Well, his is a response to a question posted on the Forum about storage solutions for the traveling photographer.

Portable Hard Drive by tonyhall, on Flickr

thetravelingstach wrote:

“… any insight into storing files that big, en mass, while out on the road? I do a lot of travel photography in some remote places — usually 3 – 8 weeks at a time — and at 48mgs a piece, it seems like I’d be blowing through SDHC cards (in places where I can’t just buy more cards)…”

My answer to this question is based on personal experience and is not a comprehensive review of all the storage solutions for the itinerant photographer.

Dropbox

If you are going to carry your laptop any way as you travel and you are lucky enough to have an internet connection, a great solution is Dropbox. Dropbox is a free service which works like a remote folder much like a folder would be on your desktop.

You can download Dropbox and install it on every machine you own, and it automatically synchronizes every time you are connected to the internet. It works pretty much like a big folder. You can save a lot of files in it, up to 2GB for the free account.

Dropbox allows you to share folders by emailing a link from the Dropbox website to the person with whom you want to share the files in a folder. If that person signs up for the service, you get a referral bonus of 500MB added to your account.

iPhone Dropbox by yto, on Flickr

In my work, I can get files to an editor even when on the road, or across the city, without hassle, so there is this added benefit of having a Dropbox. The only drawback I see with Dropbox is that large files, like submissions of TIFF or Illustrator files, take a long time to synch—sometimes when I am submitting some 16 GB of files, it will take up to two days to synch my folders. But I have never had a problem with Dropbox and it has helped me with storage and space management on the road.

Epson Multimedia Storage Viewers

The Epson multimedia storage viewers have made it possible not to have to bring your laptop on a photo shoot. Epson storage viewers have a double function: as a hard drive (the latest model, the P-7000, has up to 160GB of storage capacity) and as a viewer for after hours editing.

Obviously having that much space allows a lot of mobile storage, and your photos are always with you while you’re on the road. The second advantage, being able to edit after a day’s shoot, means you can free up space on the Epson storage viewer while you are on the road, culling the files that don’t really work, and keeping only those that do.

I have worked with the Epson P-2000 (40GB), P-5000 (80GB), and now have the P-7000 as well. If I am on a very long trip of up to 8 weeks, shooting in RAW and having both the P-5000 and the P-7000 helps to lighten the load on the road. These machines are the size of a thick pocketbook, fitting easily into a side pocket of the camera bag.

dinner’s served (bitches) by limaoscarjuliet, on Flickr

For editing while on the road, the Epson storage viewers are indispensable. The screens are four inches wide, making it easy to see the image versus how it would be on the camera’s LCD. There is a zoom button to check for detail and sharpness.

An added bonus is being able to store a folder that contains portfolio shots in your Epson. Before the iPad, the Epson held my portfolio of 12 signature shots, and allowed me to take it to every place I went. Why is this important? If an opportunity arises for you to show someone work and they hire you, you’re ready with the portfolio if they ask.

These are just two backup solutions when on the road, that worked for me. What’s worked for you?

Aloha Lavina is an Asia based photographer whose photographs have appeared in CNNGo (USA), Canon PhotoYou Magazine (Singapore), Seventeen magazine (USA), Estamos! (Ecuador), The Korea Times (South Korea), and several books. You can see her work at her website, read her articles on her blog or follow her on Twitter.

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The filter that I have come to appreciate more as time passes is the neutral density filter, or, more specifically, the variable neutral density filter.  This puppy can do things for you that will add a completely new dimension to your photography, from landscape to portrait work, which is a pretty broad range.  It is why I refer to it as the Super Filter, and I think it is one filter that should be in every photographer’s bag.

 Variable Neutral Density Filter

The variable neutral density filter  (VND), or sometimes called a Fader ND Filter, is a flexible version of the neutral density filter that allows for the relative density or f stop of the filter to be dialed in variably between 1 and 8  or more stops.  It operates much like a polarizing filter, where the front element of the VND filter is simply turned to reduce the amount of light entering the lens.  The term “Neutral” refers to the fact that the colour of the light is not affected by the filter, only the amount entering the lens.

Variable neutral density filters are not cheap, by any means, but they are well worth the expense.  Prices can range from $30 for a cheaply made one to over $600 for the top of the line model.  The one I purchased has good quality Hoya glass and cost $120.

Using VND filters

Use of neutral density filters is well documented in landscape photography.  They are most frequently used to slow down time exposures, allowing for flowing water to become blurred, or waving grasses to become more etherial.

Use of the neutral density filter in portrait photography, however, is a bit less obvious, until one considers the interplay between flash and ambient lighting.  It is best to illustrate with a simple example:

Portrait use of VND filters

To use this filter effectively in portrait work, we want it to control all of the ambient light in the scene.  In other words we want to ensure that our background does not blow out. Often we want to even underexpose the background while properly exposing our subject with flash.  The most straight forward way to do this is to underexpose the background by either shutting down the aperture or increasing the shutter speed.  Both of these options can work, but will make our flash work a lot harder.  If we want to blur the underexposed background while properly lighting our subject, the process becomes a bit more difficult.

 Sync Speed

Every camera/flash combination has what is termed as the sync speed.  This is the shutter speed that allows the flash to use its maximum output. When using flash you want to generally avoid increasing the shutter speed above its sync speed (usually around 1/250 unless your camera/flash sync speed is higher).  Many modern cameras permit high speed sync with flash, allowing shutter speeds up to 1/8000 s.  While this can sound good in theory, the problem is that once your shutter speed slips into the high-sync flash world, your flash will be putting out less light than at the normal sync speed and working a lot harder.  You may need to use more than one light and/or bring in the light a lot closer than your original plan called for.  At 1/8000s you may well find that you are planting your light beside or up your subject’s right nostril.  In terms of energy efficiency, staying at or below the sync speed is the way to go.

 First Control the Ambient Light

This is where a VND filter can be very handy.  By cutting down on the amount of light entering the camera, we can effectively give ourselves a break on the required lighting power and aperture size we need to expose our subject relative to the background.  Through a bit of experimentation you can adjust the interplay between the camera, filter, and flash settings to get the effect you are looking for.

My youngest son agreed to interrupt his breakfast long enough to pose as my test victim.  In this initial photo I have set the VND filter so that the background is quite dark (about 2 stops down).  The shot is taken with a shutter speed of 1/250 f/22 and my flash is set at iTTL with a +3ev on the flash so that it puts out enough energy to properly expose my subject.

 Get the F Stop You Want

It isn’t a very good attempt.  The small f stop gives me too much depth of field, showing some of the reflections off of the wall in the window.  The flash is really working hard as well at +3ev.  What I really want to do is increase the exposure of the ambient a little bit and blur out the background by reducing the depth of field.  That should also get rid of the pesky reflections in the background.  Fortunately both of these can be accomplished by opening up the aperture to f4.5.

For this shot I turned off the flash to show the effect of opening up the aperture on the exposure, leaving the VND alone.  We can see that our background is at a pleasant, understated exposure and nicely blurred.  We just need to light the boy up.

 Fine Tune Your Flash

Now we have turned the flash back on, but it is still set on a iTTL + 3ev, basically nuking the subject and completely overexposing his cute little face.  Also note that our background has not been affected at all, as we would expect.

Because there are so many moving parts in this type of photography, it is best to work with one variable at a time and adjust the others as we move along.  Now that our shutter speed is set, our ambient lighting is right, and our aperture is giving us the kind of limited depth of field we are looking for, we can begin to pay attention to the final lighting of our subject.

This final test photo was made while “Fabio” here was finishing his breakfast.  The flash compensation was dropped to iTTL 0ev so he no longer glows in the dark and will probably avoid being irradiated enough that he can give me grandchildren someday.

 Conclusion

The use of the VND has given a great deal of flexible options in terms of how to integrate the background  with the subject and the chosen lighting.  It is the Super Filter of photography in my opinion and, for that very reason, will not be far from my side on future shoots, both landscape and portrait.

Doug Pruden is a Calgary portrait photographer and founder of Prairie Light Images. He has had a 43 year passion for photography since he was a lad of 10.  His current emphasis is on portrait and travel photography, both of which he addresses on his blog at his website.  You can find him @prairielight on Twitter or at +Doug Pruden on Google+ .  Please drop in and say hello!

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Gimp – This software is the mother of all free photography software. It does almost everything that Adobe Photoshop does and it is completely open source. There’s even a version that mimics the look of Photoshop so you can get used to it without having a steep learning curve if you have transferred across from PS. This one is a must have.

RAW Therapee – This is a free program to manipulate your RAW images. It has many tools to enhance details, offer control over colour and exposure and offers several option to remove noise from your photos. It also offers batch processing and is well worth a try.

Photoscape – This free photo editing software has a smaller list of option than a program like GIMP, but is still worthwhile checking out for folks who may only need to do a few things to their photos. Some of those options include resizing, brightness and color adjustment, white balance, backlight correction, frames, balloons, mosaic mode, adding text, drawing pictures, cropping, filters, red eye removal and clone stamping.

Helicon – This is full image editing software that allows you to make almost any adjustment to an image that you could think of. It has a step by step workflow feature that will guide you through the whole process.

FastStone – This image software is more designed to be an organiser, but also has a few basic image editing capabilities such as red eye removal, brightness and contrast. Most useful if you’re not looking for a fully optioned piece of editing software, but still want the basics while giving you a convenient way to manage your collections.

ClearskinFX – As the name suggests, this is retouching software that is particularly useful for portrait photographers. Touch up skin tones and blemishes. It smooths the skin of the object while preserving all the details and crispness of hair, eyes or background. Best of all, it’s free.

Picassa – This is a great piece of free software from Google (who liked it so much, they purchased the company!). It is fantastic for organising, tagging, geo-tagging, adding notes and sharing your photos online. It also allows you to make collages and movies of your images as well as backing up your collection in case the unthinkable happens. It also has a function to blog your photos at Blogger.com as well as upload your movies to Youtube. My one small criticism of this software is that it only allows you to upload your images to the Picassa website when I would prefer to use Flickr.

Photozig – This is photo organising software. It allows you to create albums, share images, add music to slide shows and generally share your image collection in new and funky ways.

Light Artist – This program lets you add realistic lighting effects to your images that you may not have been able to capture with the camera. You can modify the light color, add multiple light sources, change the surface qualities of the image and add various ambient illumination effects.

Hugin Panorama Photo Stitcher – As the name suggests, this free software lets you stitch several photographs together to make a panorama. With Hugin you can assemble a mosaic of photographs into a complete immersive panorama, stitch any series of overlapping pictures and much more.

7Zip – If you ever send images electronically by email or whatever, then you know how long it can take just to upload them. This great little program zips up your files so that they aren’t so big and cumbersome to send. This is great when you have to email more than just a couple of images. It also obviously works with zipping up other programs too!

Picnik – This is an incredible and (remarkably) free online image editing tool. Incredibly simple to use, you can simply upload a photo from your computer and then use any number of familiar photo manipulation techniques from simple cropping and rotation through to altering the color and temperature of your shots. If you don’t like downloading large files such as GIMP, then this is definitely going to become one of your favourite sites.

Firefox (with addons for photogs) – If you’re not using Firefox as your default browser, then you should switch as soon as possible. If you’re even remotely interested in photography then you should switch yesterday! Firefox is a photographer’s dream as far as internet browsers go. With so many plugins and addons for photographers it is nothing short of awesome. Here are a few Firefox addons you should download after you get the browser:

• Cooliris – is an incredible way to view photos on the web. So intuitive and easy to use that you will spend hours looking through your old shots as well as exploring other people’s work too.
• Image Zoom – just as the name suggests, allows you to zoom in on images on the web!
• Flickr Sidebar – lets you search and interact with Flickr from a sidebar in your browser. Very hand and a great time saver.
• Auto Slideshow – lets you go straight into a slide show of all of the images on a webpage with a single click. Great for browsing photographer’s websites not to mention Flickr sets and collections.
• ResizeR – just as the name suggests, you can resize images straight from your web browser.
• Picnik – makes importing images into the online Picnik service easier and even more streamlined.

Irfanview -  This is a very fast and light graphic viewer for windows that many photographers use because it is not as heavy as other larger programs and therefore runs faster. It has most of the main options of many other graphic manipulation programs too. Some of the more useful ones include

• Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
• Batch conversion (with image processing)
• Change color depth
• Scan (batch scan) support
• Cut/crop
• Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
• Lossless JPG rotation
• Many hotkeys
• Many PlugIns

This one is worth checking out if you want a basic program that runs really fast!

Faststone Image Resizer – This is another small and fast program that can do a lot of the common tasks that photographers want. According to the developers it is “intended to enable users to convert, rename, resize, crop, rotate, change color depth, add text and watermarks to images in a quick and easy batch mode. Drag and Drop mouse operation is well supported.”

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photo © 2010 Dave Mott | more info (via: Wylio)

IEXIF – IEXIF is a free Firefox plugin which allows you to view the camera data for any image that has it. This is useful for the photographer who sees an image and thinks “wow, I’d really like to know how to re-create this effect.” Trouble is, EXIF data is commonly stripped from a photo during post processing, so there may be some limitations to this plugin. The determined or creative photography enthusiast, however, should have no problems!

DreamsTime.com Photography Finder – This plugin is a type of search for graphics and photos from the DreamsTime website. It’s a quick and easy way to find stock photography when you need it, without all the hassle of opening yet another tab. The only limitation with this addon is it only searches the DreamsTime site, not the whole web.

TinEye – TinEye is another search plugin. But unlike most of your “typical” search plugins, TinEye is made specifically for photos. To use, simply right-click on the image and a menu opens to allow you to find not only where the picture originated, but also if modified and higher resolution versions exist. This is a very powerful tool that no addict should be without.

Browser Backgrounds – With this one, you can add any photo you’d like from your PC or the internet and set it as your browser background. This is a great way to customize your browser with your favorite photography work. Talk about inspiration on demand!

ImageExchange – ImageExchange is a plugin which will let you quickly discover an image’s license properties. Learn if an image is open for use or who you can contact to license any image you wish for lots of creative reasons. It’s a great tool to use in conjunction with the Google image search, as you practically have the whole Internet in pictures at your disposal.

The Ultimate Free Stock Photo Search Tool –  plugin has a very large name to live up to and luckily, it does so very well. With this addon, you can very easily search for free stock images from over 200 stock image websites. It isn’t just limited to photos, either. You can find clipart, vectors, and many more types of images with this free tool. This I perfect for so many reasons!

Nachofoto – Think of Nachofoto as Digg for your favorite images. These bookmarks of your favorite images are organized in a visual view, so you can come back and sift through them much more easily. The best part of organizing these “in the cloud” is your collection can be accessed from any computer, anywhere.

Whether it’s to search for, share or simply enjoy photos on a constant basis, a customized Firefox browser is the perfect options for us addicts.

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1. virtualPhotographer by optikVerve Labs

For those who haven’t grasped all the nooks and crannies of Photoshop yet, or simply don’t want to spend hours tweaking an image, virtualPhotographer is a simple plugin that has over 200 presets for you to apply to your images. There is also a very nifty split-screen preview function that allows you to see the before-and-after of your edit.

2. SuperPNG by fnord

This incredible plugin works with Photoshop to process and save PNG files much faster, and also saves them in a smaller size. If you work with PNG files often but dread the amount of time it takes to process them, then this plugin is for you.

3. Curves by Mehdi

If you haven’t mastered the idea behind curves yet, this plugin has eight common presets to select from, allowing you to choose which one compliments your photo the best.

4. B/W Conversion by photo-plugins.com

While you can change your image to black and white in Photoshop, this plugin takes it a step further by allowing you to select presets that imitate the common tonal effects of popular black and white films. Those who have an appreciation for black and white analog photography will enjoy this versatile plugin.

5. Local Contrast Enhancement by photo-plugins.com

Another great resource from photo-plugins.com, this Photoshop plugin allows you to accurately increase the contrast without losing too much detail. The effects from this are more representative of an image sharpening plugin rather than a contrast adjustment, but it still works nicely as it can also help clear up any “cloudiness” in your photo. Before-and-after samples are available on their website linked above.

6. Photomatic by Cybia Software

This Photoshop file has 8 different plugins in one, ranging from a night-vision effect to replicating the fast, grainy effects of b/w film. You may not find use for all of the plugins, but it’s definitely a great collection to experiment with.

7. Grain Generator by Richard Rosenman

A fully customizable grain producer that also looks fantastic on color images. Richard also has many other free Photoshop plugins on his download page.

8. Hot Pixel by Red Paw Media

If you’re a digital photographer, then you’ve encountered the annoying hot pixels that plague long exposures, especially taken in low-light situations. This handy plugin can automatically detect and remove those hot pixels without having to use your clone stamp or healing brush.

9. Wire Worm by MV’s Plugins

Personally, I can’t wait to use this plugin. If you have outdoor images spoiled with telephone wires draping across your skyline, then this tool will help you remove them without spending hours with your clone stamp. The best part about this plugin is that it has unlimited undo/redo and advanced color matching for seamless patches.

10 . Plug-In Switch by Cybia Software

With all your new plugins, you need a seamless way to organize them before things get out of control. This plugin is actually an application that organizes your existing plugins by allowing you to disable and enable them with a single click, which will cut down on your PS desktop clutter.

Read more great articles by Christopher O’Donnell at his blog or follow him on Facebook.

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Smush.it is a great little web based utility that is of enormous benefit to photographers with a lot of large and heavy images on their website. It simply takes the photo and reproduces it with no loss of aesthetic, but at a smaller file size. As you can imaging, on an image heavy website, this can lead to significant savings in loading time (and means people will be more likely to stick around to see what you have to offer as a photographer). All you need to do is input the URLs of the images you want to streamline like this:

Click on the ‘Smush’ button and you get this:

Then you just right click on the image link, save it and upload it in place of your original heavy, slow-loading image. Now, if you’re even more determined to make your photography site faster, you can download this great little Firefox Plug-in which incorporates Smush.It, but also analyses other parts of a website to determine how it can be made to load faster.

With photography websites, however, the largest issue is usually going to be large image file sizes. The aim of any photographer’s website is to get eyeballs on photos.

Smush.It helps make that a little easier and more likely.

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