I’ve been spending evenings working on my new site at Smugmug.  So far there are over 130 images uploaded and I plan to add more.  The photos concentrate mainly on images from Victoria, Australia, and in particular, the Shire of Yarra Ranges. These have been split into categories: Birdlife, Landscapes, Waterscapes, Trains, Flora and then I have an international set which features Canada and Alaska.  It is my hope that this new site will be one that tourists go to, when planning to visit the State of Victoria, or if they’ve already been and want to get a memento of their trip here.  And if someone is looking for Australian stock photos, particularly those in the Dandenong Ranges, then they are also available for digital download.

If you, or someone you know, would like to purchase an image to print, or on a product, please do visit the site and let others know about it.  And for the first three people who purchase an item over the value of $40.00 I will send you a further image gift from me, as a thank you for being my first customers of this brand new site.

I  thought I’d start writing about things that I learn from or get inspired by on a weekly basis.  I collect a huge number of reading materials, both in printed format and online, but it wasn’t till a recent holiday that I was able to catch up with some of that reading. Life gets in the way and all that, and yet reading and learning from others is a very important part of continually learning. You can’t do it all just by going out and taking photos daily.

This week I want to focus on the Australian Photography Magazine which is published by Yaffa Publishing Group.  There are always good articles in there that remind me I wanted to try something out, or prompts me to realise there is another way to do something I was trying.

This month’s issue has a letter about Solving Digital Overload Issue in it and the writer shares how they do their backups.  Timely message to read and at the time I was reading it (on the road interstate) my own external hard drive back up system was failing because the power supply had burnt out.  Consequently the external hard drive is now experiencing a read failure and I’ll need to take it to a computer repair tech to see if they can access the files on the hard drive.  There are files on there that I have no longer on my computer that I really would like to get back – photo files.  All the important ones, saleable stock and so on are backed up online via Dropbox (great secure system) and on my computer as well, but there are others I would like to have access to again.  grrr.

This situation prompts me to rethink my external hard drive system.  What would be better is if I had one that was USB driven and not with a separate power pack. By the way, I know the pack is burnt out because my husband pulled it apart to see what was happening. And we have tried another power pack to access the drive but it just keeps clicking – not a nice sound at all.  I’ll have to invest in a new passport drive. I have one that is 320gb in size but really need a larger one and you can get 1tb drives now.

So it’s off to the computer guy this week to see if he can retrieve files for me and place them onto another drive.  If not successful at least I have the most important (and saleable) images saved in two other places but I’ll know not to trust just one drive for storage any more.  This past weekend I began burning to DVD the images from December last year onwards that I do have on my computer hard drive as an extra back up – just in case.