Joy

In early September I had the privilege to get to spend 13 days on a trip to Glacier National Park in Montana and Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta with my wife June.   We were blessed with safe travels and good weather as we checked off one more place on our bucket list.   It was a time of relaxing, refreshing, and recharging.

I've got a lot of images from this trip and it's taking me a while to work through them.   When I finish I'll post my favorites in a new gallery on my website.  For now, I'd like to share one from one evening in the Many Glacier area of Glacier National Park.

This row boat is on the shore of Lake Josephine not far from the Many Glacier Hotel.  We had stopped to photograph it around 9:30 on our way up the Grinnell Glacier Trail.  At that time the sun was behind me and the light was OK, but not very dramatic.  By the time we made it back down to this point it was 5:30 in the afternoon and the light had completely changed.   Instead of a low contrast uninteresting photo I now had fantastic warm afternoon light including God Beams coming out of the clouds and reaching across the frame to the other side.  What a gift!

The name of the boat pretty much sums up that day in Glacier.  We had woken up to a fantastic sunrise right outside our hotel and I was given enough time to set up to take nine shots to stitch together to create this panorama.   After a big breakfast we had one of our best hikes of the trip up to Grinnell Glacier.  The best part was I was able to share it with June.


As joyful as this day was it pales in comparison to the joy of being forgiven through the sacrifice of Jesus.   The word joy occurs 217 times in the Bible and this joy is available to all.  What a blessing!  I'll leave you with Paul's words.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. - Romans 15:13

Backing Up Photos On The Road

First day back from 12 days in Glacier National Park and Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta.  I am in the process of moving all my Glacier NP photos from the laptop that I took with me to the desktop where I do all my editing and keep all my master files.   Lightroom provides a pretty good Export/Import tool for moving images from one PC to another and that's what I was doing this morning.

I exported all 2,383 images from the laptop Lightroom catalog to my portable pocket drive and when I plugged the pocket drive in the desktop computer I got the dreaded "click - click - click" sound from the pocket drive.   After 15 minutes the system gave up on that drive.  Good thing I wasn't depending on that copy.

Keeping multiple copies of images while traveling is always a good idea.  Here's my process:

Fuchsia Fireweed and Bee

1. I never delete images from a memory card until I am sure they are safe on the desktop PC and have at least one good nightly backup.   I have enough cards to cover a two week trip.
2. I don't have any cards bigger than 16 GB and most are 8 GB.   If a card gets corrupted then I don't lose too many images.
3. I have a copy of  Image Rescue 4 that came free with my Lexar cards.   I've had to use it more than once to read files off a corrupted memory card.
4. I download new images from the cards to the laptop at the end of each day. That gives me two copies.
5. I copy the RAW image files from the laptop to the external pocket drive (yep - same one that just died).  I don't do this every night but probably should.   This gives me three copies.
6. The external pocket drive goes in a separate bag from the computer and cameras.
7. When I get home I export all the images from Lightroom on the laptop and then import them into Lightroom on the desktop PC.   
8. I don't ease a memory card until I put it in the camera to reuse it.

No process is fool-proof but having some process that gives you multiple copies is critical.   I would hate to get back from a big vacation anticipating going through images from that great trip and find that I don't have them.

I hope you enjoy the Fuchsia Fireweed and Bee image.  It was the end of the season for Fireweed in Glacier but there were still a few blooms on the top of these tall plants. These were growing where the 2003 Roberts fire burned over 57,000 acres of the park.