Imagine going back to your parked car and finding someone had broken into it, stealing not just your camera and lens, but also your laptop and two external hard drives containing the raw files from your last six months of work. It must be one of the worst nightmares for a photographer (though mine is slightly different as I don’t have a car.)
It was Theron Humphrey‘s New Year present when he returned to his pick-up parked in Jackson, Mississippi, where he was half-way through a Kickstarter crowd-sourced project travelling across the USA making portraits of ordinary people, as Pete Brook recounts on his Rawfile blog.
Humphrey had got backers to put up over $15,000 for his project, promising them postcards, signed prints t-shirts and more depending on the amount they contributed, and at the higher end you could camp with him, nominate a person to be photographed as a part of the project or he would tattoo your name on his leg!
While he travels across the USA – and is able to continue with the project thanks to some more generous support when people heard about his loss, with loans from friends and $4000 from a donations page – his web developer Chris Barnes is putting up the work on his web site. There are certainly some interesting portraits in his cross-section of everyday Americans on This Wild Idea.
It’s also a reminder to us never to rely on a single backup of our raw files. Unlike negatives you can easily make a copy, and by storing it in a different location, keep your work safe against catastrophe. Humphrey is now using cloud storage for his files as well as presumably still saving them to hard drives.