Photos Of Fire

I love taking photos of the fire in the fire pit at the lake. I set myself up with a fast lens, usually my 50mm f/1.8 and a higher ISO so I can get a really fast shutter speed to freeze the flames. Quite often you get some really interesting shapes and designs in the flames. Sometimes you will see a face here and there or snakes or dragons. As long as you look at them in a small size you can still see that shape but usually if you blow it up to say 8x10 or so, you will lose that shape to the holes in the flame that created it in the first place.

But every now and then you will get one like the photo below. See the dog on the right side just above the middle. That face stays there no matter how large I look at it. The really creepy part is that the image looks just like our family dog. You can see a recent photo of her here. We have always wondered why she is so afraid of fire and then she shows up in a photo of flames. If I were superstitious, I would read all kinds of things into this. :)

 

Next time I plan fire photos, I'm going to wonder what the next winning lotto ticket numbers are!

Chris. 

Catastrophic Drive Failure And The Need To Back Up Your Work

On the evening of Thursday May 9th 2013, I had a catastrophic failure with my 3TB external hard drive that I carry everywhere with me and have all my files on. You can already guess where this is going can't you. Now, normally I'm quite obsessive about backing up my files. Photos, home movies, TV shows, documents, etc. I make 2 copies of them besides the one I carry around with me.

Well, since the end of the year I've been "too busy to back up right now, I'll do it later". So I have paid the price. My drive failed and I have lost pretty much everything. I spent 4 days recovering what I could but most of that has turned out to be unusable due to fragmentation. The information is just not all there. I was pretty mad but I can only be mad at myself.

I explain this to friends and family all the time. It's not a matter of "if" your hard drive fails, it's a matter of "when". They all fail eventually and if you don't back up your important files, you will lose them. But do I take my own advice? No, I'm too smart for that. And now I have paid the price. All I managed to recover was the raw home movie videos and some smaller JPGs. What saves me a bit is that our trip to Arizona was on a different drive and I still have photos from when we returned to now on my camera cards. But I have lost 3 months worth of photos including my daughter's 6th birthday.

Am I disappointed? You bet. I could beat myself up about this all day long but it won't bring back these photos and videos. So, have I learned from this? Yes. I have plans for an external raid enclosure with 2 drives at 3TB each. I'll use this simply for backup and storage.

Now I can just try to keep recovering photos as best I can but it's not looking good at all.

Chris.

Nuts & Bolts

 

Chris. 

I'm So Sad And Lonely......

 

Sad and lonely, sad and lonely.

Sorry for the David Lee Roth reference but look how pathetic she looks. We didn't make her go into her kennel. She just went in on her own.

This was taken with my 50mm f/1.8. I've been a little disappointed with my Tamron 18-270mm lately. I believe I've found the limitations of that lens. I'm going to blog about it later this week. Time to save for a 24-70mm f/2.8 me thinks.

Chris. 

Hula Girl

 

She may not keep the hoop going long but she's getting there. A video of this would be quite funny. She must do 100 MPH when she's going. I needed a shutter speed of 1/800 sec to freeze the action!

Chris.