With a landslide of fan votes this photo wins the First Friday Fashion (fail) contest! Thanks to all our friends & fans on facebook and all who came out to model!

Keep an eye out on our Facebook page for more fashionable contests ahead!

-eB

Last Friday, September 2nd, I set up shop downtown at Generic & invited shoppers to put together a favorite outfit of their best style (or worst, depending on fashion taste) and model it for a mini-session. The results were no less crazy than I expected.

Come take a look and vote for your favorite on our Facebook page. The photo with the most votes by this coming Friday, September 9th wins the model a full photo shoot!

Keep an eye out on our Facebook page for more contests & fall shoot specials ahead! -eB

Happy Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and leftovers weekend!

If you’re looking for an easy way to avoid dark-thirty doorbuster lines to find a fun gift for us (read: probably Eric) boy have we got a surprise!

Our camera bag made it into a contest!

Drop on by the Digital Wedding Forum’s contest to see all the camera bags and vote for your favorite and ours, number 18!  Consider it a great Christmas gift you don’t have to pick out, find, wake up early to stand in line for, buy, wrap, or sneak under a conifer!

Please VOTE FOR #18!

VOTE HERE >>> http://www.digitalweddingforum.com/blog/whats-in-the-bag

Plus a gift* for you!

After we have won and are crowned Camera Homecoming King & Queen / Cutest Couple, Eric will record and post a geeky video of all the gear we haul around and WHY we use it (besides it being shiny).

Thanks so much for your help! – Eric & Sara

*gift may not be exchanged for cash or less geeky content. Void where prohibited by law. Please geek out responsibly.

Congrats Stacie on your hard work to become a Redken artist! Truly amazing!

And Sara had to jump in for a few.

Hide the shears. Insert puns about “cut ups” here.

Sara’s new look by Stacie.

Image © Drobo

Just over 2 years ago I added a Drobo to our wedding photography workflow and backup strategy. (Read the original writeup here). I just fed it another pair of 1 terabyte hard drive this month and figured it would make a good time to share a review of its performance over the last 2 years of photography work and backup duty.

My use

I bought the Drobo USB model when I was running all my edit work off my MacBook Pro laptop. The MB Pro’s 320gb internal drive filled up really fast with shoots, edits, designs and my music collection. Last fall we added a Mac Pro tower to the home office to handle heavy lifting and upgraded storage needs. (And there was much rejoicing!)

After the Mac Pro addition the Drobo now handles backups of Lightroom catalogs, raw and JPG image backups, designs. Older catalogs from 2004-2008 stay archived on the Drobo for infrequent reference and finding samples from specific churches or reception venues.

“Live Work” catalogs of 2009-2011 work are backed up every few hours with Apple’s Time Machine and synchronized to a Drobo backup weekly using ChronoSync as well as synchronized between the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro nightly. (Great to have your most recent edits, designs, and full offline previews on the laptop ready to go.)

I haven’t used any other RAID systems yet to compare one setup against the Drobo’s way of doing things, but am interested to hear comparisons in the comments.

Likes

Simple. Plug it in, put in hard drives, go to town. Mismatch drive sizes and it figures out how to span the data. I started with a pair 0f 500gb drives, added 2 more 1TB drives, and now have all 4 bays full of 1TB drives. Rather effortless setup, USB connection (Firewire, gigabit ethernet and more options on newer versions).

All in one box. When I switched to Macs I started with laptops for Sara and me. I had a little city being built on my desk from the mismatched external drives I used to manage, backup, and store images. It was nice to keep the other externals as infrequent use backups or to move large folders of wedding edits between computers.

Easy to upgrade. I’m writing this while the Drobo does its work spreading data out to the new 1TB drive I just added. (Update: adding a 1TB drive took about 20 hours for the Drobo to reallocate data across all the drives. You can still access the data once a new drive is added, but don’t shut it down!)

Dislikes

I realized quickly the performance bottleneck editing a few thousand NEF / camera raw files in Lightroom from an external USB drive. None of my other external drives provided much more speed, this was a problem of needing faster, larger internal storage.

On the upside, in the winter my laptop and the Drobo could heat my office while processing these edits. There are newer, faster versions available since the introductory USB model, and I now run my edit & design work off the Mac Pro’s internal drives at a much faster pace. This solved that bottleneck.

Paranoia of a proprietary RAID format. This one still gets me. I took one of the smaller 500GB drives out to add the 1TB upgrade and when I put the Drobo-fied drive in the Mac Pro it wasn’t recognizable and would need to be formatted (read: erased) to be used in the Mac Pro. While the Drobo tells you when a drive is getting full and (haven’t tested) if one fails, it doesn’t say much of what happens when the box’s internal hardware wears out. I suppose get a new Drobo? I’m still a bit leery of this one.

Hot & bothered. It gets pretty loud when running lots of editing and transfers. I have it mounted under my desk to save some space and reduce the noise. Other reviews have mentioned this too. It’s only as loud as the hard drives spinning when it isn’t under much use, but in editing or moving large amounts of data the fan kicks up pretty high. Keeps my legs & toes warm in the winter. It seems to be loudest when compared against the MacBook Pro on the desk and the Mac Pro (near silent!) also on or under the desk. If it’s in a noisy room it’s no problem.

Here’s a couple of screen shots of the backup in progress.

Recommendation: Yes. Keep it simple.

Best for: Data backup, Time Machine, infrequently used / archived files.

If you want to give a Drobo a try and appreciated our real life workflow review, we’d love it if you got one through us here, it helps spoil the kids, I mean support our growing family.

- Eric B

Mama Sara giving the “A-OK” sign while waiting to meet our daughter

Madeline Suzanne – November 21, 2009 – 5:19am, 8 pounds 2 ounces, 20 inches

Madeline and Mama’s first moments

Daddy and Maddie

Our hazel eyed baby girl is awake! Just checking out the world and wondering what that clicking thing is that dad’s holding.

Update January 2011 – Maddie definitely has blue eyes like Mom & her brig brother.

With weekend events to photograph and mix, lots of final touches to the house, early Thanksgiving dinner (yay!), and scheduled c-section with hospital recovery in the coming week I wanted to put a notice out early to let everybody know I might be out of touch for a few days.

We’ll be back at full speed Tuesday, December 1st.

To everyone that’s going to ask, Sara’s doing well, looks great, and is more than ready to have our daughter soon. Last month soon. Adrian likes to put his hand or head on Mommy’s tummy and say “baybee” and I’m pretty sure he knows something’s up but not that he’s about to be ousted as the youngest in the house. There’s also that sharing thing to get used to.

You needn’t remind me to take lots of photos. I’ll have the exclusive since it looks like Madeline’s holding off for early Thanksgiving dinner this weekend and staying in her nice cozy hideout till Tuesday’s scheduled c-section delivery. We’ll announce when it’s ok to have visitors, keep in touch here, facebook, twitter, and faxes. Just kidding. We keep it old school, telegraph time.

Be back soon! – Eric, Sara, Adrian and Maddie

Thank you, AT&T DSL service and GoDaddy web hosting for your unpredicted reminder to back up everything powered by your companies’ web services. Seems there was some web router problem that blocked a large percentage of AT&T DSL customers from viewing our site for a good portion of Tuesday. (How specific, right?) What it meant on my side of things was just bad email and trouble checking our orders on the proof gallery. For an hour or so after I noticed things weren’t working as expected in the online world I dug up backups of our website, the blog, proofing, and emails only to be reminded more recent copies would serve me better if things really were awry.

Things seem to be back to normal after a good reminder to keep current backups!

To celebrate being visible again, see my favorite version of the system being down to a techno beat as sung by StrongBad.

After 8 years of local live music, concerts, and friendships the Underground Cafe is celebrating one last show on the South Side of South Bend. If you know me even a little you know this has been my second home and second family since it’s beginning. My wife Sara was one of the people that hatched the idea to clean the old storage basement and make a cafe. The Underground is part of my family, not just my hobbies.

Join the hunt for RED NOVEMBER and add the Rockfest 6 poster as your social networking profile photo till at least Sunday the 15th.

Get a high-res printable poster to share at
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2759/4025904557_19daa61163_b_d.jpg

Check out the event pages -

Myspace event page – http://bit.ly/rockfest6-ms

Facebook event page – http://bit.ly/rockfest6

Click here to view the embedded video.

See you Saturday!

eB & Underground Crew

Genna rocked the 1940s styles in Caroline & Josh’s “Kissing the War Goodbye” engagement session, can’t wait to see her work on upcoming shoots too!

We’re proud of you!

- Eric, Sara, Adrian and Niece Bu