Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary, Equipment

Card Corruption – Not “If,” But “When”

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A post at The Luminous Landscape today includes the following:

Just as the question with hard drives is not will they fail, but simply, when, a corollary to this is that if you shoot a lot, at least a couple of times a year you’ll end up with a corrupted memory card.

This happened to me yesterday when I was shooting a seminar session being put on at a local studio. When I got back to my own studio in the evening to copy the files to disk, I found that the card was corrupt. I have no idea why, or how it happened, but there it was. My Mac couldn’t even see the card and mount it, and in the camera (Nikon D300) the display said, no directory, no images.

Rather than despair I simply ran PhotoRescue overnight, and this morning had every single file recovered, including every file that had been on the card from my previous shoot, before I had formatted the card in camera yesterday morning. Simply amazing… [The Luminous Landscape – What’s New]

I’ll second both points. Like hard drives, memory cards do get corrupted and you need to be prepared for this eventuality. When it happened to me – twice this year- PhotoRescue recovered my photographs from the corrupted cards.

(In my case, as soon as I had tried to download the photos using Adobe Bridge, the files all disappeared and it looked like there was only a single file left on the card! As reported above, PhotoRescue not only recovered the photos that I had just made, but even turned up a bunch of older images on the reformatted card! In the end, my “bad card” was actually a problem with a separate firewire device that I had left connected to the computer.)

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What’s In the Pipeline?

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In order to continue posting daily photos, I generally must have a bunch of images “in the pipeline” and ready to post ahead of time. Consequently, the work that appears here was typically shot a few weeks or even a month ago. (The current images from Yosemite were shot during the last weekend of October and the first weekend of November.) Since that time I’ve shot a few other subjects, and they will appear soon: the Getty Center in Los Angeles, a few more of my oak tree photographs from the central California hills, and a series of photos of the Golden Gate bridge that I shot last week.

Commentary

Save Your Seconds

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Jim Goldstein makes a good point about taking a second look at your work:

Always Check Your Seconds – Out of the Gloom II: Golden Gate Bridge and Fog

If there is one thing I’ve learned as a photographer it is always check your seconds. Upon first review of a days shoot I’ll almost always pick out the great shots. There’s a caveat to this though… these great shots are usually in line with a preconceived notion of what I wanted to get from the shoot. Coming back to these same photos later allows me to review my work with a fresh perspective. The end result is usually the discover of a real gem of a photo. Case in point… Jim [JMG-Galleries]

(Follow the link in the excerpt to read the whole thing and see the photo.)

In this regard, I’ve developed an annual ritual of going through all of my photos from the previous year during the holidays. (Trust me, that is a lot of photographs to look at!) I often discover something that I passed over the first time, often for the reason that Jim mentions – it was not in line with my original expectations of the subject. However, when I look at the photo with a bit more objective distance months later I often discover something very interesting and new in these photographs. On a few occasions a photo that originally seemed almost not worth keeping has turned out to be a real gem.