Welcome to Milano Fashion Week by Douglas Stockdale
One of the downsides of jet lag, is pushing your mental endurance envelop when you should not be. But at the time, you just don’t know that you are not functioning with all of the neurons firing in full sequence ;- (
Case in point, my personal experience from my last two week assignment to Europe. At the moment, I am trying every trick I know of to salvage most of the two weeks of photographs that I had made, which just “disappeared” late yesterday afternoon. And having just arrived from Milan the afternoon before, although I was doing my computer work at 3pm CA time, my body was really functioning like it was 1am Milan time after the day before pulling a 22 hour day. In retrospect, not a good thing.
I had already had the close call when I almost lost my camera rig while boarding the plane from Rome to Milan earlier in the week. I was saved by an unknown angel who had turned it in at the boarding counter and it quickly found it’s way back into my hands just as the plane was about to pull away from the Rome terminal. When I realized that I did not have the gear, my mind could not remember when I had it last in my possession. I was that tired. I probably had just walked away from it, but I don’t really know.
So what happened yesterday? I now think the bottom line for losing almost all of my photographs was a result of not paying attention to the amount of hard disk on my desk top system. I did not realize that I was close to maxing out my system, and when I downloaded my photographic files, I was right on the very thin edge of a total max out. So when I opened the Adobe CS3 Browser to look at the raw files to rename the folders in order to back them up on my external hard disk, the Brower went sideways. For some reason, when the Browser crashed, it totally erased ALL of my downloaded images that were sitting on my desktop, all two weeks of photographic files. Everything! Yes, Crap deluxe.
And my capture and save procedures are not the best, as I download the 2 gig CF files to my portable as I travel, so the lost images are not sitting on a CF card. Another bad process, as I move the files from the portable to the desk top and I have them on the desk top, I move the files on the portable to the trash bin. I am not doing that again! Since I had not flushed the portable trash bin, I figured that the files that I had downloaded were still there. Nope. The portables trash bin was overloaded with what I dragging in and started permanently deleting files without a corresponding warning message. So I did manage to extract three partical days of photographic files. A small consolation prize, but most from The Netherlands was gone, including all of my photo’s from Noorderlicht’s Photofestival in Groningen. I do have photographs from the annual city fair in Oss and a few images from Rome and the first day in Milan. sigh.
So now I think I will remember; download and IMMEDIATELY back up, don’t get fancy with editing and folder naming.
Enough for now, so be careful when you push your endurance envelop, shit could happen.
Best regards, Doug
BTW I had this idea about a project around Milan’s Fashion Week, well just about everything that I had photographed for the project but the gem that started the whole thing, gone. So now I have to think about whether the concept is still viable and if I can reconstruct it, but I lost a lot of that inspirational moment, when working a project loose and fast and having a ton of fun. sigh. I still have that experience in my memory! (and a few of the images to potentially keep me going!)
Update: I feel blessed or as Susan Spiritus commented on my Facebook page, I’m one “lucky duck”. I was able to recover on my portable computer all of my Netherlands photographic files, and a few more of my Rome files. I was not sure if my Roxio GoBack3 was going to recover anything, but it was able to bring it all back that I had downloaded to the portable while I was in Europe. So now my lose is just the three days in Milan that I had kept on my two 2 Gig CF drives. Much better than nothing, eh?
Fashion Pavillions by Douglas Stockdale from the project 
