Memory Cards

One of the most important pieces of your photography set up, even more so than your camera, is your memory cards. I can hear many of you out there now gasping, “How can you say that? The camera HAS to be THE MOST IMPORTANT part of a photographer’s arsenal!”

Well, you would be wrong. As I mentioned in my earlier blog post titled It’s Not ONLY About the Camera, your camera is not nearly as important as you might think or as camera sales people would have you believe. Your camera is your primary tool as a photographer, but even more important than your camera is the memory card that you use.

Why is the memory card so important? Because your camera has what is known as a buffer, which is the amount of internal space in memory that the camera can hold images in before it has to start writing them to the memory card. If you are someone that shoots sports or anything else with action, like wildlife and have your camera on continuous shooting, you can only snap so many shots before your camera starts blinking that it’s “Busy” and the little red light that indicates that it’s writing to the memory card starts flashing like mad. When you reach this point, you cannot snap anymore images until the camera is done emptying it’s buffer.

Your wait time can be seriously shorter if you make sure you only buy FAST memory cards. Now I know the next thing you are all saying is “I thought ALL memory cards are fast, they are faster than hard drives!” Well, you would be right in that respect, except for SSD or Solid State hard drives, which are basically massive memory cards used in place of a conventional hard drive. However, not all memory cards are created equal and you need to be aware of this when you are buying them for your camera so that you can get maximum performance when you really need it.

Whether your camera uses SD cards or CF cards, you need to make sure you are buying the fastest ones you can afford so that you spend more of your time shooting and less time waiting on your camera to write those images to the memory card. Trust me, if you are shooting sports and you miss an awesome shot because your buffer is full and your memory card is so slow it takes 30-60 seconds for your buffer to clear, you will not be a happy camper! Memory cards do have different write speeds and as a result, the faster cards cost considerably more than the slower ones do. If you walk into say your local Walmart and buy an SD or CF card in the photo department, you will get say a 32GB SD card for $12 or maybe even $10, or that 8GB CF card is only $8 and think, “Man that is a great deal!” It’s not such a great deal when that $8 or $10 memory card costs you a once in a lifetime shot.

When you are buying memory cards, look closely at the label and see what the write speed is. For CF (Compact Flash) cards, you really want once that have a write speed of 120-160Mbps, which means Mega-bytes per second. For SD cards, look for ones that are class 10 only and XC with 900x for the speed are some of the best. With either of these kinds of cards, you buffer will empty in a few seconds instead of 30-60 seconds or longer. Now these memory cards won’t be cheap, but they don’t have to break the bank either. Look on sites like Amazon and wait until they go on sale to “pull the trigger” so to speak. The Sandisk Extreme Pro CF with 160Mbps speed is $79.99 for a 64GB model or $44.95 for a 32GB one. The same model in an SD card is $42.99 for a 64GB model and $24.95 for the 32GB one.

Now that you are better educated on memory cards, hopefully you won’t miss that shot! And remember, you don’t HAVE to get them as big as 32GB or 64GB, 8GB or 16GB will do, unless you shoot thousands of shots at a time.

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Photography Gear Luggage

As a professional photographer one of the things you will need to consider at some point and time is luggage for your photography gear. When it comes to packing and carrying your gear there are several ways you can do it depending on your needs at any given time.

1. Waist bags - these are small bags that you wear around your waist like a regular belt, but they can carry your camera and a couple of lenses and batteries. Think of them as kind of a fanny pack for your camera. There are several companies that make them from LowePro to Targus and they can range in quality and price from $20-$100.

2. Backpacks - These are just like they sound, you strap them on your back and carry your gear that way, great for hiking or walking around an event. They usually hold 1-2 bodies and 5-6 lenses and also have compartments for batteries, filters, iPad, laptop, and hoops that hold your tripod. They range in size from small to fairly large, are made by many companies from LowePro, to Targus, to Canon and Nikon and prices can run from $40-$300.

3. Rollerbags - These are similar to the suitcases people use to travel by air, they hold your gear and have a telescoping handle with wheels on the bottom and you pull them behind you. They can hold 2-4 bodies, 4-8 lenses, memory cards, Speedlights, filters, laptop, iPad, tripod and other items. They usually have multiple pockets and compartments and vary in size. Again they are made by the usual camera luggage makers, LowePro, Targus, Canon, etc, and can run in price from $100-$500 depending on the size and materials they are made from. You can also buy special roller cases that will carry your studio lighting for you as well.

4. Briefcase - These cases are usually made of quality aluminum and have foam inserts to protect your gear. The inserts can be ordered custom cut for your gear, but that usually makes them more expensive, or pick and pull, which means the foam is perforated and you can pick and pull pieces out to make your own custom size pockets for your gear. The most common maker of these is Zero Halliburton and they run $200-$800.

5. Durable Plastic Trunk - These are usually make of high strength plastic and again have the pick and pull foam to custom cut your own compartments with your fingers. These are most commonly made by Pelican Cases and range in price from $129-$600 depending on the size. Recently, Pelican started making a version of their trunks that have the telescoping handle and rollers wheels so you can pull it behind you instead of carrying it like a foot locker. They also come with padlock ports on each end to keep your gear secure.

Of course any time you have to fly for a shoot I would recommend the Zero Halliburton aluminum cases or the Pelican ones as they are the toughest and can be stowed in the belly of the plane. Some pros prefer to carry they heavy gear in these cases and stow them but carry their actual body and lenses in a smaller carry-on bag like a backpack to keep them with them at all times and not risk the airline losing their gear en route to a shoot.





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Inspiration and What to Photograph?

Good morning everyone.

I am not sure if many of you might have had similar trouble in the past, but what do you do when you are looking to photograph something for an assignment? Maybe you are just looking for inspiration. This is what I have been doing all of yesterday and then a big portion of this morning.

Writing as an Ambassador for The Art Institute can be quite a challenging task and you need to make sure that the articles relate to the work that the students require and are learning about. Once you have covered all the basics of been a student you find yourself dealing with situations from the real world.

How do I get my work seen by the world? What genre of photography should I photograph? Will I make money by photographing that? How do I market my work? and the list goes on and on.

Today I found this article in the NY Times an article by Teju Cole. It is all about inspiration and where we look for photographs. Now I am not going to recap the article here. Your job will be to go over and read it. It is part of the process of finding what interests you and what you could be photographing.

I am here to tell you how that article has opened my eyes to seeing the world around me. Sometimes we just have to take a step back and look at the world as it is. Trying to find something that is not there can be very challenging and you might just not be looking in the right place.

What I took away from the article were the few words at the end of the first paragraph,  "photography could reach eternity through the moment.’’ 

I believe that when you enter the field of photography, you will definitely be learning all about the fundamentals and requirements of making a great photograph. However, once you have learned these rules and regulations it is up to you to get out there and practice them so that when the time comes you will be able to take the decisive photograph without thinking because of muscle memory and the training that you have received.

Yes, there are moments when you need to take certain photographs for certain assignments, but at times you need to just capture the moment and have some faith and trust in the training that you have received.

Have a great day and we will speak again soon.

© Henry Cartier-Bresson / Magnum Photos

Studio Shooting with Limited Space

One of the challenges you might face while working on your shooting assignments for AI is needing to shoot in an indoor “studio” environment and if you are like I was during school, I had a house full of people, so I had limited space for my shooting.

There are ways to overcome this obstacle, if you have kids that are in school, shoot your assignments in the living room while they are in school during the day, or use a portion of your basement or attic. At the time I was attending classes, I had 6 people living in my home in Georgia and it was cramped even with 1,800 sq ft and 4 bedrooms and a large living room and dining room. I would sometimes shoot late at night while everyone was sleep, but sometimes I had to shoot during the day and if I could not use one of the rooms in the house, I would use the garage.

Simulated outdoor shot using my garage

For one of my classes, we had to simulate an outdoor shoot in soil, but shoot it indoors. This is something you will frequently have to do in many types of photography. It might be a situation where the client needs this shoot done on a deadline and the weather is bad, or for other reasons. For this assignment, we needed to replicate the same amount of light outdoors with our studio lights. I chose to use some small toy dinosaurs as the characters for the shoot and shot them in some of the soil from my flowerbed in front of my house.

Studio set up for this shoot

Now I am not saying these are 100% perfect, but I did get an ‘A’ on the assignment and I think I did a pretty good job considering it was my first attempt. One of the things you will find as you pursue a career in photography is often you have to adapt to overcome situations. One of my favorite photographers, Chase Jarvis is like the king of overcoming obstacles for photography. He shoots a lot of sports action photography and has designed and built many of the customer rigs and mounts that he uses for commercial shoots.

If you have limited space using a small portion of a room for your studio for class assignment, then don’t use your light stands, rig up your lights on the top of a door or curtain rod if you have strong ones. If you still don’t have enough room, try using Speedlights instead. A Canon or Nikon Speedlight on a small stand takes up a lot less space than the full size studio strobes but still give you tons of light power.


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Are you ready to sign up new clients....?

Hello everyone.

I say this not because I am curious about what you have done in the past or what you have already prepared for your clients, but it is more of a question for myself?

Tonight I went to a showcase for a company that I work for. It was a showcase for wedding couples looking for photographer's, DJ's and videographers. I have to admit I was not sure what to expect because I had never attended one before. So let me prepare you so that you do not make the same mistakes that I made.

Firstly, they always say that you should have a website or a portfolio ready to show prospective clients. Well, I got all of these. I have Behance it has some of my work but it did not have any of my wedding portfolios or any of my engagement sessions. I just realized that you have to make sure that your portfolio is up-to-date with the latest work that you have recently done.

I also have my own website which showcases more recent work. However the point that I am trying to make here is that you have to be prepared to show your clients all of your work no matter where you are. Tonight I had a number of different options available to me.

I used my IPad to link my Lightroom collections to my LR Mobile app. This helped me ensure that prospective clients can see some of my best work on a screen and they are able to make a decision on whether my work is suitable for their particular event. If you have not used this option before then all you have to do is download the LR Mobile app from the Apple or Android store and then when you go into your Lightroom collections you click on the little square box next to the collection name and this will sync that collection to your mobile app.

Here is a short video to see how it works.

Now you don't need a collection with hundreds of images. Just make sure it is a collection with your best edited images.

Next, make sure that you make a few prints. Whether they are canvas wraps or even large prints in a frame they are good selling points for your clients. They can see what it looks like when they have their photographs printed. It is also an investment in you and your company. Do not think of it as an expense that is wasted. It is a portfolio that you can take with you wherever you go. 

Finally, make sure that you have your business cards with you. Let the client leave knowing who they have spoken to and whether they would like to come back to you. You need to make an impression. This is your career that you are talking about and you always want them thinking and talking about you.

One additional item that I have added is a slideshow of some of my work. If you are a wedding photographer then have a great wedding slideshow of some of your best work. Here is a sample slideshow that you could have running in the background when you are speaking to potential clients.

So be prepared for any and all eventualities. I wish you all the best and success in your careers.

Kind regards.

Denzil

Two Ways to Make Lightroom Faster

This week I thought I’d blog about something a little bit different than photography itself. This week’s post is all about ways to improve Lightroom’s performance for when your Libraries are 30,000+ photos for a single year like mine are.

One of the first things you should be doing is using an external drive for ALL your photos. Don’t put your photos on your OS drive as it will fill up and max out too quickly along with all your software. I personally use a 4TB external drive with USB 3 for best performance and as soon as I finish a shoot, I copy all the images off my cameras memory cards and into this drive by year, month and day. Once that is done, you have to import them into Lightroom, now the way to improve Lightroom performance is to use SmartPreviews all the time. SmartPreviews takes your large RAW files and makes small versions of them for Lightroom to use and in turn make scrolling through Lightroom’s Library Module and loading Lightroom faster.

Notice the red circle around SmartPreviews

There are two way to deploy SmartPreviews, the first is on Import, so when Importing, under the Import dialog where you can add Copyright info, Keywords and such, check the box to use SmartPreviews. As Lightroom imports your RAW files it will then run the SmartPreview builder and make SmartPreviews of all your new images. The second way to activate SmartPreview in an existing Library of images is to select ALL images from the Library Module and then click the Library menu item, go down to Previews, and then choose Build SmartPreviews.

Deploying SmartPreviews from the Library Menu

 Now since you are deploying SmartPreviews for an existing Library of images in the second option it will take some time for them to complete, especially if your Libraries are huge like mine, but the nice thing is, once it’s done, it’s done and you can move around in Lightroom so much easier. The only catch is when you have SmartPreviews of an existing Library, you will now have doubles of every image, in a way, but the way around this is unplug or just unmount your drive as you work in Lightroom and make your edits and exports. You only need the drive mounted when you are adding new images from your camera and when you want the edits permanently saved to the original RAW file, then just mount the drive and Lightroom will sync the edits AUTOMATICALLY, that is a NO BRAINER ;)

Now, the next thing you can do to improve Lightroom performance is increase Lightroom’s cache. For those of you who don’t work in I.T. like I do for my day job, cache is a portion of your hard drive that Lightroom uses to augment the memory in your system. So if you are editing say a batch of 1,000 50Mb RAW files. That’s 6GB of files you are working with at once time and let’s say your laptop only has 4GB of RAM, how does Lightroom work under these conditions? By using some of your say 1TB hard drive as cache to supplement your system RAM. Now by default, Lightroom only uses 1GB of your disk drive for cache, which is nowhere near enough, so bump that setting up to 50GB. How do you do this? Well, click Lightroom, then Preferences and on the pop up window, cluck the File Handling tab and at the bottom you see Camera RAW Cache setting, in that box delete 1GB and type in 50GB. Why 50, well, I have tested 20GB and with both an SSD drive and a regular hard disk I noticed no improvement, but at 50GB I noticed improvement. In the screenshot you see I have mine set at 100GB, that’s because I have 12TB to work with so I figured why not double mine from the 50GB I recommend to you. Can you use 100GB, sure, but make sure you have ample space free on your system drive to do so first.

Changing the Camera RAW Cache size

That’s it folks, two ways to improve Lightroom performance in your workflow!

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