Notable from this story is the fact that the student received the necessary attention to shame the company into a settlement through the website: www.youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com. This is a great site for anyone who can’t afford a lawyer, or wants to try this before they get a lawyer.

Shaming a company with bad publicity may do the trick, and in this case it did.

Read all about Rockie’s story here.

I’ve thought about that a lot. With the passing of Milton Rogovin http://www.miltonrogovin.com/ in January, I read his obituary and I was quite impressed with Mr. Rogovin’s life and his work.

I do my best to give of my time to others. In GA there are a lot of military service members and I give everyone in the service a discount on my photography services. Many of the men and women who serve our country need a wedding photographer, and usually for just one or two hours. Sometimes for short ceremonies before they ship out, or between deployments.

I’m trying to think of more ways I can give back, but that is one way photographers can help. If it means 1 hour of wedding photography that barely covers your cost, so be it. Go do it and do it well!

As I look around on the blogosphere, I wonder how many successful photographers are blogging?

Also, if I have a really, really, really good business model right now, would I tell you about it? Would I blog to the world how much money I’m making and how you too could make lots of money and be successful? Wouldn’t all the photographers out there in cyberspace just jump on it and kill my business?

OnRequest Images in Seattle Washington seeks a Photo Retoucher

Lauren Greenfield is seeking a Photography Assistant/Researcher:

Harry & David is looking for a Producer/Photo Coordinator:

Union Hill Photo Studio, who does a lot of work for Hallmark, seems to want a Photo Retoucher.

Urban/Daddy wants to find a: Photo Editor Retoucher/Designer

Jimmy Jazz, Retoucher

While staying in Rhinebeck, NY last summer I had the great pleasure of working with two collaborative artists and photographers in Hudson, NY. After getting to know the two artists over the three months of working with them, I asked one of them if he would be willing to let me shoot him for a new body of work that I was starting titled “Environmental Occupations” and thankfully he agreed to do so.

Throughout my time in the upstate area and my many commutes to and from Hudson and Rhinebeck, I found a love for the landscape of the area and discovered a handful of small harmonious scenes that I wanted to use as environments for my photographic work — one of which was one River Rd. near Rhinebeck. Eventually, my ideas and concepts matured enough to begin shooting for my new body of work and the first area that I wanted to explore was the one that I found on River Rd.

When setting up for the shoot, he and I both vocalized the fact that we were aware that Annie Leibovitz lived somewhere near by in the Rhinebeck area but we were not sure where she lived, and how funny it would be if we actually ended up on her property by accident… well it just so happens that we were in fact on her property.

The props were perfect, the light was dusting in, and Nicholas was posed to be photographed. After snapping off a few test shots to get my exposure and composition just right, I managed to get just two or three frames in before a voice from the road began to yell.

Turning around and stepping down from the ladder that I was shooting from I noticed two women riding up on bikes, one screaming, “SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN!” Once I realized who was yelling at me a froze slightly in my shoes and looked at my subject who was looking back at me like a ghost saying, “… do you know who that is…”. I immediately replied, “fuck… yeah of courser I do…” and giggled. It was Annie Leibovitz.

I walked up to Annie and explained what that I was a student of photography working for the artist/subject (I was photographing) for the summer and that I was just shooting for my own personal work and nothing commercial. She did not seem to care. She then began firmly explaining that we needed to leave and that we were on her property and the she had kids that she cared for and did not want us interfering her or her property.

Keep in mind that River Rd. is surrounded by dense forest and that from the area that we were shooting in, directly off the side of the road, there were no houses in visible sight, there wasn’t even a driveway within sight, we were literally in the middle of the forest. When we asked if we could just simply get a few more frames in we were met with even more aggression with Annie saying that she was being nice not to call the police. Of course we then packed up, apologized and left.

For a woman who started her career working with Rolling Stone and photographing music and culture and being “alternative” and “rebellious”, one might think that she would give a young student of photography a little break and nurture the creative process of the medium she has become so fluent in — but instead she fulfilled her reputation to the max. At the time, I was more than miffed that little Ms. Leibovitz shut down the shoot and  stifled the potential of that particular scene, but I did end up getting a great shot in and I am more than happy that I can tell this story today.

We’ve had decent luck for low cost portable storage with Synology.  You buy the device, then buy and populate it with the drives that you want…setting them up in a RAID will prevent loosing data due to a drive failure.  At the 2tb size, I recommend that you use a R6 if possible.  http://www.synology.com/us/ .  They are “network attached storage devices” you simply plug them into your network, walk through a setup, and start using them.

Something like this would probably help you with what you need are looking for.
http://www.amazon.com/Synology-DiskStation-Diskless-Scalable-DS1511/dp/B004GKLT4G/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1296661269&sr=1-3

Don’t forget that you still have to buy the drives that you want to go into the device.  I like this approach, since the drive market changes so quickly, it helps keep your costs down.

3tb drives are about $200 right now, you can put 5 drives in that device and end up with ~10tb of storage in a R6.  (for around $2000 total cost /1k for the unit / 1k for 5 drives).

Hitachi Enterprise Class drives are probably what you are looking for – if you want performance and high mean time between failures.  For environmental concerns and lower performance, I use the Western Digital Green drives which are lower heat, lower rpm, and much more energy efficient.  Since you are planing on doing the right thing by going to a RAID6 so that you can loose a drive, you just have to decide what’s more important: speed and time or the environment…failures will happen, you just have to make sure you are prepared.

Hi Greg,

I just got off the phone with the Business Team from my Apple Store in WI and they gave me a couple of options for solutions to your problem. First one being to look to IBM servers. They always play Mac + PC friendly and have some options for expandability. It was suggested that you look at the IBM x3850 and x3950 X5 systems. It allows 4TB of storage per chassis even on the least expensive model. Problem that you would encounter with this is that the least expensive starts at $15,000 and the small fact that it looks like SkyNet from Terminator. So it is a big closet sized system and will use a lot of power. Second option involves Apple. Apple has put their XServe systems on EOL (end of life) however their Promise RAID solutions are still being made, sold, and serviced. This option has the expandability of up to 16TB per 3U rack and is warrantied by Apple and can run the Mac OS X software. So same interface as your laptop. These come in a multitude of flavors with options to expand. The Promise VTrack E-Class 4x starts at $7,499. This includes 4 1TB drives. It is a 3U rack so you can expand this system over the years to 16TB total. Or 8 1TB drives mirrored. Each 1TB drive is $399. I asked about media servers and I was told that you run in to problems quickly with those. Expandability is limited to each brand, HP, WD, etc. Even your Playstation 3 if you want. However depending on their interface or software being able to find a TIFF, for example, and edit in Photoshop and render it may not be an option for some media servers as they are specific to their functions. For example HP makes a media server that just accesses movies to your TV. Hope this helps. Here are the websites that I found this info on. See you in class.

http://www.apple.com/server/storage/

http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/browse/home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/promise

http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_category.aspx?region=en-global&m=192&rsn=40&statistic=Mac

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/hardware/enterprise/x3850x5/index.html

1,536 days to backup over the internet to the home centers of backblaze.com, about 5 YEARS!

I gotta check and see if I can send them a drive!

Moving down South and reducing overhead, diversifying my work, and shooting for clients I never dreamed of shooting for…. has all resulted in Profit!!!!!!

I’m working, having fun, living 30 minutes from the beach, and teaching some excellent students. Life is good.