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Photo Cautionary Notes
July 30, 2007
While I don't have the solution to this problem, I thought I'd bring
it up. The photos to the left were shot digitally, all exposed properly,
looked excellent initially, and were saved to CDs.
Much to my surprise, the colors have altered dramatically; these
images have, basically, been destroyed. Although I happen to like
what happened to some of them through the years—especially
the Tokyo scene to the left—were I using them professionally,
I'd be upset.
I live in a hot climate and it may be that 90° heat is too much
for them, even though it is dry heat.
Another caution: I took two fully loaded photo chips into a shop
in Dublin, Ireland, so that they could be transferred to CDs in
order to free up the chips for additional shooting. This was a few
years ago, digitals were somewhat new, and the clerk copied one
set of images on top of another set of images. The files were apparently
named the same because the first batch was written over by the second
batch. I lost a week's worth of shooting from Oxford, England, which
I didn't realize until I got home. When the shop was informed of
this via email, the word came back, basically, "too bad."
Something similar also happened at a high-end, well-respected photo
shop in Santa Rosa, California. They copied my photos onto a disk
owned by someone else that already had images. Both sets were partially
aborted, so I ended up with a collection of someone's wedding in
Hawaii, and they ended up with photos of one of my trips. It was
not possible to straighten in out.
Most recently, I lost a 1 megabyte chip on board the Star Princess; two days of shooting around Florence and Naples, Italy all gone. So depressing, and a cautionary note to myself to more carefully guard those little trips. Such photos are not replacable.
The moral? I don't know. But it's something to be aware of and maybe
the answer is to bring the chips home and unload them onto your
hard drive, then back them up and store in a cooler place.
We're around water 90% of the time when travelling, so we pay attention to how secure our camera is. If you are even remotely careless, you might be more comfortable with a water-proof camera. There are quite a few of them available now.
If you’re kayaking or padding, either use a waterproof case on the camera or just take it easy. My Nikon was always with me during long kayaking trips and we never had a mishap. I still have that camera and we did kayak during storms. River kayaking is a different story, though, and the kayaks are far more likely to tip into the river with you and your camera.
Light is also crazy around water and around a brightly lit beach -- both water and sand reflect, so it can easily throw off exposures. However, few shots are more beautiful than reflecting light from the ocean or a lake around sunrise or sunset.
Make sure you clean the camera when you’re done for the day as water can be very corrosive and damaging to a digital camera, especially if you are around salt water.
Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude