Rails to Trails (Margaret River > Cowaramup) and a horror story...

Here we are again... the last two weeks have been rather troublesome... 

Exactly two weeks ago when I started up my laptop in the morning to work on my images I noticed that my laptop won't boot into Windows... after about 30 minutes my laptop then changed his mind and booted up, but only to reveal the next horror: My secondary hard drive was not detected...the one with my photography stuff on...

I tried everything, re-booted several times, checked the bios, removed the hard drive and re-connected it, everything seemed pointless and I feared the worst...

The following Monday I went to see the service center of my laptops manufacturer(I won't reveal any names) and after a quick check they told me that my hard drive was DEAD! Only six weeks after my main drive failed and needed a clean install of the OS... And since the hard-drives were bought separately from the laptop, there was nothing they could do...

So, approaching 6pm, I rushed to my nearest computer store and asked them to see if they could recover any of my files from the dead hard drive but after two days I was disappointed once again when I left the store without any data...

I then contacted the hard-drive manufacturer, explained - in several calls - my situation and finally launched a request for replacement and sent my drive off to New South Wales to get it checked and replaced. This can take up to 4 weeks and to make things worse, by that time I may have already moved to a different address, about 300kms away...

Now on a brighter note: I was smart enough to back up my files the previous week and only really took 3 photos since the backup, that were lost with the hard drive. Luckily I still had these images on my SD-Card in my camera so the loss was reduced to a minimum.
To my dismay, though, I had to realize that I didn't back-up my Lightroom catalog properly and all the edits of about 200 photos were gone...including my recent images from the Fremantle Power Station, the Woodbridge House, Fremantle Harbor and a few images I shot in the forests around Margaret River a while back... what a s#*t! While I still have full size jpegs, the edits on the DNG's were lost... bummer!

So now in the meantime, while I'm waiting for my new hard drive to arrive, I have invested in a home cloud storage device(it only took 34+hours to copy the files from my back-up hard drive again, yes you read correctly - over thirtyfour hours!) and hope this will provide some proper and improved data security for my images...

And while all this crap was happening I still had to commute back and forth between Perth and Margaret River to go to work on Mon&Tue and to attend my work placement on Thu&Fri... too much bloody driving and running errands and not enough time to relax and follow my photographic passion apart from attending Team Digital's Golden Shopping Trolley Awards gala night last weekend and visiting the Northbridge Hotel to attend a Pro-Seminar held by the talented Peter Coulson(http://www.peter-coulson.com.au/) on Tuesday which was really insightful and very interesting, even though I'm not a beauty/fashion photorapher - I always believe that you can never learn enough!

Now you know why my blogs have been kinda slack lately so let's get straight into it again!

This photo came together on the day that my hard drive broke... I took my pushbike and my partner's flatmates' dog out for a run from Margaret River to Cowaramup, along the Rails To Trails bike path.

This shot was taken just north of Burnside Road, looking towards Cowaramup from a small bridge in the forest. Initially I took a 5-image exposure series and blended them together using LREnfuse but I didn't like the ghosting that was going on in the image so I settled for the centre exposure and finished editing it in Lightroom. Although I preferred the overall look of the blended exosure, I still am really happy with this shot.

That's it for now. I might go out tonight and try to capture some star shots, or some long exposures... so stay tuned! :)