Geek Photographer

So, just a quick update on my One (galery) a Week challange… If you have been watching my SmugMug site, you will notice the last photos where uploaded on the 7th Feb… I have missed a few weeks, mainly due to lazyness… I hope to get back in the photography saddle, as it where, soon…

I have also gotten a few new photography related books in the last few days. The first is The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter) and the second is The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers (Voices That Matter). I am hoping to review these and post some info about them soon. (those links are UK links, but if your interested, the US links are as follows:
The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers
The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers

just to start though, looking at the Lightroom book, its very handy. was messing with Lightroom last night using the book for reference and i have found a lot of extra stuff i did not know… very cool stuff…

So, one of the things i decided to do this new year was a One A Day type project… But after the first 6 days, i only shot on 2 days… SO, i changed my “project” to the “One a Week” project… ITs more one Galery a week, than one photo at this stage, but hopefully it will get me taking more and more photos.

The photos are currently hosted on my SmugMug site. Leave a comment on the photos if you have any.

So, i have been looking at this ColorSpace UDMA backup device, and i am thinking… I shoot on CF Cards. i carry 24Gb of them with me most of the time. I also sometimes carry my Laptop (MacBook Pro). But i like the look of this because of the ability to not only backup your CF Cards, but to back the internal drive itself up to somewhere else (other external USB Drive). This sounds very handy for long trips, large events, etc.

But, there is a question: Is it any good? Anyone play with one of these? Recommendations? Especially around using with Lightroom?

So, The Nikon D3000.

What can i say about this. Entry level camera, about $600 in late August, 10.2 MP and 18-55 Lens. Seems to shoot on SD only and supports both SDHC and eye-Fi cards…  Not a bad little camera for the price. [Update] Forgot the Link… From Engadget…]

So, a couple of days ago on my other blog, i posted that my Mac Pro, my main workstation, had died… It was a sad day… But it is a new beginning in a way… now i get to start from scratch on most things.

So, at the moment (or when my Mac Pro was working i should say) this was my workflow (roughly):

• download photos to a particular directory using Downloader Pro (had some copyright settings in here as standard). the filename structure was <drive>:\Photos\<YYYYMMDD>\<YYMMDD>-<HHMMSS>-<ImportSerial> where ImportSerial was the number of the file (so, first file of the download was 1, and so on). the directory was on a RAID 1 array, and a copy process was set to copy to my Windows Home Server at the same time
• Open LightRoom and import the photos. I had one massive LightRoom Catalogue which was set to export metadata as it was written to XMP side cars. Keywords would usually get added on import… but sometimes they didn’t. i should do the keywords more often
• go through each photo and set ratings
• do some work on photos that needed work
• export the top photos
• backup job to the cloud (either Amazon S3 or RackSpace CloudFiles)

Now that i have to start from scratch, does anyone have any recommendations? how should i setup my LightRoom Catalogues? is Downloader Pro enough or should i have something else? is my naming structure for files and folders up to scratch? And while we are on the subject, anyone have recommendations for Mobile Workflows? If i take my laptop with me, copy photos to it and work on them, how should i get them on to the main machine? just copy the LightRoom Catalogue? Is there a better way? and when should i clean my cards? do i do it after import, after backup to the Home Server or after backup to the Cloud?

Leave comments below if you have ideas.