Ron Scheffler - Photographer - Hamilton Ontario Canada

Tiger-Cats wide receiver Maurice Mann pulls in his second touchdown of the game over Winnipeg Blue Bombers defensive back Donald Brown during the third quarter at Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton.

Mann and Cats running back DeAndra’ Cobb tallied two touchdowns each.

Click on the photo or here to see more photos from the game…

The Hamilton Tiger-Cats lost their 2010 home opener in a close game against the Calgary Stampeders but there were some bright spots, such as the first quarter 98 yard punt return for a touchdown by Marcus Thigpen, hurdling over Stampeders punter Burke Dales in the photo above.

See more photos from the game…

The weekend of June 4-5 was a busy one for events around Hamilton. In addition to attending Buskerfest in Dundas, I also spent most of Saturday at the Battle of Stoney Creek re-enactment. For those unfamiliar with it, it was a pivotal battle in the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. 2013 will mark the 200th anniversary and appears it may become quite an event. In anticipation of this I wanted to re-familiarize myself with it since my last visit early in the 1990s.

It’s certainly an interesting event for photographers with all the items of early 1800s military life on display and re-enactors generally very agreeable to photography.

Captain Stutt, Officer Commanding, The King’s Regiment in the Canadas and a 30-year re-enactor. All contents in this fine example of an officer’s tent are authentic to the period. Many thanks to Mr. Stutt for the tour and agreeing to sit for a few photos.

The event runs Saturday and Sunday. Saturday includes an afternoon and evening battle. Here re-enactors relax in period daily life between battles.

One of the common tasks after each battle is musket cleaning to remove unburned gunpowder and residue.

During that time, these standard soldiers’ tents would have slept five men - a very tight fit.

Soldiers gather for muster prior to the evening battle.

Here the British forces assembled for a massed push against the Americans and fired in volleys. The evening setting resulted in much more dramatic images than the afternoon battle. The muzzle flashes were much stronger and the smoke seemed to linger longer in the air.

The overrunning of the American cannon positions brought the battle to an end.

The re-enactors lived period life for the weekend, overnighting in their tents and at the mercy of the weather. This year a storm moved through Saturday night with heavy rains and strong winds, probably resulting in little sleep for the re-enactors.

More images are online at my Flickr set here

Information about the battle re-enactment as well as Battlefield Park in Stoney Creek is here.

As the lead image indicates, there’s more than busking going on at Dundas’s Buskerfest.

Buskerfest is a street festival on the first weekend in June where around a dozen or so buskers from around the world perform in Dundas. I can’t think of the last time I attended this event, kind of like the Victoria Day fireworks, also in Dundas… I went for the opening on Friday evening and got some decent, if predictable busking photos:

Above the Checker Board Guy juggles while balanced on a non-self-standing ladder. Below, Brant Matthews, The Fire Guy, performs his finale for awestruck kids and adults alike. One of the things that struck me while editing the photos was how the kids were pulled into the acts much more deeply than adults. I guess I don’t hang around with kids enough to appreciate this, but it was interesting to see, and here The Fire Guy definitely succeeded. Plus his adult focused jokes at the expense of kids was also a nice twist:

There was one particular performer named Lurk, a clown/joker character on stilts that was kind of creepy, at least to me, probably because I don’t like clowns and haven’t since childhood. I vaguely remember going to a circus as a kid and that might have turned me off. This guy lived up to his name perfectly, waiting for an ambush:

As I wandered around and watched the acts (they were all pretty good), I began paying more attention to the spectators than the performers. In a way, the spectators were just as interesting, if not more so.

And there were a lot of teens hanging out and not really paying much attention to the acts. Pretty soon I also wasn’t paying attention to the acts and was instead drawn into the interesting teen social dynamics on display.

The angle wasn’t perfect for the shot above, but I liked the moment, as well as the out of focus couple in the background. This guy was trying pretty hard for a kiss and the girl wasn’t very receptive, though I’m not sure if it’s because she didn’t really like him, or was just playing hard to get.

I found the following sequence interesting. Another guy came by and hugged her, then the guy also tried for an embrace, but she resisted. He took off in a huff, she called after him, he came back and tried again…

And there was plenty more to observe…

Here’s Lurk again. While it was still light out he wasn’t having much luck sneaking up on people from his hiding spot between two buildings, but here he lucked out with a trio of girls were weren’t paying attention. He got them good:

Playing telephone tag:

Then the rain started and most people headed home, except the teens…

Lover’s gaze while waiting out the rain that wouldn’t stop:

She caught his eye:

So here’s a question: If it’s raining hard and a bunch of teens are getting soaked while hanging around with heavy looking backpacks, what’s in those backpacks? Probably not raincoats or umbrellas. Here one guy was busted (for those not from Ontario (or Canada), drinking in public places is not allowed, except in licensed venues, and then one must be 19 or over), though he was let off with a stern warning…

Believe it or not, there are more photos from Buskingfest and can be viewed on my Flickr photostream.

A selection of springtime abstracts:

It should be fairly safe to assume that any semi-serious digital photographer has some sort of archiving system in place, be it CDs, DVDs, second or third duplicate hard drives, etc. because we’ve all experienced some form of data loss. Generally one approaches this topic with the goal of finding an ideal physical storage medium… But what about all the recent talk about cloud storage?

And what is cloud storage anyway? It’s data stored on remote servers, typically owned by someone else, accessed through the internet. The benefit is that it’s physically separate from one’s other copies and prevents total data loss due to a local disaster (fire, storm, war, etc.). Downsides can include that it’s difficult to quickly transfer multi gigabyte file sets even with decent high speed internet access; third party reliability (being able to serve the archived files or even just staying in business for a few years); there are generally costs involved. While there are some free options, those have restrictions.

I’ve contemplated this for some time and about 4-5 years ago joined PhotoShelter as a possible solution. While PhotoShelter is an excellent service, it’s not a simple, no frills online storage service, therefore one pays for additional features which may or may not be relevant to one’s needs. For pure online data storage, I’ve decided to give Amazon’s S3 service a try.

What is S3? It’s pay as you go redundant online data storage at a reasonable set rate without volume restrictions. I can imagine some thinking, “well I already pay for web hosting, can’t I just use that?” Yes and no. It will depend a lot on your web host. You may get away with 5 or 10GB, but eventually you’ll be called out, as I discovered when I was too lax at letting certain ftp accounts accumulate. My particular host has a no storage clause tucked away in the TOS, meaning if the files are not relevant to the operation of the website, they must be removed. This generally means no bloated ftp accounts. For photographers it’s possible to keep files on the http side of the hosting account by creating web galleries, etc., but at some point the web host will grow unhappy. In my case the threshold seems to be in the 30GB neighbourhood. And I’m not even storing photos for the purpose of online archiving, just galleries created for various clients and projects that have added up and eventually have to be removed or down-rezzed. Here’s a link to an unhappy Dreamhost customer who thought she could use the service for storage purposes. Another option could be a service like Flickr or Smugmug (which is actually hosted on S3). For $2 per month, Flickr will allow unlimited storage, though there are bandwidth restrictions. My issue with Flickr is whether one could actually download a larger number of images quickly in one sitting, in addition to some slightly sketchy privacy issues. While Flickr does allow users to set privacy to eliminate public access, will it also ensure that none of their third party developers/partners will not have some sort of access to these files? You would think that they won’t, but am somewhat suspicious about this aspect of social networking sites.

Back to S3. If one spends some time over at the Amazon Web Services website it can quickly become confusing and/or overwhelming. Much of the AWS service is aimed at web developers. Photographers can skip straight to S3. Even there some of the jargon is a bit obscure for the average photographer. What matters is that it’s an online redundant storage solution at a relatively low price.

Why S3 and not some other service? I suppose this is somewhat subjective, but from my point of view the primary factors were cost and reputation. I’ll address cost a bit later, but in terms of reputation, Amazon is a huge company with the resources to create and maintain a redundant storage solution. The bottom line is they’re likely to be in business for the long run, which can’t be guaranteed for smaller operations. Of course I’m not advocating that anyone moves their entire archive to S3 in place of maintaining a local, physical archive. As we’ve seen from the recent great recession, there is no such thing as too big to fail, therefore don’t rely on anyone else as the sole solution. For some history on this from a photographic perspective, read up on the collapse of the Digital Railroad photo site.

How to set up S3:

Sign up for Amazon Web Services (AWS) via the link at the top of the page.
If you don’t currently have an Amazon account, sign in as a new user.
Sign up for S3 on the S3 page by following the link under the Products category, or go here and click on the Sign up for Amazon S3 button.

When you sign up for AWS, Amazon creates a set of unique access credentials. These are different from your sign-in credentials used to access your AWS account. The access credentials are two sets of alpha-numeric keys. One is called the Access Key, the other is called the Secret Access Key. They are respectively the user id and password for accessing your S3 account.

Amazon has a number of user guides to explain S3 via a number of methods such as javascript, php, etc., but are all aimed at web developers. Photographers can ignore these and instead use a number of current, photographer friendly tools. Photo Mechanic includes an upload function to S3, as does the ftp program Cyberduck. I’m sure there are other options, such as Firefox plug-ins I’ve seen discussed on other blogs, but my current workflow uses both Photo Mechanic and Cyberduck, so it’s a welcome option to be able to use familiar tools.

While Cyberduck is typically thought of as an ftp tool, S3 is not accessed via traditional ftp. But Cyberduck makes it appear as though one is accessing an S3 account via ftp, which keeps the user experience very friendly and consistent. One in fact accesses S3 via https, in other words, secure http. You might read somewhere that it is a folderless storage system, but not to worry, you can upload contents in folders and Cyberduck will translate it into the proper http for S3 and will display folders when you later access the files, allowing you to maintain a familiar organizational structure. One of the S3 terminologies which might seem a bit unfamiliar is what they call a bucket. It’s more or less a root folder that one creates in which to store files, and one can create up to 100 buckets. The one catch with buckets is they must be uniquely named; not just for one’s own account, but across all S3 users. Each bucket becomes the prefix of the http address for each file uploaded, meaning each file will have a unique, permanent web address. For example, if you’re uploading archive photos from 1999, and your name is Joe Smith, you could create a bucket called joesmitharchive1999. The bucket will appear as a folder in Cyberduck, into which you can then upload your files/folders. Because the system works via http, one can access the files from a web browser, but it’s not quite that simple. Each file is set to be either publicly or privately visible. If one uploads via an ftp program like Cyberduck, that setting is located in the preferences. But even if left at publicly visible, it’s not as if anyone will be able to see all of your uploads, or even find them with Google, etc. The only way to find the files is if the name of your bucket(s) and also the exact file name is known. For example: https://joesmitharchive1999.s3.amazonaws.com/january/filename.jpg where joesmitharchive1999 is the name of your bucket, which holds a folder called january, which in turn contains a file called filename.jpg. Since uploads to S3 are done via https (secure and therefore encrypted), chances are very remote that someone will be able to sniff out this information. So while it might seem like you’re putting all your files out there in cyberspace, the odds of someone finding them are very low if left as publicly accessible, and zero if set to private. If this is a concern, it’s possible to change Cyberduck’s preferences for upload, or after upload, to change privacy settings. On the flip side, there are benefits to having images stored with public access. One would be for serving files to a website, but based on what I’ve read from others, the S3 service can at times be fairly slow for this purpose. A better Amazon service would be Amazon CloudFront. An example would be if one has a popular video file that is frequently accessed but is on a bare budget web hosting account. If your site suddenly gets a huge spike in traffic, your host might suspend service due to what they deem excessive bandwidth use, even if you’re on a so-called unlimited plan. Another aspect to S3 is remote file delivery to clients, such as if you’re away from the office and don’t have direct access to your regular archive. It would be possible to send a client a given file’s S3 web address and allow them to download it at their leisure. Or you could access it from the web link, or via Cyberduck, then email it to them. Client delivery via S3 could be quite useful for very large files. The only catch is it will cost you money. While it’s only pennies, it could add up with a relatively large file linked to a popular web page.

This is a good time to address costs. S3 is an attractive option for long term storage where files will be infrequently accessed, most typically only for disaster recovery or when access to one’s main archive is not possible.

Full pricing details can be seen here.

As of June 2010 (prices in $US):

Storage (Designed for 99.999999999% Durability)
$0.150 per GB - first 50 TB / month of storage used

Reduced Redundancy Storage (Designed for 99.99% Durability)
$0.100 per GB - first 50 TB / month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.000 per GB - data transfer in (extended until October 31, 2010, thereafter $0.10 per GB)
$0.000 per GB - first 1 GB of data transferred out per month
$0.150 per GB - up to 10 TB / month data transfer out

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests (DELETE is free)

As of late June 2010 Cyberduck now supports the Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS) option. It can be set as the default in preferences under the S3 tab, or individual files can be changed between regular and RRS via the info window.

For example, PhotoShelter’s basic plan offers 10GB for $10 US per month. For the same price, one could store 66.7GB on S3 at the regular rate, or 100GB at the reduced redundancy rate, though that’s not taking into account upload/download fees. But for pure storage, S3 is attractive and scales incrementally rather than in PhotoShelter’s coarsely tiered jumps (though as of July 1, 2010, additional storage rates have been reduced by as much as 50%). Where one has to be careful with S3 is if using it as a file hosting solution because one has no control over how often visitors access a given page. With a very popular site, thousands of hits could quickly add up to relatively significant fees. In this respect, the best plan would be to host as much as possible with a regular ‘all inclusive’ web host and push it as far as possible while using S3 purely as an online long term archive.

My immediate goal for S3 is as an online archive for client work. The benefits are twofold: Mitigate potential data loss in case of a local disaster, either for me or for a client. Access client work while traveling because it’s happened enough times that I’ll be out of town and get an email from a client that can’t find a given file. In the longer term I will also archive personal work, but first I want to see how much storage I’ll require for client work and how much it will cost. $0.15 per GB seems cheap, and it is, but considering that my current client archive is nearing 2TB, it would translate into $300 per month simply for storage, which isn’t cheap (for me). Therefore I’ve decided on the following plan: Only final Jpeg images will be archived to S3. Images greater in resolution than 10MP will be resized to 3600 pixels and saved to a final size of approximately 2.5MB per file. At the same time as the upload to S3, I’ll create a low resolution (800 pixel) set of images to keep on my laptop. This low resolution set will allow me to quickly search for and identify images, even when on the road, in order to quickly find them in S3. It’s currently the only solution I can think of to offset the fact that there is absolutely no graphical user interface with S3, meaning there is no way to browse and identify images in S3 without first downloading them (an advantage with PhotoShelter or Flickr, etc.).

So there you have it. If you’re fed up with random hard drive crashes and the hassles of keeping things organized in a local archive, consider Amazon’s S3 service as an additional measure for safekeeping your valuable digital images. While there are other online archiving options available, such as the fully-featured PhotoShelter site, S3 offers a simple, low cost, redundant and secure service for those looking to park images (or any other files) as a long term, low traffic archiving solution.