Months ago, before building and moving into my house I had a hard drive crash. My only hard drive. Lucky enough for me the computer would start in safe mode and give me enough time to back up to a external drive that I ordered for the mission. Great right? Wrong!
I use Adobe Lightroom as my photo organizer and for 99% of raw conversion and editing. Lightroom works in a different way than most programs. When a raw photo is edited in Lightroom there is a sidecar created for each photo, that basically makes a layer over the original. You can see the changes, and make as many copies and change them as you want. All without creating a new image and filling up your hard drive. Quite clever actually.
The problem I had with this is (I must say that this is my fault) the side cars are saved separate of the photo itself. So when I saved the photos from hard drive from another I did a little "spring cleaning" of everything else I thought was junk from the old drive. Yeah, you guessed, the 13,000 side cars. 13,000 (thirteen thousand) photos that were all now raw and unedited. Not cropped, not sharpened, no saturation, back to color if I made them black and white, no contrast, just how I like them before they enter the computer. Not now. Now I had to re-edit every single photo I have. Including over 4,000 from the Galapagos.
I'm obviously doing it slowly but today came to the Friggets. These birds were riding wind from the cockpit of the yacht and were close enough for me to get some great portraits. These are probably some of my favorite photos i've ever taken. The one in color is the female, who have blue feathers around the eyes. Enjoy, JP.
