Since 1990 I have photographed what some have called the
Worlds Greatest Free Party, Mardi Gras in New Orleans. It’s a daunting event
and often misunderstood, as someone from the Mid-West I assumed it was one big
parade that went thru the French Quarter and there were a bunch of drunken
naked people throwing beads. Nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s actually something like 50 parades and events happening
though out the three Parish area surrounding New Orleans. In the city itself
there are more than a dozen events in the days before Fat Tuesday, the day
before Ash Wednesday the end of the carnival season.
For a photographer this is an all day shoot, day parades,
night parades, the scene in the French Quarter, there is no lack of things to
make images of. In the pre-digital days I would shoot for 5 or 6 days pretty
much all day and end up with 40 or 50 rolls of film. Now, in the digital age,
shooting both a Fuji Xpro 2 and a Nikon D810, I am coming home with 6,000
individual files and close to 350 gigs worth of data.
These events I’m photographing happen once a year, if I
loose any of that data it’s all over until next year, and believe it or not,
Mardi Gras is different every year. Parades have themes and the mix of weather
and location make a big difference in how the images are made.
My workflow part of this is to do two downloads every day,
usually after the daytime shoots and later at the end of the evening. I usually
work with a 15” MacBook Pro and spread my work out over 2 or 3 external drives.
I then make sure these drives are stored in different locations in the
apartment I stay in in the event of break in or loss, you can’t be too paranoid
about your files and drive failures are a real thing.
This year I brought with me two new external solutions. I
used two CRU ToughTech externals, one an older ToughTech Duo 3SR with two 1 TB
drives inside and the other a new ToughTech Duo C model also with two 1TB
drives in it. These drives are a terrific solution to any photographers needs
while on the road and shooting a lot of images. Each external is a 2 drive RAID
1 and shows up on the desktop as one drive. The drives also pop in and out of
the enclosure allowing easy exchanges of the drives if you want to go that
route. In my case the older Duo 3SR connects to my laptop via a Firewire 800
port and I use a Lightning dongle to adapt the Firewire to the Lighting port on the MacBook Pro model I have. It is bus powered and
no external power is required. The other back up to my backup (did I mention I
am very paranoid about loosing data?), it’s the newer Duo C model that has a
new USB 3.1 Type C interface. For this drive I have a USB type C to an older
USB 3.0 cord. This drive does require an external power supply but the
advantage is that transfer speeds are about a third faster. I’ll leave it to
the real tech guys to tell you the exact transfer speeds. Both externals are
very robust and have a solid no nonsense build quality. Both power up quickly
and are as some say, user friendly and the RAID configuration inspires a lot of
confidence in keeping your files safe. Both drives can also be configured as a
RAID 1, JBOD or a RAID 0 depending on how risk averse you are. You can purchase
the enclosures with drives supplied from CRU or buy your own 2.5” drives and
install them yourself, mounting the drives to the sleds is a simple task and
CRU even supplies you with a screw driver. As I mentioned earlier you can also
purchase extra sleds to allow you to buy one enclose and swap out the drives as
needed, the drives pop in and out without the need for tools.
No question these enclosures are a bit more expense than
some of the options, but if you put a high value on the safety of your files
while on the road and expect to be moving around a lot, these are some of the
best options I’ve ever found. My next big photo outing is spending two weeks on
the dunes of Cape Cod photographing the landscape of the National Sea Shore and
you can be sure in my computer bag will be a pair of these.
