And the new Godox X3 Nano triggers! These things are so cool!

Anyway - I just had to get that off my chest. You can get the same triggers at B&H of course - https://bhpho.to/3U8wYAu

What a week we have coming up, and what a difficult way for me to start it. I don’t want to sound like I’m whining just as I am returning from a lovely holiday in two of the coldest places on earth, but as of last evening Lightroom has removed all my photographs from my computer. I am not even kidding. Last night I updated my IOS to the latest system and everything went well. This morning I started gathering the images I need for all of the events I have scheduled for this week and none of them are there in Lightroom, nor are they anywhere in my computer. For a photographer, this is considered to be a generally bad thing.

Now, seriously… this is a disaster. Not because I don’t have the images backed up, I do, but there is another reason why this qualifies as “disaster-level” bad. Well I was not being completely accurate about the backups. I have not had time to get the last 3 months of work backed up. I am out of memory again and my computer will not support any more drives. So I will be switching from 8TB drives to 12 TB devices and putting the oldest stuff into an archive - cool, but here is the problem. I do have backups, but they are off-site and will be expensive and time consuming to get what I can back. So the big problem is not that I don’t have the pictures, I will get them back, the problem is that Lightroom destroyed my file system, removing every file and path that I have spent the second half of my life putting together. It is those files that allow me to get to any image I have ever shot in seconds. I use that file system, literally, all day and every day.

Now imagine that I do that one hundred times a day and then double it. I am looking for images in my file system with almost everything I do, from writing emails, to prepping for a stream, making a video, or talking to one of you on the phone. Now what I have is a big empty bucket that used to hold all my files and I am going to take all the pictures I can find and dump it all into the Lightroom bucket, so that I at least have the pictures. And you are thinking, so what is his problem, just refile them. OK, I am going to do just that, but how long do you think it is going to take me to sort and file half a million images, by hand, while also doing my regular job(s). I’m not sure but it would have to take several years. I could deal with the inconvenience of having to buy back all my images from Backblaze if I was just a photographer - stuff happens when you use so much data. But I am not a photographer so much as I am a teacher and an entertainer for which my lesson materials and visual props are all, you guessed it, my photographs. So over the next few days, (very, very busy days), I will be coming up with a plan to move forward, and I ask that you show your usual forbearance if things are happening a little slower than you might like. But we are moving ahead with the schedule as planned, because these photos were all taken on my phone and were never put in Lightroom. So we kick things off with tomorrow’s Macro Talk, #89, I believe…

This is going to be a good one - jam packed with useful information and tips with a couple of demonstrations. I have been preparing this one for several weeks and it should cover the whole gamut, including the chemicals and solvents, the science, the risks, the all important lighting and how I have devised a simple and elegant solution for cross-polarization in crystal photography. An hour is not enough, but we can make a good start. Of course, the only pictures are the handful that I took today. Everything prior to that is history. Should you wish tp participate you are most welcome - and here is your link - https://youtube.com/live/xTO3v8UzKbQ?feature=share

Thursday is Macro Talk Too ad I am afraid that this will not be as visually gratifying as I had planned. I took quite a few pictures from Scotland and Iceland using my iPhone - that is good, but I shot the pictures in RAW, as that is how I roll. Which means all of my travel pictures were in Lightroom, and now they are not. I will not have time to re-edit all the raw pictures before Thursday (Christmas, more like), so they are not going to look as good as I would like. But I think they will be good enough for me to make all the points I need to.

But I will save that story for the lifestream. I learned a lot from using the cellphone as my camera for almost two weeks, almost exclusively, but I am not sure I would do it that way again. I don’t care much for the images from the phone, and that does matter, but the convenience was hard to beat. We’ll talk about it on Thursday. If you want to join the melée it will be here - https://youtube.com/live/qETDR0KaSYg?feature=share

That is it for this week. If you are a Patreon supporter, check out my Plog post on this site. If you are not, consider becoming one so you don’t miss things like this…

Now that will be a blast!

See you in the stream! AW