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Duct tape shoes

During my early days in boarding school, it was not uncommon that near the end of the term, our clothing would start to get a little ragged.

It was also not uncommon to see duct tape used in some very creative fashions.

Since that time, I have seen duct tape used in everything from patching a wound to making a sailboat.

But I returned to the humble beginnings of how duct tape is best known, with this visual example –

A picture of Before and After of Duct Tape Shoes...
A picture of Before and After of Duct Tape Shoes…

Just another exciting example of what one can do with duct tape!

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Using Lightroom to buy a Lens

Adobe Lightroom Icon
Adobe Lightroom Icon

I’ve been thinking about buying a new lens for several years now, and I can never figure out what I want to get.

At the moment, I only carry three lenses:

I lost my EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM last spring, when it decided to go for a swim, and picked up the 75-300mm as a quick replacement.

I must say there is a noticeable difference between those two lenses.

Anyhow…

In my effort to figure out what Lens I wanted to purchase next, I needed to assess my style of photography, again.

In my film camera days, I carried 5-6  fixed length lenses, but in the digital age, I’ve gone down to three.

Mentally I had an idea, but I had no data to back up my real work environment.

Or so I thought…

While in Adobe Lightroom, I realized I could use the EXIF data contained in the metadata of each file – Lens and Focal Lengths!

This is a very fascinating look, at all of one’s images, over 31,000 in this one catalog!

Using Lightroom and the embedded EXIF metadata information, I could clearly see:

Most Used Lens

  • 18mm-55mm –  8168 images (25.79%)
  • 28-135mm –  16332 images (51.56%)
  • 70-300mm –  3798 images (11.99%)
  • 75-300mm –  1996 images (6.30%)

Most Used Focal Lengths

  • 18mm – 4258 images (13.44%)
  • 28mm – 4363 images (13.78%)
  • 70mm – 1339 images (4.23%)
  • 135mm – 2626 images (8.29%)
  • 300mm – 1888 images (5.96%)

Needless to say, sorting by every focal length alone is a large grouping, but in my case, I looked for any Focal Length over 1000 images or spikes.

Oddly, there is no spike around 55mm (473 images), which suggests that I never really used the 18mm-55mm all the way zoomed in.

Here is an exercise: What if your Lens happens to cross over in their Focal Length?

In this case, simply isolate/select a given Lens and Record the Focal Length numbers, which can reveal which Lens you actually used for a similar situation, and Thumbnails, just below.  It’s a great way to remind you of what you did!

I wish there was a way to export the data and bring it into a spread sheet for my geeky fun! (Note to Self…)

In my case, it turns out to be the Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM, which is now verified with actual Lens data.

That did not surprise me in the least, but which side of the Lens should I consider for my next Lens?

Clearly, my next largest ranges are 18mm (13.44%) and 28mm (13.78%) — about 27.22% of the images.

At the same time do I look at the 70-300mm range, which is 18.29%, because I a shot 70mm+ 18.46% of the time?

If this confuses you, don’t worry, because the more you dig into the data, the worse it becomes!

Try some of these!

  • Sort by Year – See how your Capture needs have changed
  • Sort by Body – Most used combinations to compare results

The list goes on.

I just wanted to highlight another aspect of Adobe Lightroom that might help you in your decision-making.

Now if you have any ideas on what I should do about my Lens dilemma, please let me know via email.

Update(s) –

07/17/2015 – In my morning reading, I ran into this site lightroomdashboard.com, in which you upload your Lightroom catalog file (.lrcat), and it will visualize your shooting habits. With a backup of my live catalog (1.27 GBs), I tried the “Drag-n-Drop” interface, and Chrome crashes. There is a Note that says they are aware of issues with 2+ GBs LR Catalogs. I would not be surprised their server(s) are being hit hard today. Need to check later.

>>> “Commenting Off” because of Spammers – send email! <<<

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Adobe Equipment Hardware How to(s)? Ideas Information Networking Photography Software Tech Talk Thoughts Utilities

Moving Computers – Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom Icon
Adobe Lightroom Icon

It is always a pain to move to a new computer because there are so many files and settings that need to be redone for the user to really get productive again.

With this idea in mind I offer the following tips and advice in regards to moving an Adobe Lightroom User from one machine to another.

This guide is geared towards people who are technically proficient on the Windows operating system, but should be able to serve as a guide to those working in a Macintosh environment.

If you have any other ideas or tips please feel free to send them my way!

Transferring the Data

As any User of Lightroom knows, the Catalog and Image files are the heart of your work and business, and if you are moving to a new machine, you need to consider what to do with them as you move forward.

On the “C:” drive of Old Machine –

There are several of options available to you, if your original catalogs and Images are still on the main “c:\” hard drive of your old machine.

Transfer files across the Network

If both machines are still attached to a network, you can easily transfer the catalogs across, but that is going to take time, and chew up various network resources.

Remember, depending on the number of Images you have, your catalog directory could easily reach several gigabytes worth of data,in my case: Catalog: 12.7 GBs & Images: 261 GBs

Remove the old hard drive –

If you remove the hard drive, you have two basic options, but before you begin, backup your files on the old machine in your normal manner.

Install in new computer –

By simply taking the hard drive out of the old machine, and installing it into your new machine, is most certainly the easiest of the options, and also gives you a second HD spindle when dealing with I/O operations in Lightroom.

But before you remove the hard drive, be sure to check the compatibility of data interfaces on your new machine – Can the new machine deal with the older IDE interface?

An example I can give, is my new machines, that is based on the Asus Z87-Pro motherboard, which does not have any IDE connections.

Also keep in mind, that if you connect the old “C:” drive, and it wants to reinitialize for whatever reason, and you have not backed up your data…

External case –

This is another good alternative, and does give you the flexibility to move to different environments with little issue, and also gives you the additional spindle speed during I/O, but is subject to the port speed when you plug-in, assuming that the chipset on the external drive is the faster of the two.

Backups

There are three critical areas that need to be transferred to your new machine for it to work in a fashion that you are used to: Images, Catalogs and Preferences.

Images –

Do I really need to say more?

Catalogs –

As mentioned earlier, catalogs can easily reach several gigabytes worth of data, but does all that data need to be transferred to the new computer?

Again Users of Lightroom know, and unless they have change the default settings, the program will prompt you to do backups, which are located in a sub-directory of the main catalog directory.

c:\My.Adobe.Lightroom.Catalog\Backups\

By simply looking into the backup directory, one could easily save time and the amount of data that needs to be transferred, by simply cleaning out old unnecessary files, but this is completely user based.

Just check to see which “Date – Time” named directories really need to be moved.

Preferences –

Since this is most likely a new software install, none of your preferences will be in place, so where are those files located?

Like all other User preferences, they are stored in the operating system’s Users profile directory, that is hidden through the normal interface, that can be easily accessed with a little forethought.

C:\Users\%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom

Once you are inside Adobe Lightroom directory, it should be very easy to recognize which directories are most important to you.

In my case I transferred files from these directories onto my new machine:

Adobe\Lightroom\Export Presets
Adobe\Lightroom\Filename Templates
Adobe\Lightroom\Import Presets
Adobe\Lightroom\Keyword Sets
Adobe\Lightroom\Locations
Adobe\Lightroom\Metadata Presets
Adobe\Lightroom\Smart Collection Templates
Adobe\Lightroom\Watermarks

Once installed in the new directories, Lightroom should have no issue accessing the “.lrtemplate” files. (BTW – If you really want to be geeky, you can open up these files in a text editor and play with them to your heart’s content)

Conclusion

When I moved to my new machine, I used a combination of techniques described above.

On my old machine, the Lightroom catalogs and images were already located on an internal secondary SATA hard drive, so I just removed the old hard drive, and installed it into the new machine.

From there, I copied the images and catalogs (approx 275 GBs) to the root directory of my new machine, creating a new backup of the files.

Even across the SATA III bus, this still took several hours, and I could smell hard drive smoke. (just kidding!)

When I got to my preferences, I connected to my old machine across the network and simply copied the files into the associated directories.

From there, I reconnected the Lightroom catalogs to the local main image directory, now located on the root of my main “c:\” drive.

Finally, I rewrote my old robocopy script to include the additional external hard drive, that I added for redundancy in my backup solution.

  • HDD1 (1.0 TB) – Enhanced (WDC Black) (Live Data)
  • HDD2 (1.5 TB) – Seagate Barracuda 7200 – Backup 01 (Internal)
  • HDD3 (2.0 TB) – WDC Green – Backup 02 (External)

Some may argue, that having all my data on the “c:\” will produce bottlenecks, while I would agree in theory, I also have to wonder with my usage of Intel’s RST technology, reduces this as an issue.

I have also, set the cache files of both Lightroom and Photoshop, to the extra space left over on my Solid State drive, as mentioned in another post.

If you have any thoughts or ideas I’d be very interested in hearing from you.

Good luck!

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Blogging Equipment Gadgets Hardware How to(s)? Information Personal Reviews Tech Talk

It has been 10 days with Loong

It has been about 10 day, since I first started setting up this machine (Loong), and I thought I would give you a quick update on what has been going on.

In the early morning hours of August 5th, I placed my order with Amazon.com…

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and went to bed.

Later on in the morning, my inbox was full of confirmation emails telling me when to expect the various packages over the course of the next few days.

Wednesday morning, the 7th, the first set of boxes arrived, and when I checked my email, it suggested that the rest of my shipment would be at the house by the end of the day!

Talk about excited!

I spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon, reviewing various videos on how to build your machine from scratch, taking particular interest in the application of the CPU thermal heat paste amount. (One of my nervous points)

Between picking up the kids from play dates, and getting dinner on the table, I was not able to finish my build until early evening, and that is when my first hopes were dashed.

The machine would not boot.

After doing my basic troubleshooting, and communicating with several people online, it was determined that the most likely culprit, was the motherboard.

A replacement board was ordered immediately and confirmation notices suggested that by late Friday afternoon, I might be able to begin again.

Now all I could do was wait…

Tick tock… Tick tock…

All I could hear in my head, was Carly Simon’s “Anticipation” song…

FINALLY, around 4 PM the new motherboard arrived!

It was easy for me to reassemble the machine in record time, since I’d had so much practice only hours before…

Then it was the moment of truth… Pressing the on button, I saw the motherboard LED codes change in the CPU fan fire up!

It was finally a success in getting the hardware to work, and I was off for a long night of installing software!

Configurations

I tried two different configurations, especially since I had nothing to lose.

SSD for operating system only –

In this configuration, the goal was to set up the SSD with only the Operating System (Win 7 64-bit), and using the HDD for Applications and Data.

In theory, this would be the fastest configuration on this box, but as I thought about it, and read reviews of the possibly quiet and deadly malfunctions of SSD drives, I decided to reconfigure the box for something a little bit more practical in the event of a failure.

I did not want to rebuild this machine anytime soon.

That being said, and since it was so early in the morning, I decided to download the various patches from Windows update, and returned to the machine when I woke up later.

Saturday – My eagerness to play with my new machine woke me early, and I scurried down stairs to my office with a pot of coffee.

I woke up the box, and was happily greeted with no error messages, but I rebooted the machine, and in standard Microsoft fashion, more updates needed to be installed.

More patching ensued, and the only bottleneck was my access to the Internet, and my kids streaming their various shows from YouTube.

It was amazing that once the files were downloaded, their installation screens zipped across the monitor to the point of not being able to be read the dialog box titles; what use to take minutes on my old machine, now took seconds!

Playing a little more, and seeing the incredible “zippy-ness”, I finally ran the benchmark again, and was very surprised to see it only ranked in the mid-fives.

Now I was on to creating a new configuration that offered more reliability in case the SSD failed.

Hybrid SSD-HHD –

One of the technologies included in the Intel Z87 chipset, is the ability to take advantage of Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology, in which you use both a SSD and HDD drive in conjunction to form a hybrid of the two technologies.

Basically, you install your operating system, in a normal manner, onto the HDD, and after all the RST RAID drivers are installed and operating system is updated and rebooted, you are ready to play.

There was a little catch that I did not pick up on when I was initially configuring my purchase, but I have been able to take advantage of it, as I will describe later.

When configuring the RST RAID drive (or cache drive), there is a limit of 64 GB, which left me with 50% my SSD drive still unused, which initially had me irritated for over purchasing the 128 GB SSD drive in the first place.

After quickly configuring the RST RAID, and rebooting I was now able to “see” the technology in action.

At first, it was definitely faster than running on the HDD alone during the initial set up, but not as “snappy” as the pure SDD OS install.

It does seem to be getting quicker as I move along, and that is what is to be expected in this type of configuration.

The SSD drive, will slowly “learn” about the most commonly used files and cache them to disk. The HDD is now termed “enhanced” on the motherboard’s RAID controller.

In regards to reliability of this configuration, the thinking is, that if the SSD drive fails, the only files that are lost are cached files.

The main “live” data still resides on the HDD drive!

Simple! – (I am keeping my fingers TIGHTLY are crossed now!)

As an amusing little side note, in both configurations, after I installed the base OS, without any Drivers or Updates, the built-in Microsoft App only rank the machine as a 1, but eventually did reach a 7.4.

Current Configuration

As I set off into this new adventure, I have configured my storage drives as follows:

  • SSD1 (128 GB) – RST drive
  • HDD1 (1.0 TB) – Enhanced (WDC Black) (Internal)
  • HDD2 (1.5 TB) – Seagate Barracuda 7200 – Backup 01 (Internal)
  • HDD3 (1.0 TB) – WDC Green – Backup 02 (Internal)
  • HDD4 (2.0 TB) – WDC Green – Backup 03 (External)

And (2) ODDs, which should hold me over for a while..

As it stands now, I only have about 500+ GBs of “live” data that I’m worried about, and this is the first time that I’ve actually had the space on one drive to put everything!

Consolidation of files – It should now be very easy since I’m only dealing with one main directory, and this will make writing a Robocopy backup script incredibly easy!

Installed Software

Google Chrome –

I have not mentioned this until this point, but this is the first time I’ve been able to install the Microsoft operating system, without using Internet Explorer!

Why?

It is because the Asus Z87-Pro mother support DVD, includes and installs Google Chrome, which is VERY nice!

Yes, when I ran Windows update, I did patch, to the best of my knowledge, Internet Explorer, but I have yet to launch it in any way shape or form.

Mozilla Thunderbird –

Talk about installers dream!

I was able to quickly download install the Thunderbird application, and after an initial launch, I exited the program in hopes of establishing the base directory structure.

On a whim, I thought I would try to take my existing Thunderbird email directory from Dragon, and copy it across the network, into the same location in Loong.

Being an old Microsoft Outlook 2007 user, I thought there would be no way this would work, and I’d have to spend time reconnecting my POP accounts and individual PST mailbox files.

To my amazement, when I relaunched Thunderbird the second time, everything popped up right where it should!

That was about an hours worth of configuration and headaches that I didn’t have to encounter!

Adobe Lightroom 5 (64-bit) –

Adobe Lightroom 5 (64-bit) was the first major application that I installed onto Loong.

Since I had already been running LR5 on Dragon, there was nothing really new or interesting yet, I still had not transferred my catalogs or images files, which were still on a backup hard drive.

Adobe Photoshop CS6 (64-bit) –

This was the application I had built this machine for.

You don’t get an Intel i7-4770 for basic word processing.

With that being said, Adobe has made it rather difficult to actually find CS6 for download on their site, which makes sense, when you consider that they are really pushing their new Cloud Computing environment.

In the final hours of configuring the system for software, I thought about CS6 vs CC many times, and it came down to what do you have at the end of your expenditure of money.

Basically, once you stop your subscription to the Adobe cloud, you can’t Open your files, whereas in the purchase of CS6, I still have an application “locally”, and I can do what ever I want with my images. I am not potential held ‘hostage’.

I do plan in the future, to look at and use their single application subscription, but for an application like Photoshop, I feel far more comfortable having a local installation of the software application.

Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 –

I have been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking since the late version 10 days, and have always had a sort of love-hate relationship with the software and the company.

Originally, I wanted to try to use my existing version 11 license, but was thwarted when I could not find the 11.5 upgrade file in my backups.

One would think, it would be a simple matter of going to Nuance’s Support page, and download the update, especially as a registered user, but I had forgotten that you lose all support after the initial 30 days of owning the software, and there was no way for me to download the patch.

So I spent several days lamenting on whether I should ‘bite-the-bullet’ and purchase a new license for Loong.

Searching the internet, I was able to find an online deal where I got a new seat for only $75 after various rebates!

After the software arrived, I eagerly installed it, only to find that I had to download a service pack, which is no big deal, per se, if the service patch was in 500 MB to be downloaded!

I also made sure that I backed up the Service Pack file this time, and at the moment, I have not registered.

Once I had Dragon finally patched, I started a new user profile, and I have been using it to create this blog entry, and so far it has been working out very well in terms of speed and accuracy, and as I use it more, it should get better.

Final tweaking

As the title of this blog entry suggests, I’ve been playing around with my system for about 10 days.

I still have not gotten into some of the deeper aspects of the fine tuning of the OS, mainly because the machine is very quick and responsive.

I have copied all my 500GBs of live data from Dragon onto the C drive of Loong, and reestablishing connections in my Lightroom catalogs.

Moving in and out of the various image directories and watching the thumbnails snap up on the screen is very exciting.

I have opened a few of bigger 800+ MB files into Photoshop, there is no hesitation as they jump up on the screen, as I zoom in and out!

Crunching HDR files together is very quick, and should save me countless hours in the future!

WOW!

Then it occurred to me while playing, but I still had some of my SSD disk available to me.

I opened up Disk Manager (diskmgmt.msc), and initialized the remaining SSD partition.

Going back into both Lightroom in Photoshop, I set their cache options to the newly created SSD partition, and relaunched the applications.

Now that it’s fast!

Conclusion

In reading the various manuals, how-to guides, tips and tricks, there is still a lot of things for me to explore and learn on this new machine.

I will continue to post new tidbits as they become available, so do stay tuned!

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New Computer Ordered

The last time that I bought a new computer, was back in late 2003, just before my daughter was born.

I remember say to my wife at the time, I had to purchase the computer because there was no telling the next time that I would be able to purchase a new one.

This time, instead of paying extra for a mainstream computer, I decided to go to a local computer builder, and have a custom unit built for me.

I ended up with a Pentium 4 on an Intel motherboard, 4GBs RAM and a 100GB HD for around $1000.

At the time, it was a very speedy machine, but after many years of service, and countless upgrades, the machine started to show its age when trying to run Windows XP, Office 2007 and Photoshop CS3.

So the hunt started for an upgrade, and I was able to finally scavenge a base Intel Core 2 6400 box, which I am still using to write this entry.

My biggest issue with this current machine, is that I am running into some compatibility issues with Camera Raw 7 after upgrading to Lightroom 5 and trying to move files into Photoshop CS5.

There is also the occasion, when working on larger 1+GB TIFF/PSD files, I simply run out of memory.

Then, about 2 weeks ago, after a tough budget negotiation, I was given the green light for a new machine!

Yeah!

Now the question was what to get!

I knew what I wanted a machine that could run Photoshop & Lightroom as the main applications, which meant as much CPU and RAM that I could get!

Like any computer geek, I fantasy configured systems on the major computer websites, and knew that they were way overpriced for what I wanted.

I wanted a custom-built machine, but how? Another Local vendor? or via the Internet…

Or myself, which I had never done before, even though I have fixed hundred of computers over the years!

I started to look at several ‘You Built It’ websites to get a very rough idea of price and configuration, and was quickly overwhelmed with the various configuration options!

It was time for a spreadsheet.

I listed the major components I wanted, and then I started to visited 5 different sites (ComputerLX.com, Magicmicro.com, NewEgg.com, TigerDirect.com, Amazon.com), collecting prices and reviews.

Even for a seasoned computer person, the various chip sets and sockets available made my head spin! I spent countless hours reading the forums on Tom’s Hardware so that I could make as intelligent decisions as possible!

At some point, I came to the realization, that I was going to be building this machine myself, and I started to venture into YouTube land to learn more about the basics of my new DYI project.

Finally, after many hours of research and internal debate, I finally placed my order:

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Stuff starts to arrive Wednesday!

I can’t wait!

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