Light Pollution

Light pollution is my enemy. For the type of night photography that I like, it's critical that the skies are dark.



One photographer has made a project photographing nearly the opposite: the world's brightest cities.
http://gizmodo.com/the-45-brightest-cities-in-the-world-photographed-by-o-1464752320

It is interesting yet depressing. The article states that most people haven't seen the Milky Way in their lifetimes.

I live in Houston, so I know what it's like to have very bad light pollution. You can almost read a book by ambient light at night in my backyard :-(

Organizing

Doing anything efficiently in life requires good organization. In photography you need to organize your images as well as gear.

And, the organization that's put into place must be maintained and revised as changes are made.

So, I've spent the better part of a weekend now putting new shelves and drawers in my closet. Part of that system is for camera gear. And it's damn nice to have easy access to it now. Everything has a home in a drawer or on a shelf.



This has nothing to do with my closet project. It's just a Manhattan lit by a citronella candle as I attempted to relax in the backyard for a little while. We obviously still have tons of mosquitos.

But I highlight this because I often have to force myself to slow down, stop being so busy, and take a break to rest and, of course, think about photography. And it's worth it.

A Week of Photos

Daily Grind

Caught in the day to day monotony. Sleep, eat, work, repeat.



This is exactly the situation to avoid. Before you know it, time has flown by, and you find yourself out of touch with your creativity.

The sunset last night (first pic) and the sunrise this morning (second shot) were two events that pulled me away and made me, at least temporarily, observant of something beautiful.

Storage and Backup

Ever have a hard drive fail? Ever worry about your photo files?I don't think I've ever been comfortable with my storage system. But then what would give me absolute reassurance that a storage system was 100% reliable?

My system has evolved over the years. I've used combinations of hard drives, CDs and DVDs, and archival CDs and DVDs. One thing is certain, for any given system to work in a feasible and friendly way, it has to easily accommodate an exponentially increasing amount of data. And because of this I have long since given up on optical media.

The big thing these days is cloud storage. But I don't trust that any more than I do having a hard drive stored in a remote location.

So for now, I'm content with having my work on multiple hard drives stored in two different locations. It's a good thing that hard drive technology has advanced steadily through the years along with my ever increasing stash of image files :-)

P.s. Yes I've had drives fail. The pic above is one example. It fell victim of my curiosity and tools.

Head Down, Fast Forward

I see that time has, once again, snuck past me. It's been almost a week since I posted here, and that kinda violates my new plan for staying engaged with photography.



As we all say, "I was really busy".

I had jury duty on Monday, got selected, and spent 3 days commuting to downtown Houston for the trial. In the evenings, I had to catch up on work and work emails and such.

There will be times like this. I can accept that. The hard part is resuming the "normal" life after the busy-ness has stopped. Being busy for a while derails me and my routine.

I did manage a few thoughtful photos and put them on my Instagram page. The one above is floor tile from the federal courthouse. Only tile that depressing would be (and should be) found in a government facility :-)

Now, back to being "normal"...