I know why they call it Mozy!

 Techy Stuff  7 Responses »
Jul 132007
 

lazydog.jpg
Mosey taken to an art form!

Once you get into this digital photography thing and you start thinking about backups, you just can’t seem to have enough! I have redundant 500 GB drives for my images, but this does nothing for me if, say my house burned down, or someone stole my computer, or if the Mississippi River overflowed its banks and made it all the way to Charlotte, North Carolina, which would be quite a feat! Anyway, having an off-site backup is a good idea. There are a number of ways to do it.

  • One could buy and extra drive and ship it to a friend, or perhaps store it at a relative’s house.
  • You could rent a safe deposit box and store it there
  • you could get one of the online services that store your data for about $100/GB
  • Not do it and hope for the best!

So, searching for low cost alternatives, I found Mozy. Mozy is an unlimited backup service for $4.95/month. It works by installing a process on your computer that does, first, a full back up, over the Internet, of all of the files that you select. All files are encrypted and sent to Mozy. The process couldn’t be easier. Simply tell Mozy what you want to back up and turn it loose! You can even adjust how much network bandwidth it uses. You can move the slider so that you have a faster computer, or faster backups, or somewhere in the middle. When the backup is finished, it provides you with a history of how many files were backed up and how much time it took. It’s very simple!
mozy.jpg
My first backup, some 75 GB, started on 7/5/2007 and finished today! Yes, 6 full days! If that ain’t moseying, I don’t know what is! After your first full backup, all other backups are incremental based on when files have changed or been added since the last backup. I have a high speed DSL connection, rated at 8 Mb/sec. It’s pretty fast, but the Mozy backup service isn’t. If I have to restore, it would take a while. I would say that if you don’t have a T1, Cable Modem, or really High speed DSL, don’t even think about it. Dial-up is out of the question!

For those of you how aren’t familiar with southern vernaculars, to mosey means to go somewhere in no particular hurry! To stroll. To meander a bit! :-)

After completing my first full backup, Mozy immediately went into another backup. You see, while it was doing the full backup, I had added another 4 GB of files in that week. The next backup only took about 20 hours! So, it’s getting better!

Can I recommend Mozy? I don’t know. I’ve not had to do a restore, yet! If you don’t have a very high speed Internet connection AND you have a lot of files, AND you shoot RAW, I would probably say no. I’d say just get an extra book drive, copy it, rent a safe deposit box, or buy a fire proof safe, and update every once in a while, like monthly, perhaps. I’m thinking about buying a 160 GB drive ($99), making a copy, and heading for the off-site storage, but I’ll try Mozy for just a bit more … but I’d like to have a backup plan. See what I mean! It never ends!

Here are some comparisons of online backup services.

OK folks, time for me to mosey on up to Akron, OH for my aunt’s 80th birthday. I’ll be on the road all day. :-( However, when I get there I’ll be staying at a hotel on the banks of the Cuyahoga River. Some of you older folks may remember when that river caught on fire! It’s a little bit cleaner now!

 Posted by at 00:00

Blue skies, nothing but blue skies … crap!

 Photography, Techy Stuff  11 Responses »
Jun 062007
 

before2.jpg
Before

Want to see how much dust you have on your sensor? Go outside, stop down to f/22, take a shot of the clear blue sky, or perhaps a piece of white paper with your lens focused to infinity, come back in, open the image in PhotoShop, process it with Image -> Adjustments -> Auto Levels and be amazed!!!

Oh well, sensor dust is a fact of life. There’s just no way to prevent it. It’s time for another cleaning of the sensor. The last one that I did was in October. Nope, I don’t send my camera back to Nikon, I’m one of those intrepid do-it-yourselfers! This will be the 3rd time that I’ve cleaned my sensor and let me tell you, it’s not a big deal. After you’ve mastered the ‘art’, it takes about 6 minutes to do it and 5 minutes of that is getting setup to do the cleaning! My camera seems to only need cleaning about every 6 months, or so. Nikon has done a great job on the seals of the D2X. I’m not in very dusty environs very much, but I would say that I am a moderately heavy user of my camera.

As for cleaning, I’ve tried a couple of things. First, I tried the Visible Dust sensor brushes. These are very overpriced nylon brushes. They work fairly well for very loose dust particles. A word of caution: You have to be extremely careful with the brushes. If you ever let them touch anything other than your sensor, say your fingertips, they’re pretty much ruined. I know from experience. The oil wicks right onto the brush and it is no longer useful, except for leaving oil streaks on your sensor, which is NOT why I bought it! Sigh.

For those dust bunnies that refuse to move, direct contact is required with a cleaning solution. I prefer, instead, the basic sensor cleaning kit from Copperhill Images, which consists of a small bottle of Methanol, a 100 count pack of Pec Pads, and a small spatula measuring 14mm across at the tip.

My process is fairly simple, and as I said, take just a few minutes.

  1. Turn off the A/C – Critical because you don’t want any air movement in the room where you are working.
  2. Wipe down the work area with a damp cloth to remove any dust.
  3. Wash my hands, face, and forearms to remove any dust or dead skin.
  4. Don a shower cap to prevent anything from falling from my head. I normally shave my head bald, so that’s not an issue, but better safe. :-)

  5. Make sure that I have a fully charged battery in my camera. I don’t have an AC adapter.
  6. Attach the remote release.
  7. Turn off Long Exposure noise reduction!
  8. Place the camera on bulb.
  9. Prepare the sensor swab (spatula) with a new Pec Pad.
  10. With the lens still in place, lock open the shutter with the remote.
  11. Add 2 drops of Methanol to the swab.
  12. Remove the lens.
  13. Place the swab on the sensor. One swipe right, move down, one swipe left.
  14. Remove swab
  15. Replace lens.
  16. Test: Go outside, change to aperture priority, take a shot of the sky at f/22.
  17. Load test shot into Photoshop.
  18. Image > Adjustments -> Auto Levels
  19. If dust remains, repeat steps 8 – 18.

Note: It’s also helpful to have a nice bright light that you can direct into the chamber, like a desk lamp, to help you see what you are doing.

It looks like a lot of steps, but as I said, it really takes about 5 – 8 minutes. When you purchase the kit, or go to the website, he has full instructions on how to do it and all of the necessary precautions to take.
after2.jpg
After

Should you do it yourself? If you’re the nervous sort and the thought of even looking at your sensor makes your head swoon, I’d say NO! However, if you can follow instructions, don’t like to have your camera away from home for a long time, and have fairly steady hands and decent eyesight, go for it. There is very little chance that you will damage the camera. Hey, the D2X cost me a pretty penny and, believe me, I don’t want to damage it!

This is a very gentle cleaning process. I’d say read the tutorial and decide for yourself if this is something that you want to tackle. If not, you can always send it back to the manufacturer and let them move the dust particles around for you! :-)

Now I can continue my song … Nothing but blue skies do I see!

 Posted by at 00:00

New home

 Techy Stuff  7 Responses »
Jun 032007
 

pdlester_20070602_056.jpg

If you are seeing this post, then, through the wonders of the Internet and Domain Name Servers, you have been sent to the new home of Paul Lester Photo. Nothing has changed, just the host. My previous host, http://www.eleven2.com, had numerous issues with uptime, so since it was at the end of my 1 year agreement (Wow! That was fast!!!), I decided to move to another host, http://www.bluehost.com. Hopefully these guys will have a better system!

About the photo: I saw this guy sitting upon some flowers in the garden at UNCC. I went there yesterday morning to take a few shots.

 Posted by at 11:58

Crop factor misinformation

 Techy Stuff  13 Responses »
Jun 012007
 

pdlester_20070527_009a.jpg
OK, I’ve had about enough of the misinformation about crop factor! I’ve read a number of articles saying that the crop factor of a digital sensor increases your telephoto’s ‘range’ by 1.5x and touts that as an advantage of having a smaller sensor … increased telephoto range!

The only thing that a smaller sensor does is reduce the area of the image capture, giving it and effective CROP factor, not a zoom factor! So, when I use a 500mm lens on a full sensor, I get the coverage of a 500mm lens. When I use it on a APS-C sensor, I get the COVERAGE of a 750mm, with the magnification of a 500mm lens!

In the above image, the whole image represents what might be seen on a full frame camera utilizing a 36mm x 24mm image sensor; inside of the black lines would be what you would capture using an APS-C sensor, which is about 75% the size of full frame. There is no magnification, only a crop.

Below is a life sized representation of a full frame sensor (white) and an APS-C sensor (black). (36mm x 24mm @72 dpi = life sized)

sensor.jpg

BTW, the top image was taken on my D2X, which has an APS-C sensor, not full frame. I just placed the black box at the 75% points. The only full frame digital cameras that I know of are: Canon EOS 5D ($3600), and EOS-1Ds Mark II ($7,000). Mind you most manufacturers stick with the smaller sensor because costs a lot less and results in a somewhat smaller camera.

OK, now I can get down off of my soapbox! I’m feeling better.

 Posted by at 00:00

Dodged a bullet!

 Personal, Techy Stuff  7 Responses »
May 172007
 

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Generally, I don’t have trouble with computers. It’s just the way that it has been, fortunately. Also, if you’ve read my previous posts you know that I believe in things like synchronicity, not coincidence, and intuition as well.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve had this nagging feeling that I need to buy a new computer system. I kind of dismissed it as a ‘desire’ but, in truth, I hadn’t had a new computer in more than 5 years. Further, running Lightroom and CS2, I needed more than the 1GB of RAM provided by my current computer.

So, one morning before I went to work, I just ordered a new Dell computer. It arrived on Wednesday of last week. I got mostly everything moved over to the new computer. I left some on the old computer because I had planned to continue to use it for Micro$oft Money as well as iTunes.

Tuesday morning when I came downstairs, the screen was blank. I thought that it had gone into hibernation, but it hadn’t. It had died! I tried to reboot, but only got a message that said that windows/system/config is missing or corrupt. This is never good news! :-)

Tuesday evening I downloaded PuppyLinux, a derivative of the very popular, secure, and stable linux operating system. I was able to burn a CD with this very small OS and boot the computer. I can still see all of my files and will be able to move them off via FTP or something. So, the hard drive is not bad, just Windows.
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I even thought that I would grab the old drive and put it into the new computer, copy the files, and the reformat the disk and run Linux; however, as my old computer is 5 years old, it has old technology and uses IDE drives; the new system uses SATA II drives! Also, I thought that I’d hang my ‘old’ printer on the new machine. Nope. One uses old parallel ports, the other, only USB. Technology has passed me by! ;-)

I’m happy to report that all of my images, which would be the only thing that I would have a hard time loosing, are safely on my external drive and backed up to DVD as well. However, with this latest event, I’m becoming even more paranoid. I feel the need for another external drive to store images to and place in a safe or off-site.

I’ve even explored the idea of remote automatic backup, but it is way too expensive, coming in at about $100 / GB / year. I have a couple of hundred GB of data!

 Posted by at 00:00

Lightroom and compressed files

 Techy Stuff  3 Responses »
Apr 292007
 

I’ve not seen this mentioned anywhere prominently, so hopefully if someone is in a similar predicament as I was, this small write up will help them on their way. This applies to the Windows version of Lightroom.

When I first installed Lightroom, I tried to get it to import all of my files from my removable drive, labeled ‘G:’. Lightroom didn’t see drive G. I tried everything that I could think of: Reboot the computer, disconnect/reconnect the drive, check for the latest drivers, check the Adobe forums. Nothing helped.

Finally, I right-clicked on the drive and selected the properties entry from the menu. The drive compression box was checked. I never use drive compression because it slows down the throughput of the drive, sometimes drastically. The drive was delivered that way and I had no reason to check the properties. I now have a reason for any future drives that I may purchase! Anyway, I unchecked the box, waited for the drive to decompress, then started Lightroom again. Lo and behold, there was my drive.

I’ve since found out, in the forums, that the Adobe engineers decided to ignore compressed drives. I don’t know the reason behind this, but I think that it is something that they should have made painfully clear!

So, I thought that everything was right as rain; however, I found that when I tried to import directly from my CF card, Lightroom would not allow me to import into an existing directory in my ‘images’ directory. I could select the top level directory and then a subdirectory, but that was as far as I could go. I sometimes got an error message saying that the import could not be done with the selected directory, but it never said why. If I allowed Lightroom to create the directory structure, it would work, but I didn’t want Lightroom to organize my photos the way that it wanted to.

So, more experiments, more failures. I gave up. I created the directory manually and copied the files to the directory, then used an in-place import in Lightroom and everything worked. Sure, it was an extra step or two, but it worked.

This morning, I had an idea: I tried to import to drive C:. Everything worked fine. I then created a new directory on drive G: and tried to import. Again, it worked fine! Then I checked the properties on my existing directory: G:\images and guess what?! It has a property saying that the directory and subdirectories are compressed. So, the drive decompression didn’t decompress everything, only the root level and all ‘future’ directories. The old directories remained compressed. Sigh …

Right now I’m in the middle of a long decompression, which will probably take several hours after which Lightroom should be fully functional! Finally!

In short, before using Lightroom:
1. Make sure any drive on which you plan to store images is not compressed.
2. If it was compressed, decompress it.
3. Decompress all existing directories and subdirectories for those directories where you plan to use Lightroom.

 Posted by at 09:10
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