Quiet Time

These last few days I haven't been able to photograph much. Over the weekend, the cataloguing and editing program I use, Lightroom (LR) from Adobe, provided me with its own version of the BSOD; it announced that "the catalogue is corrupt and can not be recovered." For those who know the program, LR stores all the changes one makes to raw files in its catalogue - crops, exposure, contrast, saturation and so on . While my original pictures were all intact (in raw form) and I had backups of both the pictures and earlier editions of the catalogue, this was some, but not satisfying, consolation; I had effectively lost many months of edits, as LR resolutely refused to recognise one backup after another. I thought I would have to rework all the raw files all over again.

Eventually after much hammering away, LR recognised and "repaired" a catalogue dating from early February this year - which confined the loss to a couple of months. And then, miraculously, after closing the program, turning the computer off and on, and replacing the now functioning February catalogue with the latest two-day-old April version, LR "repaired" this latest catalogue and all my edits are back on hundreds of pictures taken this last year.

I am now going through the very lengthy process of converting all the photos into a format where all the edits are written into each image file, and not stored in a separate catalogue, for one's vulnerability to the corruption of that catalogue are now all too apparent. A cautionary tale. Backups are not enough.

I did manage to get out one morning, to Great Falls again. I had read with great interest Aiko's retelling of some of the lessons she has learned in her photography one of which is not to be "greedy". One doesn't like to come back from an excursion with nothing; on the other hand, this need to get something, anything, seems to fuel somewhat hasty "snapping away" and then one often comes home with exactly nothing! This time I saw a sliver of pink down a rather steep rock face; it turned out to be a bush precariously perched between a pair of rocks. Heeding Aiko's advice I spent an hour with this one bush. The pictures attached were taken with a wide angle, focal length 17mm, with the camera about 2-3 feet from the bush. Both exposures were taken at f/16, with shutter times of 1/3 and 1/2 seconds respectively. One picture has the sky in it; the other doesn't. Can't decide which I like better. Oh, and thank you, Aiko.

The Highline

The Highline is an elevated train track in Chelsea that has been made into a park. Here are some images I made last Friday while you all were enjoying Scott's Run.

Here are two faces of Scot's Run: Fall and Spring:

Very different moodes and colors.

By Aiko

Took many reflection photos with green color. I was debating in my head wheather I should crop the wood stiking into from the left or not.

We were srrounded by young green everywhere. I was trying to take all in and took many photos of leaves. Not many reflected what I saw in my eyes but this one might be very close to what I saw while taking photos.

I run out of battery while taking below dogwood flower.

I could not go home without this picture and stayed in my car and re-charged the battery and got back to the flower and took this shot.

The plant left is called Jack-in-the-Pulpit and poisonous if ingested.