My first-ever hard drive failure occurred five weeks ago. It came after more than 15 years of digital photography and, like death and taxes, I suppose it was inevitable. Unfortunately, the manner in which it failed meant that it cost me images from a week-long West Texas excursion that I can’t recover. I can re-visit and I can re-shoot but I won’t recover THOSE images.

So, $1,200 and five weeks and multiple missed-deadlines and lost-sales later, I’m left with a harsh lesson: Stuff breaks. More specifically, “Brand new, out-of-the-box G-Tech stuff breaks.”

Did I backup, you ask? Well, no, because I didn’t get the chance to backup. Like most traveling photographers, I carry a compact hard drive that I use to dump images until I’m back in the office and can transfer them to my studio RAID. I’ve used that drive for 18 months with no issues and, in fact, that drive performed perfectly. It was the brand-spanking-new 500 GB G-Tech drive that I transferred those images to that failed.

The back story: On returning from West Texas I purchased the new 500 GB drive because I wanted more traveling capacity and so I could give the 250 GB drive to my son who was returning to college at the end of the week. I transferred the images, 49 gigabytes, to the new drive, cleaned the 250 and handed it to my son.

When I arrived at the studio the next morning and attempted to transfer the images to the RAID, the transfer would time out and ultimately fail. I tried for several hours, ran disk warrior and cursed G-Tech before taking the drive to my local genius bar for a complete diagnostic. They hooked me up with a local data recovery company and a mere $400 and three weeks later, I had 49 gigs of mostly-corrupt, mostly-unusable images from out west.

Yesterday I returned the drive and exchanged it for a 500 GB LaCie. My G-Tech days are done. I’ve ceased cursing the name of the G-Tech CEO, whomever she or he might be. I’ve ceased kicking myself for not testing the new drive first and I’m now at peace with it.

But not really.

This comes, ironically, just three months after I worked as an assistant on a three-day advertising shoot for a colleague. I insisted that we back up everything on two hard drives in the field each day. She didn’t see the need but humored me and I slept soundly after each day’s shooting.

There’s another lesson in here and it has to do with redundancy and flawed processes and accountability. And as a sole-proprietor/owner-operator, I can tell you two things about my boss: He’s a prick and he’s fallible–but he’s infinitely smarter than he was five weeks ago and he’s now backing up on two hard drives in the field.

I made this image in my pasture Thursday, Feb. 11, at 11:30 p.m., while snow was still falling. I was struck by how much ambient light was reflected by the snow. The sky was completely overcast and save for the light above my barn door, off camera right, there was no light source nearby. My neighbor’s porch light is visible in the distance.

It was a 2.5-second exposure at f4, ISO 100.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming and I’ve seen big snow, but never in my back pasture. The stillness was overwhelming–no cars on the streets, so it was silent all around. My part of Texas was sleeping under a 12-inch blanket of downy snow.

During my recent working trip to NYC I was, as always, fascinated its denizens. These are random glimpses of New Yorkers being New Yorkers–and they do it better than anyone else.

New York actor and playwright, Taylor Mac, is currently performing at the Undermain Theatre in Dallas and paused Monday to speak with Theater Jones critic, Mark Lowry. Taylor talks about his craft and his creative process in Lowry’s video interview.

Taylor’s a brilliant and thoughtful young actor whose hands move constantly while he’s talking. I simply let him speak and the hands did the rest.