What’s that? You didn’t know we had one? We do. It’s here. Come on over and join the fun! We post more images of more recent work over there, so check out what we’ve been up to!

Also, while you’re there, check out the daily portrait session special. Every day this week (9/12-9/17), we’ll be offering a different discount or incentive to a limited number of sessions that book that day. Check back every morning to see the new deal and get on it! Now is the time to plan your holiday portrait session in order to get images and cards back in time to send them out.

See you over on the Book!

(and, just because posts are prettier with pictures, here’s a couple from last fall)

I’m holding a contest! ***UPDATE*** the contest voting is closed!

I’m going to leave the voting open until Wednesday evening, March 4th, at 5 pm (Central time). At that time, I’ll count up the votes and choose my 15 images. The client whose gallery image receives the most votes will get to keep the gallery print when the display comes down! That’s right, baby: a free print! Depending on how big I print them, that could be worth something!

So, what can you do? Drum up the votes! Tell your friends, tell your co-workers, tell your family! Send them a link to the blog post and tell them to come vote! They can vote on up to 15 images to help me whittle them down.

Voting is easy: you can

• leave a comment on facebook on the pictures you want to vote for (if you’re my facebook friend),
• send me a facebook message (even those who aren’t my friend can do that, as long as you have an account) with the image numbers you’re voting for,
• send me an email (rikandesphoto at gmail dot com) with the image numbers you’re voting for,
• dm or @reply me on twitter (twitter.com/rikandes) with the image numbers you’re voting for,
• leave a comment on this post right here with the image numbers you’re voting for,
• click on the images below you want to vote for and leave a comment there,
• find me and tell me the numbers in person–just make sure I write them down!

Here’s the link to my facebook album: http://bit.ly/k9QEd

Or the link to this post: http://bit.ly/9ZWnD

Good luck, and stay tuned for a separate announcement regarding the show dates and location of the gallery!

The fine print: I withhold the right to make the final judgment over which images get into the gallery showing. The client image *in the gallery* with the most votes will get the print.

I was trying to clean up our poor, almost full hard drive (we’re running at 91% capacity these days, mostly full of pictures) after finishing the processing of Nichole’s session. I backed up all the files twice (one for storage here, one for storage off-site), like I do with all my sessions, and then started deleting the files I no longer needed to keep on the computer: the RAW, digital negatives and massive Photoshop documents.

I right-clicked on the folder of the RAW files and selected “Delete.” The computer thought for a second, told me the folder was too big to put in the recycle bin, so did I want to delete it permanently. This didn’t strike me as that odd–RAW files are, after all, quite large. I really didn’t see any need for them in the future, so I said yes, go ahead and delete them.

I watched as another window come up and start listing the files as they were being permanently deleted, bypassing the Recycle Bin on their way out of my life. I noticed something odd in the hundreds of files that were flashing by: none of them should be there. These were the names of folders containing personal and family pictures, not Nichole’s session!

I hit cancel about as fast as I could, but it was too late: I had already lost about 10 GB of family pictures, equating to the last four months’ worth of photography. As a habit, I back up my photo sessions as soon as I get home and don’t delete the originals off the card until they are safely backed up in a number of locations, just in case. Not so with the family stuff, however. I checked the Recycle Bin, but there was nothing there.

Fortunately, from reading past forums and discussion board postings from other photographers, I know this is not the first time that someone has accidentally wiped valuable photos from their computer, so I started searching the internet for help. I knew that the files I had deleted were still on the hard drive, and that they would be until something else was written over the same physical spot on the disk. All I needed was a tool that would look past all of the signals that said the files weren’t there, and there they would be.

A very short time later, I was downloading Pandora Recovery, a free personal file recovery tool. I installed it to my external hard drive (so I wouldn’t be writing over any of the deleted pictures with the new software) and started it up. It immediately showed me where on my computer I could find deleted files, and there they were. This lovely, easy-to-use program very quickly recovered about 95% of my pictures. Some of them couldn’t be recovered because they had already been partially written on, but most of them are back, safe and sound.

Well, at least, they will be safe…once I get around to actually backing them up.

I keep thinking there’s a lesson to be learned in all of this…

Can you see that little photo credit there? Yeah, that’s my name. I was so excited this week to receive a copy of The Sailor’s Book of the Weather, by Simon Keeling, and finally see one of my pictures in something that I didn’t pay to print.

It’s a fun feeling.

The publisher was searching flickr for a picture illustrating centrifugal force when she found mine and liked it enough to ask if she could use it. A pleasant side effect of having my pictures online.

In case you can’t see it, here’s the original picture they used in the publication:

I shot this in November, 2006 with our old 3.1 MP point-and-shoot digital camera, so I’m not too sure about the settings, but here’s what the camera recorded on the picture:

ISO 100, 1/14s, f3.7, 10.9mm

The slow shutter speed (1/14s) is what’s producing the motion blur over most of the picture. The reason that the hand and bar are in (reasonable) focus is because I was panning, moving my camera from side to side, as I took the picture. It’s a really fun technique that you can use with any moving object with sometimes very surprising results.