Mallorca Part 1: Light of the Balearics (and some data recovery issues)

After a rather difficult winter for nature photographers, many spring days were quite wet and grey until the end of April here in western germany. So I was all the more pleased to spend another 10 days on Mallorca 😀

 

This time we took it a little easier - Christina is now 8 months pregnant and so we skipped exploring and spent a lot of time by the pool and on our terrace, and of course at the buffet 😉

 

I usually spent the first 100 minutes after sunrise photographing birds (then the light gets too harsh for me) and at sunset we only went on short excursions. Photography therefore played more of a minor role on this trip.

 

However, I have to say that photography is sometimes like other things in life: If you don't force it and your expectations are very low, things often go particularly well. I think I can say that I managed to take some special pictures this year. Many places that I have explored in recent years simply worked well.

 

I split the total of 40 images into 2 series: My personal highlights can be found in the second part of the series: here I dedicate an entire blog post to three bird species: the kite, the hoopoe and, above all, the interesting red-headed shrike.

 

Today, in the first part, I'm showing you a colourful mix of landscape and bird photos, with some beautiful light moods from Majorcan April.

 

Incidentally, some of the pictures in this series almost didn't make it, as a memory card unfortunately had a defect. I would like to write a few lines about this for anyone who is interested and make a recommendation if you ever have such a case. If you don't need this, just scroll down to the pictures 😉

 

We only had one longer excursion (92km into the Tramuntana mountains) and that morning we had really interesting conditions at the classic spot Es Colomer, where I hadn't photographed before. It was a beautiful morning, but it was also quite exhausting - after all, we had to leave at 4.45am. At lunchtime, I wanted to back up my data, but my notebook didn't show me any pictures, instead telling me to reformat the cards. Oh no, I thought, this morning of all mornings 🥴

 

The same message then appeared in both my cameras (Nikon Z8). Where I had been able to view the images just a few minutes before. There were also a few landscape images on the card from the day before...

 

This really annoyed me, as I decided some time ago to always write to 2 cards in parallel (as a backup) for landscape photography anyway - but I'm sometimes a bit careless in my battery and card management and simply forgot to write twice here.

 

This happened to me about 2 years ago, back then with a 640gb Prograde Cobalt, but with a different notebook, different camera (Z9) and different card reader. And now with the Sandisk Extreme pro 512gb (both CF Express). Back then, a neighbouring PC shop couldn't help either, despite days of effort, and neither could the usual recovery tools.

 

So I did some research while I was still on holiday, as this time I wanted to use a provider specialising in data recovery:

 

During both the online research and a few phone calls, I experienced some really subterranean things and found a lot of the work in this industry to be pretty dubious, I'll spare you the details. At some point, I simply took a look at „Trustpilot“ to see who actually has good reviews in the context of data recovery. Well, this list is pretty short.

 

I came across Tobias Jungbauer Datenrettung Festplatte - Datenretter - IT-Forensik (jungbauerdatenrettung.de) and I was actually helped here. With a fair pricing policy, fast response time and good advice. Many thanks at this point and my full recommendation! All the data from that morning could be restored and was made available to me quickly - even online 👍

 

So I'm happy to be able to show you a few landscape pictures now.

 

I hope you enjoy the pictures 😉

 

Best regards,

Thomas

1
1
2
2
3
3
4
4
5
5
6
6
7
7
8
8
9
9
10
10
11
11
12
12
13
13
14
14
15
15
16
16
17
17
18
18
19
19
20
20
21
21
22
22

I hope you enjoyed the series 🖐