BRIAN SMITH PHOTO GEAR

WE'VE MOVED

2009-10-12T22:51:00.006-05:00

Please visit us at our new address:
www.briansmith.com/blog

Leica Comes Out Blazing

2008-09-22T19:53:00.002-05:00

Just six days after a Wall Street Journal article that basically boiled down to "What the Hell happened to Leica and how did they become so irrelevant in the digital age?"

Well today, Leica answered that question.

Leica came out blazing with the announcement of the 37.5 mp Leica S2 with a mid-size sensor (co-designed by Phase One) that falls between 35mm and medium format sensors. Anyone who has uses a medium format digital back can tell you it's not just the megapixels but the sensor size that counts and this is a GIANT step in the right direction.

You can read more from Leica, Professional Photographer, DP Review and British Journal of Photography.

LACIE QUADRA RAID ROCKS!

2008-04-28T12:15:00.006-05:00

For those of you searching for a RAID solutions that's cheaper than Apple's X-Serve RAID and faster the the Sloooowbo, I mean Drobo, LaCie's Quadra RAID might just be the ticket.

Let's face it, Drobo is a bit light in the loafers when it comes to speed and built more as a "consumer" than professional enterprise storage solution.

On the other hand Apple's X-Serve RAID is big, loud and expensive. Plus it uses more power than a small emerging nation.

Well, Goldilocks, LaCie's Quadra RAID is just RIGHT...

My good friend photographer James Russell turned me on to these drives. James has been using them for a couple years now and James is ALWAYS right. If you shop Amazon you can find one loaded with 4.0 Tb of drives (which equals 2.73 Tb of RAID 5 storage after allowing for overhead and redundancy) for $1800 and change - or even less by the time you're reading this since the price of hard drives drops every 30 seconds or so...

SONY ALPHA 700 + CARL ZEISS LENSES

2008-04-28T12:12:00.001-05:00

I recently had a chance to put the Sony Alpha 700 to the test on a few jobs. I can tell you that I like the lenses a LOT. The Zeiss glass reminds me of the medium format lenses that I've used for years. Sony definitely has the right idea. It's ALL about the glass. The Zeiss 24-70mm/2.8, 85mm/1.4 and 135mm/1.8 are all razor sharp, but what's hard to quantify is that not only are they sharp, but they have a great "look" that I've only seen from medium format glass.

I shot Hideki Matsui the with the Sony Alpha 700 a couple days after I got my hands on the camera. We were set up for a portrait shoot and waiting for Hideki when the Yankees PR came up to say he was doing the interview "now" and we might not get him later. Rather than tearing down one of the lights from our big set-up and dragging lighting across the stadium, I simply grabbed the Sony Alpha 700 and the Zeiss 85mm/1.4 and 135mm/1.8 lenses. These were shot in open shade under the stadium with the 135mm/1.8 wide open at 1/60 handheld at ASA 100. For the best quality, I always try to shoot at ASA 100 yet with the camera's image stabilization it was easy to keep every shot razor sharp.

DROBO NOT QUITE SO MUCH A SLOWBO ANYMORE

2008-03-21T09:36:00.011-05:00

I have good news and bad news for all you Drobo users.

As many of you know I've been critical of Drobo for two glaring problems:

1. It was slow and by that I mean glacier sloooowww...
2. There was no way to create a single volume larger than 2.0Tb. Meaning if you filled it up with four 1Tb drives, it would theoretically create a 2.7Tb array after overhead and redundancy, but only 2.0 Tb of that could be in a single volume meaning that the remaining drive space was not contiguously accessible. Or in simple terms, you were screwed.

THE GOOD NEWS:
Both issues have been addressed by installing Drobo Dashboard upgrade 1.1.1 and Drobo Firmware upgrade 1.1.1. Both are available here.

THE BAD NEWS:
If you've filled your Drobo with 750Gb or 1Tb drives, you'll have to reformat your Drobo in order to take advantage of the ability to create a single volume of all the available space.

WHAT THE UPGRADES MEAN:
Drobo write speed increases nearly 50% from 680 Mb/second to 990 Mb/sec. Which is still slow compared to 3.1 Gb/sec of my eSATA drives, but 50% is still a huge speed boost. Volumes are no longer capped at 2.0 TB, they can now be created of up to 16 Tb. Since the largest drives currently available are 1 Tb drives and four 1 Tb drives create a 2.7 Tb volume, so this actually gives Drobo lots space to spare in the future.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?
As long as you're using Drobo for redundant storage and all of the files are backed up elsewhere, then this is a no-brainer. Bite the bullet. Install the updates and reformat your Drobo. If you aren't backed up elsewhere, shame on you. Buy another enclosure back up your data first then upgrade and transfer it back.

HARD DRIVES 101

2008-01-24T21:51:00.000-05:00

I'm really only about a '6' on the Geek Scale, so I'll try to make this as simple as possible.

SCALABILITY: This is Geekspeak for E-X-P-A-N-D-A-B-I-L-I-Y. You want to set-up archives that grow. Most photographers started out using single external drives, but as your archives grow, so does your collection of individual drives. A friend of mine went down this route until he had a "Great Wall of Drives" with 40 LaCies Daisy-chained with 40 individual power sources as a case study for "Fire-Code Violation."

You DON'T want to go down that road.

You also do not want to be plugging drives in and out of enclosures because you are too cheap to buy enough enclosures. 2-Bay enclosures are meant for backing up files while you are on the road. PERIOD. There is no other long-term use for them. They give you no ability to expand. You will have to add more drives in the future. Just accept it.

In your case, you have room for 3 more internal drives and that's where I'd start. You do NOT want to keep you data on you start-up drive with you applications. Get all that stuff onto a PAIR of matched internal drives - you have the space. New Egg has Western Digital 750 drives on sale for $149.

HARD DIVES TO TRUST: Seagates are great. Western Digital have shorter warranties but also hold up very well. Hitachi's are great IN a Mac, but have issues in external drives because they are very slow on start-up and can time-out in an external enclosure.

On the other hand, I've never heard good things about Maxtors so I avoid them.

LaCie doesn't make drives they buy from all of the above depending on which of the above gives them the best price on a given day, so you never know what guts your are getting. So in the words of Clint Eastwood, "You gotta ask yourself, Do you feel lucky punk?"

If you buy drives from NewEgg like I do, you'll notice they have like five identical listings with differences like "OEM" and "retail." This refers to the packaging and as one of the drive manufacturers told me, packaging has nothing to do with performance so buy the cheapest you can find since you're not going to keep the box anyway...

CONNECTION SPEED:

WICKED FAST: Fiber Optic, such as Apple X-Serve RAID. Also wicked expensive.

VERY, VERY FAST: SCSI - makes you wonder why it's all but obsolete.

VERY FAST: SATA used on most Internal Drives or SATA enclosures

KINDA FAST: Firewire 800 and USB2 - USB2 is slower than FW800 on a Mac, but faster on a PC.

NOT-SO-FAST: Firewire 400

SLOW: USB

SLOOOOOW: DROBO. Ok, I know Drobo is a drive enclosure not a connection type but for some reason it's slower that USB2 should EVER be...

EFFEN SLOW: NAS Ethernet based NAS is NASty slow. Like watching paint dry...underwater...

If you're on a Mac, no matter what kind of drives you're using, step one is formatting the drive in Disk Utility so that it's compatible with your current OS. Disk Utility can be found under Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility. I run Disk Utility to "Repair Permissions" on my boot drive every time I install or upgrade software, so I keep it in my Dock.

Dr. Brown's Process 1-2-3

2007-11-11T19:22:00.001-05:00

Adobe evangelist Russell Brown has brought out a lot of cool scripts - but none as sweet as his new Dr. Brown's Process 1-2-3. Available as a free download as part of Dr. Brown's Services 1.9.2 that can be found here.

Consider it an update of his very useful Image Processor on STEROIDS!

Dr. Brown's Process 1-2-3 allows you to save up to three sets of images out of Bridge as PSDs, TIFFs or JPEGs selecting color spaces for each and in any compression settings independently for each set of images. You can also run a batch action at the end of the process if for instance you wish to change from 16bit to 8bit after the converting to the final color space.

Here's where it comes in handy. My working layered files are full-Rez 16bit ProPhoto PSDs generally from a Leaf Aptus 75S. So I need to downrez and convert the color profile before delivering the files to my clients and my photo agency. But the file specs are different for each.

When submitting to magazines, I submit 8bit Tiffs in Colormatch RGB - 18 inches (5400 pixels) in the longest dimension - and I use Lossless LZW compression to make upload quicker.

My agency requests Uncompressed 8bit Tiffs in Adobe 98 - no larger than 80mb (which translates to roughly 6000 pixels in the longest dimension when shooting 4x3 format.)

Before now it was a pain to downrez two sets of files at different resolutions, different color spaces and different resolutions. Dr Brown's Process 1-2-3 makes it easy. I save both as presets that save the files in subfolders marked "Corbis" and "Magazine" in the same folder as the layered full-rez 16bit files.

Drobo Slowbo

2007-11-10T11:33:00.000-05:00

Ok, so I caved under peer pressure and decided to test out a Drobo from Data Robotics which calls the Drobo the "World's First Storage Robot" for fully automated data storage. I ran into these guys hawking the Drobo at PDN's PhotoPlus Expo in New York and had to ask, "Is Drobo just RAID for dummies?"

Well, yes and no.

Drobo's lead engineer explained that the Drobo is designed to be extremely user friendly and take the confusion out of drive arrays. There are slots for up to four Sata hard drives. If you load 2 drives Drobo backs up data between the two drives using RAID 1, add a 3rd or 4th drive and the Drobo automatically switches to RAID 5.

So yea, basically "RAID for dummies..."

Set-up is a snap. I decided to load up four Hitachi Terabyte drives resulting in available storage of 2.72 tb. The Drobo Dashboard shows how the drives are configured and how much total storage space is created and how much of that is used. When you start it up for the first time, Drobo then formats the drives. Any drives you add in the future will automatically be ERASED and formatted.

One of the Drobo selling points is that unlike conventional RAID, drives of different sizes can be mixed together, however the largest drive will always be used for storage, so one 750gb drive mixed with three 250gb drives gives you no more storage capacity than four 250gb drives, so while it's possible to mix-and-match, it's probably best to stick to equal sized drives.

Easy set-up is the plus. What are the minuses?

Well, the Drobo is maddeningly slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwbo...

I decided test how long it would take to transfer 2.5 Tb of images from 2006-2007 from three separate drives into a single Drobo Archive. I stared with a single internal 1tb drive containing 930gb of data and using Retrospect to duplicate the files to the drobo took nearly TWO DAYS. To be precise it took 23 hours to duplicate the files and then another 23 hours more to compare the volumes as it moved at a snail's pace of 681 mb/sec

For comparison, the eSata connection of my Sonnett Fusion 500P Sata drive boxes move data more than FOUR TIMES FASTER .

So what makes the Drobo such a slowbo? The most obvious culprit for the slow speed is the whimpy USB2 connection, which was chosen for the Drobo to keep the cost down. I asked the engineer if a faster connection like eSata might be in Drobo's future and they are definitely looking into that possibility. I hope so. I'd pay for the added cost to add a eSata connection. Time is money, so eSata would make this much more valuable....On the other hand if the way that Drobo writes RAID is the reason for the slowdown, a faster connection may not do the trick.

So would I use a Drobo as a main working drive? No.

Would I consider it for back-up? Probably since the price is good and once you've copied your data onto it, incremental updates go pretty quickly.

Would I pay extra for eSata connection? Absolutely!

Leaf User Profile

2007-10-30T22:15:00.001-05:00

Leaf Digital rolled out their new website last week with a brand new look and they pimp me out with a proile on their Testimonial Page where I talk about the color and look of Leaf Digital files and the advantages of true 16-bit digital capture. I'm a big fan of Leaf backs and their Aptus 75S is like having a handheld scanner that cranks out a 200mb scan every 1.2 seconds...

from Leaf User Profile:
Brian Smith Celebrity and Star Athlete Portrait Photographer
Brian Smith’s 25-year career definitely hasn’t been dull. His broad range of work was honed during his 10 years as a news photographer, culminating in being awarded the Pulitzer Prize. “That was my training ground,” he reflects, “Newspaper photography lets you shoot a lot - a lot of times that means three assignments a day. It was almost like grad school. But I realized during these years that I wanted to spend more time with the people I photographed.”

Converting to Digital
He made the move into magazine shooting and advertising, which gave Smith more time to put into his assignments, while also offering him more resources. He was shooting medium format film with a Mamiya RZ, Mamiya 7 and Fuji 680. He recently made the switch to digital, and has been using a Leaf Aptus 75 for about a year. “I was a tough sell on digital because I wasn’t a convert to digital until I could get the look I was used to from medium format film,” he says, “It wasn’t until I started shooting with Leaf that I felt the same results. You’re back to a shallower depth of field. The sensor size plays a big part in this.” Smith finds that Leaf’s full 16-bit capture more accurately matches the subtle gradations of film. Plus, compared to even high-end 35mm digital, there’s no anti-aliasing filter so the raw captures don’t start out as mush. “I actually dial down sharpening to next to nothing because the sharpness is amazing.”

Speed and Quality
The two biggest things Smith was looking at in considering a medium-format digital back were speed and quality. When working with busy people every second counts. When it comes to capture rate fractions of a second can make the difference between catching and missing a shot. “I tried everything side by side,” Smith says, “and the skin tones were much more realistic with Leaf than with anything else. Other backs had a much more ‘digital’ look. Leaf images were more film-like, which matched the look I wanted to achieve without having to fight the files every time.” He adds that, in terms of bit depth, he can take the file and do amazing color adjustments and that the file integrity holds up well under re-touching. “I’m able to get a lot of
the look I was used to in fi lm without degrading the image.” He uses a Leaf digital back because of the quality it delivers. “It’s a case of when it’s even more important to me than to some of the clients,” he confides. “In general, photographers can see a huge difference even if clients can’t. I use my Aptus to get the quality I want.”

Perfect Partner for Realizing Your Vision
Smith is almost always called for bold, dynamic, and colorful images. When doing a celebrity or an athlete, they’ll dictate the time of the shoot, so he’s found ways to light up his shots, often adding a strobe light. “A lot of what I’m trying to do is somewhat more humorous and playful. Depending on what I’m shooting.” For this he relies on his Leaf back to get the results he needs, even under extreme conditions. Take for example last year’s shoot in the British
Virgin Islands for Time Magazine to photograph flamboyant Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin brand empire and who’s now expanding into commercial sub-orbital space travel with Virgin Galactic. “With Branson dressed in a spacesuit, we were able to shoot really quickly just as the sun came up,” Smith describes. With rapidly changing light, the Leaf Aptus 75 kept the rhythm going, adding a lot to the speed and the amount of material they were able to shoot. Smith experienced the same when photographing professional athletes, where just as in sports, fractions of a second make the difference between success and failure. When Smith was assigned by ESPN the Magazine to shoot last year’s Home-Run King, Ryan Howard, before a game against the Florida Marlins, he was told that he had only 10 minutes to shoot before batting practice, and had to be packed up and out of there before any other players took the field. “Shooting with a Profoto 7B strobe, the Leaf Aptus 75 outpaced the recycle of the strobes, and I never had to slow down to wait for the back to catch up,” he explains, “so, when my 10 minutes were up, I had everything I needed and more - tight, medium and loose shots of Howard holding his bat and action shots of his home-run swing and follow-through. The quality was incredible. The 33MP back captures even the finest detail - every thread in his uniform. The gloss of the lacquer on his bat looked like glass. Everything the magazine could ask for - priceless.”

Download PDF

Hitachi Terabyte Drives

2007-10-30T22:01:00.000-05:00

I've been using Hitachi terabyte hard drives for over a month now and though I loved my Seagate 750gb drives. - the Hitachi Tb Drives really rock. Best prices are always from New Egg.

PMA Las Vegas March 8-11th

2007-03-05T20:10:00.000-05:00

If you're attending this year's PMA Tradeshow in Las Vegas March 8th-11th, be sure to stop by to see Greg and everybody at Moab Paper (Booth K251) and have a look a some of my photographs printed on their latest paper "Colorado Fiber Gloss." Also, check out the Panasonic Booth (C166) where they are rolling out their new photo workshops and see my photo of NBA All-Star Dwyane Wade.

Sandisk Extreme IV Compact Flash Cards

2007-02-13T09:32:00.000-05:00

I've been using 2gb and 4gb Sandisk Extreme III compact flash cards since they debuted. I recently bought a couple Sandisk Extreme IV 8gb cards and man they're wicked fast.

I think it makes the most sense to match the cards to the raw capture size. You can get roughly the same number of raw images from a 8mp camera on 2gb card as from a 16mp camera on a 4gb card or from a 33mp digital back on an 8gb card. That puts the rougly the same number of eggs in each basket.

You'll definitely want to get the bundle that includes a Sandisk Extreme FireWire Card Reader. It downloads a 8gb Extreme IV in half the time it took my old USB 2.0 reader to download a 4gb Extreme III...and time is money....

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

2007-02-11T21:04:00.000-05:00

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is flat out the best RAW Processor I've ever used. I've been using Lightroom since the first beta and it's been promising since the start. I'm using Lightroom to process files from both Leaf Aptus 75 digital back and Canon 1Ds MarkII raws and Lightroom absolutely rocks. Lightroom offers so much control. It's like a Ferrari - Sleek and Elegant on the outside - but if you pop the hood, the engine will blow the doors off the competition!

I absolutely love the raw conversions from Lightroom. There is so much control that you can get most of the adjustments you want in RAW which means you can batch apply the look to every image in the shoot. It’s gotten faster and more robust with each beta, and now that release version 1.0 is out, I really love this Lightroom, because there are a lot of things to love:

HUE/SATURATION/LUMINANCE: You can control the HSL of each of the 8 colors: the standard RGB + CYM (though cyan is called aqua) plus orange and purple. While you can expect this same control in CS3, this alone is worth the price of Lightroom. These panels take care of a lot of the layered adjustments I used to do in Photoshop to fine-tune individual colors and they can be batch applied saving a lot of time. The luminance adjustment is particularly useful if you wish to darken a blue sky. Rather than bumping up the blue saturation and risking pushing the file out of gamut, instead try lowering the luminance of the blue channel.

VIBRANCE: The vibrance adjustments allow you to boost saturation without pushing highly saturated colors off the cliff. It's particularly good at holding skintones from going brassy (well unless that is your aim...)

BATCH HEALING/CLONING: The coolest thing that’s been added to the final release version of Lightroom is the RAW Cloning/Healing Tool. Adobe Lightroom Beta Testers will notice this addition that Adobe engineers were able to squeeze in after Beta 4.1 into the release version. If you've ever had 1,000 images with sensor dust in exactly the same spot on a white background you're going to love this. This means it can be batch applied to all those sensor dust spots that pop in exactly the same spot and it auto-rotates between horizontal and vertical images to find the dust on the same spot of the sensor every if you rotate the camera, so if you've ever shot a job on seamless only to discover a dust spot in exactly the same spot on every frame, you'll love how east it is to clone out the spot and then sync that to all frames. The Spot Healing/Cloning Tool is also improved so that you now can now see the source point that it's sampling and manually adjust that it you don't like the point that is being sampled. This is also coming to Photoshop CS3. Even better news is that with the release of Camera Raw 4.0 ACR will add all of the same added adjustments contained in Lightroom, allowing RAW files can be moved back and forth between the two applications.

WEB GALLERIES: If you want to create really good looking web galleries really fast, Lightroom will save you a lot of time. I've always wanted web galleries to be as close as possible to final color and Lightroom allows you to create Web Galleries incredibly quick as directly from the raws - no wasting time processing jpegs - so no need to waste time on a step you can now skip. This can cut an hour or two of time it takes to post a gallery from many jobs.

You can order Photoshop Lightroom here.

Profoto AcuteB 600

2007-02-11T21:00:00.001-05:00

On location, we use lots of Profoto 7B 1200 w/s battery strobe packs. At times we rent as many as ten of them on our bigger shoots. It's a great pack and practically bulletproof, the only drawback is that one of the thing that makes it bulletproof is that it's powered by a sealed lead-acid motorcycle battery.

I just bought a Profoto AcuteB 600R pack for those times I didn't need or want to lug a Profoto 7B on the road but a little shoe-mounted flash like a Vivitar 283 just won't do. Late last December, just a day after picking up one of the first production AcuteB 600R from Foto Care in New York, I was flying down to the Caribbean for exactly the type of shoot I that was perfect for this tiny pack.

I wanted to be able to use an Elinchrom Octabank but I didn't need to pump 1200 w/s through it. Most of my shoot was going to be available light but I shot one or two portraits each day without every running low on output or power.

COST: Profoto is always on the upper end of pricing (unless you're a Broncolor user) and this is no exception. The list price is $1,950 for the AcuteB 600 pack and $2,185 for the AcuteB 600R with built-in Pocket Wizard receiver. I bought the R version. I don't know if Profoto does the same thing in other countries, but MAC group in the US holds about 40 "One-Day Sales" a year where you can buy the stuff for 10% off (that's what I did) so just ask them when the next event is coming up and have it shipped.

WEIGHT: The biggest advantage to the AcuteB 600 over the 7B is size & weight. While the 7B weighs in at a whopping 26 lbs, the AcuteB 600 weighs in at just over 10 lbs so it's light enough that the shoulder stap it comes with won't rip your shoulder off... The only disadvantage to this is as Peter suggested, you get a 2-fer with the 7B as it also becomes a 26 lb sandbag if you hang it from the stand. At 10 lbs, the AcuteB is pretty light in that regard.

SIZE: Same size as the original 600 Acute Packs 7.5 x 7.5 x 5" (19x19x13 cm.) You can easily fit a pack, head and reflector into a Tenba 300/2.8 long lens bag which makes it easy to carry and small enough to even fit into the overhead compartment of many small planes.

HEADS: While the AcuteB head is made specifically for this pack and at the moment is the only head that allows you to use its 85 watt modeling light, Acute 2, Acute 2 twin heads, old-school Acute heads and will all work with this pack sans modeling light. There is an adapter called a "Profoto Adapter 85 W" that will be released at some future date that will allow you to replace Acute 250w modeling lights with a 85w, so you won't have to buy a AcuteB head unless you really must need the modeling light.

TWIN HEAD: I also purchased an Acute Twin head for times that I'd want to combine two packs for 1200 w/s. Each pack has just a single flash socket, so a twin head makes the most sense when you plan to split it between two packs - however even just using one leg of the split flash cord will provide higher flash duration than the regular heads just not as much of a benefit as splitting power between two packs. Because of their shorter u-shaped flashtubes the Profoto bi-tubes have faster flash durations even when each leg is on full power. How much quicker that actually is I'd want to test. This isn't not much of an issue in terms of flash syncs of 1/250 and below, but with a leaf-shutter on the Hasselblad H-series offering a 1/800 flash sync it may come in handy.

MODIFIERS: Though I'd much prefer that Profoto not have separate Pro and Acute series heads (this is because the Acute flash trigger voltage is 450w -vs- 900w on Pro-series) but at least they both use all the same modifiers, so any reflectors or banks you have for Pro 6 or Pro 7 will work with Acute.

FLASH DURATION: I did these tests with both Acute 2 and old-school Acute heads and got similar results. I doubt the duration is different in the AcuteB heads. Profoto lists the full power 600w/s flash duration as 1/1000th of a second, but they have always measured "peak-to-peak" duration which is much shorter than actual. Using a flash meter, the actual duration when using either an Acute 2 or older Acute head both appear to produce a flash duration of 1/350th of a second. This means that shooting at full power at 1/500th will clip about 1/2 stop of output and at 1/1000 you'll clip a full stop of output, so if you need to shoot at 1/500 or higher, you might as well trim the pack to 1/2 power. There are two ways to cut the output of the heads. The first is a 3-position switch for Max, -4 (1/4 power) and -2 (1/2 power) this trims power without lowering the voltage, so going down to 1/2 power this way cuts flash duration to somewhere around 1/800th of a second and even going to 1/1000 of a second only clips 2/10ths of a stop. The second way is a click-stop dial that allows you to trim up to 2 stops in 1/8th stop increments. This is more accurate, but it appears this also trims the voltage so the flash duration doesn't get cut back as much, so just remember if you want the fastest flash duration, trim the power as much as possible using the 3-position switch - not the dial.

BATTERIES: Listed by Profoto as good for 160 full power flashes. While extra 7B batteries weigh the same as the AcuteB Pack, extra Acute 600 batteries are just 4 pounds meaning you can throw in a few extras without adding a ton. Extra batteries with cassettes list for $225, but you can buy the batteries alone for $40 when the old ones wear down. I have two extra batteries on order, but they hadn't shown up in time for the trip. Even so the one battery I took never dropped below 1/2 power. The battery slides in very smoothly from the side which is good. On most battery packs the battery is in the bottom of the pack, which I find always puts too much stress on the clips that hold it in place.

CHARGERS: Comes with a Profoto Charger 1A that charges the pack in 5 hours, but can also be used with a Profoto 7B Charger that will top off the pack in less than half the time and (according to Cliff from Profoto) keeping it hooked up to the the Profoto 7B Charger will allow you to shoot continuously with an AcuteB without running out of juice. For best battery life, keep batteries on a charger all the time when you aren't shooting.

CASES: At 26 lbs, 7B packs put a lot of stress on cases so I find myself repairing my Tenbas on a fairly regular basis. The same was true when I used Hensel Portys. But these packs are so light that you can probably get by with a lighter case for even more weight savings.

OVERVIEW: The AcuteB 600 isn't as much a replacement for the 7B, but rather an option to it. If most of you gear is Acute and you work at lower power it may be the perfect pack to throw in with your A/C Acutes in case there's no juice. I'll probably keep using the 7B as a main light but take a pair of AcuteB 600Rs for back lights. It's also perfect for little jobs where you hate to drag the big packs or for backlights if you typically use 600 w/s or less on those anyway. If you regularly push 1200 w/s through a bank, then a 7B is probably be more cost-effective.

Redundant Hard Drive Redundancy

2007-02-11T20:50:00.000-05:00

We shoot 10-100gb each shoot, so the gigabytes really start to add up. Everything we shoot gets saved to redundant Sonnet Fusion 500P 5-Bay SATA Enclosures with port multipliers loaded with 750gb Seagate SATA drives that we buy from New Egg. When all five bays are fully loaded with these bad boys, each drive enclosure holds 3.75 terabytes.

SATA transfer speeds are 3gb/second, so there are no hang-ups when processing or saving huge files. Using Retrospect, each working drive is duplicated to a clone drive in another drive enclosure that runs off a separate battery protected circuit. Up to four enclosures (20 drives) can run off a single Sonnett SATA host controller that supports port multiplier, such as Sonnett's Tempo SATA E4P for computers with PCI Express slots, Tempo SATA X4P fpr computers with PCI-X slots or Tempo SATA EXpress 34 for portable computers with an ExpressCard slot.