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Turns out the feed for my blog decided to bork about 4 days ago. David sent me a kind note (as he always seems to do about 5 minutes after fecal matter impacts spinning metal) but I couldn’t find wtf was wrong. A few days later, and it’s bugging me, and FeedBurner is choking on the fumes. I try FeedValidator.org, and it’s all “hey! dude! your feed is all like 404, ‘n stuff!” And I was all like “no fracking way. it’s all good, man. haven’t even touched that stuff in a long, long time, brah.” and then FeedValidator says “whatever, dude. I’m telling you, it’s gone. 404. MIA. Fix it.”

I send a message to the FeedValidator listserv (because I can see the feed just fine in my browser and via curl/wget/etc but FeedValidator insists it’s 404), and get 2 responses back within 10 minutes, suggesting my .htaccess was inflicting all kinds of negative foo. I decide to give up on trying to make sense of it, and just replace it with a fresh copy. And it seems to work now.

Anyway, all of this to say “sorry for any RSS noise you might see as a result of my feed’s borkage and subsequent hopeful deborkage.”  Of course, this post jynxes it. It’s probably going to bork just to spite me. Fracking blog.

We went to the Zoo today, and I brought along the Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 USM MK II lens. I wanted to try getting up close and personal with some of the animals, which is something I hadn’t really tried before. I’ve usually gone with the point-and-shoot, or just the kit 18-55mm lens on the XT. This was the first time I tried shooting animals at 300mm. I wound up taking 178 photographs. I kept 18, and I’m really quite happy with the shots that survived the cut.

The technique I was trying was to get as close as possible, then get even closer. Many of the shots I like the most from this visit are shots that would have been uncomfortably “close” if I wasn’t forcing myself to get closer. The second shot of the East African Crowned Crane, for example, might normally have been shot such that the entire crown was included. But by getting even closer, I think the shot is much more interesting.

I was shooting without a tripod or monopod, so wanted to force a fast shutter. I bumped the ISO to 800 (on a bright sunny day) and shot in Aperture Variance mode with the aperture cranked wide open. The theory being, if I force as much light as possible onto the sensor, I’ll compensate for hand-holding.

Except that I accidentally screwed up royally. Somehow, I’d inadvertently twiddled the buttons and knobs and wound up setting the exposure compensation to be 3 stops higher than normal. Meaning every single shot was terribly overexposed. Unbelievable, painfully overexposed.

Thank the gods I shoot in RAW, and use Aperture. Aperture freaking rocks. On most shots, all I had to do to rescue it was to drag the “Exposure” slider to the left. That’s it. On others, I had to futz with Highlights and Shadows, and Levels on a couple others. A few shots that had lots of light or white wound up with so much lost data that they were lost. But the vast majority were saved, and were actually acceptable.

Lesson learned – check all camera settings before starting a shoot or project. ISO. Exposure compensation. Maybe even image size and format (make sure it’s in RAW). Aperture may be an amazing tool, but it’s just plain silly and reckless to fall back on editing and manipulation to rescue images, if that could have been easily prevented by just properly setting the camera. But, it’s good to know that if Something Bad Happens, I can pull some useful images out of an otherwise garbage roll.

I’ve been using an rsync-based script to backup my iPhoto library to another computer, just in case my Powerbook blows up or something, so I don’t lose every photo I’ve taken for the last 4 years. It’s worked flawlessly, run every now and then from home, to squirt changes in my Pictures directory to my desktop at work, where I further back it up on an external drive using another rsync script.

But, now that I’ve added Aperture to my work desktop, the script I had been using became suddenly quite dangerous. As in, destructively dangerous. And I hadn’t thought to check out the script in awhile.

So, I ran it last night. It faithfully chugged through my ‘book’s ~/Pictures directory, so I walked away as it started working.

Then, late last night I did a quick scroll through the rsync log, and to my horror found a whole bunch of stuff like “Deleting: ~/Pictures/Aperture Library.aplibrary/...”

Holy. Crap.

I’d accidentally told my computer to nuke my Aperture library on the work desktop.

So, I cracked open the “rsyncpics” script, and lo and behold, I’d left in the “–delete” flag. Which wasn’t a problem – it was actually desired – when I was only using iPhoto. But since Aperture isn’t on the Powerbook, the “–delete” flag told rsync to nuke anything on the desktop that isn’t on the powerbook. Like the Aperture library. Doh.

Thankfully, I also periodically backup my work desktop’s home directory to an external drive, so had a slightly out of date version of the Aperture library which I could just copy back into place. But it was missing everything after Ken Ryba’s session from a week ago. I’d copied the best of the “Campus Tour” photos to my home iPhoto library, so it’s not fatal, but a good lesson learned.

The moral of the story is: be careful with rsync, especially when using --delete. I’ve learned my lesson, and have resurrected most of the lost photos. I’ve also added an Aperture Vault on the external drive. They offer these backup tools, so why not use them?

Update: Between the various locations I’d copied files, and a healthy application of the awesome Flickr Backup utility, all photos worth saving have been restored. Whew.