Month: October 2011

Till Pitch Black

I was looking thru some old photographs and found this three that I saw as a great illustration of what I like to say about photographing sunset: it is not over until it is pitch black. All three photos were made a top of Hurricane Hill at different times.

The sky was clear. The evening started with sun slowly setting behind mountain peaks. The streaks of sunshine were breaking thru mountain tops, highlighting mist rising from the bottom of valleys.

Sunset on Hurricane Hill

Once the last light of sun vanished the valleys were filled with blue cool tones of shade, while the sky was still deep orange. A few minutes after the moon rose just where the sun disappeared.

Quiet Evening

Later when it got so dark, you could barely see anything deer started gathering at the top against last warm tones of sunset on the horizon.

Deer at Hurricane Hill

Adrian is 5

My son Adrian turned five three days ago. It is a big milestone for him and for his parents. Now he is old enough to participate in family activities. Last summer I took it on a photo trip with me. He has a lot of fun. He had his own camera taking pictures as well as pressing a shutter on my camera.

Here Adrian explains that he took a photo of a beautiful flower on a chilly morning:

DSCF2093

Next year we’ll do several trips like this. Especially, since he expressed specific interest in certain things. Like he wants to see how wheat grows. So, several trips to Palouse will help him to see it.

Too Many Eggs in One Basket

I just got back from 3 week vacation and… it is a second time I lost all vacation photos.

First time I lost vacation photos was due to hard drive failure in my laptop close to the end of the vacation. The problem was mechanical, thus recovering disk content was just too expensive ($2000). I had an external drive with me to make backups but never got around to actually do them. From that case I told myself I’m going to do backups every night on my trips.

A few years forward. This time I have done backups to two external hard drives. Both laptop and hard drives as well as some other valuables were in one very important bag – the most important bag, the only bag not to lose. And I lost it in an airport. Later I was contacted by airport authorities that the bag was found and everything but laptop was in it. I have not got the bag back yet and I can only hope that I eventually get it back with hard drives undamaged. But I was not very persistent about backing up to external hard drives every night and thus a lot of photos are lost for sure.

What I have learnt from this? First, backup should be simple and done consistently during a trip. Second, those backups should be placed to different bags to decrease probability of losing all photos as a result of loosing one bag.