Mortal Coil

Hi all,

I realise I haven’t posted in a little while here, apologies firstly but the simple truth is I haven’t been anywhere outside work trips (airport-hotel-meeting-restaurant-hotel-airport is not usually conductive to photography) and the UK weather has not exactly been inspiring photo jaunts of late either.

Anyway I am posting today not to show new photos, but to talk about something simultaneously quite pedestrian and yet essential: backups of your photos.

I have a pretty large archive (1.5TB) of my past digital photos stretching back to 2000, and even farther back – I’ve got scans of photos from the pre-digital era. They’re all fairly well organised into folders by year, then month, then subject (e.g. “2008 > 01-January > Marrakech”).

Now I’ve been lucky that (thus far) disaster has not befallen me. I’ve never had a hard drive crash before I could get my photos off of it, nor have I had a fire or burglary which has taken from me my only copies of any precious shots. But this is down to luck so far, and a casual perusal of the internet is all it takes to remind you of how easy it is to lose everything, even by something so daft as an errant press of the delete key.

A couple of years back I was running out of space on my main photo drive, so I upgraded to a RAID system (a QNAP 419+) with 2x 2TB drives operating in a RAID mirrored configuration, with 2 empty drive bays for future expansion. The RAID mirroring means I don’t have to worry about a hard drive failing – if it does, the other drive will just take over until I can replace the dud one. So far, so good.

However, this is not truly backed up. For one thing, I could still fall victim to the dreaded accidental Delete key. RAID won’t help with that. And I could still lose the whole thing in a house fire or burglary. In an ideal world I would either be using Time Machine on my Mac – which would involve having another, even BIGGER drive to back up to – or I could keep an external hard drive, remember to back it up once a week or so, and keep it offsite. To be frank, I was too lazy to do this.

I do, however, have two assets that I should be able to use to effect a lazy-man’s offsite backup: Adobe Lightroom and Dropbox.

Like many photographers, I have been using Lightroom to catalog, organise, and process my digital photos for the last couple of years. I have also been using Dropbox for about the same amount of time. Never before, however, had I figured out how to combine them to good effect. But Eric Scouten’s recent update of his Lightroom workflow made me think about backup again and how I might use Dropbox.

I wanted somehow to make it so that I could tag my “keeper” photos in Lightroom and somehow automatically export them into DropBox, crucially with my existing folder structure intact – so a keeper from my Marrakech trip would still be found within the “2008 > 01-January > Marrakech” folder in my new DropBox archive.

My Eureka moment was when I found the HierarchyExport plug-in for Lightroom on the Adobe site. It’s very flexible, allowing the user to either create a new export folder hierarchy (e.g. based on photo metadata, Lightroom collection hierarchy) or, and here’s what stuck out to me, to replicate the file folder hierarchy of the source image. Crucially, it also has an option to skip or overwrite files in cases where the filename already exists in that location.

Then I figured out how I could semi-automate this from Lightroom. I started a new Smart Collection called Dropbox Backup, which I set to include only the photos that had the keyword “DropBox” added to their metadata. I then went about setting up the first batch of photos to backup. Your mileage may vary, but I use the green label (“8″) for “artsy” shots that might end up on Flickr or the blog, and the blue label (“9″) for social / personal / snapshot images. Most of the time, if I then Flag the image (“P”) then it signifies that I’ve uploaded this somewhere. So just to start out and build my collection a bit, I filtered my 2011 photos for green- or blue-labelled, flagged photos. I then did a Select All in the grid, added the Dropbox keyword, and watch the Smart Collection populate with my just-selected photos.

You can see where I am going with this. The process I have come up with is:

1. Install HierarchyExport plugin referenced above using Plugin Manager
2. Create new “Dropbox Backups” Smart Collection filtered for photos with the “dropbox” keyword
3. Tag “keeper” photos with keyword “dropbox”
4. Switch to “Dropbox Backups” collection. Verify photos appear in this collection.
5. Select All photos in Grid View
6. From the File menu, choose Export…
7. At the top of the Export dialog, change the dropdown to HierarchyExport
8. Change the parameters of the plugin to suit yourself. In my case I use Original Folder structure, and I skip files if they already exist. Note: this will prevent you writing out the same files over and over again as your collection grows.
9. Set the image export particulars to suit yourself. I actually went for exporting to 100% quality, non-resized JPEGs. I would have gone for TIFFs if not for space concerns. I also turned off watermarks in case I want to use these as print files.
10. Set the Export location to somewhere within your DropBox folder. I actually put these in an “Archive” folder within the Photos folder on mine. That ensures that I can browse them from anywhere on the internet, if need be.
11. Save this as a User Preset by using the + button on the left. Call it “Backup Dropbox”.

From now on this means that all I have to do is tag my photos in Lightroom with “Dropbox”, go to the smart collection, select all and do File > Export and pick the “Backup Dropbox” preset. Lightroom and the plugin will backup all my chosen photos with folder structure intact, will be smart enough to ignore ones it’s already done, and I will finally have my long-sought-for offsite backup.

From time to time, I will use these “From the Archives” posts to highlight some of my photography from the period before I started this blog in 2009. These photos have been publicly available on Flickr for some time but they have never before been featured on this blog. I hope you enjoy this blast from the past!

Waaaaay back in the early days of 2008 I popped over to Morocco for a brief (very brief) look around Marrahech, from the old medina surrounding the central square Jemaa al-Fna, including the myriad alleyways with mysterious doorways opening into stunning riads to the simultaneously fascinating and annoying souk – annoying due to very very persistent touts, but enjoyable nonetheless. Outside the centre were various palaces and mosques to be enjoyed, but the highlight was the beautiful Majorelle Gardens and their heritage buildings.

Arrival at Marrakech

Rose atop the Dar Silsila

Souk Beggar

More photos below the fold, simply click below:
Read more…

Howdy everyone, hope February’s treating you well. Just this past weekend I travelled to Berlin for my girlfriends’s birthday celebrations and lugged my camera along. I love Berlin, it seems to be right at the centre of Europe’s respective cultural and political maelstroms and it’s a vibrant, ever-shifting and fascinating place to spend a few days. Of course, by choosing to travel there in early February we more or less guaranteed that it would be viciously cold, and we were not let down on this front. One (late) morning we discovered that the reason we’d felt especially cold at 4AM was that the temperature had dipped to -18C (0F). I’m from South Carolina and not even 12 winters living in London meant I had experienced that kind of cold. But, as they say, there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad preparation. Fortunately both of us were well kitted out with thermals, glove liners, toe warmers etc and still had a whale of a time. Anyway, the photos below show a rather abstract outdoor view of Berlin and don’t reflect the sheer amount of time we spent warming up indoors. But then again, once you’ve seen one blurry picture of a bar you’ve seen them all…

As usual, more photos from this trip can be found over on Flickr.

Last weekend I flew up to Scotland for a jaunt out to the Isle of Skye, accompanied by my trusty pal Corin and our able guide, David Langan, who escorted us out to the Isle of Skye for a full long weekend of trekking around Skye in search of the perfect landscapes. We braved 300m+ vertical hikes and gale-force winds in pursuit of our photos. I am happy to say that one or two of them came out.

The photo below may be somewhat pedestrian, but I had to shimmy out on to a ledge over a giant cliff to get it, which was the only way to shield the camera / tripod from the gale-force winds on the clifftop. The winds were so fierce, a waterfall nearby was blown back over the top of the cliff before any water actually fell. So this photo gets included, no matter the quality!

These and more photos can also be seen over on my Flickr feed.

From time to time, I will use these “From the Archives” posts to highlight some of my photography from the period before I started this blog in 2009. These photos have been publicly available on Flickr for some time but they have never before been featured on this blog. I hope you enjoy this blast from the past!

JAPAN
Back in November 2007, I took a 2 week photo holiday to Southern Japan. Like many Westerners I had been fascinated with Japan since I was a child – every boy goes through a ninja phase, after all – and I had a growing appreciation for the refined nature of their culture, especially their cuisine. I came to Japan with many preconceived notions, somewhat expecting everyone to be demure, deferential and bowing non-stop, but I quickly realised – of course – that the Japanese are human after all, and a few rowdy nights in izakaya and out on the streets of Harajuku and Osaka quickly put paid to my hackneyed stereotypes. The Japanese people were generally very kind and even inquisitive, and it was a joy to travel through this land, and, barring the occasional instance of having no clue where I was or how to read the signs, I had one of the most perfect times imaginable. I am looking forward to returning to this fascinating land.

Below are a small selection of the thousands of photos I took during my travels through Japan:

Girl dressed for "Seven Five Three" ceremony, Yoyogi Park, Tokyo

Parental Encouragement, Yoyogi Park, Tokyo

Tokyo Rockabilly Club, Harajuku

Shinjuku Girls, Shinjuku, Tokyo

Toshogu Shrine Roof, Nikko

Sunset from Kyoto Graveyard

Heian Shrine, Kyoto

House on the Pond in Gardens of Heian Shrine, Kyoto

Mini Zen Rock Garden, Roan-ji, Kyoto

Entrance to Senso-Ji, Asakusa, Tokyo

Lanterns, Yasaka Shrine, Kyoto

Samurai Castle at Himeji

Itsukushima Shrine by Night, Miyajima

Morning at Torii Gate, Miyajima

Owakaduni Hot Springs, Hakone

Mount Fuji from Hakone

Moto-Hakone Lake Panoramic (Mt Fuji in Background)

Backlit trees and Maniden Roof, Shoshasan, near Himeji

Incense Smoke, Engakuji Temple, Kamakura

Temple Roof Detail, Shoshasan, near Himeji

Inari Kitsune Statue, Toshogu Shrine, Ueno Park, Tokyo

Temple Gate Detail, Engakuji Temple, Kamakura

More of my Japan 2007 photos can be found over on Flickr.

It’s been a good year for me. Not only have I got a new and exciting job with lots of travel, but I also moved in with my girlfriend and we’ve had the good fortune to have a couple of great holidays (to Vietnam and South Africa) and a couple more mini-break trips to boot.

It’s been an eventful year for me travel-wise. According to my profile on Tripit.com, in 2011 I have had 14 trips abroad totalling 100 days, racking up 147,596km of travel to 32 cities in 12 countries. Phew.

Apologies for the length of this post – I am having a hard time whittling down my favourite photos of the year!

January
In early January I was still getting to grips with my latest acquisition, a Canon 7D. I took it out on an crisp winter’s day and put it through its paces around West London:

I also made a brief business trip to Saudi Arabia. One of the stopovers was a coastal town called Yanbu, which like many Saudi cities has an “Al Balad”, an old town, which has often been left to rot, due to lack of a tourist trade and lack of interest in anything that isn’t shiny and new…

February
In February I didn’t travel abroad. Instead I continued to get to grips with my new camera, so took it out on another winter walk, this time to my familiar (and subject-rich) stomping ground of London’s South Bank.

March
In March, springtime began to make itself known in London.

Also, the UK Uncut protests swept through the West End of London, mostly peacefully, but with occasional spots of mayhem provided by the Black Bloc splinter group.

Towards the end of March I took a business trip to Kuwait City.

April
April was an eventful month. Within the same week I had changed jobs, moved out of a shared flat and moved into a new flat with my girlfriend, and had all of 4 days to settle in and unpack before we were off to Vietnam for a 3 week south-to-north adventure. The first week of this trip saw us travel through Saigon, Mui Ne and Nha Trang.

May

For the first two weeks of May we continued travelling northwards through Vietnam, through the cities of Hoi An, Hue, Sapa, Hanoi and to the glorious Ha Long Bay.

Straightaway after returning from Vietnam, I made the first of several trips this year to Dubai.

June

In June, I celebrated my birthday and went to Lagos, Nigeria for work. Sadly, neither of these events produced photos worth reproducing here.

July

In July we went on a long weekend break to Barcelona to reacquaint ourselves with this vibrant city and to spend a little time at our friends’ place out in the countryside of Catalonia.

I returned to Dubai for work…

And, back in London, we took advantage of a sunny summer day to stroll the South Bank…

August

We started out August with a trip to the Cotswolds to have a cottage weekend with some friends, and of course enjoyed a countryside hike.

As is our tradition we also made a point of walking down to the Notting Hill Carnival to join the throngs which constitute Europe’s largest street party (Day 1 / Day 2).

September

This month we trekked down to the Isle of Wight to attend Bestival 2011, a “boutique” music festival which is threatening to get bigger than its breeches.

I also made another trip to Lagos, Nigeria, but one can only take so many photos out of the side of a moving car…

October

In October I was extremely busy with work travel, with trips to Dubai, Turkey and South Africa.

Fortunately, the South Africa trip afforded us the possibility of continuing on in holiday mode once work was done. We started out in Cape Town and explored both it and the surrounding areas.

November

In early November we were still on our South African adventure, heading out from Cape Town and headed to the Kruger National Park, where we spent five days on a self-drive safari, stalking the “Big Five”, some stunning birds, assorted other animals, and grabbing time for the occasional landscape.

Shortly after returning from South Africa we got back on a plane and headed West this time, to New York City, to meet family for the Thanksgiving weekend. Of course, I brought my camera…

December

December has (thankfully) been rather quiet on the photo front so far, aside from social snapshots from various Christmas celebrations. This has allowed me to catch up on my “queue” of photos and – goodness – I am all caught up now, fresh and ready for the photographic challenge of 2012. It already looks as though by the time February is done I will have been to Morocco, Scotland (Skye), Nigeria, and Berlin.

We capped off our travel this year with a personal trip over to New York for some family time around the Thanksgiving weekend. Lucky enough to have some relatives and friends who live in NYC, I make it over about once a year and always manage to find time to go out and shoot this mega-metropolis. Though I daresay I probably have enough Central Park shots in my library by now…

More of my latest New York photos can be seen either on Flickr (here) or Google+ (here).

This will probably be my penultimate post for 2011, if not my last – my next one will be a retrospective of the year with some of my favourite photos. It’s been a very fulfilling year.

Now, if I am totally honest, I wasn’t on the hunt for landscapes in the Kruger. For one thing, we spent every waking moment looking for wildlife. For another, you’re only allowed to get out of your car at certain points, and there’s no clambering through the bush trying to get that perfect framing of mountain, tree and sky. Taking landscapes out of the side of a car window is not ideal. And, regrettably, while Kruger is often beautiful, with wide expanses of veldt broken by a solitary tree, it is also quite often either A) flat or B) barren, and from about a half hour after sunrise to a half hour before sunset, the sun is a blazing presence, obliterating all shadow detail and washing out colours left, right and centre.

All this is a roundabout way of apologising that quite a lot of the pictures below feature, well, trees.

Well, that’s it for the South African photos (finally, a month after arriving home). Next up are shots from New York from a short trip there last month. Then, I think, a roundup of 2011.

Thomas Hawk has been very vocal in recent months about the supposed superiority of Google+ and why all the professional photographers he knows are moving to the service, and leaving Flickr in droves (see: “Flickr is Dead“). I am not sure I agree, at least on the superiority front. I have been frustrated with Flickr’s lack of innovation in recent years, but the fact remains it has a robust set of tools for management and sharing, and these simply don’t exist yet in Google+.

Thomas’ most recent post on the subject asserts:

Over the past few months the tide has begun shifting even more. Photographers are moving in mass from Flickr to Google+ as their primary photo sharing network.

Just like the social crowd moved from Webshots and Fotolog to Flickr a number of years ago, the social photography crowd is now moving from Flickr to Google+.

This may well be true, but I don’t find Google+ any more compelling for photo sharing than I did several months ago when first trying it. I summed this up in a comment on Thomas’ post:

I am a bit late to the party here, but I am perplexed at Thomas’ incessant promotion of Google+ as a superior photo service to Flickr. I will grant that engagement on a photo-by-photo basis seems to be higher, and that more innovations may be coming from Google+ than from Flickr (though I would debate this) but there are still some pretty glaring omissions that haven’t been addressed since the last time I looked at switching from Flickr.

I am currently uploading some shots to Google+ that I also uploaded to Flickr, using the Google+ in-browser uploader. (Note I have not tried using Picasa to upload).

I still find it unreal that despite having entered all kinds of information into my IPTC / EXIF tags of my exported images in Lightroom, most of these don’t get preserved when uploading to Google+. Why do I need to enter a caption again when I have already set this in Lightroom? Why can’t I look at more than a few cursory lines of EXIF information in the photo details page? How come I can’t set Creative Commons options? And why can’t I have the option to upload a scaled-down, web-sized version of my shots instead of having to suffer through painfully-slow (from the UK) full-resolution uploads?

And once the photos are up – can I browse by tag? No. Can I automatically reorder my photos by capture time if I add more shots to an album? No. Can I see a map of my photos within Google+? Astoundingly, no.

Most infuriatingly, is there an easy way for me to generate embed code to share a photo inside my own blog posts? No.

All of the limitations above also limit the ability of others to discover my photos and socialise them.

I am just as annoyed as anyone with Flickr’s stagnation and worry about its future. But, Mr Hawk, I think for you to say that Google+ is currently a superior photo sharing or discovery service stretches the bounds of credulity.

Until Google+ can address some of the shortcomings I see above, I can imagine a lot of photographers will hang fire on completely ditching Flickr. That day may come, but it isn’t here yet.

As a postscript, I do wonder whether Thomas’ experience with Google+ is coloured by his prominence as a photographer / social networker – in other words, his experience and engagement with Google+ has never been less than amazing because he came to the party with an existing mass of followers? For me, as someone with rather less popularity, the supposed benefits of the social experience on Google+ do not outweigh the lack of basic functionality…

Following on from my last two photo reports from our Kruger safari (see “The Big Five” and “The Birds”) I will close off the animal-based photos with, well, everything that isn’t a “Big Five” or a bird. This menagerie includes a wide variety of wildlife, from the ever-present (Impalas) to the tiny and rare (dung beetle).

Giraffe

Wildebeest

Zebra

Hippos and Crocodiles

Reptiles and Insects

Leopard Tortoise

Dung Beetle

Warthogs and Hyenas

Antelope

Kudu Bull

Impala Ewe

Impala Ram

Male Steenbok

Well, that’s it on the wildlife photography front from our Kruger trip. Next up will be a few landscapes from the Kruger Park, and then a selection of shots from our trip to New York last weekend. See you soon.