Time Immortal

I do…which is the only reason I will be able to tell my wife, when I get home, that all the pictures our various relatives took at our wedding are safe and, you know, still in existence.

As opposed to having a more awkward conversation instead.

My current backup scheme is probably not ideal but it is effective, at least. I stuff everything onto optical media (gold-layer DVDs, in fact) as I edit it, and I’ve just started backing up all my photos (RAW files and edited JPEGs) to a large external hard drive as well. I have fallen behind in using the family website as a third backup repository…although in this case, it’s the web-based copies of the photos that saved my butt.

Nothing was lost (amen!)…thanks to backups.

Back up your files! I’m not going to tell you again! Actually, I probably will tell you again…but you should still be backing your files up.

This is a HDR image created from a single RAW exposure, which means that there’s a bit more digital noise in the shot than I might otherwise accept. But the image itself is pretty good, and the clouds in it look spectacular, especially in terms of colour and contrast.

Taking a brief break from the Greece pictures, I’d like to post something a bit more relevant to the dawn of the new year, 2008. Last night, Grace and I went to see the fireworks in Edmonton’s Churchill Square, in the heart of the downtown core. The city just won the title of Cultural Capital of Canada for 2007 (whatever that means), and put on the largest-ever pyrotechnic display in the history of the city’s downtown area to celebrate that fact.

Just one of several good shots of the fireworks that I managed to get — and I was freehanding, as has become custom for me. Oh, if I really wanted to make an issue out of it, I’d go and get my tripod back from my brother…but then, when one is standing in the middle of a few thousand people, a tripod is kind of a liability. And there really isn’t space to set it up in the first place.

Edit-wise, I did some fringe reduction in and around the brighter sets of sparks, as well as noise reduction (this was shot at ISO 800, after all) and the usual colour calibration that I apply to all my RAW photos. And as the reader can see, it turned out just nicely. I used to be just terrified of shooting things like this without benefit of tripod; thanks to the stabilizer, I’m much more at ease with the idea now.