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BACKING UP YOUR FILES
by
Heather Shimmin

This podcast was recorded (Click here to Listen) by Gino, a talented Multi-dimensional actor who does film, theater, voice work and much much more.

I’m sitting at the coffee shop on a Sunday morning in a leather Manhattan chair. My soy latte is cooling on the end table to my left. The Shins are playing in the background as I wave to a friend who just walked in the door. I’m working in PhotoShop, removing a few pieces of lint from the model’s black blazer when my mouse freezes. I can’t force quit. I can’t ctrl+alt+del. I hold down the power button to shut off the machine. I wait 15 seconds and turn it back on. It seems to be booting up just fine. Then, the blue screen of death appears. I’m not too worried. I reboot. Blue screen. I reboot. Blue screen. I’m sweating now. I have 6 photo shoots on there which have not been delivered to the client. I don’t have a backup of my contacts. I have dozens of emails which have vital information from my job search. I haven’t backed up for months.

Gone. Everything was gone.

I had to wipe my hard drive clean and rebuild my laptop for the third time that year. I lost data, images, a portion of my professional network, all of which I had no way of retrieving. I still don’t have it.

There is no excuse for not backing up. It’s quite painless, really. I make it a point to not only backup on an external hard drive, but to store information in multiple places. There are many places online to keep a second or even third copy of your data. Here are some of my favorites:

GOOGLE DOCUMENTS is a great place to store docs, spreadsheets, and other text documents. It’s free, and you can share the document with others.

GOOGLE PICASSA makes organizing, editing, storing, and sharing your photos simple. You can make photo albums, slide shows, add tags, and share your pics effortlessly (I should get a kickback from Google for all my promoting efforts).

FLICKR.COM and MYSPACE are other options for backing up, albeit, the space allotted you is limited. I use these sites for portfolio pieces.

Editor Note- Many of the online companies mentioned above are good, but none are great, many of them do impose size limitations, to date I don’t know of an online service that offers backup at a good price with the amount of storage a typical photographer might need.  Many Photographers resort to using backup that is located in their studio, office , or home office, external hard drives work great but they too are limited in size. Drobo or some other type of Mass storage is the way to go if the Photographer had a large number of files to store, currently I am at 2 terabytes of images , and that is after deleting rejected images.The highest level is to purchase a SAN or a NAS , if you do go this route use a device that supports iSCSCI, which essentially treats the storage device like it is attached directly to your computer. I you like more info on this drop us a line.

HOTMAIL, GMAIL or who ever hosts your email has their own platform for adding contacts, their phone numbers, email addresses, and other vital information. That way, when, not if, your computer crashes, you won’t lose all of that valuable data. Finally, there are many online backup companies out on the Internet, MOZY and Carbonite are just two, but in my opinion they are some of the best.

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EXPOSURE DO’S AND DON’TS
by
Heather Shimmin

Because photography literally means drawing with light, having an understanding of how light enters the camera is paramount. You cannot develop your photography skills nor your image quality without understanding exposure. If you don’t, you’re just guessing.

Exposure is how much light reaches the film (or CCD but I will use film interchangeably). “Correct” exposure is when the film has received the right amount of light, producing an image with correct colors and tones.

EXPOSURE DO’S

Purchase a middle grey card. All camera light meters measure light as if it were reflected off of an 18% reflectance grey surface. A black stallion and white snow look the same to a light meter.

Understand the Zone System. Ansel Adams developed this system to precisely understand and control exposure. Briefly, the Zone System suggests you start by visualizing what you want the image to look like and adjusting your exposure based on an object’s individual tonality which corresponds to eleven “zones.” If that object is lighter or darker than Zone V (middle grey), then you adjust the exposure accordingly.

Understand The Law of Reciprocity. Once you have determined the correct exposure, you may wish to have a higher shutter speed or a wider aperture. The Law of Reciprocity means that when you change one setting you have to make an adjustment to the other in order to keep the same exposure. For example, you are at the beach with your girlfriend. She is standing in the sand with her surfboard. For a correct exposure your settings are at 1/250 and f/11. But you want a shallow depth of field to blur the ocean and people behind her. At your current aperture, you have a large depth putting everything into focus. You change the aperture to f/4 (letting in more light) therefore you have to compensate by having a faster shutter speed (letting in less light), 1/4000.

There are three stops between f/11 and f/4.

Therefore, you increase your shutter speed three stops from 1/125 to 1/4000 to compensate.

1/15
1/30
1/60
1/125
1/250
1/500
1/1000
1/4000

Adjust your ISO to compensate for the amount of available light. Low-light situations require an high ISO (400 or higher) while situations such as your girlfriend on the beach require a low ISO (50 or 100).

EXPOSURE DON’TS

Leave your camera on Auto or Program Mode. This is for several reasons. One is that your camera meters off whatever object is in the middle of the view finder. Going back to the Zone System, your camera views everything it meters as 18% grey. Two, leaving the camera on automatic mode takes away your power to adjust the aperture or shutter speed. In summary, you are giving up control of how you want the image to turn out if you let the camera do all the thinking.

Think that you can fix it in PhotoShop. A grave error both amateurs and professional photographers make is thinking that poor exposure can be magically saved in PhotoShop. Minor exposure blunders can be repaired,yes, but image quality is compromised. When trying to lighten up an underexposed image, lots of noise and grain appears. If an image is overexposed, not all of the information is recorded in the blown out areas. You can’t go back later and try and bring back details in a photograph which were never recorded in the first place because you overexposed the image.

Meter off the brightest or darkest area. Again, the camera thinks that the area it is metering is a neutral grey with a reflectance of 18%. If you meter off the darkest shadow in the frame and do not adjust your exposure accordingly, everything lighter than that shadow will be too bright. You will loose detail and tonality. Similarly, if you meter off of the brightest area, everything darker will be underexposed.

Meter off the sun. Aside from the stupidity of looking into the sun which will burn your retinas, the sun is so bright that everything else in the image will be underexposed, that is If you can even see after that. If you go blind, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

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