Category: General

The importance of backup…

I have always been taking backup seriously. I regularly backup my photos, both to several external hard-drives (I am a big fan of the 2TB Western Digital Passport series), RAID-enabled network disks and cloud storage. Still, given that I haven’t experienced a drive failure in more than 10 years, I have not been as diligent as I should. And just after Christmas I experienced the nightmare when my primary disk suffered a complete mechanical failure.

Trying to restore my photos, I discovered several things (that in hindsight are obvious):

  • You need to backup the Lightroom catalogs just as diligently as your photos.
  • Saving metadata (pressing ctrl+S) in Lightroom to generate .xmp sidecar files should be second nature
  • Take an old disk and try to restore photos once in a while. Being able to restore your photos is perhaps the most important feature of your backup regime!

So, have you backed up your photos and all the associated metadata this week? No? Go and do it! Today!!

Event photography

It’s been a long time since I posted anything (until the last couple of days that is). I have been busy travelling (without my camera unfortunately) and taking photos at the local riding school. Over the next couple of posts I’ll outline some of my recent photography experiences…

The first event was the yearly spring jumping event. The event is based around volunteer work, and my contribution is photography (since I am better at this than say, baking or cooking). I took photos at last years event as well, but this year I felt confident enough to post my blog address around the event to attract readers. And it worked…. Over the event days I got almost 30.000 pageviews of my photos, quite a lot compared to the 20-50 I usually get per day.

Based on last years experience I prepared by thinking ahead where I should place myself to get the most out of the fences.

Finding the spot

A lot of considerations had to go into this, such as the position of the sun, the background, distance to other fences and much more. And of course everything changes for each class, so I had to study the course diagram to position myself correctly for each class.

After a few riders, I was getting warmed up and had found a few favorite spots that gave me good coverage

Of course, the event wouldn’t work without volunteers, and they did an awesome job of keeping the course organised and in shape

Even though it was the beginning of May, it still got quite cold to stand there all day…

All in all, I took about 3000 photos that weekend, of which aobut 400 survived the editing process

A trip down memory lane

Even if this blog is new, that doesn’t mean that I haven’t taken a lot of pictures… I just haven’t gotten around to creating a blog until now 🙂

To get some entries and learn how to use WordPress properly, as well as testing all the plugins, I will use the next weeks to take a trip down memory lane, showing photos I have taken in the past.

Enjoy!

Harald