Preserving memories and why it’s a good idea to back up your photographs.
A brief window into Melbourne BMX in the year 2006
Back in 2006, I had an early Nikon digital camera, the D100. This body used a cropped six (yes, 6) megapixel sensor and was a huge part of my early photography career. Shooting 3 frames per second, I thought it was the greatest camera ever.
I upgraded to the battery grip so I had the vertical shutter release and I eventually saved up and bought myself the Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8 Fisheye lens and got to documenting my world within BMX.
Being fairly new to this digital world, I never really concerned myself with a backup process and I paid the ultimate price. My old PC crashed and one of the two hard drives failed, taking with it a lot of my earliest BMX photographs and memories. Gone forever.
Finding Hope
A crash from my office woke up our daughter and it took us a moment to work out what had fallen. An old draw of CDs and DVD fell from the cupboard. Loosely labelled with my weird names for photograph folders, an excitement gripped me with thoughts of what might be on these lost disks.
Loading them into Lightroom, I found a bunch of useless stuff but amongst it all, a small selection of OG BMX images from about 2005/2006.
Bendigo Trails Jams, Flemington Banks Jams, the Melbourne Street Video Competition and more. What just fell at our feet was long forgotten about but so excitedly scrolled through.
The power of photographs like these is that with every one, I was transported back to pressing the shutter release. And, for some of those who’ve already seen a small selection, it did much the same for them. Stories come out thick and fast.
“Remember the massive fire at the trails? That got wild.”
“Oh man, Nathan Charles!”
“What a time,” reminiscing on when we had a few bands play at a jam we hosted.
Make sure you're preserving memories - and backing them up
While I’m sure there’s far better ways at doing the backups, now I’m preserving memories at regular intervals on multiple hard drives. Even these photographs that I found again, they’ll be backed up in a few different locations now.
Memories are important and, perhaps this is speaking from personal experience but, our brains fade. Back up your hard drives.
Anyway, please enjoy a few photographs from a great time in Melbourne BMX.
