A Studio Session Saved(ish)…

Sunday I found myself in the studio with my colleagues Matt Beaty and Andrew Paffrath from thevisualCollective. We had a few friends stop by to have their likeness captured in a photograph and we had a generally pleasant afternoon. That is until we were wrapping the set and I unplugged the computer mid-file transfer and lost everything…

This was totally one of those “D’oh” moments were you realize your mistake just as it’s happening but the gears of disaster are already turning and it is too late to change course.

To clarify, I was shooting tethered to a school computer that doesn’t allow files to be saved after one logs out (or unplugs the computer). I sometimes shoot tethered because it is nice to look at images while shooting on a bigger screen with better software and someone sitting there making sure everything is coming out well i.e. in focus, good exposure, framed correctly etc.

After shooting I was transferring the camera raw files to a portable storage device and striking the set when I unplugged the computer mid transfer. As I have alluded to, everything was deleted from the computer and from what we could tell the folder on the jump drive was corrupted in the unplugging (we couldn’t open it with Finder). Devastated and quite grumpy I packed my bag and headed home.

Upon my return to the home office I figured I would look one more time, but this time with the Adobe Bridge photo downloader. The folder opened, there were lots of items, and even a few image files. As it turns out the program I was using to shoot tethered (Leaf Capture) creates a lot of files in a session. Custom camera settings, raw utilities and my saving grace, thumbnails in jpeg format. In the few minutes the computer had, it transfered most of these small files before dealing with the large, time-consuming camera raw files.

Ecstatic, I opened one in Photoshop…72-dpi just shy of 1000-pixels long and a jpeg to boot. (for those in the know, this is not exactly what one wants to have as a starting point for high-quality images with any chance of ever being printed or looking half-way decent).

Out of the thumbnail images I managed to save, I found a few that were worth the time to play with and try to salvage what I could. What follows is the culmination of my afternoon…

They came out pretty well for web, but don’t expect to see prints…

Thanks Angela for stopping by, I really liked this set…

Dahlia stopped by to say hello. She recently cut off her dreadlocks and I wanted to shoot her new do. (Did you know I used to have dreads? Fun fact)

We had two other friends stop by as well, unfortunately their images were lost, sorry…Be sure to stay up to date with Matt, Andy and The Visual Collective to see the rest of the images (and maybe a video piece) from our day.