Save Daves' Photos Fund
Donation protected
Heya all, some of you already know me through some of the sites I regularly put my photos up on, but for those of you who don't, here's the brief story of who I am and how I came to be in my current predicament.
My name is Dave Porteus, and I'm a 33 year old photographer who grew up in Binghamton, NY, and currently lives in Melbourne,Australia. I specialize in urban and low light HDR photography.
I'm a very active member of several online art communities, along with regularly uploading to social media sites. I do free HDR workshops and contests for people to try out the technique, upload free stock photography for digital artists, and have even done a brief video tutorial series on youtube. I also have a website where I upload a new photo every day and do weekly tutorial posts.
On Friday morning, disaster struck. The hard drive my photos were on suddenly started making whirring and clicking noises, and then froze up my computer. Upon rebooting it, the drive with all of my photos wouldn't read at all. Being a somewhat tech savvy person I tried every trick I could think of to revive it, but nothing worked. I decided to take the drive to a data recovery specialist to get a quote, which because it was due to a mechanical error came to almost $1900 Australian.
I do have one physical backup of my photos, but it only covers the time from 2004 until I moved to Australia in 2010, and it's in cheap DVD-R form back in the US, so I'm not even entirely certain if the data on them is salvageable. The only other copies of my Australian photos are the ones already online, most of which are only in web resolution.
This is where you all come in. I'm asking for enough money to repair the hard drive so that I can access my photos in full resolution. This will enable me to sell prints/wallpapers of the ones that aren't online already, sift through old photos for interesting ones that I missed the first time around, and it will help save an archive of images spanning a decade.
Thank you so much for reading this story, and any amount you can donate would really mean the world. I've spent the last 10 years amassing this collection of photos, and they are very important to me.
My name is Dave Porteus, and I'm a 33 year old photographer who grew up in Binghamton, NY, and currently lives in Melbourne,Australia. I specialize in urban and low light HDR photography.
I'm a very active member of several online art communities, along with regularly uploading to social media sites. I do free HDR workshops and contests for people to try out the technique, upload free stock photography for digital artists, and have even done a brief video tutorial series on youtube. I also have a website where I upload a new photo every day and do weekly tutorial posts. On Friday morning, disaster struck. The hard drive my photos were on suddenly started making whirring and clicking noises, and then froze up my computer. Upon rebooting it, the drive with all of my photos wouldn't read at all. Being a somewhat tech savvy person I tried every trick I could think of to revive it, but nothing worked. I decided to take the drive to a data recovery specialist to get a quote, which because it was due to a mechanical error came to almost $1900 Australian.I do have one physical backup of my photos, but it only covers the time from 2004 until I moved to Australia in 2010, and it's in cheap DVD-R form back in the US, so I'm not even entirely certain if the data on them is salvageable. The only other copies of my Australian photos are the ones already online, most of which are only in web resolution.This is where you all come in. I'm asking for enough money to repair the hard drive so that I can access my photos in full resolution. This will enable me to sell prints/wallpapers of the ones that aren't online already, sift through old photos for interesting ones that I missed the first time around, and it will help save an archive of images spanning a decade.Thank you so much for reading this story, and any amount you can donate would really mean the world. I've spent the last 10 years amassing this collection of photos, and they are very important to me.Organizer
Dave Porteus
Organizer
Maidstone, VIC