Nature Photography

I recently had to rebuild my computer…while away on a lengthy business trip, my water-cooled superworkstation leaked. The leak wasn’t a gusher…rather, it was slow and steady. The coolant is water based, with a glycol and dielectric thinner mix…the leak was slow enough that a rather large, blue crystal grew out of one of the nipples that connect tubing to my water blocks. The crystal then dripped, a little here or there, all over the inside of my computer. I had to take it all apart, clean each and every component, and put it back together. While doing that, I tried to remove the crystal…which promptly disintegrated into a thousand soft little blue chunks that required precision Q-tip work to clean up without griming up my components even more. Much to my delight, everything worked like a charm, nothing was fried, and everything was good…or so I thought.

Seems the “trauma” of being rebuilt gave some “palpatations” to one of my hard drives. It is “working”, in the sense that it has not yet totally failed…but it seems to be going through a systematic process of eating a few files a day in order to keep itself alive. Sadly, this is one of two drives that has my photography on it. For the most part, I have backups, but the recent photography I’ve done over the last week and a half has not yet been copied to my NAS. A lot of my recent work was wildlife, and I think includes some of the best deer photos I’ve taken to date…and they may be lost. I was working them in Lightroom in order to upload them as galleries here…when one by one LR started spitting out errors. Couldn’t load RAW image, couldn’t load metadata settings, or even worse…couldn’t access the Lightroom catalog.

Well, suffice to say, I started a full blown “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” check disk routine…and its been running for almost three days. Out of the near 250,000 files on my drive, it has so far scanned….a whopping 22,418. Yup…less than a tenth of my files have been scanned and repaired. I do not know why it is taking so long, but at this rate, I’ll be here for over a month before it finishes. I really don’t want to lose those latest wildlife photos…but I think this particular drive may be dead. I’m afraid to even reboot, for fear of the thing dying like all my other hard drives have…the clickity clack death, where the drive can’t even spin up and nothing can be done to revive it. So long as it remains running, I think there is a chance of recovering at least some data…I just hope I don’t have a power outage anytime soon!

Anyway, I do not know if I’ll be able to run lightroom or process any of my photography until this scan is completed, and that will probably be a while. There hasn’t been much going on this summer anyway. I’ve heard a few new songbirds, but they have yet to stop by my yard to give me any kind of photographic moments. Deer…well, you can only photograph deer so often before they become incredibly boring. I figure by the end of summer, when things cool down and the fall migration starts, I’ll be good to go, and will have a nice new lens and a whole lot more opportunity to get some excellent photos.