My Very First Photograph On The Internet...

...and why you can't see it here.  This was going to be a trip down memory lane as I introduced you to the very first picture of mine that had found its way onto the internet.  I was going to plaster it here on the page like all of the others you have seen over the last several months.  Instead, I'm going to force you all to follow a link to another website to see my picture, all because I was an idiot and didn't follow the first rule of digital photography.  BACK EVERYTHING UP!  Much like Fight Club, that is also the 2nd and 3rd rule of digital photography.  It's important to take care of your digital files because without them, you have nothing.  I'm actually kind of a nut when it comes to backing things up, which makes the disappearance of this particular photo all the more perplexing.  All of my pictures find their way quite rapidly onto three hard drives and 2 CD's.  Yes, some may call that extreme, I call it being extra careful.  The photo I have misplaced was taken on May 2, 2010 for a project by the New York Times called A Moment In Time.  The goal of the project was for people all around the world to stop whatever they were doing at 15h00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time..which made it 9:00AM local time) and take a picture.  You would then send that picture to the New York Times and they created a whole website/photo album of all of the photographs that were sent to them that day.  To this day I sometimes like to introduce myself as a New York Times published photographer just to bump up the old ego, though I'm always quick to point out the real reason behind why my picture is there.  Back to the story, the whole concept of the project was to get a real person's view of the world they live in.  However, and after having gone through several of the photographs on the website I can say that I wasn't alone in doing this, instead of taking a photo by chance, I purposely placed myself somewhere I wanted to take a picture.  In this case, the Saint-Lambert War Memorial with it's tulips just coming into bloom.  9:00AM came, I took the picture and moments later it was sent to the New York Times.  A few days later it showed up on their website, complete with my name, and my day was made.  And that is forever, where it will stay because my file of the photograph is MIA.  All the more strange is the fact that I do have the back-up files for all of my photos from my Vancouver trip which began only five days after this particular photograph had been taken.  So my friends, hear my words, and heed them well.  Make sure you take the time to back-up all of your photographs, or make sure that they're good enough to be published by the New York Times so that you can still always see them.  Yes, that was a joke.  By the way, if you would like to see the photograph I just went and blabbed on about, you can follow this link.  Try and show a little love for the dandelion who managed to sneak into the shot without my being aware.  Also, as their tag-line says, if you have a couple of hours to kill, take the time to look at as many of the other photographs that can be found on the site as well.  Some of them are quite spectacular.