u/cygnus93

Hey guy! Planning to camp next weekend August 14-16 in Spruce Knob Campground. I do want to take a few Milky way shots for the summer, but now I am looking at the weather forecast it shows a bit cloudy and rainy in the night. Not sure if I should wait as the date gets closer or I should cancel. I live in DMV area and it is a long drive.

Just wanted to check if anyone is in the same boat, has been in the same boat or have any other suggestions. Would love to see if anyone is planning to go there in the same time period.

Thanks,

Hey everyone,

I'm looking to set up a proper, secure backup system for my photography workflow, but I am hitting a massive wall with hardware prices.

Over the last 3 years, I've accumulated about 12,000 photos. Because I shoot in RAW, it's a decent amount of data (somewhere around 400GB–600GB). I started looking into standard "budget king" recommendations from older threads and videos—specifically the Western Digital Easystore 8TB desktop drive—expecting it to be floating around the $130 mark.

To my absolute shock, it's currently sitting at $380 at Best Buy. or correct me if I am missing anything

Given the current market, what is the most cost-effective way to safely protect a library of my size without dropping $400 on a single mechanical drive?

Are most of you leaning heavily into cloud solutions right now (like Backblaze, Google One, or Amazon Photos)? Or is it smarter to just buy a couple of smaller 1TB or 2TB portable external drives, mirror them manually, and hope the market normalizes in a year or two?

Would love to hear how you're structuring your backup workflows without going broke right now. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

My external 2TB Crucial/Micron X9 Pro SSD suddenly stopped mounting on my M1 MacBook Air. The drive contains a massive amount of important data, specifically critical canon RAW files.

The physical hardware is detected in Disk Utility, but the partition map seems scrambled and the volumes won't mount. Here is exactly what I’ve diagnosed so far via Terminal and recovery tools:

• diskutil list identifies the main partition as Microsoft Basic Data. However, running diskutil info incorrectly identifies the file system as legacy MS-DOS (FAT) and reports Volume Total Space: 0 B (0 Bytes).
• Data Recovery: I tried scanning with Data Rescue. It hit a physical read error at offset 34,603,008, matching the terminal errors. While it successfully carved some raw signatures (mislabeling them as .arw files due to the missing exFAT index map), the application interface keeps glitching/freezing when attempting to actually extract the files.

Current Plan: I am setting up PhotoRec to perform a targeted raw carve strictly for .tiff/.cr2 structures to stream onto a secondary external drive.

Are there better free/open-source block-level tools or alternative paths I should consider before I risk wearing out the drive's controller? Any advice is highly appreciated!

Hey everyone,

I’m hoping to get some technical opinions on my wildlife shots. Despite shooting with what should be a stellar body and lens combination, I am struggling to get those crisp, tack-sharp details, and my images consistently feel a bit soft or "mushy" when evaluating them.

My Setup (shooting in RAW):

• Body: Canon 5D Mark IV
• Lens: Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM

Typical Settings & Context:

• Shutter Speed: 1/2000 sec
• Aperture: f/5.6 to f/6.3
• ISO: 800 – 1250
• Focal Length: 400mm (Image Stabilization turned on - AF1)

I’ve attached a few photos I took with those settings.

I am not sure, it might not be anything, but I just wanted to get views from you all.

Would love to hear from anyone who shoots with this setup or has dealt with similar telephoto sharpness limitations. Any insights on technique or troubleshooting steps would be greatly appreciated!