A collection of snaps.
I have collected some of my favorite snaps from San Francisco’s Embarcadero on my picture site. You can see them by clicking the picture below.
Click the picture for more.
The Embarcadero
Monthly Archives: February 2011
CarBak
Staying safe.
The Russians/North Koreans/Iranians/Iraqis/Hezbollah/Hamas/Al Qaeda/YouNameTheFlavorOfTheDay loonies just dropped a big one down the road and the fire or electromagnetic shock wave fried your computer. Or, more likely, Pacific Gas and Electric or ConEd just dropped a bigger one and the power surge and resulting brownout fried it ‘real good’.
No problemo, quoth you, I have my back-up in the cloud. Well, tough, ’cause the cloud storage facility was 100 yards from the epicenter and what was 40 years of your precious snaps is now so much molten whatever-they-stored-them-on.
I last mentioned backing-up in my piece titled Paranoia over two years ago and am happy to report that the Aluratek drive holder I profiled continues to do sterling duty many times a day. Given its absence of moving parts I would expect no less.
The Aluratek Docking enclosure remains available from B&H, now for $35, and the beauty of the device is that it can accept both 3.5″ and 2.5″ (notebook) hard drives. And nothing has changed for cloud storage of large photo catalogs, meaning forget about it. Too slow to upload or download and too dependent on a host of new variables, like did the guy running the cloud facility just forget to press the button because of the bottle of tequila he downed the previous evening right before crashing his car? Remember when Apple’s vaunted MobileMe went down and many users lost files? Uh huh. So much for the cloud.
So for my precious photo catalogs in both Lightroom3 and (legacy) in Aperture2 I adopt the following back-up routine.
- Every hour or so to the Aluratek fitted with a 3.5″ 1.5tB Samsung whopper drive, stores a back-up using Apple’s TimeMachine which gives me access to legacy files rather than overwriting each with the latest version. That’s an automatic back-up which I check now and then to make sure it ran. By using a really large drive I preserve an immense amount of legacy versions should I ever need to go back – TimeMachine will start deleting the oldest files once the drive is full. (Roy Hammans convinced me of the wisdom of TimeMachine a while back when he explained how he had merged layers in a Photoshop file and needed to go back to the pre-merged version. Time Machine did the trick). I confess that TimeMachine has saved my bacon more than once when I was too fast saving an Excel/Word/whatever file.
- At two in the morning Carbon Copy Cloner makes an incremental bootable back-up to the second internal 1tB 3.5″ hard drive in the HackPro which is my workhorse desktop computer. The beauty of a CCC back-up is that, if properly set up, the back-up contains the full OS X system and can be booted from if the main drive in the HackPro blows. By contrast, TimeMachine back-ups cannot be booted from. The CCC back-up is incremental, meaning the first one takes forever and subsequent ones need only a minute or two. I check that this one is bootable once a month, thank to iCal pestering me with a repeating reminder.
- Notebook drives have become very inexpensive. MacSales will sell you a 500gB Samsung SATA for $75, a minimal premium over the much larger and heavier 3.5″ drive. Get the cheaper, cooler running, more reliable 5400rpm one – after all, what’s your hurry? Why a notebook drive? Well, first, it fits in the Aluratek (or similar) cradle just fine once the 3.5″ drive is removed. Second it’s small and light and is perfect for storage in the glove compartment of your car, or wherever is cool and off site. An envelope or pouch protects the exposed connectors. On this one I simply calendar iCal to remind me monthly to do a back-up, pull the drive from the old four seater, plug it in the Aluratek and do a simple back-up of the Pictures directory on the HackPro where my picture catalogs and related indexes and preview files reside. This is the ultimate failsafe when the Loony Of The Day has another go at the last bastion of freedom in the world, aka the United States. This solution should also work in Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, but I’m not too sure about the rest of the world.
CarBak – the notebook 500gB HDD next to my wallet. Not exactly large ….
Flash chip RAM drives with no moving parts? Nah! Too expensive, still working out teething problems, and you don’t need superspeed access times for a back-up drive. Wait a few years – the spinning disc drive may be nearing the end of its life but it’s cheap and reliable. And realize that the notebook drive is seldom working and it’s known to be extremely shock resistant. Sammy claims 400-900G shock resistance and 55C/131F maximum temperature for their notebook spinning disk drive, and I don’t even want to think about either of those.
Another benefit of the notebook drive back-up is that you can take it with you if you use something like a MacBook Air, as I do, which has very limited internal storage yet is more than capable for on-the-road Lightroom use. On of those Newer Technology Universal Drive Adapters, at all of $28, will allow easy connection. A related benefit of this device is that it will allow attachment of an optical drive, for DVDs and the like, to a MacBook Air, which has none.
CarBak running.
OK, you say, the Big One drops on your home where your car is parked. Bugger, says I. But do I care any more?
The dog trainer
Pure joy.
Coming from one who has never met a dog he does not like, what follows is a highly biased account.
I was pedaling around the bay, in the area of that soulless ball park which AT&T has foisted on the long suffering inhabitants of San Francisco, when my eye was caught by a flurry of activity on the east side of the stadium. Taking advantage of the BikeCam I was there seconds later, chatting with this man surrounded by some twenty dogs.
“What’s with all the dogs?”
“I’m a professional dog trainer and this is where I exercise them daily”, he replied, proceeding to name each of the twenty by name, specifying their breed. All but one pure bred and the basenji a stowaway on a ship from Thailand! Every dog responded to his name by bounding up and jumping all over him with an expression of pure delight. What had been a blah day (I had been trying to take good pictures of the UCSF Mission complex, which is arguably impossible) turned into a glorious one, just like that, as I shared in the experience with this utterly charming man. Even the fearsome looking bull terrier ambled up and gave me a nice, long lick and a wag. Yes, I checked, and my hand was still there.
I related, of course, that the house pet is a vicious Border Terrier and swear that a look of abject fear flitted across his face. Such is terrier power.
…. and this one is Rex ….”
As he composed himself, I cycled about a bit marveling at this spectacle and, as I made my way back to the city, saw the lot of them engaged in some sort of competitive ball game, right by that stretch of water where a big hit from the ball park splashes down.
Want a long, healthy, happy life? Get a dog.
All snaps on the Panny G1 with the kit zoom.
The Oriental Warehouse
A charming period piece.
Located at 650 Delancy Street at Brannan, in San Francisco, the Oriental Warehouse has been beautifully restored and now does duty as residential condo housing. The preserved exterior loading bay doors remain in place, somewhat strangely supplemented by a modern stainless steel addition, and what better opportunity for some good old fashioned black and white?
The Oriental Warehouse. G1, kit zoom @ 31mm, ISO 320.
The dynamic range here is so huge I had to expose for the highlights in the steel door (the Panny’s sensor eagerly awaits any opportunity to burn our highlights) then brought detail back in the original oak doors by using the selective adjustment tools in Lightroom3, which detail was otherwise lost in the stygian gloom.
Here’s the story, courtesy of the little Panny’s built-in flash:
Dump the lens hood
Useless clutter.
It still amazes me that you hear that old chestnut that a lens hood helps improve your pictures. With modern lens coatings it’s very hard indeed to induce flare in pictures even directly into the sun and when you do, careful shielding of one corner of the lens with your hand is far superior to anything offered by a lens hood, the latter an inevitable compromise between function and size. What’s right at the wide end of your zoom focused on infinity – which physics dictates any hood must be designed for – is near useless at the wide end and/or closer distances, whereas your hand is supremely efficient by comparison. Just cup it around the lens until it just disappears in the viewfinder.
What’s that, you say? The lens hood provides protection? Wrong. When you drop your camera on its hood you are just transmitting increased leverage from the shock to the lens barrel, owing to the force magnifying effect of the protruding hood.
So do yourself a favor. Remove this piece of nonsense or avoid wasting money on one, if it’s extra, in the first place.
Pier 9 and Transamerica, San Francisco. G1, Olympus 9-18mm @ 18mm. No lens hood.
And while you are at it, junk that useless case and start taking pictures instead.