Shooting RAW images and using a higher megapixel camera, means I have ended up having a large and rapidly increasing collection of “backup” disks. Also I tend to buy the “Barrel of Disks” stacked on the spindle variety (they are cheaper than the individually boxed version)

I have already discovered that using the spindle and drum as a storage is a big no no! The Disks are stacked one on each other and the recorded surface can become quickly scratched as the drum is repeatedly handled.

So I have lots of “precious” disks without a secure home. For a while I was using old floppy diskette envelopes. These envelopes worked just fine and are very compact to store in a common storage boxes (yes even shoe boxes). Then I got the idea of making my own origami envelopes. A google search will find 100s of origami folding designs for CD or DVD covers , including this amazing spiral one. However I have something much simpler and easy to do. First you need to get a blank page on your favourite word processor. Then using Tables or its draw tool, create a square box 12.5cm by 12.5cm. Align it horizontally in the center of the page but slightly below the center vertically.

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Good Morning Everybody,

We got into New York City late Saturday,  settled into our hotel, grabbed a quick snack and relaxed. I'll tell you, it's just what the doctor ordered.

Sunday was a Great day at B&H Photo and Video. That”s LaDawn, me, and my daughter, Elizabeth, standing among the crowds of B&H customers – the place was packed on Sunday. We had a full house and the program went off without a hitch.

Every time I give a program, I try to weave a few new things into the presentation - new images, a different take on a lighting concept, whatever. It just makes the presentation more fun to give and I think the audience enjoys as well. They sure did yesterday at 420 9th Avenue.

We are up here In the city this week for a little business but a little R&R. So before I get too long winded, let's get right to Quick Hit Monday. Here we go...

So What Have You Done Lately With Your Video Enabled DSLR?

It seems the new video DSLR features that started showing up on the latest Nikons and Canons have not been taken lightly by the video cognoscenti. Those who had the foresight to see and understand the possibilities of these new video DSLR capabilities jumped right on board. The onboard video capabilities

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I’ve recently got a Western Digital My Book 1 terabyte USB drive, I like it, it was easy to install, I just had to reformat to use NTFS (It is distributed with FAT32 presumably for lowest level compatibility)and decided to move my photo archive to it. A terabyte is a lot of space, my collection only took up 207 GB, 125,820 photos. The trouble is I already knew my archive collection had been polluted a bit, with more than a few duplicates. Finding them by hand in such a large collection was not a task I was looking forward to.

Finding Duplicates with Picasa

After I’d moved my files, it took a while, I pointed picasa to watch the new folders on My Book drive, that took a while to “index” my photos. I thought I’d try out the picasa duplicate finder (its under Tools\Experimental\Show Duplicate files). I learnt I have duplicates in 683 folders. The bad news was unless the duplicates where in the same folder or adjacent folders (which very few where) you don’t get to see the duplicates. So I would suggest anyone still wanting to use this features, does so with extreme caution (after running a backup). Time for a rethink.

Duplicate Cleaner

Next I looked for a specialist duplicate file finder utility on the net, there are lots. I tried a few but the one I liked is freeware and called Duplicate...

Good Morning Everybody,

We wrapped my Master Class last Friday, packed the bags on Saturday for the last leg of my Digital WakeUp Call tour, and hit the road on Sunday.  Can you believe it - only 10 cities to go! We made the 8 1/2 hour very picturesque drive down to Raleigh, North Carolina yesterday arriving about 8:00 p.m. and we are ready to go again tonight.

I brought the Master Class images with me and hope to get a show posted over the next couple of days.  I'm planning to mix in a little video too - it should be fun.  And speaking of video, be sure to check out tomorrow's post. Yes, it is ready to go and looks very cool.

Hey, enough already - let's get on with today's post.

Come On Down To Mardi Gras In February 5-7, 2010
I got an email from my buddy, Ralph Romaguera, last week about this great idea he is putting together for next year's Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans.  He wants to put together a float of photography friends every year. 

Ralph has been heavily involved in Mardi Gras for many years in his home town of New Orleans, even being King of the crewe last year. He has informally put together these Mardi Gras extravaganzas for photographers the

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Hey gang, how many of you guys and girls are using on-line backup system? My guess is probably not many of you. Most of us are satisfied with our CDs, DVDs, cheap USB drives, etc. There are a lot of on-line storage solutions available and most of them cost an arm and a leg – like in the $$$ per gigabyte range.

In March 2006, Amazon.com got very smart, well in my opinion they've always been smart they just got even smarter. Amazon decided to leverage the massive amount of extra storage they have throughout their extensive data infrastructure. They call their new initiative Amazon S3 - the 3S's stand for Simple Storage Service.

They decided to rent their excess storage to anyone for any number of things from software development to data storage. It’s the data storage that has been intriguing me these last several months.

Here is the deal;
Get this, instead of spending the average $10/month for 10 gigs of on-line storage, you can get storage from Amazon for $1.50 per 10 gig/month. You heard right that's only a dime and a nickel, fifteen cents, per gig! That’s about as cheap as it gets. Yep, you have to pay to upload those 10 gigs up to Amazon but that cost is only a $1.00. Furthermore, there is a retrieval cost but that amounts to $1.70/10 gigs to retrieve your data. but that's still just a drop in the bucket.

When I originally...

Good Morning Everybody,
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Back in the days of film, or even slides, photos that didn't make it into an album, or frame, disappeared into a shoebox. there was seldom any order or logic, negatives, prints and maybe if your were lucky a few notes might be penciled on the back. Well its not a lot different with digital pictures only the shoebox is now a CD, or set of CDs (maybe even a DVD) and probably they are no better organized than the old shoe box

So I thought it might be interesting discussing the various ways you can build and collate your collection of digital images, both with and without a plan to keep them organized. 

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As I go I will update links from here to related stories, but you can also just watch the blog for them to appear in no particular order.