With all the nice spring weather we have had the past few days I was able to take my Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro out. The flowers on the trees present a perfect opportunity for some close-up shots of nature’s heavy lifters, the bumble bee. Over 1/3 of the U.S. food supply is pollinated by bees most of which are from hives that are driven around the country chasing the spring blossoms of the crop in different locations around the country. Lately there have been some articles in the news about the mass disappearance of these extremely important agricultural workers. Lets hope they figure out why, and quickly, I don’t know what I would do without my OJ in the morning.

Article Regarding The Disappearance of Honey Bees

B Love over at PhillySkyLine.com has some great photo tours of Philly. The tours vary from neighborhoods and parks to skyscrapers both under construction and completed. His site recently made the local 6pm ABC news cast for its Comcast Center hard hat tour. The photos from 57 floors above philly are fanatastic. Head on over to Philly Sky Line and have a look around.

Photo Essays [phillyskyline.com]
Video of PhillySkyLine.com [Youtube]

I woke up this morning to the sound of sleet mixing in with the snow we had been getting since yesterday afternoon. While it doesn’t compare to the 146 inches of snow in upstate New York I was still in for a small surprise when I opened the front door. I guess I will need to get the shovel out if I am going to be venturing out today. Looks like it will be a good day for a photo walk.

Original Image:

Flowers

Originally uploaded by NOVA JIM.

New Photo:

Flowers 2

Originally uploaded by NOVA JIM.

I was looking through the Explore page on Flickr and this great photo caught my eye. Down in the Blue has posted lots of great shots he has taken on his long haul flights from his seat in the cockpit. There are some amazing photos of what different wind patterns can do to contrails when you are somewhere out over the pacific ocean. His photos are a perfect example of how a shot showing a common scene from an uncommon perspective can really make a shot great. Everyone has seen pictures of planes and contrails but to see a picture through the front window of an airplane at 40,000 feet can really make a photo something special.

See The Entire Set Here

Stopped to take some pictures of the Van Auken again today. The outdoor temperature was 9 degrees without the wind chill. I got everything ready in the car including putting the camera on the tripod and hooking up the shutter cable. After donning my hat and gloves I quickly walked down to the creek, snapped a few pictures and then quickly walked back to the warmth of the car.

If you are not familiar with JPG Magazine then do yourself a favor and head on over to their web site, it’s a great place for photographers to try and get some of their photos published. Basically it’s a site where photographers can submit their photos according to various themes chosen for each issue of the magazine. The community then gives a “Yeah! It rocks!” or “Nah. Next time.” vote to the pictures submitted and at the end of voting the editors pick some of the best photos to be published. The magazine appears in stores like Barnes & Noble, Borders, Hastings, Books-A-Million, and Urban Outfitters. The people over at JPG Magazine do a fantastic job! Oh and by the way if you do head over to their site take a look at my two submissions for issue 9 and give a “Yeah! It rocks!” vote.

Photo Submitted To Elegance Theme
Photo Submitted To Street Photography Theme

The cold snap we had today put a serious dent in my recent string of outdoor photography. It’s cold and windy now with a wind chill most likely below zero. So instead of trudging out in the freezing cold to look for some good photo opportunities I figured I would take some time to talk about my photo backup plan. I have only been taking pictures for a little over a year but all those RAW files take up a significant amount of room on my hard drive, a little over 13 gigs to be precise. I can’t imagine what I would do if I lost all that work and I know in the past I have said it won’t happen to me but I have had hard drives fail and I know it will happen again. Luckily in the past it occurred before I had built up a large music library and photo repository. In those days I had everything backed up on CD but now with 13 gigs of photos alone and more added each week I needed to think of a longer term scalable strategy.

I use a Mac Mini as my personal computer with a 37 gig hard drive. With approximately 13 gigs of photos I needed to find another place to store my pictures. I purchased a Western Digital My Book with 250GB of space. This would give me enough room for storing all my pictures and music. Copying over all 13GB of photos took a lot of time and for now I am keeping one copy of the data on my Mac Mini hard drive and another copy of the data on the My Book.

The next problem I encountered was how to keep the second copy of pictures on the My Book in sync with the copy on the Mac Mini. Copying over all my files that changed to the My Book using a manual process simply wasn’t going to work. I found a nice piece of software from LaCie, a great technology company that would more then meet my needs. The best part of the Silver Keeper Software they offer is that it is freeware. What this piece of software allows you to do is schedule certain folders to automatically backup and set it to run as often as you want. I set my pictures folder to backup to my My Book 3 times a week during the day while I am at work. The bonus feature is that using the modified dates on your files it will only backup what has changed so it doesn’t need to copy over my entire pictures folder, only the files I have worked on or added to my Mac Mini.

The second great feature of Silver Keeper is the ability to backup to DVD. In addition to the My Book portable drive I also burned a copy of all my photos to DVD ensuring that I had a 3rd copy. I also burned a second set of DVD’s and took them to work; this ensures that I have an off site backup. All of this may seem like overkill but my photos are something that I could not imagine loosing. With a few purchases and a little bit of effort I can help lessen the effects of a hard drive failure saving countless hours of anguish and even worse having to cope with a lot of hard work lost.