A quick blog to just explain my recent apparent absense from the website. Summer is always a busy time and unfortunately photography has taken a bit of a backseat whilst we carry out some major renovations at home. However next week we are heading up north to the Lake District for a week of hopefully decent weather and walking. I'm sure I'll find a few scenes to point the camera at and despite them not being susex based I'll get them online once I'm back.

After a bit of a mistep by myself when making some site changes the other morning I managed to display all updates on my blog. I think I've now got the problem resolved (as can be proved by the appearance of this update) and I plan to backpost a few saved entries in a short while.

This post is not directly photography related but worth a mention as it should allow for quicker email response times and website updates. I'm with the network provider Three for my mobile contract and since my free upgrade was long overdue I called up last week to arrange my new deal. After a lot of negotiating we agreed that I could get the Nokia E71 handset on my contract with unlimited internet usage. As such I am now able to recieve emails on the move and I also plan to try and twitter more from location to pass on interesting tips and ideas as I think of them.

So far my experience with the handset has been pretty good and my emails seem to be working properly.

My main editing and storage PC has been causing all sorts of problems for me recently and this weekend I made the decision to reinstall the operating system (Windows XP) to try improve the performance. I have a long IT background and this is a fairly routine task which I've performed hundreds of times with little or no problems. This time however Windows XP decided to clear my disk partition information during the initial setup which caused a major headache.

Due to the storage requirements on hundreds of Canon RAW files and processed photographs I have a number of disk drives in my system. All are partitioned and used for the various stage of my workflow. After the initial reinstall my main photograph partition and data partitions were both unavailable. The drives were visible and a blank unformated partition was in their place. Panic quickly set in and I loaded my external hard drives to see how current my backups were. Due to some reorganisation I'd been doing all of my pre 2007 photographs were not backed up and none of my more recent shoots were accessible either.

After many hours of messing around I was fortunately able to recover the original partitions and data from my drives. After a few more hours I got all of my software reinstalled and will see how the computer behaves from now on. It's  still being cranky so I may find myself ordering a new system soon. The moral of this story however is make sure you have backups of everything important and not just some of it. Had the drive actually failed I would have been completely stuck so regular backups are worth the time and effort.

Welcome to my new Sussex Vistas blog!

I'm normally pretty bad at keeping my blogs up to date. I always seem to have others things to be doing and forget that the blog needs care and attention to make it more than worthless ramblings. I've implemented a great open source blog solution called BlogEngine.NET which I hope will make managing my blog easier and therefore increase my use of it.

I'm not really sure what I'm going to be adding to the blog but I'm sure I'll throw in some news, landscape photography techniques and tips, product and services information and anything else that is reasonably relevant. Please let me know what you would like to see on the blog by contacting me or commenting on my entries.