Hasselblad, Aperture, Photos and backups
I got a new camera last week. Well, new to me, I haven't checked, but, my guess is its an early 1980's model. Anyway, it was precipitated by the underexposure of several photos that would have been incredibly important to me. I have several digital cameras, and several film cameras to be honest, but, I have recently become infatuated with medium format photography. I love the much larger imaging area, and it is probably subjective, but, I feel that film captures a more interesting image. That is not not to say that digital doesn't do a fine job of capturing an image, its just that I prefer the look of the image captured on film. Because of this, I started looking to upgrade from my Holga, which takes great photos, but lacks the ability to control exposure, therein marginalizing its effectiveness. I settled upon an old Hasselblad 500c/m that I was able to find for a very good price. When I was starting to look at medium format cameras, I was concerned that they would all be super expensive, and coloquially everyone knows that Hasselblad's are the most expensive. I spent a good amount of time looking at the Kiev 88, and almost bought one once or twice. Though they are in general cheaper, I started to add up what it would cost to start taking pictures, and it quickly rose to the price of almost every other medium format system out there. When I compiled data on the price of the different systems, from the Kiev to a Mamiya, to a Rollei or Fuji, they all seemed to really float in the same price range when looking at used cameras. Because of this, I decided to go with the one that would be a departure from the standard way of shooting, and would require me to actively engage in the art of photography differently. When looking at the cameras that were fully manual, and had a waist-level finder, I chose the Hassy because the build quality is generally referred to as superior. I have only shot 3 rolls of film through the camera yet, but, I am happy with it. It definately requires a different approach to photography, and it requires patience. Lots of patience. When I was shooting over the weekend, I was about to take one of my favorite shots when out of the corner of my ear I heard Evan say to wait. It was too late though, I had already started the sequence of events to take the picture. And then this little girl, maybe 7 or 8 came running around me and I knew it instantly that she was in the image. On seeing the negatives, she is only on the right hand side, having almost completely crossed the film-plane before the shutter opened, so I may be able to salvage the image, though it will lose its square format. I took a second one as quickly as I could, but I had to reframe a little to keep the crowd of people who were now gathering out of my shot. And that really defines why the Hassy requires patience. I am not sure if it attracts attention or not, but several times I found myself framing and focusing in an empty area, and then right as I was about to squeeze the shutter, a mass of people would arrive to stand directly in front of my lens.
As I was scanning the film from the weekend, (apparently I might or might not have a backlog of film to scan), I made a couple of realizations. The first is that I need to rethink my Aperture Library situation. I have traditionally told Aperture on import to include a copy of the image in its library, as well as putting a copy in the Pictures folder organized by date. I think this is a good replication strategy. It is not backup, I will get to that, but, it maintains the images, should one corrupt, the likely hood of the other corrupting is low. However, the Aperture library is itself stored in the Pictures folder. I am not sure if this is the default, or a setting I picked a long time ago, but, this will need to change. Aperture also has a Vault, which it will backup into, and I use the Vault all the time. The Vault is stored on a separate partition, which is on my long-term storage Raid 1 Array. This helps to alleviate the problem of drive corruption or failure, and gives me a tertiary copy of my image. This is the copy that straddles the line of backup, because its not the working copy, its a backup, maintained in a separate location with redundancy, however, its still in the same computer, so its not really backup. Luckily I do have what I consider to be a pretty safe backup plan. Well, I did. Apparently over the course of the year I have generated 30Gb of images. This pushed my Aperture library to 40Gb. So, my Pictures folder is now a touch over 80Gb. Which is no big deal, all things considered, my system drive is 250Gb, and I am only getting to the point where I am using 220Gb. However, I have been cloning my system via CCC or SD to an external drive with relative frequency, and always before any system or software updates. Unfortunately I have now pushed myself over the capacity of the 160Gb drive I had been using. Again, this is not a catastrophe, but, it did make me notice where I was storing things and that I do need to make some updates to the way that I have data stored and where it is accessible from. And because I have said several times, this or that isn't backup, I use Backblaze to backup my data to an off-site data center. That is my backup. I am happy with it, however, it has definitely helped me to find the inadequacies of the Clear internet connection I have at my house.
Long term, I am considering moving my data from being machine centric to a home NAS, so that I can turn my computers off, and only turn them on when I am using them, but, still have access to my data everywhere. It is partly a cost factor, and partly an implementation factor. While I have several computers I am more interested in the little devices, which can stay online and not consume huge amounts of power. I have read mixed reviews about the Drobo, but, I am tending to lean more towards a Synology.
One of the other things I have noticed via my usage of Aperture is the places I have been. While I definitely have not gone back in and tagged all of the photos to where they are, I try to tag them when I import them. So sometime since I started using Aperture 3, I can see the places I have been via the Places window. Here is a screen-shot, I cropped in, but the only place where there were pins that I ignored is Milwaukee, because at that scale it crushed the rest of the pins down to 2 or 3.
Ignoring the outlier of Milwaukee, I am pretty stagnant in my location. I already know that in the not too distant future, I will be adding a few more pins into the map at further distances, but, I think that will be an ever expanding goal for me. To get out and see more places, and keep the pins stretching further and further.