Crazy fun stuff that I like to buy. This time is a half terabyte external Sandisk SSD drive.

On the Spanish Steps in Rome. 1995. Mamiya Six camera.

I'm photographing the annual Summit conference for WP Engine at the end of the month and I learn new stuff every time I do this three day assignment. We move fast. They move fast. A few times last year we (the marketing team and I) had photographs from the CEO's final speech up on social media minutes before she left the stage. Three years ago I learned I needed a much faster laptop for the conference (no time to head to the studio to process and upload, we did everything within 100 yards from the main stage) so last year I finally retired the noble but painfully slow Mac Pro I had been using and bought a new one with a faster processor, more memory and an SSD HD. It's so much quicker. The narrow part of the funnel last year was how long it took to write files to my conventional (spinning disk) hard drive. So, this year I bought several of the Sandisk 500 GB SSD drives I found on Amazon for $89 each. I've already tested one of the drives and it's super speedy compared to the older tech. Now my big hope is that the new Fairmont Hotel here in Austin, Texas has a nice, juicy broadband connection with which to work.

This will also be my first year to use the Fuji cameras for a larger conference. I'll be shooting mostly photographs but need to also catch some B-Roll video for the client as well.  The X-H1 is particularly well suited to this. The real trick is in the upload. We shy away from 4K when we aim for fast delivery....

Last year, when I was shooting displays, and some demo areas that were in really low lighting, I used a monopod for stability but I ended up anchored to the camera. You can't just walk away from a monopod and think that your camera and the floor won't soon meet up,  and there were times I wanted to set a self timer, use a flash and stand with the hand held flash about ten feet over to one side. I have narrowed down my selection of tripods for photographs to just two. I may have "over narrowed" because while the two that remain are wonderfully rigid and durable neither is light weight and both are a pain in the ass to carry all over a hotel convention space.

I have my eye on a Benro tripod that might fill the bill for a very small, very light, take everywhere tripod. It's called a Benro Slim. It's carbon fiber, has a decent bullhead and only weighs something like 2.4 pounds. I know it won't be as sturdy as my big Gitzo but I also know I can strap it onto the side of my photo backpack and never notice the weight. It's for those times when I want to shoot interior stuff and I need to have the camera on an autonomous support so I can walk away from it to adjust lights, etc. (Darn, I was so enthralled with what I was writing just now and I took a break to look at the tripod specs on Amazon and decided, in the spur of the moment, to just go ahead and order it......).

The interesting aspect of this show for me is the immediacy of delivery that we're going to engineer. I'm working hard to figure out how to continuously, wirelessly, send files as I'm shooting to a folder on the laptop but I can't figure out (right now) how to continuously upload the images from the computer's folder to a Smugmug gallery without having to touch the computer. We use Smugmug.com to share the photographs with the team so they can quickly select and download the stuff they want to use.

If you have ideas for speedy, one man file transfer I'd love to hear them.