This is a part three to the “Best of 2009″ pictures for “Animals” category. To be honest, I haven’t done much wildlife photography this year, because I was busy photographing birds, landscapes and portraits. After seeing a small number of animal pics in my photo collection, I decided to try to capture more wildlife this year, if I can.
Unfortunately, one of the worst computer disasters hit me last year, when my hard drive died and I lost two very precious weeks of photographs. Those photographs were priceless – I captured a fox with 5 fox kits in their natural habitat: playing, cuddling with each other and chasing, capturing and eating mice. All of those photos were lost for good and I was only able to save a low-resolution version of a couple of pictures that I sent over email to a fox rescuer. Honestly, if there was a way to save those pics, I would have traded them over everything else I got in 2009…that’s how valuable they were for me. I resized those low-res images of foxes and I’m attaching them here. Although they are not as good when it comes to quality, I still love them.
1) Red Fox 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
2) Red Fox Kit 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
3) Mountain Pika 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
4) Mountain Pika Voice 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
5) Male Buffalo 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
6) Island Fox 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
7) Female Buffalo 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
8) Dolphin Jump 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
9) Coyote 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
10) Channel Islands Side-Blotched Lizard 1920×1200 Widescreen Wallpaper
About Nasim Mansurov
I always copy my images from the card to two different hard drives before editing, then sync my edits back to the 2nd drive during and after editing. I always have at least 2 (preferably 3) copies at all times.
How badly did the drive die? Can it be recognized by the motherboard at all? Sometimes you can run the manufacturer’s diagnostic and repair bad sectors, and sometimes software like GetDataBack for NTFS can recover corrupt partitions and lost files if you know what you’re looking for. I’ve successfully replaced a logic board from an IDENTICAL drive a couple times to recover data when it wasn’t a mechanical problem. Sometimes leaving a drive in a freezer overnight (in a zip lock baggie so there’s no condensation) will allow it to spin up if it is a motor problem. Then there’s the ultimate data recovery services out there where they take the platters out and retrieve data in a white room if you REALLY need the data, but it starts around $2K or so sadly…
Aaron, thank you for your comment and suggestions!
As far as the drives, I always backup my files to multiple locations too, but I used to do that after working on the files, not before. Lesson learned, now I’m importing to two locations at once and fully backing up the Lightroom catalog once a week to two external drives.
The drive was set up as a part of a RAID 0 array (I know, totally stupid), so when it physically died, I lost all of the data on both drives. I tried everything, including leaving it overnight in the freezer – nothing helped. There was a problem with one of the platters and the drive wouldn’t even spin up fully, creating very noisy clicking sounds. I knew it was toast…if it was just bad blocks, I could have retrieved some or all of the data using GetDataBack or other data recovery tools.
Long story short, I called two different data recovery companies and one quoted me over $5K + parts, and another over $8K for retrieving the data. They told me that they would have to not only get the platters out and reassemble them, but also reconstruct the RAID 0 array, which is very time-consuming. Both told me that it was a risky procedure and they could not guarantee the retrieval of the data :(
Mr Nasim, despite low res images, geez they are still very sharp and so nice to look at. Presume ur high res in RAW? Very lovely.
Jeanne, yes, the high resolution images are all in RAW (except for the fox images as explained above), ready to be printed out on large paper :)