Amazing but true

As mentioned in my prior post I have been having difficulties with my computer. My hard drive that holds all my photos is going kaput. I'm not sure if I've mentioned it before but you shouldn't backup in case of hardware failure but for when it fails. Its just a matter of time before anything with moving parts (i.e. hard drives) will fail. In other words, its not a question of if a drive will but when.

Fortunately, most of my images are backed up. I was in the process of backing up my Hawaii images when the drive started giving me problems yet again. In fact it looked like about 350 or so images were missing. When I uploaded them originally to my PC it took hours. It royally sucked knowing that I had to do the whole process over again. I decided to purchase a card reader. I used to have one but found that it wasn't any faster than transferring from the camera. My printer has a card reader but it only operates on USB 1.0 which is really slow.  However, I wasn't going to spend my whole evening once again transferring the same image so I gave SanDisk's ImageMate a try. Wow! I've already uploaded my 2 - 2GB cards and I just finished transferring a 1 GB card while I wrote half of this paragraph. I'll probably have all of my photos transferred before I am done writing this post.

I really have to wonder why I didn't get a good card reader before. This gizmo is SUCH a time saver. In less than 15 minutes I transferred over all the files that it took me hours to upload before. Amazing...but true!

Aloha from Hawaii!

Alright. I am already back from Hawaii so its not aloha from Hawaii. I'm sad because it was around 24/25 degrees Celsius when I left Kauai and its around -10 here now. Lovely. Good-bye shorts and "slippahs" (sandals). Hello parkas and snow boots.

My computer has been giving me troubles so I haven't been able to go through my images. I do feel I owe this blog at least ONE picture however. This image was taken at about 6 am one morning. Exposure time was about 30 seconds. I packed my tripod in my 60+ liter backpack because it wouldn't fit in my suitcase.

 It was absolutely beautiful. I hope this does the scene justice.

This is Alberta

I have to admit that four images does not even come close to encompassing all there is to see in this province I live in. Heck, the four might not even be categorized as stereotypical at all.  Its not even a taste, perhaps just a half whiff of a fragrance that you can't quite place.  Nevertheless, the president of the Foothills Camera Club gave us this assignment for this month's President's Challenge.   Perhaps with contributions from each member we'll give the viewers of our slide show (a photo club in the UK) a taste of Alberta.

I took this shot last summer on an outing to Banff and Lake Louise. Not your typical postcard image but then again, who wants the typical shot?

 Another Lake Louise image here. It was one of those "Holy Crap! There's something cool happening!" type of shots. i.e. I turned and saw the sled and shot.

 

Yup. I submitted this and I have posted this on the blog before. I think one of the highlights of Alberta is the Canadian Rockies and this is one of my better shots.

My dad has been racing chuckwagons for around 40 years. This shot was taken at the Red Deer Exhibition last summer. The processing is more than I usually do because I didn't want the same old same old shot. Then again, for people who have never seen the sport it would be new anyways!

The set can be viewed as a slideshow on Flickr.