Disruption

blue bee
Originally uploaded by mehampson

I was struck this week with a deep philosophical question. When bad luck occurs, but is canceled out by an equal yet opposite stroke of good luck, how do you rate things overall? Bad, because of the bad luck to begin with? Or good, because as unlikely as a catastrophe is, a catastrophe followed by a miracle is even less so?

I’m kind of inclined to go with the latter. I lucked out. A couple days ago, I ordered a new hard drive for my laptop — a 320GB 7200 rpm Western Digital to replace an old 120GB 5400 rpm Seagate. It was kind of an impulse buy, since I was getting frustrated with Lightroom and Photoshop being sluggish about loading files and previews, and short of replacing the whole system, there’s nothing else left to upgrade. Plus, I haven’t really trusted the old drive for a while now — it’s an three-year-old laptop — so a $60 upgrade seemed like a good idea.

The new drive shipped out on Friday, and by Sunday morning, the old one in the laptop was dead. Totally dead. Not even recognized by the BIOS. Making whhrr–sproing noises. So I’d say that was pretty good timing, and pretty good luck, since I only wound up with two days downtime.

But like everything else, 95% of good luck is good planning. It wouldn’t have mattered that I had a replacement in the mail at the moment my drive died if I didn’t have everything important backed up. I had stopped keeping anything important on my laptop a few months ago: RAW files were imported directly to my external drive, which had a second copy of nearly all my “data”. I keep my OS and applications on one partition, and all my photos, mp3s, documents, etc. on a separate one, to make reinstalls easier — my external drive has a copy of that second partition. My photos also live on another external drive that I keep at my girlfriend’s apartment, in case mine gets struck by a meteorite or something.

The real luck here was having the foresight to prepare for this kind of problem. Whether you’re a photographer or not, if you don’t have at least one backup solution, get one right now. I’ve lost some stuff, but nothing I can’t recreate or find new copies of. The only hassle really is reinstalling Windows and the big programs I use every day, and that just took an afternoon or so. I don’t want to think about where I’d be if I’d lost all my photos from the past few years…

At the same time as all this, I broke my macro rig. I tried mounting the bracket to a tripod collar to see how well it worked, but the socket on the bracket just rotated in place when I tried to unscrew it. Eventually the whole thing cracked in half when I tried pulling it out. I haven’t done much bug stuff lately, except for some natural light work I haven’t been thrilled with. (Got some GREAT shots of chive flowers this way, though.)

But I finally got the replacement bracket in the mail, along with a third-party lens hood for the 100mm macro that I’ll trim down to work with the extension tubes, and went out and shot the blue solitary bee in the photo above. Still need to do some tweaking to the overall rig, but I’m happy to have found a new bee.