near tragedy
I just accidentally deleted four months of personal and family pictures.
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…
unphotographable
This is a picture of the Wamego City Band conductor, handing his baton to a band member’s 2- or 3-year-old son because he really wanted his mommy and then walking over to sit in the stands as the boy conducted the entire march.
And he never took his binky out the whole time.
because, if it hasn’t happened already, one day, you will miss a shot
Occasionally, because they know that I dabble in the photographic arts, people ask me what camera they should buy. That’s a really tough question to answer because, really, there are so many variables involved, the majority of which I cannot possibly foresee for whoever has posed the question. I recently ran across a blog post (that I have tried and tried and tried to find, to no avail) from a photographer who used to provide the best possible comparison of different camera types, models, and so on, in the hopes of providing some basis for the person to choose a camera from. It would take time, effort, and nerves (what if he recommended a camera that the person bought and then hated?). Now, however, he has a different response:
If you want to take better pictures, invest in a photography course instead.
That’s not the point of this post, but it is such an important point, I had to include it somewhere.
The point of this is to introduce all of you “I’m in the market for a camera, so what should I buy?” types, along with all you gadget-o-philes, to a brand-new camera that may be exactly what you’ve been looking for.
You see, Casio has just announced that, in a short time (about two weeks), you can buy your very own time machine.
Really.
The Exilim EX-F1 is an amazing new digital camera that has all the features you always knew that you needed in a camera because Star Trek made you want them. With this camera, you can actually get those shots that you have missed every single time before. By holding the shutter button half-way down, the camera starts silently recording 60 shots a second until you press the button, discarding all the old shots as you go. After you hit the trigger, you can then review all 60 shots from the second before you hit the button, choose the perfect one, and get rid of the rest. Or keep them all, just for kicks (or to turn into a movie). Or delete them all because the shot you really want was over a second ago and your reflexes are just that bad.
And really, it’s the camera’s ability to shoot at 60 frames a second that is so extraordinary, especially when you consider that a movie camera only shoots at 24 or 30 frames a second, and the best, professional cameras that I know of can only pull 10 or 11 frames per second. Mine only does 3 per second. Of course, you can only keep up this sort of speed for a second, but you can, of course, adjust the frame rate to give you more shooting time: 30 frames a second for 2 seconds, 20 frames a second for 3 seconds, and so on.
One very important point to make: these are not tiny little shots that you would have to think hard about whether you’d even post them on your blog because they’re so small. No, they’re fully 6 MP images. You can print posters with these suckers.
So, you can start shooting 60 frames a second right before something happens, hold the button down half-way in anticipation of something happening, or you can set the camera down and let it shoot the good stuff all by itself. That’s right: if you ask it to, it will sit there for hours (if you’re battery is charged sufficiently, I’m sure), wait for something to move, and shoot a 60-fps burst all by itself. Catch all the great action that comes along when you are not there.
Did I mention it does full-HD movies with stereo sound? Or shoot ultra-high-speed movies for ultra-slow-mo playback? We’re talking up to 1200 frames per second here…that’s some serious speed!
Of course, with the good comes the bad (including the $1000 price tag, which actually sounds quite reasonable). Get the rest of the skinny from the NY Times (along with a nifty, and actually entertaining, video of the EX-F1 in action).
error 99
This weekend, at my son’s birthday party, I discovered that this is not a good thing for your camera to display. At first, I wasn’t really sure what that particular error code meant, so I looked it up.
Apparently, error 99 means “You idiot. You left your camera, complete with it’s massive flash unit that, of course, makes the thing quite a bit top heavy, on top of your already unstable refrigerator right when your wife was trying to get all the food for your kid’s birthday party out of the aforementioned refrigerator such that, of course, when she shut it, the big, expensive, top-heavy thing took a tumble and your cheaply built 50 mm f/1.8 lens took it right on the nose and shattered into pieces. What did you expect?”
Anyone know of anyone wanting to give away their nifty fifty? I miss mine.
unphotographable
In the tradition of photographer Michael David Murphy and his blog, Unphotographable, I give you my own first installment.
This is a picture of my wife and I, me hunched over the bathtub, she kneeling beside it, holding onto the same Himalayan cat. We are both soaked and variously spattered in blue paint spots and blood from several scratches up and down our arms. The cat, beneath the firm restraints we have placed on him, looks very much like a drowned rat, except for the faint blue streaks in his fur that my wife is trying to wash off with a washcloth. There is a vaguely wild look in his eyes.
This is also a picture of the blue paint spots on the carpet, trailing away from the paint tray and roller on the floor of our son’s room. The paint is randomly striped and splattered on various objects that the trail of carpet spots encounters on its way out of the room: the bed leg, a never finished Jackson Pollack work in blue; the train table, blue stripes on natural pine veneer. All of these spots abandoned by the two who are wrestling with the cat in the bathtub.
It is unclear who is winning the fight.
“7 years later” is semi-featured in jpg magazine!
If you’re not familiar with JPG Magazine, it’s a photography magazine by the masses. Anyone can sign up on the website, upload pictures, and submit them for consideration in various themes that might appear in future issues of the magazine. Website viewers can vote on whether they think a particular image is good for the theme in question, but the ultimate decision rests in the hands of the magazine editors. You can subscribe to the magazine and get it in your mailbox or buy them in most bookstores. You can also download every issue from their website in pdf format. It’s very cool.
One of the themes of the most recent issue was Family. Since I’m a family guy, I submitted a picture I took of us on our 7th wedding anniversary this past summer, appropriately titled 7 years later:
This image did not get selected for publication.
However, JPG Magazine just started producing outtakes: images that were cool enough to catch the editors’ attention but that, perhaps, didn’t quite fit the issue well enough. Or maybe they ran out of room for that theme. Or whatever.
The important point that I’m trying to make here, besides the fact that JPG Magazine is cool, is that my image above was included in the outtakes for the Family theme. You can get your own copy of the outtakes (I’m on p. 15 of the pdf) from JPG’s downloads page, along with pdf versions of whatever issues you’d like.
stacea: my first shoot. ever.
My very first shoot ever–as in, planned, set aside, executed–was for our babysitter. She was a senior in high school, nearing the end of the year, when we discovered that she hadn’t had her senior portraits done. I was wanting to try my hand at photography work, she wanted pictures done…it was an easy arrangement to make.
We shot most of the session at Wamego City Park around sunset. I really was just starting out, so most of the images are, in my opinion, passable, but nothing to scream about. I wanted to present a couple of the images from the session anyways, just to have a reference point to look back on to see progress.
So, here’s a couple of my favorites:
And this is the one she sent out as her graduation announcement:
