Wedding #1

It’s not often I go to a wedding as a guest, I’m normally there as the photographer, however I was invited to my friends wedding, it was a beautiful event and I got a few good shots.  The pressure that is lifted when you’re taking photos for fun rather than in an official capacity.  Enjoy.

You can see the whole gallery here.

creativeLIVE [shameless plug]

creativeLIVE is about providing the best free, live creative education on the web. From our studio in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, we offer free online workshops in photography, video, web and graphic design, app development and a wide array of other creative topics.

All of our live creative workshops are available to watch for free in realtime. Once a live workshop is over, we edit the best of this content into easily downloadable files available for purchase through our online store. It’s that simple.

At our core, we’re a dedicated group of creative-minded individuals. Our aim is to work with the very best instructors who want to share their knowledge and creative expertise with the world. If you have suggestions for new topics or instructors for creativeLIVE, are interested in joining our team, or just want to say hi, please contact us.

Thanks from everyone at creativeLIVE

Do you ever wake up saying, “Helloooooo Internet” to great the day? Audition to be a creativeLIVE Co-Host! If you’re in the Seattle area, a +creativeLIVE fan, enthusiastic and passionate about education, we want you!

Application deadline August 10, 2012.
http://www.creativelive.com/blog/audition-co-host-creativelive

Family Shoot #2

My latest family shoot, want to see more?

If you’re interested in your own family shoot then :

1 Hour Shoot
1 x 10 by 8 image of your choice
All images print ready on a cd

£70

Contact me at photo@paulmellors.co.uk

Rufford Park Shoot

Rufford Abbey sits in 150 acres of historic parkland, woodland and gardens in the North Nottinghamshire area known as the Dukeries.

This varied park includes the ruins of a medieval monastery, a contemporary craft centre, gardens, woodland walks, children’s play village, sculpture trail, and a lake. We have lots of special events too. Bring the family for a relaxing and inexpensive day out.

More images here

Backups, Backups and more Backups.

As a parent I taken a lot of images and let’s face it i’m paranoid about loosing them.  I remember a quote, “It’s not a backup if the images you’re wanting to save are in a different folder on the same drive”.  Makes sense really, if the hard drive fails you’ve still lost the images.  I don’t know about you, but i’d be gutted.

With that in mind, i decided I wanted backups, and being paranoid decided to go over the top, but lets face it better to be safe than sorry. Here’s what i’ve done, don’t get me wrong, it’s probably not the best way, but it works for me.

 

Ive only got a laptop at the moment which ihas a 128GB SDD, i use a program called SyncTool, to backup my files to my windows server.  The NAS drive then runs it’s own internal backup to pull the files from the server to it’s drives, these  are mirrored.   So let’s see, laptop, windows server, then nas, that’s data on 4 drives.  Ok it’s in the same location so I still have a similar issue to having it on one disk in that if there is a fire, i’ve lost the lot.  This is where the USB comes in.  Once a week I get the USB drive from the secret offsite location, attach it to the nas and back that up.  It’s then returned which means I do have a backup OFFSITE.

I also use smugmug to display my images, if i wanted to I could upload them all to that for even more redundancy.  It does sound like overkill, but lets face it these are all my images since the birth of my kids so that’s 4 years and over 300GB of data I certainly do not wish to loose.

Trash the Dress

 Trash the dress is an event that you can do anywhere, at the end of the day all it involves is models/decent outfits [that they don't mind ruining] and an environment that can be classed as trashy.  In this case it was a car breakers yard near where i live.  It can be a fun event, perhaps you should try your own.  Here’s a couple of images, but if you want to see the rest, you need to go view my gallery