8thcross Photography

Based on my per­sonal expe­ri­ences, here is a list of things I rec­om­mend to you as a Pho­tog­ra­pher. Think seri­ously about these in 2011 if you still haven’t already done it… So, here goes:

1. Backup: Excuse my lan­guage but S**T hap­pens. When it does hap­pens, all hell breaks loose. It is always bet­ter to be equipped and pre­pared when this hap­pens rather than pan­ick­ing. Of course, I am talk­ing about your Mac/Windows com­puter crash­ing, Hard disk crash­ing etc.  There are 2 ways to go about it — (a) Backup (b) Data res­cue options. For backup, I per­son­ally use the OWC Mer­cury Elite-AL Pro. You can use any­thing you want, but I strongly sug­gest that you make this your top pri­or­ity in 2011. With­out one — its like hav­ing no life insur­ance. Read more about my backup story here. I use Prosoft’s Backup soft­ware as well as Apple’s Time machine for my back­ups. I have 2 sets of back­ups as well as a 3rd set on a remov­able hard disk (only my images) stored in a fire safe (You can store if off­site if you have a means to do this — say your friends place or your at your par­ents place). Other rec­om­mended soft­ware for backup include: SuperDuper! or iBackup (free­ware). Prosoft makes a Win­dows ver­sion as well. For Data res­cue — I use a soft­ware called Data Res­cue from Prosoft. They have a win­dows ver­sion as well. This soft­ware can pretty much recover your files from deleted hard disks or CF/SD cards whatever.…Remember, it is only a mat­ter of time.
2. Lens Align: Chances are — every one of your lenses needs align­ment. Chances are that you never knew. I didn’t, until I got mine. Well, tech­ni­cally speak­ing, you don’t have to get this to align your lenses. There are sev­eral other ways to go about it, includ­ing print­ing out your own chart or fol­low­ing other online cal­i­bra­tion mech­a­nisms. You may or may not get accu­rate repeat­able results with these other tools unless you are an engi­neer at heart and know exactly what you are doing. With a Lens align, a lay­man can get repeat­able accu­rate results, and I decided to get one. I found that every one of my lenses required align­ment — some were back focus­ing while one was front focus­ing. Once you get your lenses aligned, and you still have bad focus in your images — it becomes very appar­ent that its not your cam­era, its “you” caus­ing it. No more blam­ing the equipment!
3. Col­or­Munki: Well, I have had mine for 2 years now — so, this is not exactly new, but I have decided to include it here, because — these have been on the mar­ket for a while now — and its an inex­cus­able to get a mon­i­tor cal­i­bra­tion device if you are a pho­tog­ra­pher. “Color” is every­thing — Nail that color right. A very impor­tant first step is to make sure you are see­ing accu­rate col­ors on your mon­i­tor, and then to cal­i­brate your cam­era to the same stan­dard so that your cam­era cap­tures accu­rate color as well. A com­pletely cal­i­brated cam­era + mon­i­tors can do wonders!
4. Fujitsu Scansnap: Well, this is not exactly your stan­dard pho­tog­ra­phy gear, but I am includ­ing this because — as a Pho­tog­ra­pher and/or busi­ness owner — You *will* need to be paper­less sooner or later. This is the best scan­ner out there in the mar­ket. It is not exactly cheap, but is the best portable solu­tion for small photographer/business owner. I store my scanned image data­base on Drop­box (it is acces­si­ble every­where Inter­net is available).
5. Pro­fes­sional Light­ing equip­ment: As you progress your career into doing events, por­traits, wed­ding etc — It becomes very impor­tant to do two things — to con­vey your pro­fes­sion­al­ism by invest­ing in the lat­est things out there in the mar­ket and to stay away from cheaply made prod­ucts. Last year, I finally got myself a Elinchrom Quadra sys­tem, and boy — they are good. It is the per­fect advance­ment to a stro­bist setup. It gives you the flex­i­bil­ity to con­tinue to be a stro­bist (portable light­ing setup and move­ment started by David Hobby) while explor­ing and lever­ag­ing your knowl­edge to larger avenues (Fash­ion, Por­traits, Wed­dings and Events). Also — if you have those cheap eBay trig­gers, it is time to get rid of them and move on to more sta­ble setups.
6. White bal­ance tools: Despite the fact that Auto WB is pretty good these days, “Pretty good” doesn’t exactly trans­late to “Exact”. Some­times “exact” is what you need. Espe­cially in events and wed­dings. There is no levy for errors, and no time for “trial & errors”. There are plenty of tools out there start­ing with a very sim­ple white bal­ance gray card to the Expodisc tools. I have both, but have started using the G7 key­chain card. It is both small to carry as well as con­ve­nient to use.
7. RAW proces­sors: In this day and age, if you are still not shoot­ing RAW — shame on you! Switch to RAW now! There are plenty of excel­lent RAW proces­sors to choose from, and pretty much every one of these RAW proces­sors can extract bet­ter qual­ity images from your cam­era than the cam­era can pro­duce via JPEGs. I per­son­ally use Cap­ture One and Light­room. But, You can also use Cap­ture NX, Canon DPP or Apple Aper­ture and get equiv­a­lent results. Of course, Pho­to­shop is still indis­pens­able for some/most of the post processing.
8. Social Media: As a pho­tog­ra­pher, all social media is very very impor­tant. If you have still not embraced the new media tools, it is time to get on it. Here are a few impor­tant ones to explore — Face­book — as a mar­ket­ing tool and to build brand recog­ni­tion, Twit­ter to keep in touch with the lat­est trends and news before it becomes com­mon knowl­edge and of course — Blogs, con­fer­ences and the like.
9. A list of my top appli­ca­tions for 2010: Topaz Denoise, Topaz Info­cus, SNS Pro HDR Soft­ware, Movist Movie Player for Mac, Image­nomic Por­trai­ture plu­gin, PT Lens per­spec­tive lens cor­rec­tion plu­gin, Ever­note note tak­ing soft­ware, Skitch screen­shot soft­ware, Quick­sil­ver launcher, Drop­box and Google Chrome!
10. My list of top hard­ware for 2010: iPhone, iPad, Boxee box, Eye-Fi SD Card, Kelty Red­wing 3100 back­pack, Pana­sonic GF1 m4/3 cam­era with 20mm f1.7 pan­cake lens, Epson 3880 printer, Deal extreme flash­lights and Ulti­mate ears Triple.fi Pro earphones!