Monday, February 20, 2023

On my way to Tanzania again!

I am writing this blog from Heathrow airport in London, about halfway to our final destination in Africa. As many of you know, Tanzania is one of my favorite places in the world, and definitely an amazing place to photograph wildlife. As I sit here in the airport lounge, a little bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, I started looking back at some of my favorite images from my previous trips to Tanzania. I thought I would share some of those with you now.

The following images are in chronological order.


We came across these two elephants grazing amongst the acacia trees, and it was an overcast morning. The muted light really helped to make this such a cool photo.


On my first visit to the hippo pool in the Serengeti, there was a lot of running water and a lot of activity amongst these large animals. It is always fun to wait for the big opening of their mouths and then getting shots like this.


This is one of the most difficult photos I have taken in Tanzania. This motion pan was taken at 1/30th sec, with me hand holding a Canon 200-400mm lens.


Photographing elephants is always incredible, but catching them with their youngsters is even better!


This group of elephants with nice big tusks, came right towards our vehicle. The bright blue sky in the background worked well for this scenic photo.


I have seen lions hanging out in trees before, but this was the first time I saw more than 12 lions in one tree. It was an epic moment!


Did I mention how much I like the baby elephants? :)


We see a lot of baboons on our safaris. This one was hanging out next to the parking area where we stopped before entering the Ngorongoro crater.  It wasn't until I was reviewing my mages that evening that I noticed the perfect symmetry of this baboon. 


In that same location, we witnessed this beautiful moment between mother and baby.


On this particular day, we came across a herd of elephant crossing the plains of the Serengeti. These two youngsters stopped and were sparring for quite a long time. I love the interaction between them.


I remember this moment so well. It was the end of the day and we had a little bit of sunlight left. We looked for some big cats to capture and did not find any, so we decided to stop and photograph these young baboons playing the trees. 


This photo was taken on the way to the air strip, before we took off to our next location. We always leave early in case we spot something good, and that day we definitely did. There were at least 3 generations of lion together in this spot.


Photographing the spotted cats is on the top of my list at every safari. On this afternoon we followed this leopard for at lest an hour. It stopped on this rock and took a rest. I had our guide move the vehicle so we would have a great background far in the distance. Just after we moved, it looked up into the light rain and yawned. We all fired off a ton of photos at this moment. 


During the Great Migration, millions of wildebeest cross the Mara river. It is not uncommon for the crocodiles to try and score some lunch during the crossings. This giant croc lunged for the wildebeests but missed catching any of them. At this point they started jumping over the crocodile to get out of harms way. We were all shooting and cheering at the same time. It was such an awesome moment!


Before the lions grow up to be the kings of the jungle, they start looking like this. Honestly, there is nothing cuter than cubs in the wild.


This photo was taken on our last safari. We had been out photographing all day and were heading back to our camp as the sun was setting. I asked our guide to wait in this spot to get the acacia tree silhouetted in front of the setting sun. I then saw that one of our other vehicles was heading towards the tree and prepared everyone in my vehicle to capture this scene.

Also from our last safari, this lioness had been feeding on a zebra carcass, when she got up and started walking towards us. The late afternoon sun was right into her eyes and made this shot that much better.

It will take us a day to get to Tanzania, but on Wednesday we will start the hunt for the next favorite images. For this trip I am bringing the following gear:

* Canon R5 camera

* Canon R6 camera

* Canon 200-400mm lens (with RF-EF adaptor)

* Canon RF100-500mm lens

* Canon RF24-105mm lens

* Lots of ProGrade Digital memory cards

* Apple 16" MacBook Pro

* Crucial 4TB x8 SSDs


I look forward to capturing more images and sharing those with you soon!

__________________________________________________________________________

Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!
__________________________________________________________________________
If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
__________________________________________________________________________
Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Africa, Costa Rica, Cuba, Europe, Asia, India and more. And Canon will loan you any gear you want for FREE for any of my tours. 

__________________________________________________________________________  

Tuesday, February 7, 2023

Goodbye Drobo, Hello QNAP - My new data storage solution!

As you can imagine, the process of transferring all of my data from one hard drive system to another is a daunting task, and not one I looked forward to. But...about 6 months ago I got a letter in the mail stating that Drobo was going bankrupt, just as my trusted Drobo 8D was crashing every 6 hours or so. This drive has EVERY digital photo I have taken since 1990. I was also using two of the Drobo 810n NAS drives to remotely backup my data more than a hundred miles from my house. These stopped working correctly as well.

It was panic time!

I tried reaching out to my contacts at Drobo, and they did whatever they could to try and fix the issues, but the writing was on the wall. I needed to investigate new NAS solutions and do it quickly!

I was doing a workflow presentation for B&H, and as part of that I mentioned my dilemma. I said that if anyone out there knew of a good replacement solution to let me know. I received numerous emails from listeners and one of them mentioned QNAP. I really did not know know much about QNAP, but looked at their website and saw the solutions they offered. 

I reached out to their support people and peppered them with questions. 

I wanted to know about:

* The speed of their devices

* Remote synchronization abilities

* Remote access from anywhere in the world

* Over the air synch of data from my phone

* Management utilities and options

The answers I got were really encouraging. They had really great hardware, remote synchronization options and a lot more. I then reached out to their corporate marketing people to learn more. 

As it turned out, they are located in Southern California, and I was scheduled to be down near their offices last December. A meeting was set up and I met them to get even more information, and to see their products in more detail. This time I was totally blown away. I brought a long list of features that I required and another list of features I had long wanted from Drobo. QNAP was able to deliver on all of them!

Fast forward a couple of months and I am now moving ALL of my data to the QNAP TVS-h874 NAS drive, which is populated with 8 of the Seagate IronWolf 20TB hard drives. Yep, this will give me more than 100TB of storage, even set up in Raid 6 (which means all my data is safe even if two drives fail at the same time). 

I have been moving the data (literally millions of images) from my old Drobo 8D to the QNAP drive over the last 5 days, and I am almost done. I hope to have everything on the QNAP by the end of tomorrow. Then my plan is to replicate everything from the TVS-h874 NAS drive to the TS-832PX NAS drive (which has 8 of the 16TB Seagate IronWolf drives in it). This second box is the one that will be placed offsite. I want to get all the data on the second drive here locally so that I am not trying to remotely synchronize all this data over the Internet. Once I get everything copied to the second drive, then I will set it up for nightly synchronization from my location to the location in far from here. 

I have yet to set up everything, but I wanted to let all of your Drobo users out there, that there is a great alternate solution. Not only does it do what Drobo did, it also happens to be way more powerful, have a ton more features, and a substantially better user interface.

This is what the web-based user interface looks like. I have yet to dive into all of these options yet, but I will report back once I am fully up and running.

I have tried accessing files on the TVS-hx74 NAS drive while traveling and it is amazing how much faster and easier it is than using the Drobo. What used to take 10 minutes can now be done in 1 minute. I love that!

Stay tuned for more information on my data transition. I am sure there is a lot more information to come.


__________________________________________________________________________

Subscribe to the Jeff Cable Photography Blog by clicking HERE!
__________________________________________________________________________
If you are interested in purchasing ANY equipment, please click here to go to B&H Photo, as I get a referral from them if you enter this way. It does not change the cost to you in any way, but it helps me keep this blog up and running.
__________________________________________________________________________
Check out my upcoming photo tours to amazing places around the world. I have photo tours to Africa, Costa Rica, Cuba, Europe, Asia, India and more. And Canon will loan you any gear you want for FREE for any of my tours. 

__________________________________________________________________________