I’ve been using a digital body about 18 months and have been amazed, frustrated & what not by all the options, menus & complexity of these machines. I use a Nikon Df fwiw.

What I’ve noticed is that sometimes ec doesn’t seem to do anything I can see. After fiddling around with this I’ve learned that the phenomenon is related to shooting in full manual. What I now understand is that in full manual mode using the ec dial only changes the meter scale, not the exposure itself. So one must readjust exposure manually after entering ec mode to recenter the meter reading. In the other modes such as aperature priority the ec dial functions as I expected. I had no idea this was the case when in full manual.



So I pass on my admittedly naive notion as false. Perhaps this thing I’ve learned will be of use to another shooter. That’s my only purpose in bringing this up. It seems one could spend years mastering all the options built into these modern cameras. A good day to all.

Jerryc41 I agree that most of the full frame mirrorless camera and lens combos do not save substantial weight over a DSLR but that is not the case with micro 4/3. My D750 & Sigma 24-105 f/4 weighs 60.7 ozs vs the G9 & 12-60 f/2.8-4 (24-120mm equivalent) weighing in at 34.5 ozs. Believe me that makes a big difference plus it is a great deal smaller when carrying it all day plus toting the gear through airports. I like the size and feel of the D750 & the Sigma but not for overseas travel.

I always run a backup of my photos to both a thumb drive and an external hard drive whenever I add new photos or edit existing photos .
While there are many backup programs which come with a external drive these usually require restoring the file and do not have a copy of the file which can be opened directly from the backup drive,
The following batch script I found years ago in the Win98 days which copies your files without compressing them and leaves an exact copy you can access from any computer.
Also this batch file will replace any file in the backup set which is newer than the existing file in the backup set.

Things you will need to use this batch file:
PATH TO YOUR PHOTO FOLDER - All of your photos should exist in one main folder. They can all be in various sub-folders but the sub-folders must be in a single base folder.
PATH TO YOUR BACKUP FOLDER - This should be the same as your source folder but with the backup drive letter in place of the C: of your source folder.

Windows likes to store all of your stuff to C:\user\username\etc.
I prefer the old school and create the folder C:\Photos.

Open Windows "Notepad" and type the following substituting your folder locations for the C:\Photos\ and the K:\Photos with your folder locations. Maintain the punctuation etc as shown.
There is a space before the K and space between \ and / also spaces between the letters and the following /.


@echo on
REM copy documents
xcopy "C:\Photos\*.*" k:\Photos\ /c /s /r /d /y /i

Name and save this as a text file - File name.txt

Save the file again as a batch file - File name.bat
Right click on the batch file and create a shortcut on your desktop.
Running this batch file will copy your photos to the external or thumb drive and update any revised files.

If using a thumb drive you will be limited on the quantity of files you can copy to it. My Canon utility saves my photos in folders based on the date they were taken so that made it easy.
What I have done is set a starting date based on when the previous backup came close to filling the drive.
The batch file will then look like this:

@echo on
REM copy documents
xcopy "C:\Photos\*.*" k:\Photos\ /c /s /r /d /y /i/D:11-15-2014
(No space before the D or anything following the D.

I have created separate batch files both for the external hard drive and for the thumb drive.

Since I started using this method a long time ago it was easy to find the start date for thumb drives, however if you already have more photos than even a 128GB thumb drive can hold you may have to fill the first drive by arranging your files by date and manually copying them to the thumb drive.
I have not tried running the batch file to see if it will just stop when it reaches thumb drive capacity.

While the batch file is running you will see a command line window showing the progress.

Lightroom has a lot of flexibility in all aspects of a workflow. Currently, my import destination is a sub-folder in My Pictures that I name (based on the shoot I took). Since Adobe seems to have built their process around Collections (being visible in Library and Develop), I hear many users simplify their import by simply assigning the import destination By Date i.e. year/month or year/month/day. I am not a date-centric person and can't even remember our anniversary.

I am interested in what UHH members use as their preferred destination (by date or named folder). Either way, I plan to leverage the Collections features and believe Collections can satisfy my 'folder fetish'. As always, one answer is "whatever works for me", but I am interested what members have found to be efficient and effective.

Thank you, Bob