Well, this was an unanticipated introduction to the skills/gear category!

So you may be wondering where we went… most of it was a simple matter of not dedicating nearly enough time to making this blog a reality (cuz it is actually fun), but some of it was a technical hurdle. You see, on New Year’s Day, my motherboard in my 10 year old Dell XPS Studio 8100 gave up the ghost. Like big time. Won’t even power on nevertheless fail a POST. This is supposed to be a blog about going outside and taking pretty pictures while wandering around with a pretty coonhound. The coonhound is still pretty, but the pictures tend to require some level of post processing and asset management and all kinds of effort that requires things like motherboards.

Let me introduce you to the technology that brings this blog to all 60 of you that read it. (Dude, I’m totally stoked that we’ve been seeing that much traffic). Here we go:

Desktop:

Dell Studio XPS 8100

Intel Core i5 650

8 GB DDR3 RAM

NVIDIA GTX550 Ti card

1 TB 7200 RPM Spinny HDD

Laptop:

Toshiba Satellite with a battery that won’t hold a charge (needs to be plugged in at all times)

Intel Core i7-2670QM

8 GB DDR3? RAM

Intel HD 3000 Graphics (on processor)

750GB Spinny HDD

Camera:

Fujifilm X-E1

Fujinon 23mm f/2 lens

Software:

Adobe Lightroom Classic CC

Adobe Lightroom CC (For sync and sharing capabilities)

Photoshop CC

Several Iterations of Capture One Trials, but I haven’t committed. With all this happening, I’m not going to commit yet for reasons we’ll get to in a little bit.

“I don’t know or care what any of that means… Can we go for walkies now? There’s a snowbank I haven’t peed on.” -G

So it’s pretty clear we have been running on older, yet very good technology (except for that lens, which is simply world f*%&ing class). The problem is, laptops are not known for lasting 10 years, and Dell desktops are not known for being repairable or upgrade-able. This gets more complicated when you acknowledge the fact that Digital Asset Management has been a four letter word for just about a decade around here. Longer if I ever start scanning my negatives… which I have been slowly finding.

With Dell making very good desktops with very annoying proprietary plugs, I have decided to so something I haven’t done in 15 years. I’m going to build my own damn computer. I’ll document and post the build process and also how I’m setting up backups and management of the past 10-20 years of photos. I’m going to focus on the digital stuff now, but maybe, hopefully, I’ll also be setting up scanning and printing capabilities so I can go back even further as I find my negatives in boxes all over the place. At this point in my life, shelling out money on fancy computers and camera gear takes a back seat to paying off student loans and perhaps someday buying a house with a backyard for the hound. This leads us to planning for an effective, yet reasonably priced system that has some elements of future proofing built in. So here’s the technology plan:

New Desktop:

Intel Core i3-8100 CPU (Will go to Core i7 later)

Gigabyte B360 (perhaps H370 for future proofing?) Motherboard. Nothing fancy, but ready for Thunderbolt 3

8 GB DDR4 2400 MHz RAM (One stick for now, I’ll go to 16 GB dual Channel later)

1 TB Samsung EVO SSD SATA drive (Might be able to get away with 500 GB, but this will force me to think about external storage sooner than my bank account wants to)

Corsair 200R or Be Quiet Pure Base 600 case

I’ll re-use the power supply I bought in trying to fix my Dell, and I’ll also reuse my NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti for now.

For the new laptop (work will pay for a significant portion of this if I use it as dual purpose)

Probably a Dell XPS 15 of some sorts.

Maybe a Surface Book 2, but probably not. But damn are they shiny.

Camera:

Sticking with the X-E1. Its autofocus is absolute shit, but the pictures are simply incredible.

Hopefully getting a 50mm f/2 lens in a few months, but this computer crisis has put that in question. I’d rather have a reliable workflow than an extra lens that I can only use when my computer is working.

Now for storage and backup:

Backblaze on both computers. Currently, I only have my dead desktop covered on Backblaze. I picked up one of those HDD enclosures from amazon, and have access to everything on the old hard drive, but my current laptop is completely unprotected (to the tune of 250 GB of photos. Not a lot, but quite a bit for me)

Eventually, I’ll get a NAS local backup for both the desktop and laptop. It’ll probably be a RAID 5 array of spinny disks and connected via my router. .. I’m way more worried about getting my cloud backup complete.

My plan as it stands is to get my new desktop up and running, get all my photos under one roof, then start expanding into archives. With the photos coming in in four different formats, I’ll be using Lightroom Classic to get it all into one master collection. While I would love to use Capture One for this, since my archives spread across several cameras, I’d have to shell out $300 for C1 pro. This would be $300 on top of the $10 a month I spend on Lightroom and Photoshop since C1, while an amazing program (especially for Fuji shooters) simply can’t replace Photoshop. From there, I’ll start planning out how to keep space free on my boot SSD and where to put the rest. Any advice is appreciated.

Hopefully going to order parts and start building next week. Until then, snooze like a Coonhound!