Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Data

Ever wondered what 534 CDs and DVDs looks like?


This is my 'office copy' of all my images. Originally I had done a second copy that I stored off site. The off site copies had gone a few years ago, but I had never got around to getting rid of the office copies. They were on a shelf units, on top of a filling cabinet and in the box in the picture. 
Starting from 2001 there were 329 CDs. Then I moved onto DVDs, all 205 of them. I stopped writing to DVD in February 2011, after that I have shot around another 400 GB of data which went straight to hard drive.

Over the next few weeks I will go through all the disks checking I got all the data from the offsite set when I wrote them back to hard drives. Then each disc will be cracked to render them unreadable and sent of to the dump. any plastic and paper that can be recycled, will be.

Should keep me busy for a while!





Friday, April 11, 2014

Data Data and more data.

I came across an interesting link today.  A Trillion Trilion megabytes. 

This got me thinking about the data I create.

I am currently sitting on about 2Tb of data this all the images I have created since the year 2000 it currently is backed up onto two desktop drives. these are about 3 years old and are due to be upgraded. Not having looked at the hardware in a few years I found this.

BrandSamsung
Item Weight168 g
Product Dimensions11.2 x 8.2 x 1.8 cm
Item model numberHX-M201TCB/G
SeriesHX-M201TCB/G M3
ColorBlack
Hard Drive Size2 TB

This means I my entire digital life will sit on a 168g drive. That is about the weight of a 5 pack of 120 roll film that I shot unto about 2003. 

So to put things in perspective. 

All my photography from my birth until 2003 consists of a shelf about 6' long full of negatives in folders plus 3 draws of a filing cabinet full of first choice transparencies plus 5 archive boxes of 2nd choice transparencies and this after shredding 2 large bin bags of reject transparencies a few years ago.

All my digital photographs from 2000 until now on a 168 gram hard drive!

Now that would have looked like magic when I started in the business in 1976.

As Arthur C Clarke said. 




Thursday, April 10, 2014

stopstealingphotos.com

Before the internet is was not easy to set up a fradulant photography business. Most serious enquires from prospective clients meant, that the print portfolio was dusted of, an appointment made and a face to face presentation given.
I have no doubt that some people showed clients some finished brochures or magazines that they had not shot but the prints in portfolios were hard to steal. To get good prints you needed to work from original negs or transparencies and it was almost impossible to get access to these if you were not the original shooter.

Now with the web, images can be stolen and offered as examples of a person work very easily. Also with the boom of digital cameras anyone can set themselves up as a photographer and have no real idea what they are doing.

It is obviously illegal to steal images as all images are copyright the moment they are created, but this fact will not stop some people from stealing images and claiming them as their own work to market their business.

Stopping this is not easy. Yes it is illegal but law enforcement is not going to get involved especially if the crime crosses borders. Employing a lawyer is expensive and the chances of reclaiming any costs are slim, as few of the fraudulent businesses have much in the way of assets, for the simple reason they are a fraudulent business.

A more effective way is name and shame and the power of SEO.

stopstealingphotos.com is the highest profile site outing photographic thieves today.

Originaly run as a blog but now with a URL and website it has been outing thieves for nearly two years.

The site and its owner have be successful in disrupting the businesses of fraudulent photographers by creating a web presence that becomes, by the powers of SEO, the number one listing on Google, if any potential client is searching for that company by name, the first result will be the first entry they find.

It would always be better if stealing did not happen, bit it will, and stopstealingphotos.com will be needed to out thieves.



Sunset Margaretting

 A nice sunset but full moon stayed behind the clouds.