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Saturday, November 29, 2008

Gift ideas for the photographer in your life - Part 3

PPC News Staff | 11/29- 12:10 PM

A photographer always needs more storage space so buy them a new hard drive.

Another advantage of these external drives is to make a backup of your photos during transfer from your camera, or memory card, to your computer.  Many programs, like Adobe Lightroom, offer to copy your photos to the computer as well as send a second copy to an external drive. Its always best to have a backup of your photos in case something happens to the images on the laptop.

For those photographers using a desktop computer at their home or office there are a number of options.  Again you can either add or replace internal drives or consider using external drives.

I keep my eye open for sales at stores like Staples, Best Buy, Circuit City or online at places like Newegg, or Tiger Direct.  I recently picked up a Seagate 1.5 TB internal drive for only $129.  Last year you were lucky to get a 500GB drive for that price).  Before you buy though check that the desktop computer has empty drive bays and enough connectors on the motherboard.  Otherwise consider pulling out the older drives and replacing them with higher capacity ones.

I’ve got a whole collection of external drives from Western Digital, Calvary, Seagate, and a few internal drives I had laying around mounted in their own enclosures. Look at the size of the JPEG or RAW images from your camera, multiply that by the number of images shot in a month and you can figure out how long it will take you to fill a 500GB drive. A busy photographer can fill up a drive that size in no time.  For example, I use to often shoot 1,000 or more images in a day during a catalog shoot. Multiply a 8MB JPEG by 1,000 and you’ve filled 8GB in a day.

For the photo studio or power-user you can invest in a network storage device like those like the Drobo from Data Robotics, Inc.  The Drobo is basically a box with electronics and 4 hard drive bays where you can insert 3.5” drives of any capacity. Connect it to your Ethernet or wireless network and everyone on the network will have access to the photos. The advantage of theDrobo system is its automatic redundancy. If something should happen to one of the drives and it fails or the data on it is corrupted the Drobo has an automatically generated backup. You can add or pull drives on the fly too.  Drobo works with PCs, Macs and Linux machines and you can set it up to access the drive from anywhere in the world where you have an Internet connection.  Price ranges in the $400~$500 range w/o drives. Check out their site for more details http://www.Drobo.com

So much for adding extra storage.  Next article I’ll cover what lighting accessories would make for a good gift for that person who loves to take photos.

Business • DSLR • Editing • Hardware • Photoshop •

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Dan Carr | 11/08- 11:04 AM

Where it all began

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