April COBA Meeting

The April meeting for the Camera Owners of the Bay Area (COBA) user group will be held this Wednesday, April 11, 2007, in Cordura Hall 100 at Stanford University from 7:30-10:00 pm.

Drobo Storage Robot

Drobo (http://www.drobo.com) is a new contender in the data storage field from Mountain View-based Data Robotics. Drobo is billed as the “world’s first storage robot.” In brief, Drobo acts as a large hard drive, but has several benefits over using multiple hard drives or existing RAID systems:

• Drobo upgrades capacity on-the-fly: Add drives to Drobo at any time. Mix ‘n match capacities, brands or speeds. No downtime, data migration, or waiting to access new capacity. Drobo works the way you do.
• Drobo lets you “pay as you grow”: Hard drives get bigger and cheaper all the time. Don’t buy storage capacity until you need it. Buy capacity “just-in-time” possibly saving you hundreds of dollars.
• Drobo manages storage, so you don’t have to: Just connect Drobo to your Mac or PC. No software required. No RAID levels. No management or configuration. Drobo does everything for you. Get rid of multiple external drives. Avoid the complexity of RAID. Attach a Drobo storage robot to your system and let it manage your storage so you don’t have to.

I was given a demo of the Drobo storage robot last week, and I think it’s an exciting entrant in the data storage arena. There will be a promotion for COBA members to purchase the Drobo at $200 off retail price for the month of April. If you’ve been on the fence for upgrading your storage solution at home, come to the meeting to see Drobo in person! Otherwise, stay tuned for a future mailing list announcement with pricing details.

Photo Selection Part 1

We’ve all seen it and have been guilty of it. You take hundreds or thousands of photos and throw them up onto the web for all to see. Too many photos, however, means that it becomes a chore to go through them all!

This month, we’ll begin a two-part series into how to edit and select your photos for maximum impact, on the web or in print.

Bring and share your horror and success stories as we take a hands-on approach to editing photos from several recent photoshoots.

Monthly Assignment: SPEED

Each month, COBA will feature an optional monthly assignment and contest. Members are highly encouraged to participate as the point of the monthly assignment is to motivate you to take photos, try new techniques, and learn.

Speed is the topic for this month’s assignment. Be fast or be slow, but be prepared to finish your photo in the next few days for the meeting!

Only new photographs taken from the previous meeting date to the next meeting date will be accepted. Please print a print of your photo!