El Cid in the City, #1, Barcelona, 2020
May 2021 be better for all of us than the past 365 days have been.
Three Photography Ideas For The New Year
1. Take some time away from Netflix to back up all your images to two different external drives.
I’m terrible at this and tend to do it only every couple of months. If the hard drive on my main computer were to auger in, I could lose a few hundred photographs. Oh, well.
It all depends on how much you shoot, though. A wedding photographer who shoots thousands of frames a week probably needs to back things up every time they sit their fanny down to download a new batch.
A slow-moving and pensive landscape photographer who gets out two or three times each Blue Moon maybe just needs to do a monthly back up.
For convenience, software is often included with the purchase of a drive that will do an automatic backup as per your desired schedule.
Whatever you do, back up your babies to at least two other external drives, one of which you should keep off premises–just in case an RV playing “Downtown“ ever parks in your driveway.
Memory is cheap these days–I have a couple of 5TB drives, and even 16TB drives are starting to emerge. Then there is even cloud backup if you are heavenly inclined.
2. Clean and check your camera and lenses.
Check for any obvious damage, clean the glass and the sensor (for the latter, take it to a shop if in doubt). Rotate/reformat/recharge your memory cards and batteries. Before reformatting cards, double check for any stray images left on those older cards in the bottom of your case.
3. Go through your gear and sell or donate what you aren’t using.
With time, all sorts o’ stuff will go forth and multiply in the deep, dark privacy of your camera bag(s)–adapter rings, batteries from cameras you no longer own, strange cables and wires, that odd lens you thought was a good deal at the Kiwanis swap meet, special effects filters for a project long since forgotten, and so on.
Consider a donation if it’s something that could be useful to an enthusuastic, up-and-coming, young photog–maybe one of your old film cameras? Doing that could change someone’s life, vice just leaving the item in your dusty closet. A local camera club can guide you to an apprpriate recipient.
There you have it–three ideas to start out the New Year!
Now… Found on the memory card
The images on this post were found sitting on my camera’s memory card… abandoned and forgotten. Luckily, I did as counseled above and found them before pressing the FORMAT button.
Here they are after post-processing (Adobe Photoshop Elements and then Silver Efex Pro for the B&W conversion)…
This one will go into my Ghost Women portfolio. Call it, “You are the rotten apple of my eye“:
Ghost Women, #200 (You are the rotten apple of my eye), Barcelona, 2020
These nextb two I worked up as candidates for my Barcelona Structures portfolio. And, yes, it’s the same bird–amazing how it managed to fly into both scenes. I’m not a documentary photographer, so I feel quite free to add elements if I think they are needed–like birds and a Moon–or eliminate them if they are not–like extra birds or the odd and portly tourist. I actually like contrails, but they are pretty hard to clone in successfully, so I just wait around for those and capture them in-camera.
This first building is where you’ll find Catalunya’s government, the Palace of the Generalitat. You can probably decipher the banner even if you don’t read Catalan: “FREEDOM OF OPINION AND EXPRESSION, Arrticle 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” The adjacent open space, la Plaça de Sant Jaume (St. James Square), is the site of both pro and anti-independence protests as well as fun holiday celebrations and festivals–and the odd filming of a scene for a movie, soap opera, or TV show.
For me, the Moon symbolizes how far away the actual reality of Catalan independence might be, and the bird represents that freedom that is so desired by many (though not all!) Catalans:
Freedom of Expression, La Generalitat, Barcelona, 2020
This is the 14th century church, Santa Maria del Mar, in Barcelona, a classic Catalan Gothic structure whose construction was financed largely by the common folk of the time rather than by the nobility. Some therefore call it, “the church of the people”. For a good read which describes the amazingly laborious and even dangerous construction process, try out the best selling novel by Ildefonso Falcones, Cathedral By the Sea.
The modern jet contrail contrasts harshly with the centuries-old facade… the Moon has been around much longer than either of these human efforts (tall buildings and airline travel) have been or will be… and the Nature still soars [somewhat/partially] free despite such human intrusions:
La Catedral Santa Maria del Mar, Barcelona, 2020
Finally, I thought this was an unusual juxtaposition of faces, lines, bars, sharp points–and a tree. The museum that houses these contemporary works, the Villa del Arte Galleries Barcelona, is right next to the main Barcelona Cathedral and is worth a visit when you tire of looking at “old stuff” in the Gothic Quarter:
The Three Faces of Eve, Barcelona, 2020
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