adam reeve

Offsite backup with Crashplan

Backup is one of the less glamorous aspects of aspects of computing, and alas one which often goes unconsidered. People keep so much important stuff on computers – photos, documents, videos, address books, accounts, the list goes on and yet many people haven’t figured out what they’ll do when that hard drive dies, or there’s a fire, or their laptop is stolen. At our house we have a number of PCs and laptops which contain a variety of data – some of it important, some less so – and I have some simple scripts which backup once a day to our central server. That means we have at least 2 copies of anything important, as long as it’s not more than a day old, and as long as we don’t lose the original machine and the server at the same time.

Photo Tips #8 : A Lens Primer (Part 2)

Last time we talked about lenses we covered length, zoom vs prime and different mounts and manufacturers. Today I’ll be talking about the other big differentiating factor – lens speed (all those weird f numbers). We’ll also cover some other features you’ll see talked about such as autofocus, image stabilization and macro.

Photo Tips #7 : Crop Factor Revisited

I talked about crop factor in the previous installment, it’s the reason why an identical lens mounted on a camera with a smaller sensor will appear to have a local focal length. I thought that a diagram might help clarify things further, so let’s try this. Imagine you’re looking straight down the lens onto the sensor, mounted at the back of your camera.

Photo Tips #6 : A Lens Primer (Part 1)

If you have a DSLR you have a choice of hundreds of different lenses, ranging in price from $50 to many thousands (the most expensive I ever saw was a Canon for $100,000 – used!). So how to choose? A lot of that comes down to personal preference and what you want the lens for, as well as factors like budget, but in this article I’ll try to give you a basic primer so you at least can understand the differences.

Photo Tips #5 : Canon’s Numbering Scheme

As a follow up to my DSLR guide, here’s a quick explanation of Canon’s DSLR numbering scheme which will hopefully clear up some common confusion!

All Canon DSLRs have a model number starting with 1, 2, 3 or 4 digits and ending in D. For example you have the 5D, the 60D and the 600D. Here’s how to tell what you’re looking at: