I welcome the chance to take the occasional bungy photo; and today seemed like a good opportunity because there was a charity event at Jungle Bungy Jump and there would be plenty of participants.

Rolled up a little early and there was a lack of jumpers, but soon there was a group of very charming little kids who were far more interesting to photograph than some lunatic jumping off a crane.

Tracy Cosgrove set up the Melissa Cosgrove Children’s Foundation more than ten years ago, and since then she has been helping children in Asia in many different ways. She runs an orphanage in Myanmar, care centres in the slums of Bangkok, and labour camp nurseries; one of which is in Pattaya.

Rather than live in primitive conditions while their Cambodian or Burmese parents work on building sites, Tracy boards the children in a house in Pattaya, providing food, clothing and an education for the duration of the parents contracts; typically three years although it is often longer.

It’s noble work and it’s clear that the children adore her.

I have received an exclusive* invitation to a “Movers and Shakers” event:

Obviously I can’t attend, because I am not a mover, I am not a shaker, and I am certainly not both. There again, neither are the people who turn up at these gatherings, although they probably think they are. I’ll admit to being rather suspicious of anyone who is consumed with so much self-importance that they feel they both qualify, and would wish to attend, such an event.

No posts over the past couple of days because I have done nothing worth writing about (not that that normally stops me). Having said that…

Finally cleaned up my photos so that I had several thousand fewer shots than I used to have, and all of them were sitting on my primary network drive. All I needed to do was to back up this drive to my second network drive and the job would be complete. Naturally, everything fell apart at this point. After thirty hours of attempting to back up 800GB, a mere 78GB had been backed up and then the job crashed.

The prancing pony season is nearly upon us and I need more disk space.

Most of my photos sit on a 1TB network drive, which backs up to another 1TB network drive. Recent shots are held on the computer and moved to the network drives every month or so. Except that hasn’t happened in 2012 because my network drives are almost full.

Have been ignoring the problem for a while (since around March), but last week I decided to do something about it by ordering a new NAS drive complete with a couple of 3TB drives. But there is no current stock of the items I am after, so it is on to plan B, which is to clear out my crap/redundant photos, which take up at least half of my current storage.

So today I sat in Lightroom and deleted thousands of photos, at least one of which I will no doubt decide I want to access tomorrow. Seven thousand bike shots were culled, which still left about a thousand of the best (which is enough bike shots for a lifetime); and all non-special polo shots prior to the 2010 season went in the trash can. Got as far as ‘S’ in my main library before I decided I had had enough photo deletion for one day.

On my way through I found this, taken seven years ago:

Took a walk with the Kiev this afternoon, and brought along the GX1 with the Lensbaby as an accompaniment.

Guanyin sits in a little park not far from the Pratumnak lookout, and she always welcomes some photographic attention as she faces the setting sun. I like this shot because the Lensbaby blurring gives an ethereal touch to the extremities of the statue.