My wife and I were recently over in Amsterdam for a quick weekend getaway. We had been trying to pick a new place to go for a weekend citybreak and after flipping a coin on places we hadnt been before – Amsterdam won the toss!

All I can say is WOW what a great city to visit, everything has this really great vibe about it! From the moment we arrived (which happened to be around 6am thanks to RyanAir) till we left, we felt strangely comfortable in a city neither of us at had ever been to. While there, I managed to spare a bit of time to get a few shots of the city – and of course, as everyone knows, there if there is one thing that there are plenty of in Amsterdam, its the bicycle!

Anyway we had a great time and if you are ever considering which city you want a quick (or long) break away in – you can’t go wrong with Amsterdam!

So like most bloggers (apart from the professional ones of course!) my blog has had a period of relative inactivity. Unfortunately I have been caught up in all the activities that come with running 3 technology companies. Then in the evenings and weekends my time is spent with my wife and son. We also have a new baby due in April, so I think that the situation may not be about to get any better soon!

Anyway for the first time in probably 3 months (gasp, has it been that long?) I picked up my camera on the weekend to take some pictures that are not entirely personal – but i wont go into that now – and have a few posted below of a new doberman puppy (well not new born puppy but she is 4 months old) below. It was great to be out in the spring sunshine just playing around with camera a bit. As you can tell, I have tweaked some of the photos in lightroom a little -  but I liked the results.

All of these were shot with my A550 with a Sigma 70-300mm APO lens which I am starting to consider as one of my favourite lenses. Anyway have a look and see how they turned out!

I was in the health clinic at the Dungarvan hospital today and saw the bright spring sun powering it’s way into one of the rooms. There was even an old fashioned spot light to add to the retro scene! I couldnt resist but grab a quick shot!

Dungarvan Hospital room in the spring.

As I learn more about photography, I realise more and more that the secret to a great image is obviously being in the right place, at the right time, in the right light, with a camera! But even more than that and I know that this has been said before, it is about really seeing the world around you, because there are literally hundreds of great photographs all around us all the time, but it takes a bit of creativity and imagination to actually see them.

Thats why, the image above might not appear to be a particularyly great shot, but for me it was a realisation of this fact and something that hopefully will allow me to see more of these “photographs”  in my daily life.

How do you back up your images? Do you back up your images?

I think it is Ron Brinkmann (@ronbrinkmann) from This Week in Photography who always says

“If your data doesnt exist in three places, then it doesnt exist”

I like this statement and it goes along with the way I like to think about my data or images and how i manage the storage of them. Today, with everything moving to digital – from movies to photos to music to documents, we all accumalate a lot of important digital information! So just like the old days – in order to keep our information and in this case our images safe and secure, we need to make sure that we have multiple copies of them, just in case something goes wrong and we lose the only copy we have.

Now you dont need anything as extreme as a house fire to lose your information, it could be as simple as someone stealing your laptop or home computer or even you editing an image and saving over the original and not being able to go back! So what we need to do is make sure firstly that we have more than one copy of our important information and secondly (even better) if we can have a copy that is offsite or not in the same location as the other copies (a backup is no good if it is sitting next to your computer if there is a fire or theft).

There are plenty of back up options out there, and there are even some that are on your computer by default – but I am going to talk about a free (for home users) application that I use, that will work across all operating systems – Crashplan. Crashplan is great because it automates your backups  on a daily basis and allows you to backup to either a locally attached hard drive, your friends computer or Crashplan’s own “in the cloud” storage (which is a paid for service based on how much you store with them).

I use the local backup and backup to a friend option, which means I can backup to a friend’s computer and in turn, let them back up to my computer which gets me around the whole “offsite data” element of disaster recovery. This is great if you know any other photographers or even another family member who is looking to back up their data offsite. Whats even better is the security – your back is encrypted at source (so as you back it up) so no matter where it is, it is secure. You can even do the first back up (called a seed back up) locally and then take this to your friends house on a removable hard drive so that your first back up wont take forever. Then only the changes and updates going forward will be synchronised securely across the internet between your computers.

Here is a quick schematic of my back up workflow:

As you can see above, my computer has RAID storage which keeps two copies of every file on my storage drive, just incase one of the main hard drives fails. This is probably an overkill for most people and just having a local backup and an offsite copy will suffice for 95% of photographers out there!

Anyway the message is, however you do it – make sure you backup, backup and backup! As per usual, if you have any questions – drop me a mail or fill out the contact form!

I am sure very few people read the terms and conditions before registering on a website or entering a competition – I know I dont normally. A few weeks ago I saw a tweet from #ScottBourne on twitter that pointed to the facebook T&C’s and the fact that :

“For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.”

Now it looks like the above T&C’s have recently changed, because the cancellation of the license is now effective if you remove your IP from facebook or close your account and also it now appears the permission is based to your privacy settings. However while the content is up there there is still a full license being granted to facebook to reuse your content as needed.

When I read the above I was a bit annoyed, but I dont tend to post many photographs on facebook and those that I do, would not be my “photography” photos if you know what I mean. My “photography” images are shared either on my website or over on flickr – which has a T&C of service which depending on the licensing model you choose on your account, is pretty good. Recently I was invited to join the Fotovotr group on flicker and then invited to join fotovotr.com which is a website that allow you to vote on images using your flickr account – at the end of each week there are leaderboards which show you the top 15 images of the week, as voted by the users.

This is all good and I was using the service for just over a week, when I was invited to submit photos for Fotovotr to create an online memory game. Being an amateur photographer I was initially delighted at being asked and immediately decided to take part in the new venture. I dont know what caused me to do it, but as I was signing up for the new application I decided to check the terms and conditions of the Fotovotr service and there in the middle I found a the nasty bit:

“You represent that Your User Content is wholly original to You and that You exclusively own the rights to Your User Content, including the right to grant all rights and licenses in these Terms of Service without Provider incurring any third party obligations or liability arising out of its exercise of the rights thereto granted herein by You. You grant to Provider the unrestricted, unconditional, unlimited, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive, irrevocable right and license to use, exhibit, broadcast, copy, reproduce, publish, distribute, encode, compress, encrypt, incorporate data into, edit, rebroadcast, transmit, record, publicly display, publicly perform and create derivate works from or otherwise exploit in any manner whatsoever, all or any portion of Your User Content to which You have contributed, for any purpose, commercial or otherwise, an unlimited number of times, in any and all media, now known or hereafter devised, throughout the world in perpetuity and without any compensation to You.”

Now I am not a solicitor, but the bold section above certainly sounds to me like I have effectively lost control of my images and they can do with them what they wish and there is nothing that I can do about it! I was quite shocked and immediately went to the “My Account” section of the website to see if I could delete my account because I wanted nothing more to do with Fotovotr. The thing is, there is no way to delete your account. So I ended up emailing them directly and requesting that my account be deleted on the grounds that I object to their terms and conditions. To their credit they carried this out quite swiftly and thanked me for my input to that point. The only thing I wonder about now, is the fact that I imagine even with the deletion of my account, they probably still retain all those rights to the images I had already posted to their competitions!

Moral of the story? I know they are boring and tedious, but at least glance over the T&C’s of any site or organisation you are submitting your images to, or you might find out the hard way that you have lost control of them!

I have recently taken the plunge and moved from my old image management software to Adobe’s new Lightroom 3 product. Now I have yet to delve into the software due to current time constraints, but what I have seen so far has been incredible. There are so many great features that I have discovered so far such as:

• Great UI
• Powerful Develop Module
• Simple file and image management
• Searchability and keyword / META embedding
• Presets (only just touched this powerful feature and am seriously impressed)

All this after only 4 or 5 hours tinkering. Best thing for me – no need to goto Photoshop, 95% of image processing can all be done here in one place!

Here are three quick pictures that I was working with some of the presets on: