Mozy: Online Backup, Easy

For the last few days i have been playing with Mozy, an Online Backup service. Its pretty easy to install and setup: It has built in backup templates, and you just select the ones you want to use, and it just backs up in the background. And not only that, its FREE. Well, you get 2Gb of online storage, for nothing, or unlimited storage for $4.99 a month! Very cool stuff. Perfect for storing your most valued photos!

Sign up now!

Adobe LightRoom 1.1 released

Adobe Lightroom 1.1 has been relased. Inside Lightroom has the details. I might try this out over the next few days on Windows and see how it fares on the Mac Pro with 5Gb ram and 4 processing cores...

Lots of new HP point and shoot cameras...

All budget ones. Right, usually i would perfer posting about higher end point and shoot cameras, and nice SLRs, but, Engadget has a list of 9 HP budget cameras just released. Now, why would i be interested, when i have a grand worth of SLR and Glass in the house? Well, you cant really bring them to the Pub, or a birthday party with Drink and drunken people, especially if you will be drinking too. These are the kind of cameras which you dont mind accidentally dropping... So, check them out. cheapest is $80, most expencive is about $300.

Video: Photo Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3D [2006]

Video: Photo Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3D [2006] [via Microsoft Photography Blog

GigaPixel photos

Docbert.org has some very cool photos, some of which are in the Gigapixel range, and very high mega pixel counts too. there are 3 in total: Chicago by night, at a Gigapixel (tech info here), Machu Picchu, at a staggering 1.5GP (again, info here) and Sydney by night, at 720MP (tech info here). This is pretty interesting stuff. in the info pages, the photographer says how the photo was generated, but there are no details about if there was a special tripod or anything used to take the photos. Very cool stuff though.

Custom Photography Laptop Case

Check out this video over at Chase Jarvis' blog showing you his custom laptop case for photography. This is very cool! 1 or 2 things though:
1: will it hold a 17" Mac Book Pro?
2: Would be cooler if it could hold a camera too...
3: I want one! :)

What does CS3 mean for Aperture users

I never really likes Adobe Photoshop. Too bulky for what i wanted. Thats why i love Aperture. Everything is a lot easier and quicker (well, depends on your defination of quicker) then photoshop. But, anyway, this article over at Oreilly's Inside Aperture goes into some of the new things in CS3 and what they mean for Aperture users. Check it out.

Drobo: Worlds first storage robot

Now, this rocks! Drobo is a storage robot which allows you to not have to think about storage any more. One of the problems I have is my photos being stored in places. I have 2 300 GB external hard drives, which both store my Aperture vault. Then I have the original data stored on my main hard drive in my Mac Pro. Now, with Drobo, in theory, I could store the aperture library just on Drobo, and not have to worry about it. It's not a RAID array, as such, but it does do mirroring, migration of data, and other cool features.

It connects via USB, takes SATA Drives, and just automates your storage needs.

Couple of things I want to see:

1. Support for more drives (say 8 or 16)
2. NAS/iSCSI support. Linked in with above. My thinking behind this is if you have one of these with 16 750 GB HDDs, you would make images (think VHDs) of drives, which would be mountable over iSCSI or connectable via SMB or NFS. The reason I think iSCSI would be to allow Media Center to connect to it, and actually record to it. Also, Exchange could have a chunk of storage, same with SQL. I am thinking of my own network here, but it should work with everyone's... or at least guys with as many machines as I have.

I have read about this before, but this post over at Inside Aperture made me want to post this.

[This post is being posted on both my main blog, for the techie content, and my photography blog because of the Aperture stuff].

Looking for an Aperture solution

So, i have 2 macs: My PowerBook G4, which, after some tweaking will be my on the road photography machine, and my Mac Pro, which is my main Aperture machine. At the moment, the PowerBook is not being used in the workflow (it was up untill i got the Mac Pro) but what i want to be able to do is take a PowerBook with me (say a wedding or anywhere for that matter) and shoot on the 350D with direct to memory card or Tethered. then, after the shoot (or during with tethered) i want to do my keywording, small modifications to the images, rating, etc. once all this is complete, i want to be able to leave it alone. When i get home, i want to then add the project that is in the PowerBooks library to the MacPro's library, with modifications. since the masters are not touched, my thinking is copy them over, with the XMP side car, but also what ever changes are used to make the version. Has anyone done anything like this? anyone have a workflow i can "Borrow"? [update] i think i found it. in aperture you can export projects. now, i dont know exactly what it does, but you can also import one. So, if i can do that, and if it works, then cool beans man! now to try it out... :)

Tethered workflow in Aperture

Check out this Apple.com tutorial showing you how to setup a Tethered workflow in Aperture. You might be wondering why you would want this and what a tethered workflow actually is. Well, with a tethered workflow, your camera does not save its photos to the memory card, but sends them via Firewire or USB to the computer directly. This allows full screen previewing of the photo a lot quicker then shooting a few photos, poping out the memory card and then uploading to the machine. and that kind of answers the why too. i have been playing with this today for a few minuites, and it seems to work well. Ideally, this should be done on a Laptop (my PowerBook may do the job well) but while trying it out im doing with on the MacPro. Anyway, check it out. Very handy for Studio shoots.