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DO. NOT. CUT. CORNERS. WHEN. BACKING. UP. YOUR. PHOTOS.
I was getting happy while trying to free of some gigs on my nearly four year old Mac and I let a tech savvy spirit inhabit my body and mind. I now only have 32 -64 KB images of every. single. picture. i. have. taken. since.i. got. my. new. camera. in. december.
I know, I know…there are many tragic things that happen in life and in the grand scheme of things…IT’S NO BIG DEAL.
But, I am still experiencing a bit of a mourning process and it’s taking me a little time to assess the situation and salvage what I can of our year in pictures so updating is clearly going to take a bit longer than usual. Couple this with a reorganization of my office space and the impending school year (year 10 for me, year 1 for Lucas! Big!) and there are sure to be delays.
To answer the obvious questions:
1. No. I had not yet burned to CD/DVD.
2. No. I had not uploaded to my photo processing/online back up site.
3. No. I had not properly copied them to my external drive.
4. Yes. The being that took over my body still knew how to empty the trash on the desktop.
5. No. Copies of the files are not somewhere else on the hard drive.
6. No. I do not use Blogger so I do not have a back up on Picasssa.
7. Yes. I resize all my blog photos in Photoshop before uploading them to WordPress.
8. Yes, I have splurped my blog to Booksmart and I can print a coffee table book with thumbnail sized photos from Shoot. Post. Repeat Daily. I imagine the same results with Notes for Tomorrow. I welcome other suggestions.
Lesson learned.
Once more, with feeling:
DO. NOT. CUT. CORNERS. WHEN. BACKING. UP. YOUR. PHOTOS.
We were also in one of the local papers! It’s always exciting when someone notices something cool that you’ve done! I’m very excited about what this does for the credibility of my program and the work that I’m doing there. A really cool thing about this is that the reporter was just scouring the web and ran across something that was out there and called the school board to see if we could do a last minute interview. The principal and I had asked the media representative to look into some press coverage, but that wasn’t how it all shook down.
more about "Ah, some recognition!", posted with vodpod
As I mentioned already, I spent my Spring Break with 15 teenagers. I missed my family when I had a chance to, but I stayed so very busy, as you might imagine. I can honestly say that I feel a little bit like I actually had a vacation too! I worked incredibly long and strenuous hours. I was usually up until about 2 a.m. and had to wake by 6:30 most mornings. I have had a lot of trouble adjusting to six hours of sleep, isn’t that crazy?!
My students were so amazing. I wish every trip could be this great! Seriously, I cannot rave enough. I am still recovering as I mentioned, so posting will continue to be light for a little while as I decompress and explore some of the resources I learned about while in Orlando. After all, I was in breakout sessions with the likes of Al Tompkins and Les Rose, industry pros! In addition, I got to network with TV teachers from across the US and I have come back to work completely recharged. I know that teaching TV/FILM is where I want to be and now I have even more tools with which to do it. I am pumped.
Oh, and we won some contests too!
I’ll update this post Monday with the pictures that are on my school laptop. Of course we’re in The Bartlett Express (cover!) this week and should be in The Commercial Appeal tomorrow!
My student, Graham, is so creative and talented. During his first year with me (as a sophomore) he had an interview with the people whose house was used for June Carter’s house in Walk the Line (which was filmed largely in and around Memphis, as you know) and he managed to replicate an exact shot of their porch that was used in the film from his visual memory. I knew then that he’s just got a great eye for framing and what not. He’s since done trailers for upcoming plays as well as other projects for our TV Production class. He’s now a senior and still producing quality work every time. When he approached me about being in his latest big idea, I was thrilled. I don’t get to do much by the way of acting anymore (it’s been YEARS!), so I was delighted to be a part of his production. Of course, I had to watch The Devil Wears Prada first to completely understand his concept, but it was a lot of fun, even if we didn’t get to spend a bunch of time on it! Evan’s rotovirus kept me home from school three of the four days we had allotted to work on it. I look forward to joining the theatre and film communities here in town as the boys get a little older. I realized how much I miss it!
more about "The Devil Teaches Film", posted with vodpod
It’s kind of a no-brainer, but I think there are a few Mac users out there who feel a little invincible. Really, it’s not very often that one hears of a “bad Apple.” But, they do happen and even a good Apple can start behaving sluggishly without routine maintence. I’m trying to tidy some things of in my digital world and this is my current “State of the Project.”
Back up your iTunes library by copying to an external hard drive.
That’s a good deal of music I’d like to hang on to.
I have all photos uploaded to Snapfish through December of 2008. I still have to select The Best of: October, November and December. This is HUGE, for those of you not following along at home. Just two months ago, I was still working in 2007. I now have all photos printed through February of 2008.
My next goals is to have selected, sorted and printed all photos through 2008 by Evan’s third birthday in April. Remember, my long-term family historian goal for 2009 is a year long project. I’m just now setting my short term goals to paper. By May I should be ready to work full force on Evan’s albums and by December I’d like to have finished year one, at least. I will certainly push myself.
I am really enjoying taking and posting a daily photo, though I do get a day or so behind in the posting of them from time to time. I have to resize each one in Photoshop before uploading it, so it’s a little more labor intensive now. Notice my iPhoto has fewer than 1300 pictures on it, down from over 8,000. For having a brand new camera, that’s not too shabby.
I think I’ll update the iPhone and iPod before turning this little desktop off for the weekend. Talking about getting unplugged a little. The next few weeks will be busy ones. Today, taking a “mental health” day to chill out was well timed and well spent in preparation for it.
Lucas started back to soccer practice yesterday and Matt’s got a weekend camping trip coming up next weekend and I’ll be taking 15 senior high school students to Orlando for a week during Spring Break. Ahem. Very busy. I will keep taking pictures, but I may not post them until Sunday night. Stick with me!
more about “Sunday at the Zoo“, posted with vodpod
For those of you who choose not to be moved by my tireless efforts at a political, emotional and personal statement about life, love, family and good weather may be appeased by the few photos below. Everyone else, please see the slideshow on my Vodpod to the right or check the February 10th post. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Oh, and the story about the :45 second intro that got cut:
This slide show is shorter than the original (see last post for the explanation of that) and I had to find a short segment of a song to fit. One of my favorite songs of all time is the Leonard Cohen song, “Hallelujah” as sung by Jeff Buckley, the incredible talent that drowned in the Mississippi River here in Memphis the first summer I lived here. At the start of our Zoo trip, while waiting by the tigers for Matt to return from the car,, I discovered the plaque memorializing him that I had never seen before that day in all our years of visiting. The first :45 seconds were originally the start of that favorite song of his. It fit, but , I guess it wasn’t meant to share. My original post about the song is now stripped of its video because WordPress didn’t support transferring the video links from TypePad, but I’ll give them again in case your interest is piqued. It’s truly a gorgeous song and I promise I have found two of the best performances of it around, though it’s totally subjective and I highly recommend you spend some time looking at Kate Voegele and k.d. lang’s renditions just so you can make an informed decision for yourself.
Jeff Buckley’s live (just discovered tonight while looking up the links again!)
And a little commentary about the lyrics.
Now, go look at my slideshow and check out my zoo pictures! I’m so proud!
So, after wringing my hands for hours last night, I watched the pictures in a slideshow on iPhoto once more while, chanting, “there must be a way, there must be a way.” And, my friends, there is. Apple never intended for me to spend hours importing, dragging and dropping 66 photos into iMovie and relentlessly searching for a song that equaled exactly the 4 minutes and 35 seconds that the movie lasted (I wasn’t successful anyway. The song I wanted was about :45 seconds short and of course no other one would do instead, so I cut a clip from another song as an intro~more on that later.) There is a button I discovered that tells iPhoto to adjust the length of each slide to fit the show within the length of the song. See?
So, lesson learned. iPhoto will EXPORT your slideshow as a movie!
Annnd as long as you have a DRM free song in your iTunes, you can add it and then post it. You can use Digital Rights Management Protected music, but you’ll get a warning that says basically unless a machine is authorized to play the song, the viewer will hear no music. Of course I know this because the one song that will work happens to be from one of the only three albums I have ever purchased through the iTunes store. It figures. So…I tried to pay the .30 cents to get the DRM-free version, but it is not yet available. (Yes! You read correctly, one must pay to get full rights back on the music they have already paid for~I won’t rant much about that as I knew what I was doing when I bought the music in the first place, but some poor saps did not and have large collections of this stuff that they have limited use of, it’s true. A little more on DRM at the end of the post.)
Do not despair. I found a suitable copy. My slideshow is now being uploaded to Vimeo as I write and I shall put it on my Vodpod later on (that’s that little video box on the right hand pane). The slideshow will be up later tonight along with the story of the :45 second intro that ended up on the cutting room floor.
**For those of you who are curious about this DRM stuff: It’s well, you know, that mean thing Apple did (and is now reniging on thanks to Amazon.com’s nudging in the marketplace) that prevented one from using the music on more than 5 machines or burned more than 7 times. You can read more about it here.
See, I have spent my entire evening working on a video slideshow of our zoo photos from this afternoon and for whatever reason, you are distorting my images when I export (this is dv or .avi). I am not happy about this. Is it because you’re HD? Certainly I’m not the only one who can take over 200 shots in a couple of hours at the zoo, whittle them down to 67 and want to string them together with a bit of music. Right?
I’m going to postpone this endeavor as I do have to work in the very early morning, but I am not going to bed happy because you have really done me wrong. I happen to know of a few other options and I might decide to “play the field.”
My friend, Leanne, allowed me to play with her fancy external flash and in return I will teach her how to use it. Seriously, she bought it a year ago and she still had it in the plastic within the box. I’m pretty meticulous about how I care for my stuff, but clearly, she’s not used this thing! I got some nice shots of Evan tonight while he was playing with Daddy and I see plenty of evidence that I could benefit from one of these bad boys. To keep things simple I just kept everything (camera & flash) on auto, but I’m sure I’ll experiment as the weekend allows.
