works of wanderlust

Category: photography

  • Tech Help: Fixing a Photographer’s Nightmare

    I turned on my computer this meta Monday morning and was greeted with the following message in the black and white boot screen:

    WARNING: Please back-up your data and replace your hard disk drive. A failure may be imminent and cause unpredictable fail.

    It seems that my life never fails to present me with timely topics to write about.

    But you ask, why am I writing about computer tech problems on a cast iron blog?

    If you are an outdoors guy like me or just love to take photos and video of your travel adventures, chances are you too have gigabytes of media stored in fragile spaces.

    Yet, all of this epic computer fail wasn’t necessarily a surprise.

    When I built myself a new computer a few years ago I had salvaged my data backup drive from my old machine. It was a two terabyte drive that also happened to be where I stored all my photos and my music library. I popped it out of the old and dropped it into the new, and voila… all my media were on the new computer. Yet over the last couple weeks, working from home from this machine, some odd noises have been emitting from the big black box and I’ve been a terrible techie and basically ignored the early warning signs.

    Imminent hard drive failure warnings are something like a stage four cancer diagnosis for your computer. You don’t deal with that stuff tomorrow… you act. Today.

    Now, to be clear, I do have a cloud backup of all those photos in case of an epic emergency like a fire or a flood, and local backups scattered across old hard drives and such, but my core library is… well, was this drive.

    I write “was” because as of this morning that first action step was to immediately start to move all that data to a newer drive…. all seven hundred plus gigabytes of what I hadn’t copied already. (The music files are up next and that’s also nearly a terabyte of data I need to contend with!) All in all, I’m looking at about six hours of data migration today in a race against the ticking timebomb of my hard drive giving up and deciding not to work anymore. A race against a fragile piece of equipment which I need to push to its very limits by copying every last byte of data it has stored inside it. A recipe for a technical nightmare.

    Cue the epic action movie soundtrack:

    Hard Drives are not Cast Iron…

    They are the exact opposite actually… temporary, fragile, and mysterious in their operation. Even so, I use the former every day to share my love of the latter.

    So, if you got here by Googling and are mid-panic and wondering how to deal with this kind of error yourself, here’s my advice:

    First, stop whatever else you are doing and get that data off the failing hard drive. Put it on another hard disk in your machine. Put it on an external drive. Drag it onto another computer. Move it to memory cards. Push it to USB sticks. Write it onto recordable media like DVDs or even CDs if that’s what you have handy. Whatever you can do to save all those precious files, particularly files you don’t have other copies of, cannot replace, or would be time consuming or expensive to restore. Save as much data as you can first.

    Second, figure out a backup solution (or two). Backup external hard drives are fairly inexpensive these days and even a hundred bucks to store a decade worth of photos and video is a relatively small investment to protect your memories and work. Free cloud storage products are hard to find anymore, but if you don’t mind paying a hundred bucks a year you can store a lot of data with Apple or Google or Dropbox or any of a dozen reputable companies who will keep your data safe in their datacentres. Watch for fees for things often called “data egress” which means you pay extra to download those files when you need them back.

    Third, don’t mess around with broken drives. Get that old hard drive out of your system and replace it. There are lots of software programs that claim to fix or restore failing drives, but too often these are temporary fixes at best, fixes that give you time to nab your data before it’s done for good.

  • Doubled Down. Do You Carry Multiple Cameras, too?

    I have a habit that I have not completely decided if it is a problem… yet.

    It results in lots of great photos, hours of video footage, heaps of social-media ready content, and nary a missed moment.

    It also results in a sore back, full hands, and often being the guy standing back recording the action rather than fully participating.

    The maybe-a-problem is that I usually carry multiple cameras on vacation.

    Actually, while these days I’m often lugging a dSLR with multiple lens, an action camera (like a GoPro) with a video stabilizer, and a smartphone (for snapshots or panoramas, and because it’s a phone), I only occasionally doubt the practicality of this approach.

    After all there are some pros to having more than one camera:

    The Pros.

    • I usually have the “right” camera or lens for the scene.
    • I’ve taken some amazing pictures over the years and often this comes down to having appropriate equipment.
    • All the tech I’ve invested in gets a turn.

    On the flip side, I have been known to just bring a single camera somewhere so I can focus (no pun intended) on a single style of picture-taking.

    This makes me think of some of the cons of carrying too much equipment, such as:

    The Cons.

    • I only have two hands, and spend a lot of time switching or juggling gear.
    • It’s tough to travel light when you’ve got so much technology and an extra bag for it all.
    • I’m likely a higher target for crime or theft.
    • As a photographer I’m not growing as I’m taking the easy way out of switching to the easier equipment for the scene, rather than getting better with what I have in my hand at the moment.

    And to be honest, it’s probably writing down that last one that hits me the hardest, the idea that I’m becoming creatively stagnant because I’ve shifted my focus to gear over improving my technique. Learning happens, after all, because we challenge ourselves to solve a problem that we haven’t encountered before.

    I don’t want to make any grand gestures or statements here claiming to forever shift to one way of doing things, but I do wonder if I’m in good company with the multi-camera approach to photography… or if I’ve instead shifted to a kind of photographic FOMO: fear of missing out on some perfect shot.

    It’s something to pause and think about next time I set out on a photogenic adventure: should I take just one camera, or a whole bag worth?

  • Focus: Low Angle Perspectives Bring Visual Interest to Snapshots

    Regular readers may have noticed that I often include my own photos with many of my daily blog posts. It’s not an accident that I often have a pretty great shot to accompany something that I’m writing about, or have actually just sat down and written about a photo that I liked.

    This is because I count photography among the most consistent of my hobbies.

    There are so many tips and tricks that photographer use to make their shots more visually interesting, and many of those do not require any special equipment. On this meta Monday I thought I’d dig a little deeper into that.

    One example of a simple trick is just this: adjusting your perspective.

    A ground-level shot of a puppy walking on a leash.

    How often have you come back from vacation and sorted through the hundreds of photos you’ve taken and, while you may have many beautiful shots, you also felt a little blah about the snapshot style that you stuck with for the whole trip?

    The thing about cameras is that whether you are using something with an eyepiece or a screen, we so often hold them up to our face-level to snap.

    But hot tip: your face is not actually part of the photo-taking process. In fact, it may be contributing to that underwhelmed feeling that comes with mundane snapshots.

    I think as humans we tend to find engaging things that seem familiar but are just a little bit askew. When you take a snapshot, the scene, angles, perspectives are all familiar, but the photo isn’t as engaging as it could be because it’s almost too normal.

    When the scene seems a little bit too normal, I often find myself crouching down, setting my camera on or close to the ground, or even just holding the camera near a hip, A simple change of the angle of the photo can create a photo with an unusual line of sight into a scene that is something our eyes are used to seeing all the time.

    This off-kilter perspective can make visual interest and that can often lead you to a great photograph.