Australia doe not have many snowfields and high country, I am sooooo lucky I live close to them. I popped up there the other day and captured this photo.
Do you know where this is? and if so what do you think of the place?
Even as a photographer the search for space is always present.
We take hundreds of thousands of photos each year to ensure you can store all those images in a safe and secure environment where you also cater for things like fire, and hard drive failures, the best friend you have is a NAS (Network Attached Storage).
For those that are not sure what NAS is, it is effectively a heap of hard drives that you would normally have in your computer, added together to create mass storage. The other key with this type of mass storage is that you combine hard drives together and they appear as if they are one hard drive so you don’t have to worry about smaller hard drives to store large amounts of files.
The other great thing and the reason why you should invest in a NAS if you have not already, si they offer security over hard drive failure.
What I mean by this, is depending on how you configure your NAS you can have 1 or even 2 hard drives fail and all your data and files remain. So all you do is buy a new drive put it in the NAS and away you go.
How cool is that!?
I have used NAS to store all my photos for years and here is the problem with a NAS.
As you fill up your drives you have to upgrade your hard drives to bigger ones, which is exactly what I have been doing over the last week. To be honest, has been a bit overdue but the cost of replacing l the drives has made me put it off for as long as I could.
Now the new drives are in and I have a heap of space once again, it’s time to start filling them up with the idea that I won’t run out of space.
Oh, the other thing about the NAS I have, is that it automatically backs up to an off-site backup so if my building burns down, I will always have a copy of the photos and can retrieve and continue on with no only minor interruptions.
win-win I say.
One of the things we really don’t do enough of is “Challenge Ourselves”
When I say challenge ourselves I mean both mentally, physically, and emotionally.
It’s one of those things we generally only do when we have to, most of us don’t chase the challenge or go to the edge of where we feel comfortable.
There are many ways in which we can challenge ourselves.
The photo above was the start of a hike and weekend camp which I can safely say that 99% of people that live in Australia will never do.
Like really what person in their right mind would go hiking and camping after a blizzard in the Kosciuszko National Park? hahahahaha
TBH – The hike on snowshoes was amazing, the countryside was even better. THE LIFE EXPERIENCE IS PRICELESS!
Let’s fast forward to today, given the blizzard conditions over the last few days and snow falling In Canberra not to mention so early in the ski season, my question is.
If your dream was to walk up to the top of Mt Kosciusko and this weekend was the only time you had the opportunity, what would you do so you could achieve your dreams this weekend given the environmental factors?
Between the light and the dark, there is the middle ground where things can seem like they on a tipping point.
The same is true with your photography where some days your confidence is smashed like a grape at the bottom of the barrel under someone’s foot as they stand on you to make wine.
The trick I have found over photographing for many years is to try and look at things differently. Take this photo for example. This was a photo I took some time ago and left it there until I thought of a concept to bring it to life, and with that open the old photograhy cabmnet, dragged it out while blowing the dust from it to give it a dual look and feel.
I wanted it to have a dark feeling with the image giving the impression that no matter which way she went it wasn’t going to end well.
From one side the blue represents the dark emotional state we all often find ourselves in, while the red in front of her was put there to give the impression that going forward was leading into the fire and so she sits. Stale and stranded at the bottom of the stairs with no place to go.
The original photo was taken with an Elinchrom ranger pack placed at the top of the stairs to give her some shadows and to highlight her body while also hiding her face.
You can move the slider to see the before and after. 🙂
AFTER
BEFORE
One thing I do know is that if you don’t continue to educate yourself and actively go out and learn things you will never grow.
You become stale and the passion moves away.
For me, I am active in many areas of my life but I must admit that my photoshop in the creative sense has not been one of the things I have been pushing so given today was a cold day outside I got messing around some photos, this being one of them.
This was a photo I took of a model a bit ago and have had it sitting in the dusty draw to one day play around with it. Well, I guess today was that day.
When I took this photo I wanted it to be something that I can use in many different photos as the pose the model was in as I think you can agree is very generic with lots of ideas..
I mashed the photo of her with some other images and with the help of Photoshop I came up with something very different.
As with other images of this type they really don’t start with an end and just form along the way.
I am sure I will do a few more of her in different areas and scenes but really wanted to play around with fire and smoke.
This brings me to my first point of this blog…. We all keep learning and if you don’t keep looking for things to learn be it in photography, editing or just life….. you become stale….
Don’t be stale. 🙂
AFTER
BEFORE
I have dedicated my photography career in the pursuit of capturing the very essence of what I am photographing so as to bring the “forever memories” back to life. Through this, I now have the ability to share my years of experience with you through my on-line courses.
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