Picture Stories by Stephen Alvarez

Alvarez Photography Print and Stock powered by Photodeck

 

the new print and stock site is here

For a while now I've been looking for a client site to augment my online portfolio, a place for a client to preview images from a shoot and download the final files. E-commerce is secondary to me but still important. There are a few sites out there that do this. PhotoShelter is very popular and for a year I had a SmugMug account. In the end I elected to go with PhotoDeck. The decision came down to three things.

Bad things happen to good photographers; be prepared

I got a call from a fiend's office the other day. Their archive had been on 2 mirrored Drobo drives. They bought a new mac pro and suddenly the entire archive was unreadable. That is a very scary place to be. Years of work can be wiped out instantly.

I've written about archiving and backing up before, but since all most photographers produce are 1s and 0s it bears repeating.

the system protects against 3 things

• Mechanical failure
• File corruption and deletion
• Physical catastrophe

tech and travel / making life on the road easier

I am about to start a busy fall travel season. I leave for Paris this weekend, then an long series of little trips until mid November. One of my great concerns when I'm on the road is that my laptop will crater. I'm not worried about the machine so much, laptops come and go for photographers, we are hard on them. My concern is that I'll be stuck without some way to recover my data if the macbook augers in.

There are 2 things that I use to make my life -a little- more secure. 

preparing Paris presentation, no files... dropbox to the rescue

I've agreed to do a presentation for NGM's Parisian advertisers this coming week. So here I am sitting in Paris and I can't find all the image files I need. It is the weekend, there is no one in my office back in Tennessee, no one at the office in Washington. What do I do?

Well, I logged onto my desktop machine in TN using screen sharing, found the right images, resized them remotely and then saved them into a Dropbox folder. They appear almost instantly on my laptop drive in Paris. Now I can put them into the keynote address just as easily as if I was still in my office.

If you aren't using Dropbox, you should give it a try. 

-Stephen Alvarez

Paris

Any experience with the Drobo Elite?

I have to upgrade storage soon, does anyone have any experience with the Drobo elite Storage Array?

Dropbox online backup

I just signed up for Dropbox. It is a free way to back up and share important files across distance and computers. 

-Stephen Alvarez

My Work Flow explained/ Expression Media and photoshop cs 4

A couple of people have asked me -both in email and personally- about my workflow. It is a good question. A bad workflow can sink your business, a good workflow makes your life easier. So here is a down and dirty explanation of mine.

I do all the archiving and editing on Expression Media (about $200 here ). It is a microsoft product I know, but it works well with canon raw files. Most of the raw conversions are done with Photoshop (student addition $200 here ) or DPP.

Canon 7D first look by Ira Block

Review by National Geographic Photographer

IRA BLOCK

UPDATE READ 7D at high iso HERE and video first impression HERE

As a photo journalist, my cameras of choice have been the Canon 5DMark II, and the 50 D when I needed high frames per second.. When I learned that Canon was debuting its 7D though, I decided it was time to move up.

A decent check from stock sales this month enabled me to make my move today. Good by 50 D: Hello 7D.

Canon promised better focusing, high frame rate and a superior auto focusing system on its 7D and so far it seems to have delivered.

Think Fixed Tech: Marketing Strategies that Work

see here:

http://www.powermax.com/articles/2005/11/20/super-secret-twitter-giveaway-lacie-d2-quadra-hard-disk-500gb-hard-drive/

This is the right idea.  They get traffic and eyeballs, you get a chance to win a hard drive to back up all the photos you are not backing up now.

Geof Bowie
www.thinkfixed.com

Journalism 2.0 rises from the ashes

I write about the death of journalism here. The NY times has an interesting article on an organization (voice of san diego.org) that is doing non profit journalism much like I advocate. Call it journalism 2.0

-Stephen Alvarez