I’d been hoping to take the girls down to California for a while now and the occasion finally presented itself in early March. The girls had a week off from school and I had succeeded in booking four tickets using points with Delta. I knew the photo opportunities would be all around so after some negotiating, I was able to plan some of our outings to be off the beaten path. We spent twelve days in sunny California where we went from Malibu to Anaheim to Hollywood to Laguna Beach to San Diego. I took several hundred photos with about thirty of them making it on to my website.
I spent alot of time discovering the local countryside on my road bike this summer. And with all that riding, I did run into many good photo opportunities. Here is one taken while riding with one of the local cycling clubs.
Quebec has many old barns all around the contryside and I just can’t avoid taking pictures of them. They give me a sort of nostalgia of an era that is slowly fading away. Here is an interesting picture of one of them at sunset. It was good to see that the barn was still being used to store hay for the winter.
Here is another variation on the same theme but taken, this time, on a trip to Granby, Quebec.
I still have summer pictures I would like to share and I will later on this week.
So you’ve implemented a RAID drive on your home computer and now feel comfortable knowing that your photographs will not be forever lost if some sort of failure happens on that computer… Well don’t feel too comfortable says my friend Bill. What if you have a fire in your home? What if a burglar steals the computer? What if flooding submerges your PC? And (lately) what if a hurricane blows everything away? Yes, he’s good at coming up with disaster scenarios and he’s right! Though some of these scenarios are more realistic than others all of them would nevertheless threaten those precious photographs (or video, or music or emails, etc…) stored on your PC. So what can you do? Well now that you’ve introduced a RAID drive in your system, the solution is quite simple and really only a small extension to the modifications you’ve already implemented. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that you will need to purchase yet another hard drive (again identical to the two already in your RAID setup) and something called a mobile rack with a removable hard drive tray. You will also need a second removable tray compatible with that rack. I said bad news but storage is relatively inexpensive today and the tray can be purchased for really not much (especially online in place like ebay…) and anyhow those pictures are really priceless (aren’t they?)
The idea behind this additional equipment is to very easily and regularly create an exact replica of your hard drive and to store this replica away from your PC preferably in another place (i.e. your mom’s, brother’s or friend’s house…) This replica will have on it everything that’s on your PC so you don’t have to decide which files you backup and which ones you don’t.
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Their was a local horseback riding competition not too far from home last weekend and I had decided to go have a look. Turns out the competition was between teenage riders (oddly enough mostly girls…) Anyhow I did get a few nice photographs of the riders. After Assateague Island I seem to be taking lots of pictures of horses lately 
Have a look:
Finally got around to posting my pictures of the New York portion of my summer trip. You can see them here:
Didn’t get to use my camera as much as I would have liked down in New York but again with three girls tailing me all the time my picture taking opportunities were a little limited Thanks to Bill and Kathy (friends down in NY) though we did get to walk up onto the Brooklyn Bridge amongst the crowds of people.
I’ve got to try and get down to NYC one day all by myself with my camera and tripod, the picture taking possibilities are simply endless…
So you’ve bought a new digital camera and have been snapping away pictures of the kids, mom and dad, uncle Bob and so forth for the last few months (or years…). In fact you now have a nice collection of photograph on your PC that you intend to keep for a lifetime of memories (do I hear violins?). And to make sure you can always find them you’ve spent a considerable amount of time laying out the directories and subdirectories on your PC (maybe by year, month and date.) You may even have also purchased a keywording software so that you can easily find pictures of your daughter by simply typing in her name. So all is nice and dandy until one morning, when you go to turn on your mighty computer, you get this error (or something similar): Fatal Hard Drive Error… And nothing else… At first you naively believe that a simple turn it off / turn it on again will solve the problem but not this time… So you try a few other tricks but to no avail… What has just happened is a complete hard drive failure. And as you slowly realize this, your thoughts turn to all your family pictures that you may now have just lost.
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Well it’s over… My vacation that is… Had a great time down in South Jersey where the whole family got together for a week of camping in a place called Sea Isle City. Not too many picture taking opportunities for me given that I was taking care of three not-quite-teenage year old girls. I did manage to get a few good photos though. Here they are:
That was the first week…
The following week I moved on to Maryland with the three girls. We spent a few nights on Assateague Island. This place is great if you don’t mind the the lack of commodities. And the island is populated by herds of wild ponies (though they’re more the size of horses…) Plenty of great shots here. The best ones where taken early in the morning or late in the afternoon given that the mid-day sun was really too bright for good picture taking. Here is the album with my best photographs taken on the island.
Only drawback in this little island paradise is the horse… flies! I think they are capable of stinging through a horse’s thick leather skin so you can image that they had a feast of me with my not so thick skin…
I also made it to New York City for a few days but I’ll tell you about it in one of my next posts…
Well I’ve finally decide to start a blog! Still thinking of how I want to structure my blog though. And obviously what subjects I want to write about… I do have a few ideas and hope to expand on them in the near future… Taking a vacation next week and I’ll definitely be thinking of this while lying on the beach…:-)
