The annual CAEN summer picnic was a great success again. With Dave, John, and Reed manning a very tasty grill and some beautiful weather, everyone had a great time.
More pictures can be found here.
Kevin and Tina graciously allowed me to invade their home on Super Bowl Sunday and destroy their basement in order to create a makeshift studio (and then watch the best Super Bowl in memory). We lit everyone up with umbrellas, softboxes and reflectors and used a couple different background.
Despite some difficulties with one my Cactus remotes (the Poverty Wizards), I think the shoot went well. Tried a couple different lighting schemes (blowing out the background and some clamshell beauty lighting on Marissa). Overall, was quite happy with how everything turned out.
Here's a slideshow of the best shots of the day. Definitely best viewed full-screen - there is a button in the bottom right-hand side of the slideshow window.
It is still cold; thankfully we can stay inside and make some pictures. I cleared out our dining room and created a temporary studio with a long piece of white felt and 3 strobes, an umbrella and a reflector. Was pretty happy w/ how everything turned out and in the process, learned a couple things. This was a trial run for some family portraits we did the next day.
Here's a slideshow of a few of the portraits.
It's cold in Michigan right now. Crazy cold. However, several of us decided to put on some warm clothes and head to Plymouth for the annual ice carving festival there. Cameras in hand, we wandered about, shooting what we could before deciding some warmth was required. After dinner, we went back out and both Andy, Lisa, and Chris were kind enough to hold some flashes while I shot some images (thanks to you all!). Ended up being pretty happy with what we took.
Here's a slideshow of some of the ice sculptures we photographed.
After my backup disk died several months ago, I've been living on borrowed time. With a growing photo library (not to mention music and movies), it was time to get some storage.
The drobo, for those who haven't heard of it, provides an expandable storage without the management problems of a traditional RAID. It holds up to 4 disks (you'll need at least 2 for data protection), has a USB2 and Firewire 800 interfaces (use the 800 for better performance), and works with OSX, Linux, and Windows. You can start w/ any sizes of disks and the drobo will figure out how to provide the most data storage it can while giving you the protection of having a single drive failure. Very flexible; very cool.
The beauty of the system is the drobo can present to your computer a filesystem that is bigger than it really is. Why would you want to do that? With a normal RAID system, in order to expand it, you would need to move all of your data somewhere else, replace all of the drives to a bigger size, recreate the filesystem, then move your data back on. More of a hassle than it needs to be (and who has a few terabytes sitting around idle anyway?). With the drobo, you specify a filesystem size (say 16 terabytes) and that is what your computer will see. Starting filling up the drobo and it will tell you when the system is getting too full AND which drive you should replace. Start out small, wait for the big drives to start coming down in price (they always do), and replace your smaller drives on the cheap. Expandable storage with minimal fuss.
One last note - on the website, you can see how much usable storage you'll have with any combination of drives, using Data Robotics' Drobolator. A pretty useful tool to get a sense of how it works.
You can buy a drobo directly from Data Robotics, but I found mine cheaper on Amazon. Through the end of January, there is an additional $50 rebate.
It was a good Christmas in Grand Rapids. Everyone traveled to my parent's house for a couple of days of good food, game playing and of course, a little photography. The Grand Rapids Art Museum had a exhibition of Richard Avedon, so we all packed into the car and headed downtown (highly recommended if you're in the area).
A slideshow of the holiday festivities.
My friends Rod and Tara invited me over to make a few images of Isabella for a Christmas card. Even though she was sick, she was quite the trooper, esp. with having a flash going over every 30 seconds. Was fun, but shooting babies is hard - they don't sit still very long. Needed a robotic baby-tracking lightstand :)
Here are the best images on flickr.
