The Ones I Like List of 2012 [#6]
Breathe. I took the photo Breathe in Lake Tahoe in 2007. Why then is it only finding its way into my Top 10 list now? Well, it’s a story of storage and failures and loss. It’s a story of a trip erased and an archives stunted. It’s a story about a dead external drive.
Yep, that’s right. There was a time when I didn’t back up everything on multiple drives. I was still pretty new to photography, and I hadn’t learned that lesson yet. External drives die. In 2008 I learned it. And it hurt.
I had taken this great road trip with my dad with stops in Amarillo, Santa Fe, Grand Canyon, Lake Tahoe, Hermosa Beach and Kerrville. I felt like I had a treasure trove of good photos that I’d be able to process for months, years even! I was so excited.
Then it happened. One day, gone. Everything. The surfers, the Cadillac Ranch, fog on the South Rim, the Lake. When you are a photographer and you invest so much into it, your photos are like pieces of you, and, truly, I felt fractured.
I took the drive to Best Buy, and their tech people said they couldn’t recover the photos in-house, but could send it off to some other state to see if the technicians there could pull the photos off the drive. I’m hyper-protective of my originals, and the thought of the drive going through US Mail and spending a couple of weeks in the hands of someone I didn’t know just didn’t work for me. I researched some local places, but the $1000 I would have to pay for recovery was steep, and, again…I was protective.
So the drive just sat and sat, surrounded only by the “somedays” that were occasionally thrown in its general direction.
Fast forward to 2012, my birthday to be precise. I received the best present I’ve ever received from my parents. Unbeknownst to me, they had taken my external drive in for “surgery,” and they were able to present me with a new drive containing all the files I had lost. I had my photos back, those little pieces of me I had been without for four years. It was unbelievable and amazing.
Breathe was one of the initial photos I processed from the lost drive. It was taken in Lake Tahoe, shortly after sunrise. It was the first of a number of California photos I processed with a soft texture motif. Below, you can see a few of the others that didn’t make the The Ones I Like List, but that I really like.
