25-October-2011

Day 8 and Counting

My Drobo disk-array is rebuilding after adding a new drive. Don’t know how long it will take. New images to follow. The down side to large storage solutions such as Drobo is the time required for backup and restore. Not sure how many days this will take!!!!  Got a message that one of the drives needed to be replaced with a larger drive. I removed the indicated drive and inserted a new 3 TB drive. Hope this doesn’t meen that the rebuild process is starting over. On the positive side, I can to read data from the Drobo array — so I continue to update my backup drives. I’m almost wondering if I should have just reset the Drobo, and restored from my backup.

Last night Auroras spilled south of Canada into the contigous United States. Check out SpaceWeather.com. There have been some great pictures, especially of some rare Red Auroras. Unfortunately, it was overcast and raining here last night. By morning the sky was clear. I’ll set up a camera tonight, but with a lower probability. As this sunspot cycle goes to maximum, I do hope to see and photograph the Northern Lights. The last time I saw Red Auroras was while in graduate school in Pasadena California the winter of 1980-81.

You can also check out an image of an old (1928 Mercury Dime) I took one years ago today: 25-October-2010

20-October-2011

Day 3 and Counting

My Drobo disk-array is rebuilding after adding a new drive. Don’t know how long it will take. New images (including a meteor caught last night with two cameras) to follow. The down side to large storage solutions such as Drobo is the time required for backup and restore. Not sure if this will be hours or days!!!!

Check out my post from two years ago today outside of Ghirardelli’s “The Original Chocolate Shop” at night in San Francisco: 20-October-2009

Three-Years Ago (19-November-2007) — Hawaii

Gone to See Hawaii. Big Island Photography Workshop with Thom Hogan. Day 2: Morning Session.

Image Processing Techniques. A comparison of different HDR (high dynamic range) programs for rendering a series of images 7 images taken at different exposures (+3, +2, +1, 0, -1, -2, -3 EV). The programs compared are Photoshop CS5, Photomatix Pro, and Nik HDR Efex Pro. I should note that I am not able to run the Nik HDR Efex Pro on my desktop computer as it causes Photoshop to crash. I had to use a different computer to process the images using the Nik HDR Efex program. The images were taken with a Nikon D2xs camera and 105 mm f/2.8 VR macro lens.