Lessons

Lesson Info

Selecting and Packing Gear

I'm going to go through a workflow with you, but we have to start at the very beginning, and the very beginning is what we're going to take with us on this trip. So, if I wanna take cameras on my trip, I'm gonna think very seriously about the size of cameras, the lenses that I need to take, and so I'm opening up my bag to you and so you can see there's the bag, and you can see that I've got an A1. This is a Profoto A1. It's a flash, and I've got another one here so it's underneath, and then these are a bunch of gels and grids for the flash, because I take portraits so I'm gonna want some extra light with me. So I've got my flash light here. I've got my longer lens here. I've got my wide lens on my Canon R. Now, one of the shortcomings of the Canon R is that it only has one card, which means you that have to be very careful about that card. Make sure that you're using good cards, not old cards, because if that fails, you're kinda stuck, so unfortunately it only has one card. However, my...

Fuji XT3 actually has two cards so when you're shooting a camera with two cards, so like my Canon 5D Mark IV has two cards. So you always wanna shoot them so that both cards are reading, are recording the original raw file, so they're backing each other up. That way, you have two backups, or you have one regular card and then a backup of that card. And don't shoot raw plus JPEG. Shoot raw, and then the second card takes a raw. That way, you're completely backed up the minute you take the picture. So as soon as you take the picture, you have two copies of that file on two separate cards. You can simply split those cards up. One of them can go in one wallet. The other one can go in another wallet so that you're secured. Okay, so that's my favorite way to operate is something with two cards. I'm hoping that the new versions of the Canon R that come out will have two cards, but right now it only has one card. It was a bad mistake on their part, but, my Canon 5D Mark IV does, and so if I wanted to I could put the Canon 5D Mark IV in here instead and shoot with that, but I had two cameras, two camera bodies. I never travel with just one camera body because if one camera body goes down, I need a second camera body. I remember when I was traveling in the '90s, I was in my graduate degree, and I was, I was traveling to Europe, and while I was there, I had my entire, my entire camera bag stolen and that was back in film days, and so all my film also was in the bag, so I lost my cameras, and I lost all the film that I shot because it was all in the same place. So you have to be careful about the way you deal with your equipment and the way you deal with your files because if you put your, if you shoot two cards, and then you don't separate the cards and you put the camera back in here and it's got the two cards, and someone steals this bag, now you've lost the most important thing which is the photos that you've taken. So I have no idea how good those photos were. I never got to see 'em. Probably 20 or 30 rolls of film gone. I have no idea what was on them. I was very sad about it. But, the point is is that you need to think about the way you're traveling because your camera gear is important, but your files are even more important, so that's why we wanna secure them. One of the advantages of this bag specifically, is that it has a little lock system on it. And it's got a code on it here, and so once I zip this up, I can set this around something like a pole and then I can lock it here to the actual zipper so they can't open. Now this isn't gonna stop someone with clippers or whatever, but if someone just comes to grab it, it's gonna stop 'em, and then they're gonna take off, because the opportunistic criminal is just trying to grab the easiest thing to grab, so this would help as long as you're keeping your eye on it, they're not gonna just take it without you noticing it. It's not Fort Knox. But it keeps someone from just grabbing and running. So, always think about your bags. Make sure that your bags are good for travel so that you have locks on them. So this is really important. This is the think tank bag. All the think tank bags generally have some kind of a security feature on them, but some of them don't so make sure that you choose one that has a security feature on it. So, use the security feature so that you don't lose your camera gear, but then we have to go to the most important thing which is securing the files and that's what keeps us from losing all of the most important things. Cameras can be replaced. The photos actually can't, so we need to make sure we secure those. So, we're gonna start by, and I'm gonna see this down so we have a little bit more working space. And we're gonna start by showing all of this stuff can fit right in that bag, so I've pulled this out. This is called a GNARBOX, and this, it's a GNARBOX Number Two. There's an original GNARBOX which is, was made more for video kind of people and it was a 1.0 kind of product. But the GNARBOX 2.0, this is awesome, and it's only available for pre-order right now but you can order it, preorder. So I'm playing with a pre-pre version of this and it's fantastic. So what it is, there's a battery here, and inside of it, there's an SSD hard drive, so 256, 500, or one terabyte of storage in this drive. So it's a battery driven secure digital drive, right? So no spinning. That means that if it shakes, it's not gonna ruin the hard drive, right? So it's very secure, and on this side, it has a port to go into either charging port or it can become a hard drive on your desktop computer. So you can plug it in to your desktop computer and just use it as a hard drive. And on the other side, there's a card reader and there are ports to plug in bigger card readers, or other hard drives. So if I wanna secure files, I can simply take a camera card and shove it in there. It's an SD camera card, but if I have CF cards, or CFast cards or something like that, I can plug in a card reader and it will power the card reader and then it'll read those and bring them in, so this becomes your little digital wallet to secure your files. Now, think about this. If you're shooting two cards. Where's my? There it is. So, here's my card wallet. So I have my cards in. You can see that these are unshot cards. These are shot cards, so anything that's upside down is shot, so if I have a card, I immediately, as quickly as possible, wanna get these cards into this box. That way I have two copies here and I have a copy here. And remember, we wanna separate out those copies. These are actually two individual cards. The secure copy is actually in a little Velcro wallet. I don't think I have it with me, so when you're done, take 'em out of the card. One goes in here and one goes in a different wallet. And that's at the hotel in a safe or it's with your assistant or it's a different bag. It's somewhere else, and so these are two separate cards. These aren't two backup cards. They're not the same card, so I take these and I put 'em in here. So now I'll have a copy here, have a copy in my secondary wallet somewhere, whether it's in the hotel safe or whether it's in a bag, or under a mattress or wherever it happens to be, and then I'm gonna have a copy in here. So now I have three copies immediately, and the beauty of using something like this, this GNARBOX, is that it's in my bag. It's got it's own little spot in the bag. So as soon as I'm done shooting for a while, all I do is just pop one of the cards out of the camera, and I open this up, and I take my card, and I plug it into here like this, and the screen, it's kind of small so I'll just tell you what's going on. It says backup now, and I'm just gonna click the button. That's it. It's backing up, and I can shut this so that if it's a little misty or you're worried about, it's totally sealed. It's water sealed, so it's very well protected. It's 8% done right now. It's just pulling the data off the card, and not only that, but once it's done, it's gonna do a zero sum check, so it's gonna compare all the bytes on the card to all the bytes in the hard drive and make sure that they're absolutely the same, which means that whatever's on the card is on the hard drive, so you know that you have a backup copy once it's finished. So now I'm gonna have a copy here. I have a copy in my sock drawer or wherever it happens to be, and then I have a copy here, but that's not all, because I'm really paranoid, and so once we're done ingesting them into the GNARBOX, we're gonna take 'em and we're going to put them in here in the iPad. And the beauty of this system is that this has it's own WiFi signal on it so I can tie from my iPad or my phone to this GNARBOX through WiFi. I just sign on to its WiFi signal and I can look at the photos that are on the GNARBOX without ever bringing them on to my iPad. So if you have space issues on your iPad or your phone, you can go through and confirm and look at the images and select the images and all that kind of stuff and it will keep them on the GNARBOX. So it's gonna keep 'em on the GNARBOX, you're gonna look through 'em, and then, if you want to, you can bring in all or some of those to your iPad, and then you can start working on them. And then you can start sharing them. And the beauty of working in Lightroom on your iPad is that anything goes into Lightroom on your iPad goes where? Goes to the cloud, and because it's in the cloud, now, how many copies do we have? We have the original shot copy, and we have the duplicate card copy, unless we were shooting on the EOS R, then we only have one copy, and we have a copy here, so we at least have two to three copies. One here, one here. When it goes into the iPad, there's another one here on the iPad and as soon as it goes to the cloud, we have another one in the cloud and it's the full raw file. All 40, 30 megabytes, however many megabytes of file you have is in the cloud as a raw file, and then, once you go from the cloud, it's gonna drop back down to home because whatever Lightroom Classic you have running at home is gonna bring that file down so you will have, before you get home, if your computer is on and Lightroom is running, you will have a full, high resolution copy at home in Lightroom Classic waiting for you there too, and anything I do here is gonna be done at home, so when I get back to the house all I have to do is open up computer and start working on the file, and it's ready to go. The original raw is sitting there on my computer at home with all the adjustments that I made here. I might tweak a few things, confirm that I like it, and then I can share it to the client or I can share it to my friends, or whatever. Do you see that overarching idea? You've got some cards here. Remember, when I was in France, I had shot all these photos, and then when I got to, it was Florence where the camera bag got stolen, all my film got stolen too. If I had been able to take my film and suddenly duplicate it five times, and put it in different places, that camera bag would not have been such a loss because I would've been able to see the photos that I had taken. My insurance paid for the cameras. It's fine. The photos are gone. So, the best way to do this. It's all done so I now I just have to hit eject, so it just ejected it. I'm gonna pull that out, and then I've got a couple extra ones here so I'm gonna shove that one in too, and it's gonna tell me backup now. And, done, so there was a small five or 10 photos or something like that, so I'm gonna eject that one. And by the way, you don't have to open and close that, I just like to because it makes like a little pa sound. So now, I have everything in the GNARBOX and we're just gonna set it right over there so that we can really see that it's not connected to anything, so that could be sitting in your bag and you could be sitting at a cafe working. You don't have to leave that out on the counter. It's just sitting in your bag. Now, what do we do with these? We put them back in the card case upside down because we've shot them. Now if you wanted to, because they're digital, Secure Digital, you could actually flip the secure switch, and then no one can overwrite them. Like if you plug 'em into your camera, it won't use 'em. You can look at 'em, but you can't use 'em, so that's how my card case is gonna look so by the time the trip is over, I should have a whole bunch of upside down cards. That's my ultimate original copies, right? This is my working copy. This is what I'm working off of and I'm selecting and looking at, things like that, and then here is the stuff I'm editing on my iPad and then up in the cloud is the ultimate backup and back at home is another backup, so what's that? One, two, three, four, five copies if we're shooting with a one card camera. Six copies if we're shooting with a two card camera. So, that is the ultimate in file security. Now, it may be that I kind of got this paranoid because I lost those films back in the '90s, but it served me well, so how many of you can say you've never lost a file? In your life? Since the inception of digital, I have never lost a digital file, ever? And I don't even knock on wood because of this paranoia, there's no chance. Now, once in a great while, a particular file was corrupted when it was written for some reason. The camera did something and so it's got some weird lines on it or something like that, but it was like one file, and then of course you duplicate that file, and you've got five copies of a bad file. But that's why we keep the original card, because if for some reason the data gets hiccuped on the way to here, or from here to here, or from here to there, we can always trace it back to the original card, so we wait and we confirm that we have the job done before we ever overwrite the original cards. The original cards sit in a wallet until I've looked at the job, which means you got to get through the job, you got to actually look at the images sooner than later, which is why this workflow is gonna work so well when we're traveling because you saw how quickly I did this. And I can do that anywhere. I can do that in the car. After I finish shooting, I can grab the card and throw it in and back it up. While I'm driving, it could be downloading to the GNARBOX. At a cafe, it could be downloading to the GNARBOX. Like at any point, if you have a few minutes, you can download your cards to the GNARBOX, get your copy. You can even confirm. Let's say you're traveling around with just your camera and you're not carrying an iPad with you, right? Oops. We don't wanna carry iPad with us as we're shooting. You probably have this. You probably have your phone. Everything that I'm gonna do here on the iPad is exactly the same on the iPhone. So I can go through and I can look at what's on that GNARBOX on my phone. Just connect to the WiFi signal, look at what's on the GNARBOX, and then confirm it. I can select images from it. I can draw images into Lightroom on my phone, so all of this works in both places. So just so you understand, that doesn't matter whether you're on a phone, or whether you're on a tablet, it'll still connect to the GNARBOX.