There’s a long held belief in the concept of “leave no trace” when visiting a place, but there’s one very noticeable artifact western tourists have been leaving on Iceland that you unfortunately can’t simply pick up and throw away. With tourism growing 500% in Iceland over the past decade, western tourists have placed higher demands on the country than it’s been capable of adsorbing without affecting the country’s foundations. While the economy in Reykjavik has no doubt experienced a boost, this has come at the expense of cultural and geographical changes that are not necessarily welcome by many Icelanders.
In 2010, the number of international visitors to Iceland was 488,600. As of 2017, that number swelled to 2,224,600. As a result, Iceland built out infrastructure. Significant infrastructure including large excavation efforts to build attractions, tour bus companies, and expansion of roads and bridges. During this period, local economies also adapted by building out their own tourist infrastructure within previously rural, untouched cities. The end result has been a very large tourist industry that has both changed the culture and the face of Iceland to conform more closely to western tourist ideals. Much of this change has been driven from the western sense of tourist entitlement which has changed local economies in many ways that are foreign to Icelanders. Money is a powerful thing, and because the economy has become so dependent on tourism, rather than the fishing and farming industry that Iceland used to depend on, it’s become easy to manipulate a country into change that many otherwise wouldn’t want.
A Guide for Photogaphers, Not Geeks
Most photographers have had at least one heart attack moment when they realize all of the photos they’ve taken on a shoot (or a vacation) are suddenly gone, and there’s nothing on the camera’s storage card. Perhaps you’ve accidentally formatted the wrong card, or the card just somehow got damaged. If you’re a professional photographer, there’s a good chance your’e also not a forensic scientist or a hard-core nerd (although it’s OK to be all three!). That minor detail doesn’t mean, however, that you can’t learn to carve data off of a bad storage card and save yourself a lot of money on data recovery. While there are many aspects to forensic science that are extremely complicated, data carving isn’t one of them, and I’ll even walk you through how to do it on your Mac in this article, with a little bit of open source software and a few commands. If you’re scared of your computer, don’t worry. This is all very easy even though it looks a bit intimidating at first. You can test your skills using any old storage card you might have on hand. It doesn’t have to be damaged, although you might be surprised just how much data you thought was deleted from it!
First, lets talk about how your storage card works. When you plug your storage card into your computer, your computer looks for a list of files on the card; this is kind of like a rolodex of all the files your camera has stored. This “catalog” basically says, “OK, this file is this big, and it starts here”. You can think of it like the table of contents of a book. When you format a storage card, most of the time it’s just this table of contents that gets deleted; the actual bits and bytes from the photo you took aren’t erased (because that would take too long). The same can be true when the file system becomes damaged; in most cases, it’s just the file listing that gets blown up somehow, making it appear like there are no files on the card. In more extreme cases, physical damage can sometimes damage the data from one part of the card, but the data for the other half of the card can still be recovered; your computer needs to be told to look past all the damaged data, instead of just giving you an error message.
Every “professional” photography book I’ve read makes it gospel that you have to shoot landscapes at f/22, in order to ensure that the foreground and background is in focus. Special thanks to these guys for teaching millions of photographers to create blurry photos. Lens Diffraction, and an explanation as to why shooting at f/22 (and