Major Fail

I am nothing if not a prolific photographer. Notice I didn't say good photographer, I said prolific, with all the false modesty I can possibly muster.

I do think that I am an improving photographer and that perhaps the new camera has helped me push the limits of my competency and image quality.

While all the new technology and filters can grant practically any image a modicum of decency, it is also a truism that for truly great photography one needs to start with well composed, correctly sharpened and exposed photographs. You just can't make chicken salad out of any old chicken shit in this medium. I have been moving in a direction where I am choosing to forego a lot of bells and whistles, even as I get more comfortable with them. Give it to me straight. By the way, in hip photographer circles, the ridiculous, heavy use of photoshop filters on a picture is called stomping the image.

As I ascend to the full glory of the declining years, my idea of what is truly tragic has also changed. And so I am not dangling on a freeway overpass right now, firemen and cops with megaphones trying to talk me down off my risky perch and get me to a nice institution where I can be appropriately treated with the right anti psychotic drugs. A tragedy is Aurora, or a chunk of blue ice falling out of the airplane bilge, slamming right through the ceiling and conking you into oblivion while you are sitting on the john perhaps. Or somebody you know and love getting real sick or in an accident. Losing thousands of your best photographs isn't a tragedy, is it?

You see, when I woke up yesterday, I had 39,762 photos in my Lightroom catalogue. Around three o'clock I got a message that my start-up disk was full and that I would need to jettison some things to create enough file space for things to start working again on my 500 gig drive.

I downloaded the program Monolingual which got rid of the foreign language scripts and saved about 3 gigs. Not nearly enough. So I went into iphoto and started throwing things overboard. It was mostly backed up on Lightroom, right?

Well I got ahead of myself and chucked about 50 gigs out. Then I went into my users/ pictures/robert sommers file and the fatal mistake was made. I started throwing out what appeared to be redundant files with names like 2011. Which turned out to be the source files for Lightroom. Grand Tetons?  Goodbye. Utah? See you later. This may not be tragic but it is still truly fucked.

I am not sure that all is lost because I had downloaded everything to a Picasa cloud server last year. I did manage to get some things back. But I am getting image corruption messages and can not get many other photos back. Ever. Including some of my best shots.

Beats getting in a car wreck, I guess. Will have to get out there and take more pictures. But in the meantime keep me away from anything really sharp.