I wanted to follow up to last week's Istagram post and a comment that I received on Instagram.
formlessness@salvarezphoto in my opinion yes that's exactly what it is, but that's not to diminish instagram in any way, twitter after all has had an important role in world events over the last few years...
I didn't mean to denigrate Instagram or anyone who uses it. In fact I put pictures up almost every day. I find it democratic and exciting. It isn't a professional platform, but it is going to effect professionals and publishers in a big way. How remains to be seen, but all "National Geographic Photographers"* now have the ability to publish photos straight to the NGM Instagram feed anytime we feel like it. For the first time in NGM's history the highly talented and tremendously skilled editors who determine what an audience sees are outside the publication process. That is a revolution, now there is no editor or publisher in between the photographer and the audience.
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.
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.
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.
