Last week I was out at night with some friend and we decided to go look at the stars because it had been about a month since we last saw the stars. I saw at least 5 shooting stars while I was making this photo. I put the camera out on a tripod and then just sat back and watched the stars for about 20 min. I didn’t even look at the photo until the next day because when I left I just put the camera away as it had to process the image for another 20 or so min.

I kind of like this photo because it shows the profile of the Japanese Alps and Norikura in the back.

I have just spent the last few days slowly going through my archive and creating a second backup of my work. I am pretty good about backing up and have a basic rule that I think all Photographers should follow. “Have at lest 2 copies of everything”. Which means that if you buy a 1TB hard drive you actually need to buy 2 of them because you need to have a backup of the first one.

Here are a few simple steps you can take to make sure you don’t wake up in the broken-hard-drive, house-burned-down, computer-stolen, black-or-blue-screen-of-death nightmare.

1. Import your memory cards frequently to you computer.
2. Backup what you put on your computer before formatting the memory cards.
3. Backup that backup (daily, weekly, kinda risky but even monthly is better than nothing) and store that backup in another good location.

The point of all of this is to make sure that your photos are always in at least 2 locations. If you follow these steps and do regular backups you will have a good chance of never losing an image. I can’t even think what I would do if I lost all the work on just 1 of my archive hard drives. I don’t want to think about that….

Anyway, a post would not be complete without at least 1 photo so here is a photo that I shot 1 year ago.