YASSC - Yet Another Sunrise/Sunset Calculator

For a while I was using a method for predicting Moon and Sun positions similar to what Andre Gunther explained in his great tutorial Predict the moon for better photos. Before Google Earth I was using maps, compass and using The Sun/Moon Calculator or the Australian ones from Geoscience Australia Geodesy & GPS - Astronomical Information.

But now we've got absolutely fantastic tool from Stephen Trainor - "The Photographer's Ephemeris". It uses Google Earth maps and shows sunrise/sunset and moonrise/moonset azimuth on maps, twilight times etc. You can also search and save your favorite locations for future use. It's cross-platform (uses Adobe AIR) and it's free! Must have software for every outdoor photographer!

http://stephentrainor.com/tools

Using External Hard Drives as Offline Archiving System

There are two types of digital photographers; those who’ve had a hard drive crash and those waiting to have one. I’m pretty sure that almost every photographer (even who is still waiting for a hard drive crash) thought about backing up photos at least to free up some space on computer’s hard drive. CDs or DVDs have small capacity and not reliable – any serious scratch could destroy many photos. RAID arrays are good for protecting your data and for fast access but they are expensive and are not an archiving solution – it quite difficult to expand them. As far as I know right now only Netgear has Network Attached Storage (NAS) with RAID that can be easily expanded. External hard drives are cheap and easy to use but this approach also has it’s own drawbacks – no redundancy, difficult to manage etc. However some people are developed a very good approach with using external hard drives as offline archiving storage.

I would like to share a few links to articles about archiving digital photos with external hard drives. The first one is written by Quang-Tuan Luong, great large format photographer. Have a look at the Digital post processing - Computers and storage section. Sorry, there is no direct link - you need to scroll a little bit.

The second and third articles are from "Image Mechanics" - digital capture company from Los Angeles. They developed very efficient and cheap offline archiving system based again on external hard drives.
Part 1: Image Mechanics Off-line Archiving System
Part 2: Image Mechanics Off-line Archiving System: The Next Generation

I hope this will help you to protect your photos.

The Pinnacles Desert, Nambung National Park, Western Australia. Photographic Guide.

The Pinnacles are located in Nambung National Park, about 25 kilometres south from the town of Cervantes and about 250 kilometres north of Perth, Western Australia. The Pinnacles were sculptured by wind, rain, vegetation, sun and time for many thousands of years from limestone. These limestone formations reach four metres tall of sand of varying...

Read the full "The Pinnacles Desert, Nambung National Park, Western Australia, Photographic Guide" article on my Fine Art Landscape and Travel Photography web site or leave comments to the article in my Travel Photography Blog.

See a little Gallery of The Pinnacles Images, Nambung National Park, WA, Australia.