If you forget all your other New Years Resolutions, here’s one to stick to; “I promise to back up all my files - regularly.”

We know you’ve probably heard it time after time, but it’s great idea to make frequent back ups of your important files. We have heard countless sad stories of people who had become complacent about their drives and file back ups, only to find that one awful morning, (usually just before an important presentation) their main hard drive or external drive simply goes pop - often erasing their files in one swoop. We recall one phone call to a well known high street retailer PC World to request a price on their external hard drives, where the salesperson remarked ‘It’s not if your hard drive could go pop, it’s when’. The hard drive is the most common part of your PC to break down. And probably the most frustrating.

The only solution is to back up to two sources if you can. With our photography, we make a back up on DVD of every photo shoot which is then sent to the client. We retain a DVD copy too for archiving, and for future reference. We run several external drives here at the studio as well which make copies of each other, or mirror each other.

For Mac users, the new Leopard OS x operating system now ships with a superb backing up solution - PC users on the other hand will have to make their own manual back ups or alternatively use third party back up software. Other Mac backing up solutions include Carbon Copy Cloner and Super Duper! - both of which offer an answer to lost files. A word of warning though, make sure your good intentions are properly set up to keep backing up. It’s all too easy to implement one back up - and then forget about it. Try and set up your backing up software to automatically back up for you once a week if possible, so that even if you forget - your files will still be saved elsewhere should the unimaginable happen.

One final bit of advice -  never back up in a hurry. We guarantee you’ll regret it. One wrong click on your backup software can wipe your external hard drive and only add new files onto it, erasing everything else you may have on the drive - which could be a couple of years of images. It’s a nasty mistake, so we’d recommend you take some proper time to sit down and do it properly.

An ongoing issue for many photographers is finding the right workflow solutions that make life easier in post-production rather than more complicated. Our clients feedback has been very positive in relation to how they receive their images after a photo shoot - and we’ve had some time to fine-tune this process. The trickiest part of this package has been creating a simple PDF contact sheet as part of an automated process, that INCLUDES filenames of the images. After much hunting around we finally chose (in conjunction with Apple Mac’s own Automator script software) a handy little freeware script (by Karsten Luth) which does what Adobe and Automator to date haven’t quite managed in one user friendly solution. Essentially it allows the user to process a set of photos into one PDF document, and includes the filenames within the PDF, and saves it to a destination selected by the user (see screenshot).

Immensely useful, we’d recommend as part of any photographers post production processes.

When asked to photograph products where a water droplet effect is required, we always reach for the glycerin. Rather than use pure water, which experience shows will bead off before you get a chance to depress the shutter, we recommend using a glycerin solution. We always take some time before a photo shoot to get the mixture right: not enough water, and the solution squits out in gloopy globs, too much water and the solution rolls off the surface to quickly. Apply using a fine pump spray about 10-15cm away from the surface, and use wide steady sweeps past the bottle a little at a time. Both the pump bottle and the glycerin are available from good chemists.