Back in April last year, I collaborated with Yorkshire Brides magazine on a bridal fashion photo shoot at Rise Hall towards the East Yorkshire Coast. I was so excited and honoured to be involved in this project as up to that point, no other wedding photography shoots had taken place there.
If you watch the TV, you will no doubt know that Rise Hall is Sarah Beeny’s home and she has undertaken the mammoth task of renovating The Hall to hold weddings of distinction at the property. When we arrived to shoot 8 different gowns with 2 fantastic models, there was still lots of work to be done at The Hall but the rooms that were finished made the most amazing environment to create the images that you see below. Unfortunately, we couldn’t use most of the images that I am now able to show due to TV rights issues which arose after the shoot was complete, but now enough time has passed and i am really proud to share these images – I hope you like them – Rise Hall is a credit to East Yorkshire and I’m sure once fully operational, will be THE destination for discerning couples from all over the country. If you’d like to see more of my work at REAL weddings, please take a look at my portfolio.
Many of you will know that I spent the best part of 10 years living between the States and Canada in my younger years (I’ve now been home from that jaunt for almost 7 years but it only feels like yesterday that I returned). The last part of my time was spent in Montreal in the province of Quebec and it was here that I really started to develop my photographic career. When I first arrived in the city, I was definitely of the ‘starving artist’ community and needed to work to pay the bills as I was assisting photographers on weekends. So – I washed windows! It was definitely one of the most interesting periods of my life so far and I met some of the most incredible people who i worked with. One of my ‘Vision Brothers’ was the amazingly talented musician Jon Cohen who at that time was involved with a band called Launie Anderssohn - they had the craziest show I had ever seen and I loved photographing them back in the film days with 3200 speed TMax – grain like the size of golf balls!
I didn’t really stay in touch with Jon, but through the power of Facebook, we connected a couple of years back and I was watching his musical progression from afar. When I saw that Jon was bringing his show to Europe and that he would be visiting Manchester I knew I had to hook up with him. I travelled over to Manchester and met Jon about 7pm and he went on at 9.45 at a venue called The Castle Hotel an amazing ‘proper’ pub that’s just been lovingly restored and has a really great concert room.
I wanted to pay homage to the pictures I had made of Jon 10 years ago in Montreal so got my head into a very ‘film based’ mind set and Jon gave me a superb photographic opportunity. His act is basically a one man band for the modern generation, spanning at least 15 different instruments that I saw. His energy was almost overwhelming and his musical abilities uncompromising - this was a show that challenged the audience in a very positive way and I’ll never forget the performance and I hope the images convey a little bit of the magic I winessed. Jon is basically self funding his curent 3 month tour and it is this courage and musical commitment that I so admire in people like Jon. He’s keeping a tour diary as he travels which makes for a great read, it’s archived at www.thejcex.com
If you read my blog on a regular basis, you know the majority of my content is based on weddings and commercial jobs I shoot around the Yorkshire region. Today I’m writing for the wider photographic community about photographers’ backup strategies so if ‘tech-geekery’ is not your thing then please tune in after the weekend for more of what you already enjoy reading! However, as Yorkshire Wedding Photographer the topic of today’s post is really important and one that I have been meaning to talk about for some time.
Clients often ask me about my backup strategy, especially wedding clients, and without going into too much detail I explain that backup and the redundancy plan of those backups will mean that I will always have a minimum of 3 copies of a wedding or commercial job to rely on in the event of a disaster. Disasters do happen and those disasters come in all manner of forms from natural phenomenon such as fire, electrical failure and flooding through to simple human error such as driving over a laptop – yes this has happened to me! Having worked as a photographer for over 10 years now, I have been very secure with my backup strategy, it was much different back in the days of film when there would only ever be one set of negatives so they ALWAYS lived in a fire proof safe but digital images allow me to easily make copies – so I do and in copious amounts!
What follows is an explanation of my backup strategy that I use day in day out and it helps me sleep very easily at night.
In the field I use (A) Sandisk Ultra II 4 gb compact flash cards in my Nikon D700 cameras. I never use cards bigger than this because if a card fails, is lost or stolen at least I have a job spread over a number of cards and all would not be lost. At a typical wedding I shoot at least 24-30 gigs (that’s around 2500 images) so if I shot 16gb cards, the stakes would be a lot higher! Once I have filled a card up, I then copy it in the field to 2 devices at the same time (B) A Jobo Giga One digital Wallet and a (C) MacBook Pro The digital wallet originally shipped with a 40gb hard drive but I have modded it with a larger 160gb drive to get more stuff on it. Once the wedding or the job is finished and I have backed up the whole collection, i will drive home with the Macbook and my assistant will drive home with the digital wallet so that we have at least 2 sets in different locations at all times.
Once I get home, I then connect the Macbook to a (D) 4 TB external hard drive and make another copy which stays at my house and that drive never leaves home. So at this point I have 4 copies of every job I do – you may think it’s overkill, but storage space is cheap and I like to sleep soundly at night! The next stage of the strategy takes place at my office where I hook up the Macbook via a Gigabit ethernet Switch to my (E) iMac which then takes all of the images and copies onto a (F) Verbatim 2TB Raid hard drive system Raid drives are awesome! in layman’s terms, a RAID is basically 2 separate hard drives that are configured to mirror each other (they can be set in other configurations, but the most secure method is mirroring) so once I copy onto the RAID I am effectively getting 2 separate copies. Should one of the drives in the array go down, I receive an email notification and all I have to do is replace the faulty drive and the system then builds another backup from the healthy disk. So this is my ‘live drive’ now propagated with the job I have just shot and I now have 6 copies, 2 of which are off site. The last step in my strategy is to backup my live drive and my archive drive on a regular basis via a (G) Hard Drive dock. This device allows me to hot swap hard drives without a caddy and so at least once or twice a week I bring drives that I keep offsite to the office and make backups of my ‘live drive’ and my ‘archive’ drive. Should I ever have a data disaster, I’m now confident that my work is safe and I would be able to work off offsite drives. Just to seal the deal I also have Time Machine set up on my MacBook Pro and IMac so I think I’ve got all the bases covered with the copies.
Some people may ask where do writable DVDs come into the workflow? Well to be honest, I stopped using them at the start of last year’s wedding season after reading a lot about how the format degrades over time so I made the decision to stop making DVD copies. I’m actually really happy about that because writing disks was a really lengthy operation after a 12 hour wedding shoot!
This discussion has been about my digital assets and how I look after them, but I do want to talk briefly about my website and how I deal with it’s security/backup as I did have a website ‘infraction’ before Christmas which led to a loss of service for a few days. My website is built on the WordPress platform and although WordPress is one of the world’s most popular CMS systems, it needs a lot of ‘tweaking’ to make it secure and robust. My web consultant has installed several security plugins which protect against various types of web-borne threats bit I also make sure I have my own copy of my website available should anything happen. Of course my web host takes daily backups but they can be difficult to deploy should they be needed on a weekend or evening, therefore I have a plugin installed which makes regular backups of my WordPress installation and files to a cloud based solution called Sugarsync. I can now re-deploy my website from a clean copy should it get attacked and my down time will be minimised.
So, I hope some of you out there found this blog interesting, I know it’s not the most rock ‘n’ roll topic in the world but I guess I wouldn’t be very rock ‘n’ roll if I lost somebody’s wedding! I’m hoping that this post might start a bit of a debate, if it does I’m hoping there’s more for me to learn!
As a commercial photographer in Yorkshire, I cover a wide range of subjects and assignments throughout the Yorkshire region and beyond. One of my clients is Comic Relief and this is the time of year when I start to work closely with them on their annual campaign. I’ve met and photographed some amazing people whilst doing this work and seen first hand how funds raised by the charity directly affects the people that benefit from it.
Today I was in Leeds City Centre photographing the Fantastic Trishool Indian Dance Academy as they prepared to take part in the Sport Relief Mile coming up not too long from now. The images needed to communicate the fun nature of the Group and also their commitment to the cause of the charity so that others will get on board to support. The team were so energetic and brought lots of their own ideas to explore so the session was a blast. The images have been transmitted to all the regional press in the North and lots of them had committed to run the story at the time of writing this blog article.
Pictures tell a story and stories sell a message, I always need to stay on brand and on message when working for a corporate client and I really enjoy working in this focused way.
So, I’m fully back in the swing of things at Insight HQ after the Xmas and New Year break. Lots of developments going on and new projects being explored, more news on them in the next couple of weeks but I can definitely say that a Fine Art exhibition is in the planning for the end of the Winter and will be really excited to share the details once they are nailed down.
For now, I’d like to share some wedding images from a couple of years ago which I just stumbled back across. Rob and Emma were married at The Millhouse Restaurant during September of 2009 and i blogged their story here. Emma recently got in touch to order some more prints from their collection to decorate their new house and although I hadn’t forgotten how great their images looked, I was really glad to revisit them. I hope you like!
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