Rising before dawn to get the perfect light…
This is the life of an airshow photographer. It is not just capturing these magnificent planes of the past in the air but also their graceful shapes on the ground. In between the weeks of providing IT support for my fellow OWC employees here in Austin, my passion is the photography of airplanes – especially warbirds. Texas being the home of the Commemorative Air Force, an organization dedicated to the preservation of these planes, luckily provides several large shows a year to photograph.
Taking the photo at the show, though, is only half the story. At most airshows, I will take anywhere between 2,000 and 3,000 photos. In RAW format, this quickly adds up to a massive amount of data, considering I will shoot from six to eight shows a year. Typically I am looking at 60GB or more of pictures from a day’s shoot. This calls for serious storage and backup.
I will download a day’s shoot to my 2012 MacBook Air equipped with a 480GB OWC Aura SSD and an external 24” monitor attached via an OWC Thunderbolt 2 Dock. The Dock allows the MacBook Air to quickly switch between a lightweight portable machine to a desktop workstation. The MacBook Air is a great machine to take along on these all day shoots being light and powerful.
Generally, I do the editing in Lightroom off the Aura SSD then move the data to an external for long-term storage. My current external storage solution is an 8TB OWC ThunderBay 4 set up in a RAID 5. This allows for a fast 6TB “work” drive with added safety – if one drive fails my data is still secure. I have experienced the pain before of a failed drive and the loss of irreplaceable work.
Whether you photograph planes as a hobby as I do or photography is your chosen profession, OWC offers RAM and both internal and external storage solutions to help speed up your workflow and keep your photographs safe and secure.
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