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chromasia.com

I finally got my laptop back - the hard drive was replaced, as was the left fan - and have spent the last few days catching up with various projects and sorting out a better backup regime. I'm fairly good at backing up ... normally ... but on the day my hard drive failed I hadn't done so for about five days. This doesn't sound long, but it caused me a number of headaches that could easily have been avoided had I been a bit more diligent.

I guess the bottom line is that any computer system or any of its components can fail. In the 23 months that I've had this laptop the CD drive has failed, as has the battery, and my hard drive has failed twice. You'd think that I would have learnt my lesson after the first time, when I also lost a week's work, but I'm determined that it won't happen again. I now have two backups for the laptop - a 500GB RAID 1 device at the office and a Lacie 500GB external drive at home. All I need to do is make sure that I connect them up and let Apple's Time Machine do it's stuff.

Anyway, in and amongst everything else that's been going on I haven't had a great deal of time to take photographs, but did manage to get to the beach this afternoon. I didn't get anything I was especially happy with, but do like this shot of Harmony, bundled up against the cold.

captured
camera
lens
focal length
aperture
shutter speed
shooting mode
exposure bias
metering mode
ISO
flash
image quality
RAW converter
cropped?
3.09pm on 9/12/08
Canon 1Ds Mark II
EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM
70mm
f/5.6
1/320
aperture priority
+1/3
evaluative
100
no
RAW
RAW Developer
no
 
3x2 + children [portraits]
comment by Simone at 08:17 PM (GMT) on 9 December, 2008

A portrait very sweet and happy at the same time...BEAUTIFUL! CIAO :-)

comment by rambohoho at 08:29 PM (GMT) on 9 December, 2008

beautiful expression and nice capture. typical chromasia!

comment by Jennifer at 10:23 PM (GMT) on 9 December, 2008

Smashing! Glad you're back in business :-)

comment by Chris Wray at 10:32 PM (GMT) on 9 December, 2008

If its any consolation, the battery and DVD Drive have both failed on my MacBook too, but I wouldn't go back to a PC. I'm surprised you didn't go for that blue tone to match the cold. Is that fill flash or a rare glimpse of the winter sun ?

comment by LightningPaul at 10:38 PM (GMT) on 9 December, 2008

Very nice portrait. The monotone colors are awesome.

For backing up: I use Acronis True Image. Great tool, it makes a full image of the hard drive during working every day automatically. I already had to restore multiple times on multiple computers due to hard disk failures. I'm ready for the next crash, it can be next year or tomorrow.
Also Sync Toy is a nice tool to copy files to other disks. I have multiple disk which get moved between my home and work place. This tool starts now automatically every time when my PC is 10 minutes idle.
Disks are so cheap these days but data is more valuable than ever.

comment by csj at 11:05 PM (GMT) on 9 December, 2008

Two things, lovely to see that you finally got it back and up and running again, and I concurr that both Acronis and Synctoy for PC use are very good utilities, and I use both on a regular basis.
Also having a dock with a drive attached for the MAC is a brilliant no brainer, ok it costs, but everytime I clip on everything in timemachine just occurs, I dont have to think about attaching the drive. Also try MOZY (mozy.com) for a free 2GB of online backup and a simple one touch backup to remote storage. All of the above are good. I'm sure there are thousands of variants, but the above are tried and tested

comment by Garry at 11:30 PM (GMT) on 9 December, 2008

Great shot of the little lady... a lovely warm expression on a cold winters day

comment by micha at 11:53 PM (GMT) on 9 December, 2008

It is a special pic. The colours are very much calling for the same tone and then her expression and smile just put plenty of light in it. Lovely!

comment by 613photo at 03:00 AM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

Simple and very effective shot. She looks very content.

comment by David Chabashvili at 09:22 AM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

Excellent bw as usual! Love the tone on her face and the way her eyes look :)

comment by djn1 at 09:28 AM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

Chris: this one was naturally lit and I didn't do a great deal of post-production beyond the black and white conversion other than to add a slight vignette.

LightningPaul: you're quite right - it's impossible to place a price on your data and given that hard drives are now quite cheap there isn't really any excuse for not having a decent backup strategy in place.

csj: I'm going to look into getting a dock as it would make a lot of sense. As for the online storage: if I could get 2TB (rather than 2GB) for a reasonable price I'd be a happy man :)

comment by Claus at 09:52 AM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

A beautiful a classic portrait! Great shot!

comment by Carlos Garcia at 01:06 PM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

Welcome back. Harmony just sings! Beautiful moment and what a smile. On the computer hard drive side of life: Time Machine is king!

comment by Dan Kaufman at 01:58 PM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

Glad to SEE you're back. I especially appreciate the "zone system" feel of this portrait. Her skin tones are subtly magnificent and your focus is tack sharp, I can practically count the hairs. Tack sharp focus on the subject of the photo, versus somewhere else, seems to be my buggaboo (and even considering I shoot with the same camera and lens as yours!)

comment by joyce phelps at 02:17 PM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

I'm going to need a new desktop calendar soon... Any plans to have calendars made for 2009? :-)

comment by Roy at 04:11 PM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

That's a wonderful skin tone you've achieved there, and no need to retouch such a young complexion. On our 13 yr-old, nothing is 'approved' by her unless some negative clarity is added and the healing brush used to some degree...

On back-ups, I use Time Machine for everything (external storage drives included), but also run SuperDuper daily to back up the main Mac hard disk to a different location. This gives me a copy I can boot from in an emergency. Also, have just added the 2TB MyBook Studio RAID for Time Machine - highly recommended.

comment by Adam Stevens at 04:46 PM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

Glad to see you back kicking again! Funny how when we have down time, it never seems to = free time! (I half expected to hear you say that with your laptop down for several days, you had a bunch of extra time to shoot, but I know better) Figured it would take you a few days to get it all back in gear.
Wonderful post. Great shot of the kiddo. Some of my very favorite photos are of my family (and will probably only be seen by family). I love the conversion too- not too "film imitation" and not just "gray-scale", wonderful skin tone.

-Adam

comment by Laurie at 04:59 PM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

Glad to hear you managed to get the computer straightened out. Never fun though!

This is such a sweet photo. She is just adorable all bundled up.

comment by Albert at 07:36 PM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

Beautiful image, perfect composition and image processing, you have a spectacular gallery, I congratulate you.
Greetings

comment by Alex Caballero at 07:55 PM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

Un retrato magnifico, digno de un magnifico fotografo...la desaturacion muy acertada, y haber escogido hacer la fotografia en raw le da ese toque especial, saludos.

comment by jelb at 10:16 PM (GMT) on 10 December, 2008

Bonsoir,
nice portrait..adorable "model"..bravo!

comment by Craig at 03:36 PM (GMT) on 11 December, 2008

Nicely shot and processed (channel mixer, biased to red?). As for backup I should take note and heed the advice given here, I'm terrible and it's going to bite me one day! I'm considering migrating to a mac so perhaps timemachine will help me out! Anyway glad it's sorted, good to see you back posting again.

comment by djn1 at 08:11 PM (GMT) on 11 December, 2008

Thanks everyone.

Dan: which focussing mode are you using? I tend to use the Servo option rather than single shot.

Joyce: we're not selling any this year, but you can win one if you sign up for our tutorials :-)

Roy: I probably need to sort out a bootable backup too.

Adam: unfortunately I ended up spending most of my time trying to get the laptop fixed, ordering new kit, and generally fretting about life the universe and everything ;-)

Craig: don't wait until it happens to you, it really is a pain.

comment by Leicca at 04:45 PM (GMT) on 14 December, 2008

De nuevo: hermoso retrato.

comment by Abhijit at 11:29 AM (GMT) on 29 December, 2008

Sweet portrait! Loved the tonal gradation of this BW image.