Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Jack Graham
I couldn't have imagined a finer weekend soending some individual time with Ralph and two whole days, I mean two whole days from 4:30am to 9:00pm, shooting with Jack. Jack took us to all of the coastal and Columbia River Gorge hot spots. It was really an amazing experience.
Jack conducts a variety of workshops in Oregon. Believe me when I say you will be in for a great treat attending a Jack Graham workshop. He will make sure that you see the best there is of Oregon at the best times of the day and give you all the hints and secrets along the way.
Check out Jack's website, you'll be in for a treat.
www.jackgrahamphoto.com
Roger
Sunset in Oregon

Between 4/22/08 to 4/26/08 I met my brother, Ralph Nordstrom, and Jack Graham in Oregon for three and a half days of shooting. We shot the Oregon coast and the Columbia River Gorge.
Being Oregon it was overcast and rainy most of the time. However on Saturday we had a beautiful day with lots of sun and wonderful clouds. But as the day wore on the clouds inscreased and as it often happens in the midwest, I'm from Minnesota, the weather turns unpredictable. In the evening we stood at the Womens Forum overlook looking east as the storm gathered steam. As the sun fell lower in the sky the rain started falling and the lightning began to strike. One of Jacks sunset locations is the Vista House a short drive from the overlook, so we headed there.
The three of us, along with a few other photographers, were setup looking west toward the setting sun. It continued to rain and thinder boomed around us. We were hoping the sun would appear under the cloud bank and light up the underside of the clouds. The sun did appear but a heavy rainstorm had moved between us and the sun. As can be seen from the image below the suns light was diffused by the rain and filled the sky with colors fromreds to purples. It was a magical moment.
Roger
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Cardiac Snow


Roger
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
What is It

The image was taken along the North Shore on Minnesota.
Roger
Backup, Backup, Backup
Fortunately for me backing up my data has been a long standing routine. My career has been in the systems side of IBM mainframe shops and backing up data is a big deal in IT. So I have always backed up my data. I always preferred unattended backups and I've owned a number of tape systems over the years but use hard drives now.
My tool of choice for moving my 20D files is Lightroom. Lightroom contains all of the info on my images so it is really the only choice. But Lightroom really moves the files, meaning the source copy is deleted. So before I began I made sure my backup was in place.
Moving 100+gb of images in Lightroom is a time consuming process. Towards the end I started getting write errors on the 500gb destination drive. To make a longer story shorter the destination drive was chock full of errors and the quality of my files were consistently inconsistent.
As it turned out my 300D files were never copied to my backup drives but I was fortunate that I could get them safely off the errant drive loosing just a few images in the process.
I proceeded to rebuild my image files for my backups. I keep two sets of backups. The first is the destination for nightly SyncToy, a freebe Microsoft tool, synchronizations. This insures that I will loose no more than 1 days worth of work. The second level is an unscheduled but regularly run synchronization of my first level backup to a second level backup. This second level is my safety net. It is not as up to date as the first but if all else fails I 'should' have a copy.
As I was rebuilding my 20D images I discovered my first level backup was missing quite a number of images. This was a disconcerting discovery thinking that they were gone. But my second level backup came to the rescue. Since the second level backup isn't subjected to daily updates all of the files were there.
In the ended it took me about a week to get all of my files restored, my daily backups rescheduled and all of my backup copies back in order. It was a chore but all of my files, minus a half dozen, were saved.
One future enhancement to my backup strategy is to use two second level backups. These would be switched back and forth every week or so with the one not in use going to work with me and stored there. One more 1tb drive would give me that option.
So the lesson here is backup, backup, backup. I have heard to many stories of people loosing thousands of digital images due to a hard drive crash. Just think of all the time and money that goes into capturing those images and memories and then how easy it is to go spend $250 for a terabyte drive and start backing up.
Roger