Photography & Stuff

Lately I have been thinking a LOT about safeguarding my data. I like many Americans probably are keeping more and more important data digitally. I have to think it is natural to have an inherent mistrust for the longevity of digital data. Which means that I have to start seriously considering measures to safeguard my information. I currently have 4 Western Digital RE2 500GB drives in a 0+1 raid in my Mac Pro. I chose the RE2 because of it’s purported enterprise level design standards. 0+1 Protects me against drive failure but not against accidental data loss or overwriting, for that you need a redundant storage system that indexes files at certain points in time.

For instance at my work we have Veritas backing up versions of files at 12 AM and PM every day on a 4 week rotation which means you can roll back a file or folder to any 12 hour interval in the last 24 days! This is an awesome solution but really that much redundancy (potenntially up to 48 versions of a file) is only practical for a work enviroment where most files are Word and Excel files. Most home users will want to back up larger media files which do not change much over time.

So I looked at a number of options:

Resync, Raid 5, Time Machine, and finally ZFS. Unfortunately for me apple decided to disable raid 5 on the Mac Pro even though it is supported on the motherboard! Instead they want you to buy a $1K Raid Card, Forget about that! For a long time I considered some raid 5 implementation to be my best bet.   In the next part of this article I will talk about the different variations of raid 5 solutions I looked at:)

So it has been a long time since I have written a blog.  That’s OK because I think I could count my readership on one hand.  I have been taking a lot of pictures lately of Hopewell Valley Central Highschool’s Boys Lacrosse team.  Tyler is the JV/(part time Varsity) goalie. Check the Pictures out at this Link:

http://www.jdlphotovideo.com/Gallery/Photography%20Gallery/Events/Sports/Hopewell%20Valley%20Lacrosse%202008/index.html

or Just go to www.jdlphotovideo.com and click on the link on the front page (although it may not be there much longer). Next year when Tyler is the starting Varsity goalie you can expect to see pictures of at least every single home game!

Stay tuned for my next entry about sfegaurding your pictures!

I’ve updated the family photo albums! Also I am happy to announce that to the general public I will soon be offering 15% off of my prints through the end of the year! This is an initiative to increase sales, who knows I may actually have to files sales tax with NJ!

I also went to the first of Tyler’s indoor Lacrosse games now happening every Saturday to practice taking pictures. I thought I did a decent job for my very first time. The lighting stunk and I am self conscious about using a flash and distracting the players. Luckily I have an amazing lens that is good at coping with the low light. I will start posting the best of these pictures on the website in the events gallery. Eventually when Hopewell Valley starts their games I will be at least every home game taking pictures. I am hoping to start to expand my business into selling sports photographs to players and their families.

Great news.My combined domains: http://blog.jdlphotovideo.com  http://www.jdlphotovideo.com  http://www.fractalfilm.com  have been receiving a phenomenal number of hits, around 500 a week. This may be laughable in comparison with a lot of websites but I think it’s pretty good for something that is less than a year old! Page views per unique hit are still under 2.0 though and I want to get that number up to 3-5 pages per unique hit.

Most of my videos are on MySpace!  Just check out  http://www.myspace.com/jeremiahlamontagne  or Http://www.myspacetv.com !  You can now link to the MySpace videos from your websites and put them on your profiles!  I will soon have many of my photographs available for linking from MySpace as well.  Enjoy!

I have been improving the website every day now. Sometimes the changes are small. So far I have been going through and checking links and optimizing the META tags for search engines. I have also however been making improvements for users. The Galleries are practically complete! I have a system set up for using Paypal to buy Photographs from the Fine Arts section and for the first time users can make comments on photographs in the Family and Events section. I know that some of you may be interested in commenting on the Fine Arts section but I have not yet made the decision to open that ability to users. The fine arts gallery is primarily a market place and as such I like to have a certain degree of control over how images are presented.

Coming soon will be a forum where you can post about any of the photographs or videos you see on this site and a chat room where you can arrange to meet people to talk about whatever. Less glamorous but equally important is the contact page. A biography/curricula vita page page and jdlphotovideo.com branded error pages. If you are navigating the site and happen to find a broken link please email me at info @ jdlphotovideo.com minus the spaces. I also encourage you all to subscribe to this blog and make comments about what I am writing. Writing posts gets a little boring I would much rather be having a conversation. Do you have questions about the photographs that you see, want to know more about my influences? Go ahead and ask.