdown in the process, weather because you are late, irresponsible or because you had technical problems delivering the images can have serious impacts to the final product. This is when you can say “my dog eat my hard drive” and make it sound just as stupid.

I now have a TV station in need of the portraits of 30 people, who god knows when they would be able to gather again to do the shoot. I knew this... I knew better than having all the eggs on one basket. That is why I had a backup. But to think that your main library AND your backup could die at the same time... Who could had thought of that??? Who could had predicted that?

Well, I did... I knew that sooner or later it could happen. That is why I have a 2nd vault. A 2nd version of the backup. Every time I import into my main library I update not one backup but two. I also keep it/rotate it off site “just in case”. Thank you Apple for making this process simple and available. The only thing I had to put on my part was the commitment and the extra drive.

You just need to be prepared. To have a plan. To know how to execute on that plan. This is the first time not only I had hardware failure, but had to reach for my primary as well as my secondary vaults. I was back in business in a few minutes. Once I was back online I could debug and find out what had happened. It was not the drives but one of the Firewire controllers that had gone bad. This made the whole chain of Firewire drives to misbehave. The other drive was not Firewire so it was simple to recover the data quickly. I had not lost the libraries - I just needed to replace one of the drives who’s controllers was the source of my problems. This took 2 days to find out - but I could do this relaxed, knowing fully well that the data was fine and that I could work on the libraries, editing, adding and changing things while I could have the problem fixed. All knowing that my customer could had their images whenever they liked.

Is it cheap to have 2 backups? Not really, but if you think of all the money I could had lost on this shoot only because I had a drive worth a few hundred dollars died on me(who’s cost you are really spreading across many jobs - so the cost is really in the two digits or less). I say it was worth it.

So, what is your backup strategy? Do you have a backup? Get a drive and start planing how to recover from your imminent hard-drive failure. You think that because you are running a RAID x you are ok... Think again.

Go do a backup today.

For more on my backup, library management see my DAM article.

Some great advertising imagery:

A very interesting visual search engine developed by a Canadian company now lets you search for similar visual images based on the scanned input. The TinEye search engine could help photographers find those images that might had been - how should I say? “borrowed” by other people on the internet... Photo Editors looking for a similar visual look, and the public at large... to find the rightful owner of an image...
So I don’t want to hear “Orphan Works Bill” excuses. If you “borrowed” something on the internet, you should make all efforts to find the owner of the image or don’t use it.
Go check it out...

I kind of touched on this thought a while back when bloging about learning from other photographers. On that post I was implying and suggesting that photographers are some times inspired by other’s work - or that at least some work ends up been somewhat similar. I found it interesting when Chase Jarvis went through a bit of an compression on themes between what he has shot in the past and some of the photographs that were chosen at the PDN 2008 Photo Annual. In the visual arts, its not only photographers who inspire us, but painters, architects, graphic designers etc..

But some times inspiration can be too much of a good thing. Inspiration can almost lead to photocopying when not careful. Take this magazine cover and advertising piece.


LEFT: photo by Jamie Nelson for Blink Magazine, 2006.
RIGHT: An advertisement for Dexim Shoes, 2008 (not shot by Jamie Nelson).

Even among magazines, covers can also be “too” inspired, to the point of running the risk of looking way too alike.



In the case of the T Living and the Coast magazine, almost every element are the same. The concept, the napkin, the tomato slice - even the ring on the finger (the same finger might I add) contributed to the success of the image yet are all too similar. The T living was published Spring 07 and Coast on July 07.



But then again, these are examples that better illustrates inspiration among photo editors or art directors - when requesting for a specific style or frame to be used in a periodical.

But sometimes, even the best of us run out of idea. In a world of tight deadlines, of shrinking budgets and margins - as well as the desire to run famous photographers in your periodicals, magazines might run the same photograph, even months apart (such as the case of Time and Esquire, with an image made by Platon)



Or re-use the same image over and over again...


Inspiration is all that... it is the trigger of new ideas, the desire to conquer an existing subject, the opportunity to tackle that has been done before and giving it our own unique twist. With that I leave you - as that unique twist is that matters at the end of the day... its what define us and what makes us unique. What separate’s your pixels to mine... So go out-there and make it yours.