Space, Space and More Space

Space the final frontier

Even as a photographer the search for space is always present.

We take hundreds of thousands of photos each year to ensure you can store all those images in a safe and secure environment where you also cater for things like fire, and hard drive failures, the best friend you have is a NAS (Network Attached Storage).

For those that are not sure what NAS is, it is effectively a heap of hard drives that you would normally have in your computer, added together to create mass storage.  The other key with this type of mass storage is that you combine hard drives together and they appear as if they are one hard drive so you don’t have to worry about smaller hard drives to store large amounts of files.

The other great thing and the reason why you should invest in a NAS if you have not already, si they offer security over hard drive failure.

What I mean by this, is depending on how you configure your NAS you can have 1 or even 2 hard drives fail and all your data and files remain.  So all you do is buy a new drive put it in the NAS and away you go.

How cool is that!?

I have used NAS to store all my photos for years and here is the problem with a NAS.

As you fill up your drives you have to upgrade your hard drives to bigger ones, which is exactly what I have been doing over the last week. To be honest, has been a bit overdue but the cost of replacing l the drives has made me put it off for as long as I could. 

Now the new drives are in and I have a heap of space once again, it’s time to start filling them up with the idea that I won’t run out of space.

Oh, the other thing about the NAS I have, is that it automatically backs up to an off-site backup so if my building burns down, I will always have a copy of the photos and can retrieve and continue on with no only minor interruptions. 

win-win I say. 

NAS Drives

Who Needs A Challenge

One of the things we really don’t do enough of is “Challenge Ourselves”

 

When I say challenge ourselves I mean both mentally, physically, and emotionally.  

 

It’s one of those things we generally only do when we have to, most of us don’t chase the challenge or go to the edge of where we feel comfortable. 

Snow Hiking

There are many ways in which we can challenge ourselves. 

The photo above was the start of a hike and weekend camp which I can safely say that 99% of people that live in Australia will never do. 

Like really what person in their right mind would go hiking and camping after a blizzard in the Kosciuszko National Park? hahahahaha

TBH – The hike on snowshoes was amazing, the countryside was even better.  THE LIFE EXPERIENCE IS PRICELESS!

Let’s fast forward to today, given the blizzard conditions over the last few days and snow falling In Canberra not to mention so early in the ski season, my question is.

If your dream was to walk up to the top of Mt Kosciusko and this weekend was the only time you had the opportunity, what would you do so you could achieve your dreams this weekend given the environmental factors? 

Crossing The Line

Between the light and the dark, there is the middle ground where things can seem like they on a tipping point. 

The same is true with your photography where some days your confidence is smashed like a grape at the bottom of the barrel under someone’s foot as they stand on you to make wine.

The trick I have found over photographing for many years is to try and look at things differently.  Take this photo for example.  This was a photo I took some time ago and left it there until I thought of a concept to bring it to life, and with that open the old photograhy cabmnet, dragged it out while blowing the dust from it to give it a dual look and feel. 

I wanted it to have a dark feeling with the image giving the impression that no matter which way she went it wasn’t going to end well. 

From one side the blue represents the dark emotional state we all often find ourselves in, while the red in front of her was put there to give the impression that going forward was leading into the fire and so she sits.  Stale and stranded at the bottom of the stairs with no place to go. 

After Woman on stairs

The original photo was taken with an Elinchrom ranger pack placed at the top of the stairs to give her some shadows and to highlight her body while also hiding her face. 

You can move the slider to see the before and after. 🙂

After Woman on stairs AFTER
Before Woman on stairs BEFORE

You Don’t Know Jack

One thing I do know is that if you don’t continue to educate yourself and actively go out and learn things you will never grow.

You become stale and the passion moves away. 

For me, I am active in many areas of my life but I must admit that my photoshop in the creative sense has not been one of the things I have been pushing so given today was a cold day outside I got messing around some photos, this being one of them. 

Fire Lady

This was a photo I took of a model a bit ago and have had it sitting in the dusty draw to one day play around with it.  Well, I guess today was that day.

 

When I took this photo I wanted it to be something that I can use in many different photos as the pose the model was in as I think you can agree is very generic with lots of ideas..

Lady Sitting

I mashed the photo of her with some other images and with the help of Photoshop I came up with something very different.

As with other images of this type they really don’t start with an end and just form along the way.

I am sure I will do a few more of her in different areas and scenes but really wanted to play around with fire and smoke. 

This brings me to my first point of this blog….  We all keep learning and if you don’t keep looking for things to learn be it in photography, editing or just life…..  you become stale….

Don’t be stale. 🙂

Fire Lady AFTER
Lady Sitting BEFORE

This Is Crap I Give Up

COVID has changed the world forever and with more free time on my hands than normal for obvious reasons I figured it was a great time to give my website a long-overdue makeover.

So I whipped off the covers, pulled out the guts and threw them out.  Employed a graphic artist to come in and change my site so it matched my vision of being a place of education and commercial photography services.

Taking the clothes of my website

You would think that building a site from the ground up was be easy and straight forward right??

Well appreantly not…  Well not when you want the ability to sell your images on my site (I currently use an external provider/website for this), have the ability to created courses that I can sell or give away, be able to have a members-only section on my site on top of this and fit into my marketing and email providers to keep people up to date on my of my site updates of promotions. 

All that has taken many months of trial and error, building my site up on the side to test and trial to see what works and what doesn’t work but I think it was well worth it.

While my site is still bare-bones it now has the foundations of all the things I have been doing over the years in my place and on my main website.

I need your help

As I look at putting content back on my site, I have taken the view that I want to put up there what YOU want to see!!!

 

  • I want you to TELL ME what courses YOU want me to create
  • What pages YOU want to see
  • What categories of photography YOU want
  • What types of blogs YOU want.

 

For example –

 

  • Do YOU want to get free courses on using lightroom or understanding the basics of your camera? 
  • Or maybe you just want blogs about what it’s like to be a photographer?
  • Or even black belt courses that teach YOU everything you need to know to go from zero to hero in photography so YOU can run YOUR own photography business?

 

The website and book are open for you to tell me.

Drop Your Comments and Ideas and Lets See What Amazing Things We Can Create.