DROBO
Digital photography has brought us a bouquet of almost magical powers, but at a cost. We worry that those ephemeral bits and bytes could blow away in a hard disk crash or rot on a DVD with an unproven lifespan. Even RAID arrays spontaneously unmount and sit sullenly uncooperative, blinking in defiance. Against these unreliable methods I have chosen to be defended by a robot.

The Drobo from Data Robotics looks like a small black toaster. After a simple formatting procedure on your PC or Mac, slide in a 3.5 inch SATA or SATA II drive. The Drobo absorbs the drive’s capacity like a Borg without your doing another thing. Add a second drive, of any size or make, and the same thing happens. Now Drobo will automatically back up your data. The Drobo will accommodate up to four drives and can handle up to 16 terabytes of storage. The Drobo distributes data across multiple drives. If one fails, pull it out and put in another, even when the system is running. Lightroom could be converting images while you watch a movie stored on disk, but the Drobo won’t miss a beat as you swap drives. Magic.

Your Drobo communicates with all the sophistication of a traffic light. A light to the right of each drive displays green for good, orange for faulty, and red for dead. A line of blue lights at the bottom indicates how much capacity remains.

There are some nits to pick. The Drobo connects to the computer with USB II, which is reasonably fast but unfortunately limits drive size to 2TB. I have four 1TB drives so Drobo divides them into two “pools” of data. I access each pool as a separate drive, which I imaginatively named Drobo1 and Drobo2. However, there isn’t a single physical location for each drive. 1.3 TB of my 4TB is devoted to automatic space management to preserve data in the face of drive failure. If you need multiple drives, $500 for the Drobo is a small premium over mirroring four drives in a RAID and is more reliable, too.

To learn more, check out www.drobo.com

LOWEPRO DRYZONE 200
I brought a Lowepro DryZone 200 to the west coast of Greenland thinking the waterproof pack would save my gear when I tooled around icebergs in a Zodiac. As it turned out, I was at greater risk on the ice sheet at 3,000 feet.

The 200 is squat and thick, with room for pro body, a flash and four lenses, including a 300 2.8. A large exterior mesh pocket can accommodate a rain jacket, and you can attach pockets or other gear to the back on a daisy chain or with straps. Stash filters, gels and other small items in interior pockets. Filled to capacity, the shoulder straps and waist belt spread the weight evenly. The suspension is adjustable, cushy and strong, as one would expect from Lowepro.

The 200 is designed to keep camera gear dry in the wettest conditions—canyoneering, boating or a day hike in the Cascades. It achieves this with a Russian nesting-dolls strategy. A clamshell of cordura clasps shut, covering a black pod of thick, stiff waterproof fabric sporting a waterproof zipper. The zipper is a little tough to move, even after applying the included silicon. Yet another zipper gains access to the main compartment, padded and divided like a conventional camera pack with yet more pockets. The complexity of the clamshell cover and the zippers slow access to the main compartment. However, in dry conditions, the system works without closing the waterproof zipper.

If you shoot in the wet, it’s a good tradeoff, as I learned on the ice sheet in Greenland.

From camp I hiked to photograph a surface lake, fording streams and balancing on ice between puddles. In mid-summer at 3,000 feet, the ice sheet is closer to a swamp than a snowfield. I set the pack on some ice hummocks and turned my back on it to concentrate on shooting the lake. When I turned back, the pack was in the lake, floating face down with zippers underwater. I fished it out with much colorful language. Luckily, I had zipped it tight and not a drop had made it to the interior.

If you need an all-weather camera pack, the Lowepro DryZone200 is as good as it gets. List price is $364 but street price is about $100 less.

Details:
Interior: 12W x 5.9D x 16.9H inches
Exterior: 14.6W x 11.4D x 19.1H inches
Outer Fabric: (Backpack) water-resistant 600D TXP^™ and 2000D ballistic nylon
Outer Fabric Waterproof: (Waterproof Drypod) waterproof plastic-coated nylon

For more information, visit www.lowepro.com.

LR/Enfuse
Slide film and most digital sensors record about five stops per exposure while the human eye can see eleven. This means that any photo of a scene with a wide tonal range will either blow out the highlight or convert all dark tones to black, or both. In Photoshop and other programs we can blend several exposures together to create a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image, a file with greater tonal range than any printer or monitor, so far. An HDR image is like a photo taken with a camera from the future.

The HDR tools in Photoshop take a while to learn and, even with practice, the program often creates surreal results. A myriad of menus, sliders and graphs confront the user. Now, Lightroom users have access to a streamlined HDR plug-in called LR/Enfuse.

After installing it in Lightroom, simply select the exposures in Lightroom and select "Blend Exposures using LR/Enfuse" from the file menu. The plug-in confects a blended low-res preview. In the Enfuse Menu, fiddle with sliders controlling Exposure, Saturation and Contrast. The Hard Mask toggle box helps with detail. If you handheld your images, a separate menu, Auto Align, puts the images in perfect register, but the program take its sweet time doing it.

To download the plug-in, go to http://timothyarmes.com/lrenfuse.php?sec=main.

You can test the program for 30 days without charge. If you decide to get the full version, the author, Timothy Armes, asks you to donate whatever you wish to support his efforts.

Be sure to check out James' latest book, DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY OUTDOORS: A Field Guide for Adventure & Travel Photographers, published by The Mountaineers Press.