North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Snap Happy

This post was supposed to be about Infrared photography. But I got sidetracked, as usual. Maybe later in the week. The location of this picture is just a few yards from that of the one posted yesterday. This is a colour infrared digital photograph, with the levels adjusted slightly to desaturate the leaves but retain some warmth in the water. Taken using a Canon350 DSLR, a Canon 75-300 USM IS lens and a Hoya R75 IR filter.

On Saturday, I downloaded the RAW thumbnail viewer plugin for Windows Explorer (for XP only - available here). I shoot most pictures in RAW format, which, until now, was not viewable as a thumbnail in Windows[The difference between JPG and RAW is described in this article on the Luminous Landscape website]. You can click on a thumbnail to see a large version of the image, though the resolution isn't great. The plugin supports RAW for Nikon and Canon (the .CR2 format)- it also supports the older .CRW RAW files generated by my Canon G3 compact (though the resolution is even poorer). The downside, for those of you living in planet Dial-up, is that, while the plugin is 5Mb, you have to download a Microsoft .Net framework (whatever the hell that is), which brings the total download size to 48Mb (yes, that's forty eight). No doubt such an ungodly act will see you in hell one day, but in the meantime, assuming you've got the bandwidth, the plugin is quite handy.

A couple of months ago, John Naughton wrote an article for The Observer that triggered a tinge or two of guilt. It began

What are you going to do when your hard disk fails? Note that I said 'when' - not 'if'.

He was talking about back-ups, and how important they are. Now, the reason I felt guilty was that I'd been meaning to do a back-up but hadn't got around to it. And after a day or two, the back-up joined the rest of the mental pile of things that I keep meaning to do, like climbing Croagh Patrick again, tidying the apartment and hunting down the rest of Westlife. Then, about a fortnight later, I switched on the computer to be greeted with the Blue Screen of Death. And, just like the chorus of a Johnny Cash song, Naughton's words came back to haunt me. Luckily, the problem wasn't the hard disk, but I wasn't taking any more chances. [Maybe it's just me but I find that XP crashes or hangs almost as often as my old Windows 98 machine. But, like a gentleman drunk, it just picks itself up again and is too polite to mention the unseemly occurrence again. Until the next time it happens.]

There was one small problem. The size of the backup. I have almost 60Gb of photos stored on my hard drive, but almost half of those were taken in the last six months (and most of those since I bought the Canon 350). It's an 8mb model, so each shot is twice the size of one taken with my previous camera. I bought a 1Gb card with the camera, and can easily fill it on a good day. [I should point out that most shots I take are total rubbish, even on a 'good' day. I'm a bit trigger-happy with the shutter button. And I can't bring myself to delete any of them]. My PC has a maximum capacity of 160GB, so I'll probably fill it completely within 18 months.

The last time I did a backup was in March and it took nearly a box of DVDs and several hours. But unless I wanted to build my next house out of DVD cases, that wasn't a long term solution. So last Saturday, I bought an external hard drive. It cost 200 euro, stores 250Gb and if you can buy it somewhere else for less, don't tell me. [It also crashed the PC repeatedly for about an hour and then worked fine, without any intervention from me. Go figure].

As for the process of backing them, I use Picasa - the second useful piece of free software that I use. It's available from Google (you can download it here) that acts like a photo album and browser. I've already organised my sub-directories of photos by location and date, so Picasa allows me to browse all the photos of a particular place by location (as rows of thumbnails). Incidentally, Picasa supports RAW in thumbnail but often hangs when I try to view full-size images in RAW. Maybe version 3 will sort out that problem.It also supports back-ups, including incremental back-up (i.e. it only back-ups the photos taken since the previous back-up). I don't know how long it took to back-up all the photos (there were 29,000 of them) but when I came back after lunch , it was done. Of course, the external drive sits on the same desk as the PC, so if the apartment burns down, all the pics will disappear. But, given that I live about 50 metres from where oil tankers dock to unload their cargo, if there's a fire, the computer will be the least of my worries…

galway, ireland, irishblogs,monasette

Posted by Monasette at August 8, 2005 09:20 PM