Get the Little Things Out of the Way

Most of us photographers like to spend time behind the camera. After all, we are photographers so this is our rightful place, isn’t it?

The problem is there are so many other details and little things that can distract us and prevent us from spending time behind the camera. Think about going on vacation for example. Just to get away there are a ton of things that must be done. Our to do list grows to enormous size and we have a lot of details to wrap up before can leave.

Even preparing for a photography-specific vacation requires paying attention to a lot of mundane details: did you charge your batteries? Did you pack enough spare flash cards? What lenses are you going to bring? Do you have cleaning supplies packed? How will you backup in the field? Do you know exactly where you are going? Do you have enough money for everything? Did you put on clean underwear? (Opps, that was bad!)

But in all seriousness all these little details can get in our way. So sit down, make a list, and begin checking these items off. The sooner you take care of the little things the sooner you can focus your camera!

Laptops & Desktops

I’ve been using a laptop for a very long time now. Its portability and compact profile make it perfect for me to carry back and forth from the office to home. I can travel with it, check my email just about anywhere with its wireless connection, and I can even sit out on the back deck and surf the web!

Yep, I like laptops. So much so that I never imagined I would ever want to own a desktop again.

Well this is all beginning to change. You see, I am not very faithful at backing up my data and this is troublesome. I have been fortunate in the past to never have a hard drive fail. Well, correction, I had a 20mb hard drive fail on my very first IBM PS2 desktop, but back then my files were saved onto 3.5″ floppy drives. We’ve come a long way from those days!

With all the photographs that I have been capturing over the years, much hard drive space is required. One problem I’ve encountered with the laptop is that my external drives sometimes change their drive assignments. For example, sometimes one is drive g: but then sometime later becomes drive h: I also have to keep disconnecting the external hard drives from my laptop every time I want to take the laptop with me.

Enter the desktop solution. Tonight I reassembled a desktop. My initial goal was attach a LaserJet print to this desktop so I could print from it on my network. But then I got to thinking, “Hey, this could make a pretty handy backup scheme if I attach my external hard drives.

Eventually I want to get a Drobo for my backups and I can simply attach this to the desktop.

My laptop is not being replaced and I will use it for my email and much of my day-to-day work, but I am beginning to see that having a desktop on my desk will be a very nice addition to my work flow. I am a little slow, but now I have some work to do to get this thing fully functional on my network!