The Pros and (Mostly) Cons of Upgrading to a 4K Monitor

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I'm in the process of getting back into photography which will mean a new camera, more on that in a later post. But the first step for me was a new computer, one with the horsepower to handle a modern day camera and its RAW files. Along with the computer comes a new 4K monitor. 4K is great for media consumption, right? Your characters on your favorite show or movie really look detailed and realistic. Scenery looks wonderful. Everything looks great, right? Wrong. You know what doesn't look great? That photo I took in 2012 that I thought was sharp but is very much not. I transferred over my past catalogs of photos over to Lightroom Classic and eagerly began opening up some of my favorite photos. At first I was happy with how the colors looked and how the scene was composed. Then I noticed it was a little soft. Well I had just gotten a new contacts prescription so that must be it. Changed to my glasses and the photos were even blurrier! I went through photo after photo and most ca

Data Loss

Believe it or not I'm kind of paranoid about data loss. My music is backed up in at least 2 places (physical hard drive and in GMusic). My documents see the same treatment between a physical backup and Google Docs. The same goes for movies and TV shows. The same went for photos, until I stopped using SmugMug in search of a different photo hosting site. Then Google+ and Picasa got in on unlimited photo storage and I made the decision to hang my photo hat there. Problem was I only made the decision, I didn't actually come up with a workflow to make it happen.

As you should know by now I run a Mac system. As such I make use of their excellent Time Machine back up service that takes snapshots of my system every hour of every day. For the most part everything is great. Then a couple weeks ago the hard drive I was using for my Time Machine back ups failed. Not a huge problem though since it was still under warranty. I packed it on its way expecting nothing bad would happen during its time away. And nothing bad should have happened if I had just been more careful.

Yesterday I decided to do a little digital spring cleaning to better organize what I call my shooting library and my family photo scanning project. At the end of this reorganization I had five Aperture photo libraries when I needed only two. The other three were experimental ones. So I proceeded to delete the extra 3, emptied the trash can, and went about the rest of my day. Later that evening I went back to Aperture to work on some shots and saw this:

Instantly I knew what I had done. I had deleted the wrong library. Over five years of photographs gone in a single keystroke. I raced around online looking for a magical cure, but there seems to be none. I've tried four data recovery pieces of software. They did an admirable job of finding deleted files, just not the one I wanted.

So where does that leave me? I currently have a very limited back catalog of photos that were uploaded to Picasa for this blog. So that's good, as the photos I post here are usually ones I really like, but they're in a smaller resolution. I am now able to easily implement an online backup strategy more easily since I don't have to worry about all the older photos. As far as this blog is concerned I might slow down to posting once a week for the Google+ project 52 only. Tomorrow will be the last post from my now deleted library. Thank goodness I write those posts up early.

I hope you all have a backup plan, and check it every so often to make sure things are running smoothly.


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The Pros and (Mostly) Cons of Upgrading to a 4K Monitor