Tuesday, March 2, 2010

A Nice Break from the Routine

I had a nice little pat on the back this week. I am a reader of Pioneer Woman the last few years (since her first SXSW recognition)and thoroughly enjoy her site. If you aren't familiar with her, google her and you will read quite an incredible success story in the blogging world. Anyway, she has a pretty good photography section to her blog and periodically runs assignments/contests. PW is infamous in the blogging community for her contests across all of her web site, she is very generous. I have entered a few pictures over the last year in her photography assignments, but this one hit home for me. The assignment was dog pictures. Well since my animals are my main models, you bet I had a few I could enter for that. I entered 4 pictures and she chose this one as one of her final 10 (out of approximately 10,000 entries). I feel a little special right now.. and very much inspired. It's amazing what a little positive recognition does ones soul. And for those who are interested in the technical aspects: shot with a Nikon D300, 70-200 2.8. I shot this the first week I had this camera and the second week I had the lens. I believe I was wide open and probably at 1/1500 at ISO 200-400 (my standard outside although I may have been on auto ISO at the time since the camera was new) I loved my D50 but the focusing system on the D300 is excellent for action of my calibre and for driving the 70-200 and I knew I wanted to be able to capture more pictures like this, hence the move up in equipment.

But there is sort of a downside to this story.. I don't have my raw file of the above shot. In fact, I had to download the picture off of my smugmug account, as I didn't even have the jpg. In December I made a major boo boo and blew away (like the alliteration?) my external hard drive with all of my photos on it. I have a general backup here in Florida, but it didn't contain this shot (I lost most everything I had shot last summer)and I am keeping my fingers crossed that I backed up the photography external to another general external that is at the cabin. I remember distinctly backing up before we came down, but I am thinking I was backing up from my hard drive rather than my photography external.. so I am bummed.. in a bittersweet kind of way. I also blew away the photos in the previous post of the dogs in the snow last spring.. and only have the web sized photos of those too. Not a good year - but I have learned my lesson and now have good a good backup procedure in place so I hopefully won't ever be in that position again.. makes me so mad at myself. But hey! Watchya gonna do? I know that I would never be able to enter any picture in any professional contest (if I ever choose to) without having the raw file to back me up.. Anyway - it was fun to be a small part of PW's site and see the comments from her readers. It has inspired me to keep on keeping on!

3 comments:

  1. Morgan - I am SO proud of you! How exciting to be recognized in this way! Big bummer about the files, though! Finally figured out how to get my reader working so, will be following your blog. Love to you, dear friend! Rebecca

    ReplyDelete
  2. Awww, your dogs are precious! Congrats on being recognized! You deserve it! That's a great shot!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for the kind words! As luck would have it.. I did find my raw files of the above picture - Yippee..

    ReplyDelete