Ken Loach, Jasmin Stone of Focus E15 and Lisa Mackenzie, author of ‘Getting By’
D700, ISO 3200, 16-35mm at 16mm, 1/40s f4
For the moment at least, though I hesitate to commit this to print, I appear to have regained control of my computer systems here, and am back at work on a nice, largish and calibrated screen, with a proper keyboard after spending over two weeks on my very portable notebook.
To my right, the Drobo 5N has a reassuring row of green and blue lights as I type, and on the desk in front of me is the external hard drive that caused my problem. It took my desktop computer around 20 days to run a disk check, outputting error messages every few seconds on 450,000 files telling me it had insufficient disk space to fix the problem for each in turn, leaving me swearing at the sloppy programmer who wrote those routines.
It could even have been Mr Gates himself, for underneath Windows, even fairly recent versions such as Windows 7 which this computer is running, is a residue from the days of MS-DOS. But what was perhaps acceptable when a large hard drive was only 20Mb doesn’t scale up well to 3Tb. Though so far, when I’ve cautiously connected the rogue disk to a running Windows system it has served up the few files I’ve requested with no demur, so perhaps these slow routines somehow managed to solve some problems, though it will be some time before I examine the whole disk.
At the moment I’m slowly transferring work from about 10 days taking pictures from the Drobo into my Lightroom catalogue. It’s a slightly more complicated process than it might be as Lightroom doesn’t currently appear to be able to see the network attached drive, so I have first to copy the files across to a directly attached disk. At least this transfer is reasonably rapid, at around 40Mb per second. Once in Lightroom I’ll need to spend the usual amount of time making a final selection of images and developing them for my web site and archive. And of course updating my web pages.
Perhaps the biggest problem I’ve had over the 20 days is having to work with jpegs. When the lighting is easy, both Nikon and Fuji do a reasonable job, but whenever things get tricky, jpegs just can’t cope. And well Photoshop is a great programme (I think I’ve used it since version 2), Lightroom is just so much faster and I think better for most editing and adjusting. Of course I was taking RAW + jpeg, but wasn’t able to edit the jpegs as I only have an old version of Photoshop on the notebook. Probably I should have updated it and installed Lightroom (as I think my licence wold allow) but I kept thinking it wouldn’t be long before I was back on a real computer.
I doubt if sending out files based on the jpegs rather than raw will greatly have affected my sales, but I certainly noticed the difference in quality. As I slowly work through the backlog I’ll try and find some good examples and write a post or two here.
Friday was my first day back processing with Lightroom, and as well as the work from that day I also had some pictures from a friend’s book launch the previous evening. Thursday had been a long day; I’d covered two protests, then gone on to a third story, where I’d taken some pictures but didn’t really have enough to be worth submitting and then taken some urban landscape panoramas before the launch. By the time I’d come home, had some food and processed and submitted pictures from the first two events it was early morning and I needed to be in bed. But before I went out the next morning to take pictures in an icy windtunnel (aka Croydon) in South London I’d started to process the party images, taken in lighting that bordered on the impossible, thankful that I could resuscitate them in Lightroom. The landscapes will wait until I have more time.
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
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And I’ve now got the Drobo visible in Lightroom by installing the Drobo Dashboard on the computer, which makes things a little simpler.
The Drobo does seem impressive, though I’ve still got to think more about backups. It has already survived its first problem, when someone accidentally pulled out the power lead (it wasn’t me!) It restarted without a hiccough, though it does take some while to start up.