Olympus OM-D EM-5 on Shasta

Big photos small camera!

As an outdoor shooter and backcountry adventurer I have written before about my interest in the new micro 4/3 camera systems and how much weight can be saved by using them.  With interchangeable lenses, no mirrors, electronic view finders, and no waiting when you push the shutter button they fill the void between my full frame cameras and less than ideal point and shoots. 

The one complaint I have had with early micro 4/3 bodies is that viewfinders are an accessory that makes them awkward and less durable.  Often these viewfinders also have a lag time that makes it difficult to capture moving action.

D800 vs EM-5 with similar focal length wide angle lenses

With all the hype about the Olympus OM-D EM-5 micro 4/3 camera I thought it was high time I gave it a shot to see if its built in electronic viewfinder would be up to professional level action work in bright conditions that my previous 4/3 bodies were not.  So two days before heading to Mount Shasta what does the happy little man in the brown truck deliver?  A brand new EM-5 with the 12-50mm lens.  I figured I have 30 days to return it if I don't like it, and taking it on a real mountain adventure for a couple days is a far better real world test then lens charts in the office.

So after shooting about 600 frames while climbing to 14,180ft and skiing 5,000ft how does it compare to my D800?  In terms of actual resolution the D800 is obviously going to beat it, but in terms of real world use how often do I need 20x30 prints from a climbing or skiing adventure?  Aside from lacking the ability to activate the autofocus using a thumb button rather than the shutter button to make focusing and recomposing easier I didn't really miss too much from my D800 or D3s.  The autofocus was fast, the exposures were good once I had the histogram appearing in the viewfinder (remember I was shooting on snow with an untested camera), and the 9 frames a second was great shooting what little action I did come across. 

Overall the climb was more about getting my Dad to the summit and my getting to ski back down, so I didn't focus all my energies on shooting, but the time I did spend was well rewarded with enough publishable images to illustrate a magazine article about climbing with my Dad. 

In a perfect world I wouldn't have to make compromises, but the difference between leaving the camera at home or taking it to a summit makes these compromises worth every ounce saved.  Of course I would prefer to have my D800 with an entire 40lb bag of professional glass, but that would mean I never made the summit.  If I were doing the trip again I wouldn't hesitate to take the EM-5.  This time I would just make sure not to forget the wide angle lens in the car!

Climbing Mount Shasta

A few weeks ago I had the chance to complete a couple goals at once on Mount Shasta.  Nearly 10 years ago to the day I had been Mount Shasta but was turned back due to weather. 

While on the mountain I watched several people skiing back to the car and remember thinking "what the hell am I doing walking, I have to learn to ski".  So fast forward 10 years and this time I have my skis on my pack and my 60+ year old Dad in toe. 

The year my Dad turned 60 he decided he wanted to climb Mt. Rainer and make a dramatic life change in terms of getting in shape and eating better.  So we decided it was time to start getting into the mountains together, starting that year with a summer trip up 14,505 foot Mount Whitney.  The following year he made an attempt on Mount Rainer, but wasn't quite in ready in terms of technical skills and conditioning.  So we decided that climbing Mount Shasta at 14,180ft in  spring using crampons and ice axes would be a good training run for his attempt this coming summer on Rainer. 

My Dad lives in the Seattle area so a friend and I drove North and meet my Dad in Shasta City and spent the night at the Bunny Flat trail head (6,950ft).  We then hiked/skied up to Helen lake at 10,400ft to spend a short night before a very early alpine start up the route while it was still frozen and safe from rock fall. 

After a short rest at the top of Avalanche Gulch and stopping to take lots of photos we made the summit a little before noon.  While the view was amazing, sharing a second 14er with my Dad was something that will be with me the rest of my life.   On the way back down we meet up with my friend who had summited earlier.  He and my Dad started hiking back down so I could complete the second goal of the trip; skiing as much of the mountain as conditions allowed.  

After waiting for the snow to soften till about 2pm, I strapped on my Telemark Skis and enjoyed the best ski run of my life.  5,000ft+ of spring corn with a quick lunch stop at Helen lake to pick up our overnight gear.  All told I skied from about 13,000ft (the summit was too icy) to the car in about an hour and a half.  I was well into a second cold beer and a nap by the time my Dad arrived back at the car. 

My Dad got the summit, I got my ski...  Success for all!

Shutterbug Bald Eagle Cover

Just found out Shutterbug Magazine chose to use one of my Bald Eagle images on the cover of this year's Digital Photography How-To Guide. I also have as smaller shot of Mount Whitney with a full moon to accompany my article on getting sharp images out of telephoto lenses. More to come...

Data Protection with the Drobo S

For a long time I have been struggling trying to effectively manage my growing image library.  At first it all fit on one 120GB external hard drive (remember those days), but recently it has been split between two 2TB hard drives in my MacPro tower.  I have also been using Backblaze for an online backup, and keeping an Apple Time Machine as well.  But every time I come back from a big shoot it takes weeks for the online backup to catch up.

After placing my order for the new 36mp Nikon D800 I knew this problem would only get worse as the file sizes are several times larger than the ones from my current cameras.  Thus I started searching for a more robust and fast system that would allow me to keep redundant copies of all my files, at an affordable price, and have fast access.  I first looked into faster cloud storage options, but the prices blew me out of the water for the amount of space I needed.

Enter my wonderful Dad!   He is a manager at an industrial company in the Seattle area and deals with all their network technology stuff (or in layman's terms he is a computer geek).  I was lamenting my storage issues with him one day on the phone and he mentioned Drobo and how his company had just bought a big 8 bay version to run their entire multi-million dollar company.  He suggested I look at their systems for photographers and gave me a contact name at Drobo to follow up with any questions.

Fast forward a couple weeks and this fancy looking black box with 5 green lights (Drobo S) is now plugged into my MacPro Tower.  It will hold up to 5 regular hard drives of any size (they don't all need to match in size), and stores my data spread across all the inserted drives.  It can run with as few as 3 hard drives and still have a single drive fail without any loss or work slow down.  I currently have 4 hard drives inserted and thus have the ability to have 2 hard drives fail at the same time and still not loose any data.  Aside from the unit being stolen or the house burning down... You know the rest...  Knock on wood. 

When I start running out of space I'll just insert one more drive into the box and it will get larger.  If a drive fails I'll just eject it and replace it (hot swap).  No managing data, formatting, RAIDing...  Strait out of the box I just inserted the drives and put in the install CD, after that it was ready.  Just plug and go! More time to shoot!

For safety sake I still plan to keep an off site backup, but having a fast and safe storage system in my office helps me sleep better at night.  The Drobo will also work when I end up replacing my aging MacPro with a newer iMac that doesn't have the space for multiple internal hard drives like the older tower.  For the serious photographer with lots of photos that represent their income Drobo is the way to go!

5/18/12 update...
Still running the Drobo, but things have really slowed down now that I am using the Nikon D800 with its 36MP sensor.  Looks like it is about time to replace the 5 year old desktop and see how that changes things.  Hopefully its the computer and not the Firewire 800 connection, since Drobo's don't do Thunderbolt and iMac's don't do USB3.

8/19/12 update...
So after a wonderful summer shooting in Central America I home with thousands of images that needed editing, so I bought the bullet and ordered a new 27inch iMac with all the goodies.  After some research I also discovered that no matter what did the Drobo S was just too slow for editing major files in a timely manner.  Thus I also dropped another bunch of cash and am now the proud owner of a Promise Pegasus Thunderbolt hard drive bay.  While expensive it more than lives up to its name in terms of speed.  With the new computer and Pegasus I can edit photos faster than ever before, and you know what they say about time vs. money:-)   The Drobo (which is still working perfectly) is now my very safe and redundant off site backup.