The Importance of Back Up

Being a wedding photographer, this is a subject that I thought was near and dear to my heart. In this age of digital data, maintaining clients images is pretty much the second most important part of my job. For a Libra, I am exceedingly paranoid about back ups. I keep weddings and portrait sessions on two separate external hard drives not associated with my main computer, on my servers, and on DVD back up.

Unless...you are talking about my own personal data. Pictures of my kids, my family vacations. That I stored on one external hard drive. That went bad this past week. Is it backed up? Some of it, yes. But when I get enmeshed in wedding season I let personal stuff fall aside and I was "going to get" to archiving all of the pictures from the past year "when things slowed down". When I made the call to a company that retrieves lost data the representative told me that if she had a dime for every photographer who called with lost personal data she would be a rich woman. What's the saying about the shoemaker's children have no shoes? The good news is they have a 90% success rate retrieving the data. The bad news? It's going to cost me around 2K. Yeah. As in two thousand dollars. That's putting a price on memories, isn't it?

I shared this story last night with a bunch of my girlfriends who, like everyone else have digital cameras and tons of photos stored on their computers. And when I asked them if they had the photos backed up to CD's/DVD's or archived somewhere else (Kodak and some of the camera makers offer off site storage of your digital images) they admitted they didn't. They didn't understand that if their computer hard drive failed that those photos were likely gone forever, or savable only by very costly means.

So, don't put it off. Even if you do it a few a day, back up those pictures. If your computer doesn't have a CD burner then go buy an external one that will plug into a USB port. The cost of backing up the photos will save you a lot of heartache and money.

October 1, 2007....one amazing day

My friend Tina just had her first baby. Miss Tina took some time to find the love of her life, and when she did, they were not sure if they wanted kids. One day last year she surprised us by telling us that she was pregnant. As soon as she told me I told her that I wanted to be there to document when that baby was born. She looked at me like I was nuts, but I told her that I promised I would photograph it as it happened, but nothing gory or distasteful. Miss Tina is a girly girl, you see...and she doesn't like to go anywhere not looking all put together. Knowing she was going to be having her baby in the past week, she gave her own self a pedicure so her toes would be pretty for the Dr. Who gives themselves a pedicure at 9 months??

When my friend Christal and I got the call, Tina was checking in to the hospital around 2PM. She was in light labor, and they wanted to watch her. If nothing else, she was scheduled to be induced Wednesday morning. Christal and I agreed to take a ride out to the hospital just to take a few shots of her checking in. I fully expected to go home, and probably get the call early the next morning, or even sometime the next day.

We got to the hospital at 4:30 PM..and baby was born at 6:15 PM. It was amazingly fast and we all joked with Tina that if she ever wanted to consider a second career that it should be a surrogate. That was one amazingly fast, amazingly awesome birth. I am so thankful that Tina allowed me to be in the room to see things from the other side of the table. I promise there is nothing scary or horrifically bloody in this slideshow, so if you are squeamish, no worries. And as my friend Tina warned me as I photographed the birth "No cootie shots" either

Click here to watch the slideshow of baby Hintz