I prefer your shots to the inspiration, but then, that's because they are more 'traditional' street photography, as opposed to the 'in your face' turn and shoot of Bruce Gilden.

So, if you want to do more street photography, go for it! If you want more of a Bruce Gilden look, then you're going to have to get much closer. Much much closer!

Not a fan of the technique or the results TBH.

32, working full time as a Technical Trainer for the largest Flat Panel and Laptop repair lab in Europe. Currently loving my job, however, if I was to come into a large sum of money, don't think I'd be one of those "I'd still go back work" people

Far to many non-work related interests I'd love to indulge!

Hey, it comes with my day job

I was doing PC Technical Support, and I'm now a Technical Trainer for a PC, TV and AV repair lab.

When you say 'Your computer won't work when the external drive is attached', do you mean that it won't boot? If so, most likely cause is the boot order setting in your BIOS.

Most desktop computers are set something like this:
Boot Priority
1) Optical Disk Drive
2) External USB device
3) Internal Hard Drive

What should happen is, you computer turns on, completes it's Power On Self Test (POST) and then looks for something to load in the order it's told too. If it doesn't find something it can load from, it moves down the list. Often External USB drive confuse the computer as they don't respond properly to the "Can I load from you" request, so the computer sits there doing nothing. USB printers with memory card slots used to be notorious for this.

If your PC boots to Windows with the drive unplugged, and then reads the drive fine once it's plugged back in, there's nothing to worry about, either get into the habit of leaving the drive unplugged when you first turn on the PC, or get someone to show you how to change the Boot Order.

If however you computer doesn't work at all when your drive is attached, then it's likely a problem with the external drive, and hopefully is only going to probelm with the USB -> Hard drive circuit board in the external box itself. Any decent computer shop should be able to swap the drive into a new case.

Avatar is me, as is the piccie on my profile

RAID, Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.

The clue's in the name, as Flossie says, it's not a backup method in and of itself, it's merely a method of providing redundancy to a storage setup. This redundancy can be used for either error protection or speed depending on the setup (mirrored or stripped).

I acheive the redundancy by using multiple drives to mirror the data in much the same way, except I have to do it manually

RAID is commonaly used for server based storage (including NAS, Network Attached Storage), or desktop computers for storage and/or speed - eg gaming or video editing.

It has the advantage, if Mirrored, of giving hot-swap replacement of the failed drive, hence the usage in servers etc. A RAID backup device (NAS) is ideal, but... A RAID setup in and of itself isn't backup, just redundancy as long as it's setup right!

-Edit @ ChrisA-
Yep, that's why I do an offsite backup everynow and then, if anything, Gods forbid, happens to the house, then I have copies stored elsewhere.

No, I will confess that I don't, on the other hand, the ones that I have used seem to have held up well to date.

What brand were your ones? The ones I have used are a mix of Verbatim, Maxel and Sony. Having said that, even the cheapie own brands have behaved well to date. I have disks and files burned onto generic 'pack of 50' CDs and DVDs coming up for 10 years old, scratched to hell, and still reading. But I suspect that is luck as much as anything else.

A few of my disks are looking yellowed at the edges despite being stored well away from het and light, so I'll probably need to reburn those. Are there any archive quality brands that you'd recommend?

I have a 1Tb external drive, and 2 500Gb external drives. I transfer all the pictures onto my other laptop, and backup onto my 1TB and one of the 500Gbs. The other 500Gb is stored offsite, and monthly updated from one of the other drives.

Really important photosets are also backed up onto DVD, and most of my pics are also uploaded onto Flickr.

That, I think, gives me a good amount of redundancy! Fingers crossed!

Here's a little piece of advice...

If your Met gets the dreaded 'Err' in the zoom indicator, and the power zoom, well, doesn't. What worked for me, and a lot of other people, is:

Take the batteries out
Tap the Flash head solidly on both sides (I tapped the top as well for good measure!)
Batteries in
Turn on
Test

It appears that the problem is often caused by the mechanism just sticking, and a few taps on the flash head is enough to free the zoom mechanism. So, that saved a possible expensive repair on an out of warranty flash!