I Am A Moron

Hi, I'm Mike and I'm a moron. See the guy in the image below? That was how I felt last month when one of my hard drives began to act up and was making funny noises. No problem, thought I. I'll eject it, unplug it, plug it back in, and go from there.

Bad move. When I plugged it back in, all it would do was make clicking, whirring noises and my Mac would not recognize its existence.

I panicked. This was the 3TB hard drive that had all of my images from this past year. Everything. All the RAW images, processed JPG's, TIFF files for making large prints.  All the hours and hours of images from my telescope's CCD camera. Every Florida State football game with thousands and thousands of game images including the Chick-Fil-A Bowl, every men's basketball game, every women's basketball, the entire FSU baseball season, volleyball, soccer. All of my images from Madrid and Barcelona. Studio photo shoots.

Could this really be happening? Over an entire year of work gone from one minute to the next?

I called every local computer place in town. Nobody could help as none of them have a clean room in which to assess the situation and perform data recovery. Finally, I found a data recovery place with great reviews. I contacted them and shipped the drive off that morning. I felt better. They would surely be able to help me. I figured even if there was some damage to the drive they would be able to recover most of the images.

So I waited. They called back after a week. The drive needed new parts. They would install them so they could get it running and then perform a ghost image of the contents to see if any data was recoverable. Progress, I thought.

Time passed. I had heard nothing. Then I got a call - the drive was running and the ghost image was 85% finished. They still couldn't tell me if any data would be recovered but I was certain it would all turn out OK.

Until yesterday. That's when I got the email. No data was recoverable. They were very sorry and were returning the drive. It should make a nice desktop paperweight. And a vivid reminder of what a moron I am.

The reason I'm a moron is because I was lazy. As I was downloading cards to the hard drive and processing away I was not backing up the images on a second drive. The same goes for a couple of other hard drives that I had never gotten around to backing up. I told myself that I would eventually get around to backing all of them up but I just never got around to it. How stupid was that?

The lesson has been learned. Very painfully, but it has been learned. I've gone back and made sure every hard drive is backed up.

But, everything I've done for the last year or more is gone. Well, most of it. I will be able to retrieve all the Florida State sports images I turned in to a client that has them all in the cloud. That will get me all of the processed game JPG's for FSU football, basketball, etc. I can go to Facebook, Google+ and my website and copy/save all the photos I uploaded into galleries on those sites but those will all be 72dpi, 1600 pixel on the along end, watermarked images that will never make any kind of print. But at least it's something.

If you have never backed up your images, don't be a moron like me. Go out, pick up one or two drives and back everything up. When you least expect it, a hard drive failure can wipe out all of your work in one fell swoop.

The Focusing Blues

Have you ever pressed your shutter halfway to focus an image and....nothing happens? With the advent of autofocus lenses, we've become spoiled. We're so used to just pushing a button and, voila, images are in focus in the blink of an eye. That is, except when something goes awry, you keep mashing down on that shutter button yet nothing happens.

Such was the case for me this weekend when I had my 80-200mm f2.8 Nikon lens on my D300 body while shooting the NCAA Baseball Regionals. When I use the Big Dog (the 400mm f2.8) on a D3S camera body, I almost always have the 80-200mm on a second body, usually the D300 in daylight conditions because of its 1.5X magnification factor. This combo gives me the equivalent of 120-300mm on a full frame body. With a runner on second early in the Championship game, I let the Big Dog take a break and grabbed the D300/80-200mm  to shoot a possible play at the plate. As is my custom, I pressed the shutter halfway to lock in on the catcher, my way of pre-focusing on an area I hope to shoot.

Nothing happened. Everything in the viewfinder was blurred. I pushed the button again. Nothing. Again. Nothing (for some reason, we humans believe that if we do something over and over again, a different result will ensue so I just kept pushing and pushing).

Finally, it dawned on me that the autofocus wasn't working. Why? I started to go through some troubleshooting. Turn camera off - turn camera on. Nothing. Take lens off - put lens on. Nothing. Switch from continuous to manual focus, back to continuous. Nothing. Rotate the focus ring. Ahhhhhh. Pressing the shutter caused the lens to focus.

Luckily, there was no play at the plate, the side was retired, and I had a chance to make sure all was well. I began trying to focus on near and far objects to test the autofocus and eventually it stopped working again. I rotated the focus ring on the lens and all was seemingly well...for a few seconds, then it was back to no focus.

From experience, I knew the probable cause of this intermittent issue was either dirty contacts on the lens, dirty contacts on the camera body, or both. Each camera body and lens has a set of contacts which accumulate dirt, grime and other nasty stuff that prevents them from making the critical, solid connection that is required for the lens and camera body to communicate. Almost always, a good cleaning of the contacts will do the trick and get things back to the way they're supposed to be.

Cleaning the contacts is far from rocket science. All you need are some Q-tips, some Contact Cleaner & Lubricator (Radio Shack sells it, or in a pinch you can use rubbing alcohol),  and a clean work area. To clean the contacts, remove the body cap from the camera body and remove the rear lens cap from the lens. Spray some contact cleaner on the end of a Q-Tip, press on the Q-Tip end to remove excess solution, and swab the contacts. I prefer to  use different Q-Tips for the lens and the camera. Q-Tips are cheap and there's no reason to use a dirty Q-Tip on the lens after you swab the camera body. After swabbing the contacts with the cleaning solution, swab them with the dry end of the Q-Tip. If you're anal like me, repeat once or twice more, or until you no longer get a dark discoloration on the end of the wet Q-Tip.

Clean the body and lens caps and replace them on their respective items, then let everything sit for 5 minutes. Attach the lens to the camera body and test to make sure all is well. Almost always, that should do the trick and everything should be back to normal. If not, the problem is likely something which will have to be addressed by a repair shop.

Hope this helps.