Shout out for ThinkTank Photo !

09. September 2015 · Comments Off on Shout out for ThinkTank Photo ! · Categories: equipment · Tags: , ,
ThinkTank backpack holding down the tripod

I have to write this post!  I have a ThankTank Airport Addicted (no longer made) that I love as a camera backpack!  I’m guessing that the closest one today is the Airport Accelerator.  There are several fundamental themes as to why I love my ThinkTank products (I also have a large sling bag from them).

  • ThinkTank Photo

    ThinkTank Photo

  • ThinkTank Photo

    ThinkTank Photo

  1. They work!  I have acquired and given away probably half a dozen different camera backpacks over the years.  They all seemed good initially, but with a little use I found issues with each in turn.  My Airport backpack from ThinkTank is the exception.
    1. As an ex backpacking guide, I know how a backpack should fit and feel, what works and doesn’t work for carrying weight on the back (and glass weighs a lot).  The Airport backpack does a great job in meeting the backpack requirement!
    2. It holds lots of stuff!  My sister says that there are two types of backpackers; those who only pack what they can carry, and those that pack what they want and then learn to carry it.  I am of the later variety.  For some trips (like when I am leading a photo day hike) I will often only fill half of it with camera gear, and then put jackets, food, water, first aid in the other half.  (and that still leaves me with tripod, 500mm, 100-400, and 24-105 lens. and filters).
    3. Usability. Some of the camera backpacks were nothing more than large bags that required rummaging around in to find things without any padding.  Others had so much padding and dividers that there was no room for anything.  The Airport backpack is a great compromise between protection, space, and access.   Access on some of the backpacks was very cumbersome and only place that they could be unpacked was the living room floor, not so with my Airporter.
    4. Incidentally nice things:  It does fit in the overhead of all but the small regional jets.  I have added a small carabiner to the top handle (it has handles in places to make it easy to carry as a suitcase) so that I can hang it from my tripod when things are windy (Oh, and I can still get in it).
  2. The second reason that I love my ThinkTank is because of how they treat their customers. Three or four years ago, after I had had the backpack for 3 or 4 years one of the plastic buckles broke.  REI did not have one that would fit as a replacement after buying several and trying.  So, I contacted ThinkTank and they sent me a replacement buckle free.  More recently, I lost (I don’t know how) half of the belly band.  I contacted ThinkTank again and they mailed a replacement half out right away along with a new buckle so that I could make sure that the buckle would match. Again at no charge.  I compare this to one of the camera day packs I had that had fraying seams at the the end of a few months of use…

So, based on my two products and my experiences with ThinkTank I happily recommend their equipment !  Next time you are in the need of some type of camera related container take a look at their equipment.

PS.   this blog is purely spontaneously written and is not a quid pro quo for anything from ThinkTank.

Below are some places the Airport backpack has been.  The only place it was a problem were some of the tight slot canyons.

detail- adding a catch light in the eyes

Waking grizzly

Arches National Park

Arches National Park

Escalante

Escalante

_MG_21-30_PA

Males seeing who is more dominant

Elephant Seals,Piedras Blancas

Eastern Sierra,Fall Colors,Sierra,Sierra Nevada,aspens,tree]

Eastern Sierra,Fall Colors,Sierra,Sierra Nevada,aspens,tree]

Fall Colors

Fall Colors

Back it up!

05. September 2015 · Comments Off on Back it up! · Categories: Backups, Taking care · Tags:
Photos I would not want to lose, therefore backups
Photos I would not want to lose, therefore backups

Skateboarder on a pipe, Santa Cruz

Back it up! -Backups save the soul

There is this awful feeling – you put your heart and soul in to creating a set of photos, only to have them gone for some technical reason.  Backups tend to minimize this. When people have to evacuate their homes, almost always they take their family photos.  How important are your photos? What are you doing about it?  Remember Murphy was an optimist; the gremlins will show up at some point, it is just a question of when….

Photos I would not want to lose, therefore backups

Photos I would not want to lose, therefore backups

Let’s contemplate the uncomfortable and look at where things might go wrong.

Photos I would not want to lose, therefore backups

Pre sunrise Yosemite valley

  • In the camera: I had a compact flash go bad after  a weekend of shooting it was 128 GB so that it held the whole weeks worth of shooting.  Yes the manufacturer replaced it for me, but the weekend was lost and could not be recovered.  This is an uncommon event, but it did happen.  I now have a camera that puts the photos on 2 memory cards, not one.
  • Between shooting and home: This area is high risk, the number of things that could go wrong are large
    • Camera stolen or lost (or the storage is stolen or lost)
    • Accidentally deleting  the photos to make more room
    • Images get corrupted on the media
    • I’m sure your mind can create many more scenarios.
    • I have a Hyperdrive  device that I use to make a copy of the photos after I take them so that I have yet another copy of the photos.  This way if I am tired and goof, I have that much more of a safety net under me.
  • Once at home we can in tiredness fat finger and delete the wrong files or the wrong directories.  I have done this one too…
  • Somewhere down the line the disk crashes and photos are lost.  This has happened several times over the years – shame on me
  • There is an earthquake, fire, tornado, etc and the computer is lost with all of the photos.
Photos I would not want to lose, therefore backups

Sunrise in fog

Although there are two general themes to the losses, external cause, and user error, the net result in both case loss of the photos. Each of us needs to decide what is it worth to have backups of the photos.  There are a variety of solutions with pros and cons.  Below are some of the ones that I am familiar with, this is not to say that there are similar or possibly better solutions, just the ones I am familiar with.

Photos I would not want to lose, therefore backups

Wind Turbine

  • Hyperdrive is a nice solution to make a copy of your media while you are in the field, and potentially allow you to re use your media.  It is easy to use and very reliable.  The only downside is that media are getting larger faster than disk space is,  so my 128 GB camera media now can only be saved 4 times in my 500 GB Hyperdrive.  The only risk is being tired and deleting something you didn’t want to delete.
  • Local raid array on computer.  Although this sounds nice, having tried the computer’s raid option twice on different computers, I have found that this is a false sense of security. In each case when there were computer problems the raid array was corrupted  and the photos lost, not because of disk problems, but that the solution was not very reliable.
  • Dedicated hardware raid array.  This requires that you are comfortable working on the insides of a computer so is not for everyone.  I like the solution.  There is potentially a significant outlay of $$$ for the solution in buying the controller, the disks, a good UPS system.  I have found from using this solution that it is vulnerable to power fluctuations and having a UPS  goes a long ways towards decreasing disk failures.
  • Synology NAS solution.   This is a box that sits next to the computer and is connected to the computer with a network cable.  It is easy to use and install. It does require buying the hard disks separately.  I have used a variety of hard drive and vendors over the years as I keep increasing the size of my storage.  I am very happy with Western Digial Red drives.  They have been the most reliable drives that I have ever had.
  • And finally BackBlaze, this is an online backup solution.  If there were a fire, I need an off site copy of the photos. I have looked at several online solutions for backing up photos and with the exception of Backblaze not been happy with the solutions.  Often they become very expensive to store photos (figure 10TB of data), or they rate limit how quickly I can upload data (so that once beyond a threshold there is no more data uploaded.  Backblaze is very reasonable at $5/month, nor do they rate limit the upload, which is good, because it still takes a long time to load that much data across the net.
Photos I would not want to lose, therefore backups

Reflections at Yosemite

I would recommend a Synology  solution and Backblaze solution for anyone looking  at backup solutions.   If you don’t have an an automatic method now, you will have some soul pain in the future.