New Camera Gear

I'm going to be traveling to Europe before long and will be taking some new camera gear. I have a Canon 40D, but find that lugging the camera body, plus three lenses and the bag I carry it all in, to be pretty cumbersome after two or so weeks of traveling. The last two years, I downsized to the opposite degree with a Canon S100, but missed some of the flexibility of the interchangeable lenses you get with something like a DSLR. The S100 takes great pictures, but I wanted more, without the weight and without spending as much as I would for a newer DSLR or a full frame format camera. The S100 is a great camera, and now that it costs about half of what I paid two years ago, an even better value in a point an shoot format, but with a lot of options.

I've been eyeing the mirrorless cameras for the last year or so. Typical for me, vacation is coming up, so now is when I decide I have to at least look at a new camera. I hoped that the mirrorless format would give me the lower weight, combined with the increased flexibility I'd get with interchangeable lenses. It's unfortunate than Canon hasn't yet produced a mirrorless camera, as I have been very happy with the Canon line. I bought a Sony Alpha a6000. Since I have at least one good "non-kit" Canon lens, I wanted to see if I could find a way to use the Canon format lens mount with the Sony 4/3 format e-mount. There are some adapters, but never having used one of these, I had to explore what the impact on the resulting image was, their compatibility with the lenses I might use, and the cost. Metabones seems to be the Cadillac of the category (at least in price), but I didn't want to spend as much on the adaptor as I spent on the existing lens, or I might as well buy a new lens. I make a lot of use of the reviews on Amazon as well as product review forums when it comes to camera gear. DPReview is one I use. But reading the reviews on Amazon left me with some doubts about my particular lens' compatibility. When looking at the Signstek Electronic Auto Focus EF-NEX EF-EMOUNT FX Lens Mount Adapter for Canon EF EF-S Lens to Sony E Mount adaptor(25% of the price of a Metabones), I asked a question about whether it should work with my Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM SLR Lens.The answer was Yes! So I bought it. That, and another battery, since the Sony isn't getting great marks for battery life.

I took a few test shots and didn't notice any vignetting, which I rather expected from changing the lens mount system. Time will tell, once I take more shots and view them on my monitor. Though it certainly weighs down the otherwise much lighter camera, it potentially gives me a much better opportunity to take big landscape photos. Since I'll be traveling in Switzerland, Austria and Germany, hopefully I'll be able to take better advantage of the lens. I'll create a separate album on Flickr to isolate the photos using this camera, lens and adaptor vs. my trusty S100, which I'm also taking. I tried the lens mount adaptor with my Canon f1.4 50mm lens, but it doesn't seem to do anything special for me beyond changing the focal length, and adding some more weight to my already too full camera/gear bag.

I updated the firmware in the Sony A6000 from version 1.0 to version 1.2, and bought an app in the Sony App store. Yes, there's an app store for my camera. The camera comes with a remote control app to control the camera for shooting, which is nice if you need to eliminate some camera shake. It also has Wi-Fi and NFC, but inexplicably, doesn't have GPS (as the S100, which is several years older) does.

I don't make much money from Amazon referrals, but I do enjoy taking my payments in the form of Amazon gift certificates and buying myself a little something from my wish list. Thanks for using any referral links!

Photo Management

Since I started centralizing my media onto my home server, I have also been in search of a better way to manage the photos stored there. Not just store them, because I have the photos somewhat organized into folders, but this doesn't allow me to organize them in multiple ways--some photos obviously could be categorized into multiple folders depending on their subject and context-- maybe it's a family photo of a vacation trip. I don't want to duplicate the photos into multiple folders. I want to be able to search on the subject and metadata. It would be nice to (roughly) geotag the photos (even the ones taken before GPS).

I want to do this without having all of the photos on any single local computer(s), but be able to browse them from any computer on the local network (not necessarily the Cloud). I've looked at a lot of possible solutions, but prior to deciding whether to use any (one) of them, I'll need to decide whether I want to continue to store the data on my own computers, or in the cloud (or both). Going with one of the cloud options means that I would have access to my photos, but would also be dependent on that provider remaining in business. I've already invested in a NAS, so I'm going to stick with storing my own library and sharing selected bits thru a service like Yahoo's Flickr.

I use Flickr for (hopefully) my better photos. But not for my complete library. And, there are certainly other Cloud solutions, but Flickr is the one I chose a long time ago and it's difficult to move (meaning I'd have to find) all of those photos to another site, even if I wanted to.

First, I needed to define my needs/desires:

• All photos are on the NAS (Synology)
• I want a database driven tool for faster searching.
• Editing tools need not be part of the application, as I have plenty of other tools for this. 
• I need a file management/cataloging tool, capable of handling multiple users (though there will likely only be one or two at any given time). 
• It needs to be able to handle jpegs, RAW files (of different cameras), but I'm not concerned with bitmaps or vector images.
• Multiple device access across the local network.
• Remote access using the same browser interface would be nice
• Only one user at a time should be able to edit the files
• Tagging; Search by tag, metadata
• Preferably cheap or free
• It runs on Mac OSX, but maybe Windows or Linux too, in the event I switch platforms again.

One necessity will be the painful process of going through decades of photos and trying to decide whether to weed out bad photos (and I'm sure there are a lot of them). But then there's the "not bad, but unremarkable photos" too.  No one is going to do this if I don't. My family certainly wouldn't be willing to do this. As long as hard disk space was cheap (and getting cheaper), there was little incentive to be selective. Now I'll pay the price for keeping nearly everything I shot. And over the years, what was an acceptable photo (because it was as good as digital was at the time), in some cases is now a marginal one as the quality of camera has improved. I started out in 1998 with a sub 1 megapixel camera and my latest addition is a 24 megapixel camera.

Plex does a a great job at allowing me to organize my music and TV shows and movies, but photos are something that can be organized a lot of ways using the same photo, and Plex doesn't allow me to do more than basic sorting by albums. Synology has apps that let me browse my photos, but again, not the way I'd like to be able to organize them (not only by who they were, but maybe who and where, when, etc.).

In searching about for solutions, I can see I'm certainly not alone in looking for such a solution as an individual.

• http://www.zdnet.com/article/my-infuriatingly-unsuccessful-quest-for-a-good-media-asset-management-tool/
• http://www.bkwinephotography.com/technology/found-best-digital-asset-management-dam-system/
• Here's a recent WSJ article with a good summary of some of the options, but not quite like I think I'm looking for, relative to providing network access to browse the complete library. http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-best-way-to-organize-a-lifetime-of-photos-1429637857?mod=djemptech_t

I plan to evaluate:

• Picasa (though Picasa is not made to be a multiuser system).
• Picasa Starter (for network drive access)
• Digikam
• XnView
• Perfect Browse
• CatDV
• StockKeeper
• Apple's new Photo app
• Lightroom

• CMS systems from
• Joomla
• Drupal

since Synology has packages for both I can install and run from my existing server. I likely have a lot to learn if I go this route.

There may be others, but for now, this is my 'long list'.

A work in progres....