I had a goal as today approached: Don’t leave the house. Mission accomplished!
I still haven’t recuperated from our Alaskan vacation! I’m sure my cold has something to do with it, but I just haven’t snapped back yet. Every day has has ended with me still exhausted.
There were still a few goals beyond remaining in pajamas. My Alaskan photos still needed attention.
Before leaving Connecticut I cleared out 100 gigabytes from my laptop’s hard drive. That should have been enough space, right? In a perfect world, yes, but hard drives need a little breathing room. You shouldn’t fill them to the brim.
I ended up using an old iPod I’d brought along as a backup drive! Ask me how scary it was to move the photos there while at sea and then erase the original photo files? Extremely! You can only pray it works.
Today the iPod and laptop’s drives were spooled off onto a 3 terabyte external drive I ordered from NewEgg before we left ($129 including shipping for 3,000,579,911,680 bytes of storage). Nearly three hours just to move the files!
I shot over 6,100 photos in Alaska. It’s less than you think. I shot with reckless abandon. Often the ‘motor drive’ function kicked in. That’s eight shots a second while hoping a whale would flaps his tail or an eagle take to the sky. Most aren’t worth saving.
In Canon’s RAW format that’s 72.3 gigabytes.
My job is to go through each photo day-by-day choosing the best. That’s harder than it seems. I’m hoping to hang onto fewer than 200 shots from the nine days we were away.
Here are the ‘best of’ shots from our whale watching trip out of Juneau. Tomorrow I’ll try and finish the rest and finally post a blog entry from our day in Seattle.