Best Business Practices for Photographers [202]
One solution would be to use something called Network Attached Storage (NAS), which would reside on your network, usually within your intranet. NAS is simply a hard drive that is accessible over a CAT5 (or CAT6) Ethernet cable. If you want to use NAS, make sure that it supports 1000mb/sec (a.k.a. gigabit Ethernet), and most importantly, your computer's network adapter is also capable of handling that speed.
Further, with correct configuration or the use of dedicated in-office servers, these images could be available from a remote location as well. Keep in mind that you'll be quite limited, to about 350kb/sec access, because that is probably your up speed on DSL/cable modems, and the up speed will be your limiting factor.
Dual Backups of Image Archives, Onsite and Off
Every job/assignment folder has an exact copy residing on a duplicate hard drive that is stored offsite. In the event of a disaster rendering my office inaccessible or destroyed, my images will be safe. We only access those drives for three reasons:
When the onsite drive fails and we need to restore it
Every few months to "spin up" the drives so that the drive bearings and lubrication do not degrade
When we migrate from that storage type (in other words, hard drives) to the next generation of storage type (as yet unknown)
Due to the current use of drive space, we are consuming one set of 250-GB drives per month, or half a terabyte of storage.
Dual Cameras on Assignment
With all this talk of office equipment, it's easy to forget about the redundancies that should be employed when you are on assignment. Just as you should take extra batteries and flash cards, you should also have a secondary flash and camera on hand, in the event that your working camera fails. More than once, I have had a camera fail mid-assignment. It's easy to simply put that one down and pick up the backup camera to continue the assignment.
Other times a flash will break off. It might be just the hot shoe on the flash, but on one occasion, the hot shoe remained in the flash attachment, and the entire top of the camera broke off. In the former circumstance, you'll want to make sure you can continue the assignment with the secondary flash.
If you are traveling to a distant location, it might be of value to bring some secondary lenses as well. Planning for the worst will give you peace of mind, especially when you drop your prime lens off the starboard side of the boat you are working from or down a ravine during a hike to the location you selected at the top of the mountain.
Excess Lighting Equipment: Don't Take Three Heads on a Shoot That Requires Three Heads
A fairly standard lighting setup for a headshot is a main light at about 45 degrees off axis to the left, a reflector on the right to fill in the right side of the subject, a hair light opposite the main light behind the subject, and a light on the seamless backdrop. That's three lights. Ask yourself, which one can you do without? I suppose the hair light, but then you lose much of the separation and dimension of the image. Now, this isn't a complicated lighting setup, and perhaps you could do without one head, but there are a number of shoots where that's just not the case.
When you arrive at the shoot, perhaps a clumsy assistant will drop the light case. Perhaps it's just the time in that flash tube's life to go to light-bulb heaven. Perhaps the light stand will be knocked over by the client, and the head will go crashing to the floor. Or, perhaps the power pack will receive a surge of electricity from the wall outlet. For lighting kits in which a pack feeds multiple heads, you'd be best served to have more than one pack, if for no other reason than that stretching the cords to their maximum lengths to get the