Cool! I like the background. Nice shots.

Very nice job mommy. Sunflowers, one of my favorite subjects although they seem to be dwindling in interest level.

I think I posted some on here. Did you see them? I wouldn't mine if you had a look if you're a true enthusiast as so many folks are.

My, my georgeedwards, I'm not into guys but it's nice to be able to see you. I love all of these people pictures so I can see those with whom I am talking. What are you disagreeing with, what I said in my fairy tale involving elk poop or something else? And while I'm here, just in case it is I with whom you choose to joust, if it IS I with whom you disagree, you would then be saying that you feel like all bad images can be fixed? Appearing to be jumping to conclusions prematurely, I would just say, if that's the case, please, I've got some you can use to convince me that I'm an idiot who needs some comeuppance. Inquiring minds, and all of that rot, you know. I just would like to get that qualified before I allow any steam to come out of my ears. By the way, congratulations on your success with that image. I like hearing that a lot.

I don't know how many times this one has been around the horn in here but I'm bettin' that I have some information that many in this forum needs. I'll share it, although it'll be a little lengthy and you can respond or not, depending on your preference. If you have something to add that I've overlooked, please do so. If you are just being contrary and argumentative and serving no other useful purpose, it might be just as well to keep it to yourself and let the less experienced in here benefit from what I have to say. I think what I have to say will not warrant a lot of discussion and I don't mean that in a pretentious manner. For those of you who already have all the answers for what I'm going to say, great, especially if you're taking advantage of what you know. For those of you who don't know or who know but don't believe and therefore don't do it, for some reason, you better pay attention. I often admit, as you know by now, that I don't know what I'm doing. That's partly true and partly a smokescreen. What I'm about to share is appropriate and some, many, can benefit from reading it:

I'll quote an unknown source as I say, "there are two kinds of computer user - those who have lost all their data (read that images) and those who are going to." Hard drives fail, not if, but when - the answer is "sooner or later."

I intend this to be alarming and while I normally don't go out of my way to attempt to guide people, I'm making an exception.

What brings this up is that I saw the other day where one of our forum members said they, "burn a disc of my originals and another of my edited versions." I cringed when I heard that. Let me tell you why. That person is headed for a sure-fire disaster with those images. Discounting all the other things that can go wrong, "disc rot" as it is called eventually happens to every disc you burn. If that were all, it wouldn't be so bad. What else happens is that often newer equipment won't read older discs. Sometimes you can get recovery software that'll save your buns and often not.

I've been admitting in various posts that I am too unorganized to lay my hands on the exact image I want to submit but that's been a little fib. My method of preserving my data is a little complicated. Like Sinatraman said about some of my "mouthy posts," I may have too much time on my hands. The fact is that I also have too many interests. I shoot some video that I burn to blu ray and that requires quite a bit of time also. I have too many images in too many places to just go get one and put it on here. The ones I've put on here have, for one reason or another not related to his forum, been brought out of hiding for some other purpose and I just popped them on the forum to get some valid criticism. What hasn't been a fib is that I have not aspired to be a "pro." It's too late for me to do that - I have too many physical and medical considerations.

Beyond that, I don't fancy myself as an expert on much and don't want to leave the impression to the contrary. What I'm about to discuss with you is different. I've debated going into it but I've decided that it's important enough to share. I've been burning cd's since 1988 and dvd's since they came out, and now blu ray and they all have something in common - they go bad. Your images are not safe with "a copy" made of blah, blah, blah. You must have multiple copies and if possible on different media or you'll eventually lose them. There are "gold" discs that offer a little better safety than the others but they too go bad, it just takes a little longer. Cd's hold up to 700+ megabytes, dvd's hold up to 4.7 gigabytes while double layered ones hold twice that much, and blu rays hold 25 gigabytes and those can be double-layer so 50 gig. Any of those on a single disc are too many images to lose at any time.

Having discs go bad within a year or so sitting in holders, doing nothing, after first I burned them taught me a lesson very early on so I devised a method of circumventing the problem. It may seem a little excessive, especially for those who have limited availability of space to carry it out. In addition to making several copies of my data and spreading it around to different places to avoid destruction by natural disaster, even lock boxes in my bank at one time, to make sure that I had several chances to retrieve it if it became necessary. I started pulling full drives out of my computers leaving the data intact on the pulled drive and replacing it with a new drive and starting over.

Then I discovered that the pulled drives didn't always want to work in a newer computer so I started simply retiring old computers as they were before they crashed and getting a new one, more powerful to handle the demands of bigger more powerful software and the increasing size of data that was stored on them. So, as we speak, I have six older computers lined up and mothballed in my basement. I have cataloged what is on the drives and when I need something in particular, I go to the appropriate computer and plug it in with every expectation that it will crank up right where I left it, and I haven't been disappointed in that yet. I don't have to worry about backward compatibility or any of the other issues that arise when I get a new computer and ship out the old one. Plus, I have the older cd and dvd drives in those machines and they read the discs that were burned in them without hesitancy.

I currently have four computers hooked to a wiring harness with a switch that lets me move back and forth between the machines using the same monitor, mouse, and keyboard on each of them by hitting the NumLock key twice to change to the next computer. I can use them for different reasons or they are all interchangeable as they sit. I have Windows 98 on one that my film scanner is hooked up to, Linux on one that I use for going online most of the time because it is, like a Mac, less vulnerable to online problems such as viruses. One has Win XP Pro and has two scanners hooked to it for different scanning jobs, and a Win 7 box that none of my scanners or printers want to work on. There's no problem with moving to different machines and finding that the images look different because of different monitors.

Then to solve the need for more storage, I have drive docks, $20, that allow me to plug in any hard drive I need to. My images are all stored on drives I can plug in to drive docks. I have 3 docks on my latest most powerful machine so I can have 3 extra drives plugged in at the same time, thereby not having to switch drives as often, and 1 each on the other 3. I have a stack of hard drives and they all fit in all the docks and can be put in any dock and they'll work on all four computers. Rendering video is very time consuming so I can be processing two videos at the same time, switching back and forth between as needed, be online doing email, and scanning in slides or film at the same time. Sometimes I feel like a monkey in a candy store but it's very functional and effective.

You just drop a drive into a dock and you're off and running. No more taking a computer apart to put the drive inside. There are two kinds of drives, PATA and SATA and the only distinction is the plugs on them. You have to have a dock to match the plugin on the drive you want to use. You can also use these docks on laptops to increase your storage and then unplug them and plug them into your desktop or another laptop, thus making it appear that the drive is exclusive to the machine you're using at the time. It's also a very efficient way of moving images back and forth between computers. The docks plug into your usb ports. It's that simple.

In addition to all of that, I use an online storage. We've all seen the adverts for Carbonite. I use another one but it's similar. The quickest way to get data into an online storage, however, is to sign up for one or more gmail email accounts and mail your images to yourself. gmail, a division of Google gives you 7.5 gigabytes of storage free and you can have multiple gmail accounts, one for each category of image you want to store. They sit on Google's servers until you're ready to open them in an email and download them to your computer. You can email up to 25 megabytes, I think it is, at one time, perhaps not adequate for some RAW files, and attach multiple images, jpgs, tiff, etc., to a single email which may or may not be desirable.

We have set up a national disaster for families with digital photography and it hasn't hit yet en masse the way it's going to one of these days. There'll be no family albums to sit around in later years and look at, admiring our youth, etc. A lot of it will disappear, I'd venture to say most. If you aspire to be a pro and earn you livelihood with your images, you won't if you don't take the necessary precautions. Businesses that lose their data rarely continue to exist, small or large. Data recovery companies and software can save some but not all. My two older sons are IT people and my youngest started and ran a data recovery company for ten years, ultimately selling it and watching it being driven into the ground by new owners. When I speak about this, I speak not only from the perspective of 30 years of personal experience but also from the standpoint of being closely associated with people who have had to concern themselves with these issues. I've seen it up close and it's a tragedy when it happens. If you want your images, you'll heed at least a part of what I've offered here. Can I get an "amen" from ya JimH, an IT man yourself. You've demonstrated yourself to be a wise, very well versed, and a much respect man in this forum who offers expert guidance on a variety of issues well beyond my capability. What say you?

I've done this rather hurriedly so please overlook all of what might normally appear to be stuck keys except where it involves whole words that appear to be missing in which case, allow that I may think faster than I can type although that may be a complete misconception.

Thank you Sarah. I'd like to engage you for a second regarding a post you made on another subject. Hopefully, since this subject is wearing on now it won't upset anyone for me to address this with you here. I saw where you said that you burn a disc before and after editing. I'm about to bring up a discussion in the "Main Photography Discussion" section on the subject of storing your images for the long haul. Please go read what I have to say and engage in the discussion.

There's no rush, and thanks again.

I've got this sign on my wall an older friend gave me about 30 years ago. It says, "Him who can brag without lying, let him brag." I like that a lot. In the name of honesty and saving time, I try to tell it like it is and hope others receive it in the manner I intended and will do likewise. You impress me as being that kind of guy. I respect that. I've seen where you matter-of-factly have admitted to being an engineer. You, sir, have some moral authority in addition to being what appears to be a man's man with a myriad of manly interests, all worth pursuing and a commensurate amount of humility to go with it. There's no reason for you to back into a room.

Why don't you have a go at it Strubbles. Let me see what you have pictured in your mind. I've not made it to the point yet of combining elements of different shots except in the case of inserting someone into a family portrait who wasn't around at the time of the portrait sitting. I've mostly done that with old photos involved with some genealogy stuff I've done on my family. I'll be anxious to see what you have in mind. Thanks.

Hey, I thought you got it just about right and I wasn't confused at all about the expression of your position. I took it more to mean that you had gone to the well too many times and come home empty and had learned your lesson. Made perfect sense to me.

You're too kind, once again and you're right, Sept 4th, the day we both signed in, was a busy day - sort of like the first day of school back a few years ago. I'm looking forward to us learning from each other and the other members. There seem to be some in the forum who have wonderful photography minds but they seem to stay in the shadows most of the time. Perhaps they'll become more active so we can all advance our love of the craft.

I'm sorry if I misled you DB. Alas, it was just a fairy tale. I was so impressed with your demeanor in your 9-11 posts. It was almost painfully obvious the degree to which you were affected by it then and still are. I hope you don't mind me saying that.

Thank you once again. Spent too much time on the story but then it's hard to wrap up two weeks in a sentence, especially if it involves thinkin' that you could have wound up being cat food.

Thank you Bonnie. I fully understand. They're not easy to catch. If they're low enough for a good picture, they go to fast.
I spun myself to the ground on some shots, rotating when they came overhead. It's tricky.

Footshift, I think I meant to say "really impressed" and didn't quite make it.

I agree, only thing is it's too time consuming if you really get into it. 'Course, I talk too much but it's tricky to keep up with everything that's going on in here and yet, you don't want to let anything get by you 'cause there's so much good stuff. I'm just all over the place and I know I'm not doing it justice. Oh well.

Oh, excuse me Don. I read your first comment rather hurriedly and failed to pick up on it. I actually came away from it thinking that you had been there and got your own shot of that scene. I didn't process that as you intended. Now, back to my thinking about it. Sorry.