My Sad Landscape tale.

I was never the greatest landscape photographer, however i did try my best.

For a number of years, i went travelling around the country, visiting well known landscape spots, and taking pictures.

I had built up a reasonable portfolio of landscape images, though i always considered it to be “side work” next to my main passion which was studio based model and fashion work.

This all came crashing down one day when i clumsily bumped against my external USB hard drive as it was in the middle of copying some files, and it fell to the floor with a thud.

The problem you see, is that i had just recently moved all of my landscape images to that drive, with a plan to eventually move them off to yet another hard drive. This meant i had no other copies of these pictures. Obviously, the hard drive was cooked. It made the dreaded clunk noise (it was a mechanical drive, not an SSD) and my OS couldn’t even begin to read it.

To add to my dilemma, after moving the images off to that hard drive, i copied a load of other things to my main SSD drive, meaning i had overwritten even the deleted images, making recovery a nightmare.

Over the next few days i managed to recover about 10% of my pictures. Luckily i had posted some around various sites (though this meant i lost the RAW file and only had small jpg’s), and i got some things recovered from my various hard drives. The recovered files were also mostly all just jpg’s, seemed that the larger RAW files were too far gone on the drive.

The end result of all this is that my landscape portfolio is decimated, and even the pictures i do have are often low res versions. I have of course learned my lesson, and now have multiple drives that are kept as offline storage.

You might be thinking, well, just go out and take more? I should do that, but the whole thing was so depressing it actually put me off the idea of landscapes altogether. On top of that, i have had changes in my family and work commitments that mean that i just don’t have the time to go out and do proper landscape shoots. Previously i would either drive 3 or 4 hours (maybe more) to get to a location, and then basically spend all day there, or, i would book a hotel, go the night before, and be up bright and early to spend the next day shooting. This all becomes really difficult when, at best, you can only scrape an hour or two here and there to go out and shoot, which is why street photography became a much better option, i can do that and pretend i’m actually out doing the shopping :)