A Haunting Reminder to Backup Your Files

Back in February I wrote a two part series of posts detailing all of my backup procedures for my photograghs – the media I use, the exhaustive redundancy, multiple locations for all my files … the whole deal. You can read those posts here: Backups and Archiving for Photographers (Part 1) and here: Backups and Archiving for Photographers (Part 2). One of the reasons that I wrote the posts is that in the summer of 2010 I made a really stupid error and completely erased my sole backup drive. Complete loss of all of the photographs that I had on there. Why? Because I only had a single point of failure … and it failed.

I’m currently prepping for an impromptu portfolio review with a colleague, and as part of the process I started flipping through some old folios of work, mostly of stuff that I’d shot prior to the Great Drive Failure of 2010. In one forgotten folder of prints I came across these hauntingly beautiful photographs that I took of a young man swimming in one of the fountains in downtown St. Louis. The fountain had been dyed red for something or other and the overall effect is dramatic and just all kinds of creepy. The one in particular makes it appear that the kid is swimming in blood, and would be downright scary except he’s smiling a little. I am guessing that these photos are some of the first photographs I made in St. Louis, probably on a visit before I actually moved here, probably in June of 2010.

The prints themselves are very poor quality, and between that and the scanning the overall effect is to make the photos even more strange and disturbing. I wish I had the originals, but alas I only have a single remaining hardcopy of each, and the subsequent scans. Luckily for me, in the time it has taken me to type this post, the scans are now safely backed up in two external storage drives and also in the cloud. Too bad I didn’t have such a rigorous system set up back when these photographs were made!