Catch up.
I always like to post a little catch up part way through the year, I find this is a good space for sharing photos which don't deserve a blog post all of their own as well as go over my gear a bit and changes I've made.
The beginning part of this year has been all about preparation, I like to keep things as streamlined as possible so the wedding/working part of the year goes that much better, this means sorting out my gear bag and processing setup as well as writing blog posts for the future and just general planning.
I've been developing my street photography skills as well as getting out as often as possible to shoot landscapes which has been great fun. My editorial work is starting to pick up pace with a few jobs coming in here and there, do head over to my other site if you would like to see more of that work. Oh and we got a new rabbit.
Gear:
My last gear post was about the carry case, so things are similar to that, I still use the case to check all my gear over before a shoot but what goes into the case has changed a little, I've also got a second case for my X100 and other bit such as chargers.
So I sold the XM-1 and bought an X-Pro1, kept that for 3 days before selling it then bought a third XE-2 and got grips for all 3.
Lens wise I sold the 12mm, 18mm and 35mm lenses and bought the 14mm and 27mm Pancake.
Other than that I picked up the little XF-20 flash unit for a backup flash and also sold all of my studio gear, I never used that stuff so off it went.
The main purpose of this is keeping things light and simple, by not having all of the gear I'm not wasting money or time on deciding what to use, this has helped me greatly and now I see the world in 35/85mm format.
I also bought a very nice ONA camera bag and sold the Thinktank.
Editing Setup:
My editing setup is largely the same but there are two key differences; a RAID setup and offsite realtime backups.
I edit a wedding before shooting the next one ideally, or I'll use a second set of SD cards and keep the ones with the wedding I'm editing on, so after a wedding I have copies on the SD Cards and Western Digital Drive, then when I get home they are imported into my main working drive on the Mac, then backed up to a RAID 1 external drive, a Time Machine drive and uploaded to Crashplan for an offsite backup. Once this is done after the wedding is when I call it a day.
During the editing process I have 7 copies of the RAW files. Overkill.
So before I had my files going to a backup drive and the time machine now they go to a mirrored RAID drive [x2 4TB Drives which make a like for like copy of the files on both drives, thereby if one fails you still have the files] and the time machine drive.
It may seem like overkill but I sleep much better knowing I've got several redundancies in place, to loose all of the files at this time would take a fire in my house and at the Crashplan servers. I can have all my hard drives fail at once and I've still got the files on the SD cards and portable hard drive as well as offsite.
Weddings:
Weddings are where the majority of my work is at and as it stands this year I have 21 weddings lined up to shoot, the first of which has just gone and now it's one a weekend for the next few months. Got some great ones set for this year so keep an eye on the blog as these will be coming out over the next year.
I hope you found that post in some way useful/interesting, drop any questions you have below,
Cheers,
Col-
