Tough Decisions for the Atlantic Region

After scouring the Atlantic Region, I found a number of interesting places. I have started to narrow them down, but am yet to decide on the final three. Below is a copy of my notes as they stand, but I will have to research all these areas more deeply before narrowing my decision further.

Feel free to look these areas up and let me know what you think of them.

ATLANTIC OCEAN
*Greenland (Denmark) - LooksGreat, Arctic Char
*Bioko (Equatorial Guinea) - Looks like tropical paradise coastline
*Bissagos Islands (Guinea-Bissau) flats paradise perhaps
*Newfoundland & Saint Pierre and Miquelon
*Ascension
*Sao Tome and Principe- looks great, tropical looking place
Rocas Atoll (Brazil)
*Fernando de Noronha (Brazil) - beautiful lagoon, but looks to be a marine park with no fishing!
*Falkland Islands (UK) (Spanish: Islas Malvinas) - Awesome but perhaps too well known

Hopefully in the next week or two, I will have done enough research to find the most interesting three out of the above list, and can move onto the next region.

Apologies for the delay........back soon.

Between starting a new job and being unwell over the past two weeks, I have not had a chance to post here. I have in what spare time I had, been researching and will hopefully next week post some details about my first three selected locations from the first region. Keep an eye out for it next week.

The Search Begins

Reigional Breakdown
The time has come for me to get serious about searching out an ideal location. As mentioned in an earlier post, breaking the world into regions will (hopefully) make this easier. I am going to search each region in the following order:

Atlantic Ocean
Europe
Africa
Asia
Indian Ocean
Australasia
Far South and Antarctic Region
South America
North and Central America
Arctic Region
Pacific Ocean

I anticipate spending about two weeks researching each region, and from each, I will select the three most interesting areas. This will leave a total of 33 possible locations which I will then look at in more detail. Once this stage is reached, I am going to ask for some reader input.

In between all this research, I have a couple of reviews to write, and I will soon be presenting Col Roberts (from Fishing Wild Magazine) with some questions about his adventure travel photography and fishing trips. This should prove to be extremely interesting and informative.

DAM Easy

DAM, where did I put that shot of..............
Ever found yourself looking for a photo that you took, only to go searching through a mess of files with it still not showing up. You would have just done a search of your hard drive, but you can't remember the file name that you (or your camera) gave to it. DAM!

Yes, DAM is the answer, the solution, and the way you can ensure that you will be able to find your important images well into the future. "What do you mean DAM?" I hear you say. I guess I had better explain. DAM is an acronym for Digital Asset Management. Your image files are digital assets. As such, they deserve to be looked after.

I certainly hadn't been looking after my images the way I should. Consequently I found that I had an interesting situation last week when I decided to indulge in some DAM. I had my computer and two external hard drives. There all contained image files in various formats. I had some images saved on more than one drive, and even worse - some double ups on the same drive, often hidden within folders with names that certainly didn't suit the contents. I could go on forever describing this mess, but suffice to say that it was a nightmare. I still have a little way to go, but am now on the right track. I thought it might be helpful to share what I have learned, along with some examples of how things are looking now.


When you open one of the drives this is what you now see. Ignoring the drives autorun folder, you will see a folder for each image file type - Jpeg, RAW, and TIFF.


This is what you see when you open the RAW folder. A folder for each year You may notice that the 2009 folder is labeled 2009X - the X is just there temporarily, so that I know that I have not completed work on it yet. It will be taken off when the folder is up to date.


The list view inside the 2008 folder. Each folder is labeled with the date in the following format:
Year-Month-Day-Description
This ensures that they are listed in the order which they were taken, and the description is simply a few words to help you identify what is inside.


Inside the folders with dates and descriptions, you will find the original RAW Images. This particular example only contains 6 images, but some contain hundreds.

The original mess that I described above is probably quite a common scene on hard drives everywhere. People tend to take a lot of photos as there are no film processing costs like the good old days. Finding a particular image in the future isn't given a lot of thought by most people until they can't find it. A simple DAM solution like the one I have shown above (or specialist DAM software) is definitely the answer.

Archive Your Images
A mess is one thing, but what if your computer crashed and you lost all those pictures? Special family treasures, beautiful personal work - or even work you have produced for a client. Having them organised is one thing, having a good backup is another. As I am cleaning up my drives, I have been making two copies, When i finish, both of my external hard drives should contain exactly the same files. I then plan to burn another copy onto DVDs and keep them somewhere away from home. This ensures that even if our house was to burn down with the computer and hard drives, I will still have all my precious digital assets.

It's Worth the Effort
It is quite a time consuming process to go back through years worth of images. The problem is, the longer you leave it the more there is to go through. Once you decide on a DAM solution, all I can say is do it. It is then just a simple matter of putting all your new files in the right place immediately after they are imported onto your computer, and you should never lose a file in the great hard drive abyss again.

I hope this has been helpful, and if you don't have the chance to come back here until next week, I hope you have a great DAM weekend!

LOOPS 'N' LENSES Facebook page launch

LOOPS 'N' LENSES on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/LOOPS-N-LENSES/92206596964
I have just launched a Facebook page to supplement this blog. If you are a member of the Facebook community, and find this blog interesting - become a fan! There is a discussion board for fans to talk about this blog. Please read the Wecome to L'N'L post.

Review - Fishing WIld

Journal of fishing travel

There are many fishing magazines available here in Australia, with only a fairly small number of them being dedicated to fly fishing. Many publications have the occasional article on, or at least mention fly fishing, but not enough to get the hard core fly fisher excited. Fishing Wild is somewhere in between. Almost every article has at least a small amount of fly fishing content, with it being a strong feature in most others. However this is not the only attraction of what the creator of Fishing Wild, Col Roberts, has called the journal of fishing travel. An apt description, as the majority of the articles are about both unusual and/or beautiful places. The photography is also of a very high standard which means the focus of this great publication has a lot in common with the journey that I am planning. I certainly hope to make my photographs different from the majority that you will see in Fishing Wild as I have my own style, but I do find it inspiring - the journeys, the places, the images.

A great feature found at the end of most of the articles are the fact files. They give a range of information on the destination which can include: getting there, accommodation, what fishing tackle you need, activities available for the non fishing partner, and a big variety of other essential information for those who may wish to go there.

Apart from the great articles, there is a department in each issue called Photo Clinic which gives some good tips to help readers learn how to take better photos. Another department, Travel Doc is an interesting read regarding health issues such as diseases and medications relating to travel, all of which I will be re-reading during my planning. The department I personally enjoy the most is Horror Travel Stories, it can be a real eye opener!

As mentioned at the bottom of the current editorial (No7, 2009) Fishing Wild now has its pages section sewn instead of being glued as in past issues. Being the kind of magazine that many will collect, this is great news. In fact, calling it a magazine is almost an insult to Fishing Wild. It is a great read and I highly reccommend it to all adventurous anglers.

Fishing Wild is publishe twice annually, in April and October. The cover price is A$10.95. If you want to subscribe you can do so directly from their website http://www.fishingwild.com.au/.

The Danger Zone

After looking into the danger of pirates last week, I have since turned most of my attention to areas on land that are of danger to travellers. I quickly learned that war and civil unrest were not the only dangers. Many places have very high rates of violent crime, others have kidnappers that want ransoms - just like some pirates, then there is the ever present risk of terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, with the amount of dangerous places it was impossible to make a comprehensive list of all of them, and then go on to look further into the specifics of each. Instead, I have found that there are a number of countries that come up immediately in most searches. Here are a couple of lists I have found.
http://www.travelersdigest.com/top_dangerous_locations.htm
http://listverse.com/travel/top-10-most-dangerous-places-on-earth/

This searching has made me realise that with the huge number of danger zones, I am better off choosing my locations, and then checking the danger before putting it on my shortlist of places to visit. Many times, a country may be mentioned as one of the most dangerous, yet there are certain areas that are safe. By discarding all the dangerous countries, I may well be throwing away some of the best locations. As far as health issues are concerned, I am going to do the same thing. Most health issues can be dealt with in some way if you are prepared for them.

One interesting website I have found about travelling in dangerous areas is http://www.comebackalive.com/ which is "The official website of Robert Young Pelton. The place where professionals, adventurers, travelers & those who work & travel in high-risk areas can keep abreast of the latest info & safety tips." Robert Young Pelton is the author of The World’s Most Dangerous Places which is virtually the bible for those travelling to dangerous places. To get an idea of the book http://www.flipkart.com/world-most-dangerous-places-robert/0060011602-mmw3f99m8i has a short description of what it's all about. I hope to get a copy and will certainly post a review of it.

Also, an interesting read on war zone safety can be found here http://wikitravel.org/en/War_zone_safety

Enough on danger for now - My next post will be my first review.