Matthew Botos

While Time Machine handily restored my MacBook after it’s original Apple hard drive failed after two years, it missed one thing: 10 GB of Colorado photos, half of which I hadn’t published yet!

The reason is infuriatingly simple, yet was kept completely obscured:

Time Machine doesn’t back up your Aperture library while the application is running. This is due to the way Aperture utilizes a MySQL Lite database which needs to be open for reading and writing all the time.

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I came home to a crashed MacBook Monday and rebooted to ominous clicking sounds and a flashing question mark - smelled like hard drive trouble. A bit of troubleshooting and a quick visit to the Apple store later, and I was shopping for a new hard drive and crossing my fingers that Time Machine saved my data and unpublished photos from Colorado.

The hard drive was a total loss; neither I or Apple could see it when booting from another location, and the clicks hinted that something mechanical broke after two years. Apple did well on several counts: their troubleshooting article was easy to find and follow, I was able to get the last tech support slot the same evening, and the guy at the Genius Bar was honest enough to tell me that for the $250 they’d charge to replace the 80GB drive, I could pay half and install a bigger one myself.

They missed on one small thing, and one very big one: their reservation form still doesn’t work in Firefox, and there’s a nasty, unadvertised limitation on Aperture and Time Machine that meant many of my recent photos were lost!

One of my goals for this year was to be more active in a few photo communities, notably Flickr and Digital Photography School. The latter’s weekly assignments have been a particularly good challenge to create a photo based only on a concept, and also see what others do with it.

The artistic variety and quality of the entires always make the weekly contest tough, so it was an awesome surprise to return from vacation and find out that I won for the Sunny Days assignment! The assignment happened to be well timed; I had just spent a sunny Saturday afternoon on the water shooting waterskiing and wakeboarding.

I’ve always been a big fan of making the computer do the arduous part of the work so I can concentrate on the more interesting parts. When writing software, that’s generally meant relying on terse or sophisticated languages like Perl and Matlab. I’m currently taking it to the next level, though, by using code-generation tool and frameworks to generate complete code layers with full unit tests.

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Armed with a some tips and inspiration from Digital Photography School, I undertook my first baby shoot this weekend. Jerry and Marlena invited me to photograph their six-week old daughter, Giada. Not only are they friends, but very accommodating parents, which made things a bit easier.

Between a few ideas I had sketched out and the shots they wanted, we found enough to fill the hour of shooting we managed to get. As noted in the link above, babies do add a certain chaotic element that rewards preparation, patience, and flexibility. Though even some the feeding break provided some good photos.

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Firing off rapid action shots with a telephoto lens from the back of a boat with the wind blowing past could really convince me to focus more on sports photography! The 70-200 on a small sensor is just right for water sports, and with bright sunlight reflecting off the water I was able to shoot ISO 100 at 1/500 most of the time and not mind the fact that it’s only a F4 lens without stabilization. Of course, the L-series sharpness and solid build were certainly noticeable.

A polarizer definitely cut the glare, and the hood doubled as a good splash guard. Resting a slightly loose tripod ring in my palm also made it easy to switch from horizontal to vertical. Being out on the boat for a few hours also gave me a change to not only get crisp freeze-frames, but to experiment with some other angles, compositions, and motion blur effects. The 70mm end of the zoom also yielded some nice portraits.

There were only three problems: my back got a bit contorted following the action for hours, my hand did finally cramp up on the smaller grip of the Rebel XTi, and I need to bring my trunks so I can try some wakeboarding!

View all the waterskiing photos

The biggest photo news of the week isn’t another new DSLR camera, but the announcement of Getty to License Flickr Images. It’s been getting lots of coverage in photography blogs, but I’d like to throw in my own thoughts as a photographer and member of both Flickr and Getty’s iStockPhoto site.

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With gas prices holding at $4 a gallon, I’m averaging $60 a tank to fill my Maxima with cheap gas. Yet last month, I actually made a net profit on the machinations of Big Oil. Here comes the math:

Gas: -$120

Discover Gas Card Cashback: +$5

Energy Stocks ETF (XLE) Gain: +$134

Total: +$19

So this month I beat Big Oil! My fortunes will probably change next month, though; I usually average 3 tanks.

I enjoy Morgan Spurlock’s work; both Super Size Me and 30 Days provide a fresh, provocative look at modern issues. It got me thinking: how would each of us cope if we had to live a lifestyle opposite to our own for 30 days?

The first step in this thought experiment is figuring out what that personally meaningful opposite is, be it a belief, lifestyle, or position on a certain issue. For me, I think something that shapes my life significantly is the regular use of computers. It’s how I earn a living, communicate with friends and family, and even meet women. How would I fare if unplugged for a month?

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You can now search by multiple tags in my photo gallery! (Since spaces are usually allowed in tags, the whole search was previously treated as one tag.) If you’d like to add this feature to your own Gallery2 installation, replace TagsSearch.class with the file in this zip:

Download Multi-Tag Search for Gallery2