Photo of the Week 2015-03-23

by the heat of the forge ...

Why an image from 2008 as "Photo of the Week"?

The back story:
I've managed to accumulate a sizable collection of images since witching to digital a number of years ago. My software of choice for storing the collection is Adobe Lightroom (currently version 5.7).

When I started using Lightroom, there were potential issues with larger catalogues so I decided to basically break mine down by year and create a separate catalogue for each year. As I continue to grow my image library it has become a bit cumbersome to switch between Lightroom catalogues when searching for images. So after reading and hearing several items relating to a single catalogue for all images I decided to take on the task of merging everything. 

Now, I currently have about 2.5 TB of total data for my combined images catalogues. I've been using 3TB Seagate drives for storage and backup (3 of them, 1-main, 1-BU#1, 1-BU#2) and a recent report from an online backup service indicates that their experience shows the Seagate 3TB drive has a high failure rate. Given this I also decided to switch over to 4TB Western Digital Red drives for the increased capacity and reliability (one at a time mind you since they're $200+ ea).

The first step in the process was to make sure I was current with my backups ... check. Then I formatted the 4TB drive and labelled it "Master Catalogue" with a main folder for all photos in sub-folders by year. Anyone using Lightroom for their image management should perform file movements and catalogue merges from within Lightroom to retain file location, key-wording, ratings, virtual copy information etc. I checked a couple of resources online (best one here) about how best to do this and it was a good thing because I learned a few new things along the way.

The process of creating one merged catalogue took Most of Friday night and Saturday (while chillin' at the cottage :-) and along the way I randomly scanned through some of the files to remind myself of what I had captured over the years. At one point I came across the image above. It's always been one of my favourites and one of the first prints that I sold. It was made at the Flesherton Fall Fair in 2008 where they had a Farrier Competition. I positioned myself with a burning forge between myself and one of the participants to shoot through the heat wave effect and captured him hammering his shoe on the anvil. No digital trickery here, just using the true scene to create something different.

... now I just need to start creating the backups.

DJE