I felt like I have just taken a roller coaster ride. Yesterday I woke up and couldn't wait for the day to start. I was heading to my photography course. I was excited and had been waiting for this day. I am finding I have a passion for photography. The course was beyond my expectations.
The instructor was knowledgeable, kept the day interesting and was very hands on in helping the students with there cameras. I bought my SLR camera as I wanted something more than click and shoot. I got more than I expected. When it came to the end of the course I didn't want it to end. I could have easily stayed a couple more hours.
Driving home I thought how am I going to use the knowledge I have learned. Well my goal is for the next month is to shoot only in manual mode and experiment with the difference setting. I know some of my pictures will be disaster but others will be perfect.. The thing is I will learn more from the pictures that didn't turn out.
I have been thinking for a while to document my gender reconstruction surgery from leaving my home to returning from Montreal. I have seen documentaries dealing with the surgery and the persons experiences. I want to document it using the camera as my eyes. So during the course I spoke with Josh our instructor. He thought it was a great idea and I plan to collaborate with him on ideas to develop this project further.
One the way home from the course I wanted to share my excitement and new found knowledge. I called my friend Llyn. She is the one that got my interest back into photography. She also see the potential I have and has been a positive influence in my continuing to post my photos. I had a good feeling sharing my day with LLyn and to hear her excited for me was even better.
Even in the best of days adversity can strike at any time, for me that day it was at 10 PM. I was just about to upload my pictures unto face book when my computer crashed. I restarted the computer and it loaded fine than went black with a message critical error and crashed. I just sunk in the chair looking at the computer thinking there goes all my photos, music and my documents. My anxiety started to rise and I had to breathe and think for a moment.
I started to calm myself and called the computer support line. They run through several diagnostics with me and we got the computer running twice and both times crashed. It looks like I am sending it in for repairs. The technicians said you need to back up your hard drive as we might not be able to recover your data. They wanted me to wait until morning to give it a change to cool down and than I might be able to retrieve the data
When I awoke in the morning and turned on the computer. I felt relieved as it started to up load my programs. It was feeling that would not last as it crashed again. I am taking it into a repair shop hopefully that can back up my hard drive and save my information. If my hard drive is unrecoverable than so be it.
It does not change the amazing day I had yesterday. I will look on the positive side as my pictures are still on face book. We all have glitches in our lives from time to time. It is how you face them that will determine the outcome in yourself. Today I am just jumping over that fence and proceeding happily along my merry way.
Huzzah for you not letting it make you crazy (and computers are so very good at making usually sane and sensible people froth at the mouth from frustration)!
ReplyDeleteBoo on computer for sailing the failboat on you ...
If I may make a small suggestion? Costco has 2 Terabyte external hard-drives for fairly cheap and you can get a small 500G usb drive for even less at places like Future Shop and Staples. It might be a good idea for you to practice redundancy in backing up your photo files.
I find, because I learned the hard way ^_~, that if you make copies to a couple of different locations (if the worst were to happen) you'd still have access to the photos on the other/external device. That way you wouldn't lose all your hard work and those shots that will, eventually, become the beginnings of a portfolio for you ^_^