ralf weber photography

Backup, backup, backup!!

ralf — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:34:36 +0000

What is more important than having the latest and greatest digital SLR body? What is even more important than getting the best lens your can afford? What is more important than using the best digital workflow management software and the best image editing software? Yes, its your friend the backup tool.Yes, people always get excited and totally thrilled when they hear the “B-Word”. Usually they just yawn and move on with their lives. “C’mon, how bad can it be? I burn a CD/DVD with my photos once a months, I have the extra copy on my HD. I have nothing to worry about. And what are the odds that my HD will ever fail?” - Wrong! All wrong … I can’t emphasize this often enough to my friends and family (and everybody else who doesn’t run away fast enough ;o) ). The question is not if your HD will fail, the question is just when? “If” btw. is covered by your HD’s technical specification and its called “MTBF” - mean time between failures (noticed the failure-word in there?).So let’s not fool ourselves: a proper backup strategy has to be on top of your priority list. Figuring out what the right thing to do is, isn’t really obvious (and certainly depends on your personal level of paranoia), but its not all that complicated either. And once you have an appropriate backup strategy set up and implemented it should just work transparently in the background and you should have perfect (and well deserved) peace of mind: all your photos will be save and sound for eternity (or at least for as long as you really care ;o) ) and you can go back to focusing on more fun things like checking out the latest dSLR bodies, geeking out on lens reviews and of course the most important of all: go out and take some great photos!Over the next couple of weeks we will post a couple of articles outlining our current plan for our backup strategy, the products that will be used to implement it and how it will all be setup.

Photowalking

ralf — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:10:58 +0000

Don’t we all know the feeling? You are at some arbitrary place at some arbitrary point in time and you see something that would make a great photo and you check your jacket pockets and your pants and you ask yourself: “Where is my camera when I need it?” - this happens to me all the time! Of course there is that little camera in your cell phone (and we’ll have a couple of posts in the near future about using your cell phone as your ‘Plan B’-camera), but the optics, the image quality and the level of control usually just doesn’t cut it.

I guess the guys over at photowalking.org must have made the same experience one too many times and that’s when they decided to start photowalking. This is the idea in their own words:

Photowalking is the act of walking with a camera for the main purpose of taking pictures of things you may find interesting.

I really like the idea behind this: instead of walking through everyday life and always getting annoyed by the fact that you never have your camera with you when you need it, why not turn this around and grab your camera and just walk around for a day and focus on trying to find great photo opportunities. At the end of the day you probably had a really good time, got some fresh air and probably even got some great shots - what more can you ask for?

Walkabout #1: San Jose, California

ralf — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 03:34:33 +0000

Its been rather busy lately with work and ‘pre-Christmas joys’, so I haven’t had much time to shoot lately. Well, yesterday my buddy Frederick and I took a day ‘off’ and decided to stay in the neighborhood and just get out and shoot.

Well, San Jose, California, doesn’t really have a reputation of being a very exciting city, besides the fact that its the third biggest city in California and the tenth biggest city in the US.

Nevertheless, as Frederick and I noticed yesterday, the downtown area of San Jose offers quite a few interesting photography opportunities. As they say: never judge a book by its cover….

Here some impressions from the Guadalupe River Park and Gardens area which is situated right between downtown San Jose and the HP Pavilion and here some impressions from downtown San Jose:

(click on either of the photos to get to the galleries)

James Nachtwey - War Photographer

ralf — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:33:55 +0000

The other night I zapped around my 5 gazillion satellite TV channels when I saw something interesting on the Documentary Channel: they were showing a documentary called “War Photographer”.I was in a pretty upbeat mood (it was a good day after all), so I wasn’t sure if I was up for a rather tough topic like this, but when I saw the captivating photos on screen I had to let go of the remote and keep watching.The show was a documentary about James Nachtwey, probably one of the best photo journalists out there .. if not the best. James’ commitment and dedication to his profession just amazes me and considering the immense dangers he is facing in his job on a daily basis (and has been facing for more than 20 years), it really surprised me how calm and soft-spoken he appears. In this particular documentary you will see a lot of violence, suffering and poverty in his images, so watching this documentary might not be for everybody, but let’s face it: he is just showing us another side of the world we are living in … and if we don’t like this side, maybe we should think about doing something about it!This is probably one of the most moving and inspirational documentaries I’ve ever seen and you should certainly check it out if you get a chance. If you get the Documentary channel (I get it through Dish, so I’m not sure if its available through other satellite or cable providers), they seem to show it again on 12/29/07 9:55PM and 12/30/07 02:55AM eastern time.You might also want to watch his acceptance speech for the 2007 TED prize where James talks about the power of documentary photo journalism.

Byodo-In Temple, Valley of the Temples, Oahu, Hawaii

ralf — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 02:15:21 +0000

Here are some more infrared shots that I took during a Hawaii vacation last year. All photos on this page are Infra-Red black & white shots taken with my modified Canon D-60. These photos were taken at the Byodo-In Temple in the Valley of the Temples on the island of Oahu. The temple is located at the foot of the 2,000 foot Ko’olau Mountains in the Valley of the Temples in Oahu’s Kaneohe Region sits the beautiful Byodo-In Temple. While always a popular stop for visitors who seek locations off the beaten track, the Byodo-In Temple has become more popular since it was used as a filming location in the first season of the ABC Emmy Award winning drama series Lost, where it served as the home of the Korean woman Sun’s powerful father. (more…)

Bodie National Park

ralf — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 03:23:09 +0000

I don’t know how it was for you guys, but the first time is really the hardest, isn’t it?

No, I’m of course not talking about ‘that’ …. I’m talking about your first blog post on your first blog ever. After figuring out all the technicalities of setting up the blog, finding the right look and feel and setting up the basic infrastructure, there is still one, very important, thing that’s missing: content! As my buddy Fred keeps telling me lately: “Just get it up, don’t over-engineer it, don’t try to make it perfect right from the start …. just get it up there and the rest will come”. Well, I guess he has a good point.So here it is: my first blog post … bear with me ;o)Last summer I made another one of those ‘California Road Trips’ (one of my favorite ways of spending a few days off from work … happens rarely enough ;o) ) and this time I finally made it to Bodie National Park, a place I wanted to visit for many years already, but somehow I never made it up there.

(more…)