Picture of the Day: 2/11/11 - "Midtown Manhattan Macrocosm"

"Midtown Manhattan Macrocosm"

What I love most about this image is the fisheye view of the neighboring buildings, visible in each of the droplets on the railing.

I haven't had a chance to take any new photographs since Sunday, and I've already milked that day's shoot of all its cream, so for today's image I went back into the archives. I shot this photo back on July 14th of 2008, outside Parsons The New School of Design, on 7th Avenue and 40th Street. We were in production with Project Runway at the time, and I was still using my old camera - a Canon Digital ELPH SD1000. One of its best features, aside from its ultra compact size, is being able to shoot in macro mode - which is what I used for this picture. This allows for extremely close focusing, and an image that is nearly life-size. Before posting, I wanted to re-size and re-crop the original image, so I started looking through my digital photo folders from 2008. That's when I made a horrifying discovery: There were only four pictures in the folder for July 14th, and none of them were of this image .

Lately I've been re-organizing my files. It's a huge job, as I have thousands of digital photos, artwork and photo manipulations, in many hundreds of folders, going back to at least 1998; and I have some digital artwork that even pre-dates '98. They're stored on three devices; a Toshiba Satellite 17" laptop, with a 160 GB hard drive, that's more or less confined to being a desktop - due mainly to its weight and a nearly dead battery; a Western Digital external hard drive, also with 160 GB capacity; and my Dell Inspiron Netbook - it, too, has a 160 GB hard drive.

I started having problems a month or so ago, when the hard drive on my Toshiba was rapidly nearing capacity. So I moved older folders, from pre-2006 through 2008, first onto my portable hard drive, and then copied onto my netbook. Turns out I'd also made multiple back ups of my entire Picture folder, and stored them in folders, sub-folders and even sub sub-folders on both devices. About two weeks ago I began the arduous process of comparing, collating and consolidating photo folders, starting first with my netbook; and earlier this week I began working on my external hard drive. I've been doing this while at work, and also during train rides home - very late at night, and it seems like I wasn't as diligent as I should have been. I haven't done a complete check yet, but it appears that I may have deleted all - or part - of 200 or more folders, each containing many multiples of files.

When I realized this morning what I'd done, I was distraught! There are some great images I've taken that - at this point - are only stored on deviantART, and those in an edited format; and I don't know if I can download those pictures from dA. I may have to find out. I just spoke with a computer maven here at Fox 5, and he advised me that when I emptied the recycle bin on my netbook last night, which was full with files and folders from my external hard drive, I may have lost those files forever! There's a recovery program available, that may or may not work, but the odds seem slim at best. I'm keeping my fingers, toes, eyes and other body parts crossed as much as is humanly possible; and I'm even considering sacrificing a virgin - if there's one to be found around this town.

Links:

"Midtown Manhattan Macrocosm" fine art prints.

Canon SD1000 Review.