Lindsay Adler

"On set, especially for fashion shoots, time is money,” says renowned fashion and portrait photographer Lindsay Adler. "Sometimes you’re shooting right up until the very last second that you have at this location, which you’ve rented for however many thousands of dollars. The second your time is up at a location, you have to be out or else you get billed steep overtime. So at the last possible second, I’ll shout ‘its a wrap!’ for our interns or assistants to wrap it up. Sometimes they pack up so quickly that they forget that the drives are attached, and the drives crash onto the floor with everything we’ve shot that day. They freeze, probably thinking that I’m going to get angry, but I always say, ‘Just plug it back in, give it a check, and make sure it’s okay.’ Since I use SanDisk Professional drives, it’s always been fine. Always. I only buy gear that is durable and reliable for that exact reason."

Adler started out shooting the usual suspects at age 15, doing sessions for friends and family, covering weddings, newborns, high school upper classmen, and so on. Soon, she asked all of the professional photographers around her where to go to college and what to study.

Adler recalls, "Every single one of them said, ‘Don’t study photography. Study business. Anybody can take good photographs, but it takes expertise and knowledge to run a successful business."

She took half their advice and landed at Syracuse University, where she studied both Photography and Business. However, it wasn’t until nearly the end of college that she took a class on fashion photography. The class would change her life. She knew she had found what her passion. Pursuing fine art was not enough. Adler craved the extra challenge of taking someone else’s vision and infusing it with her own talent and creativity to make something greater.

After studying fashion photography in London, Adler returned to her home in upstate New York to run a portrait studio while working to transition into fashion photography in New York City on the weekends. She spent her nights working on fashion editorials and weddings side by side. Adler also started building a second career as an instructor.

Adler’s first class was “Organization in the Digital Age.” It was her first of many courses she would teach on digital asset management. Her class instructs on how to keep things simple and set up smarter ways to track images and to protect them with archiving and multiple backups. Today, she offers classes at all major photography conferences around the USA. Her topics have broadened to creativity and how to cultivate techniques in being innovative and different. According to Adler, the biggest danger is complacency. People should never be complacent with their portfolios…or their storage.

My Best Backup

"When I first moved to New York, I was directing a few projects," says Adler. "We needed a lot of storage because my DP was shooting on RED cameras and the Phantom. I was talking to some really high-end cinematographers and DPs, and when I said, ‘I don’t really know what hard drives are best.’ Hands down, many said, ‘Get SanDisk Professional. SanDisk Professional has worked flawlessly for me since my first drive purchase."

Product quality and reliability are Adler’s top priorities for her storage gear. She also emphasizes capacity. While the common advice is to think twice and shoot once, Adler tends to think twice and shoot ten times. Adler notes that her best captures are often during those “in-between moments” when the model’s hair is mid-flip or there is a fleeting natural expression between poses.

This means gigabyte after gigabyte of raw images. For the years now, she’s been using SanDisk Professional  products, Adler has typically relied on pairs of G-Drive ev RAW in the field. (As a rule, she always buys two of any drive and makes sure that one copies to the other as soon as possible.) She also added the G-RAID Shuttle 8 with Thunderbolt™ 3 to her workflow for image backup from her laptop.

From camera to archiving, Adler shoots tethered to her G-Drive ev RAW, which will automatically mirror to a second ev drive. Once home, she backs up the G-Drive ev RAW to her G-RAID Shuttle with integrated RAID redundancy. The 1st G-RAID Shuttle is actually is backed up to a second G-RAID Shuttle.

A quadruple backup system isn’t actually complicated. All mirroring is automatically done and managed through backup utility apps. Shots that are selected by clients or subsequently retouched (perhaps 2% of her total image volume) also get backed up to photoshelter.com for cloud storage.

If Lindsay Adler’s methods sound a little extreme, keep in mind that she practices what she preaches. Assiduous backup has been part of her workflow ever since starting out as a teen. She is one of the "lucky" few professional photographers who have never lost a single work image. Even if a drive should break or get lost, she has always been prepared with backups.

Her storage practices align with her choice of storage brand and her professional style. Her works focus on a single element, one striking concept. That element comes to life in the image without distracting backgrounds or unnecessary texturing.

Aesthetically, Adler also loves the design of SanDisk Professional drives and how they stack to keep her environment simple and refined. She doesn’t endorse specific brands to her students, but she does recommend spending the extra money to get the right solutions.

"Especially starting out, you want to go with the less expensive," Adler says, "but it’s like using a less expensive camera or the less expensive strap. If the camera strap breaks, you break your camera. The same follows with drives. If your drive fails, you lose your files. That extra investment is worth having more peace of mind."