Category Archives: Photography

General photography natter — gear, thoughts, ideas, and the odd photo.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

A Tale of Two Displays, Part Two: A Tale of Two Displays (really!)

Over the weekend, I decided it was time to stop waiting on Apple to pave the road that leads to my new screen real estate. I did a bunch of research — although not very well, as we’ll discover later in this tale of woe — and landed on a pair of Samsung T260 25.5″ widescreen monitors. Generally, they got good reviews, and looked as good as they could at BestBuy, given that every monitor in the store was being driven from a VGA signal with more splits than a high school cheerleading squad. I was planning on a single DVI source, so I knew it’d only get better from what I saw.

I unpacked the two beastly panels, and plopped ’em on my desk. My gosh, were they ever big! I felt like a kid in a candy store as I connected them to Doc Oc, and proceeded to bask in the electronic glory of the two brightly lit beacons on my desk.

My next step (as it should always be) was color calibration. I pulled out my trusty Gretag Eye-One, and calibrated both monitors. The colors looked great to my eyes, although the monitors were pretty bright, so I lowered the brightness a bit to keep the sunburn down. I brought up Lightroom, and began walking through some of my favorite images. The brighter the image, the better it looked on the new panels. And then I hit some low-light images…. and the house o’ monitors began to tumble down.

All my low-light images showed splotches and degradation in the shadowed areas — something I’d never seen on my 20″ Apple Cinema Display. The more I worked to eliminate the problem, the more I began to get concerned that I’d made a huge mistake.

It was back to research, and I learned that the T260’s used a TN LCD panel. Apparently, TN panels use 6-bit color (256k colors), and dither to get to the 16.7m colors that are advertised. And from what I could see, my photos didn’t like that kind of treatment. (For comparison, my Apple ACD uses an S-IPS panel — 8-bit color, and true 16.7m colors without dithering.)

Tail between my legs, battered and bruised, Beck and I took the two Samsungs back to BestBuy for return. Surprisingly, they gave us no guff about returning them, and I didn’t have to get into a philosophical discussion of the religion behind various LCD panels. And, no restocking fee, which I was fully expecting to be asked for.

However, that leaves me back at the smaller screen real estate, but I think that’s a problem I can schluff off until after the first of the year. No reason to rush, and it appears that I have a good deal more research to accomplish! 🙂

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

It’s Alive!

After 10 hours of data wending its way across the wire from Doc Oc to the new Seagate half-TB, I was ready to try out the new catalog and files on my MacBook. With two machines, it made testing this really easy — try it on the laptop first, fix any catalog problems, and then try it on the Octoputer.

After copying the images, and copying the catalog, I plugged the drive up to the laptop, and found that the catalog was disconnected from the images. I had to point the catalog to the images, but after that, everything was cool.

Shut down LR on the MacBook, move the drive to Doc Oc, and all is well there too. Overall, a very easy operation. I still have some scripting to do to automatically back the thing up when it’s docked at Doc Oc’s, but that shouldn’t be a big deal.

This opens the door to two other portable drive based projects — one for iTunes, as it sure would be nice to have that with me when travelling, and another for my scanning projects. Those I’d like to turn into another LR catalog, making it especially easy to carry that stuff around to relatives to get the skinny on the images.

It’s definitely a new world for me! Now, if Apple would just release a video card for the MacPro that’ll run their new 24″ LED monitor…..

Apple Existence, Photography

New Gear: Seagate FreeAgent|Go 500GB External Hard Drive

Every now and then, I go through a little panic attack as I see all the hardware around the digital darkroom, and I begin to ponder simplifying my digital world. Ultimately, I have a ton of storage needed (easily 2-3TB, including hot backups) for my photos, videos and other digital artifacts, but not that much processor power needed for my normal work, despite having a mongo big octocore beastie under the desk.

So with the new MacBook Pros having been released a few weeks ago, my brain yet again started spinning on shrinking my technological footprint. However, my stalwart partner in crime remained the voice of reason, and talked me off the Luddite ledge.

Still, there are some real good reasons to be down to one machine — at work, it’s what we call “a single version of the truth.” In other words, there’s only one place with my e-mail, master photo library, etc. With the big machine at home, and my MacBook on the road, it’s hard to keep a single version of the truth. I really banged into this when we were on the road in June as I tried to get my e-mail while letting my big machine get it too. A single version of the truth is a compelling concept for me.

Alas, with the permission of my CFO in hand to go forth and simplify, but the suggestion of said CFO that she knows me better than I do, and that I might just rue the loss of my eight-core beauty, I kept the concept of one version of the truth, but decided to tackle it differently. Enter the new purchase tonight.

So here’s the concept, strictly for the photo library. (I’ll tackle the e-mail problem another day.) Get an external drive, export my master library and LightRoom catalog to the drive, and use that copy as the master between Doc Oc and The-Little-MacBook-That-Could. Backups of that data would happen automatically whenever the drive is connected to Doc Oc overnight, and be stored in Doc, which is the copy that Becky accesses from her machine.

So, I have the hardware now, and only have to work through the conversion process. However, I do have one concern…. speed. With the little laptop drive inside the FreeAgent, and connected at USB 2.0 speeds, I could see where there might be a potential bottleneck. However, it’s rare that I do massive big things to the catalog, and LightRoom 2 performs pretty well, so that might be ok.

Stay tuned as I build out this little experiment of technological terror….

Photography

Fall Is Here

Darla and I took today and ran around, just enjoying the nice weather and beautiful colors fall has given us. We took the Big Green Jeep and headed toward Eureka for some breakfast and roaming through antique shops.

I enjoy running around in the antique shops, looking at all the old stuff. Today, I saw all kinds of old cameras, which was pretty cool. I really dig seeing the old hardware, and keep thinking that one of these days, I’ll put some up on the walls of my office.

However, I kinda got philosophical as I passed by dozens and dozens of family portraits and old yearbooks. One of my big pushes has been preserving family history, and it struck me that there was a ton of history being lost, one antique store at a time. Even if you were to pick up every old family photo out there, there’s no good way to tie those to anyone in particular. At least with the yearbooks, you’d have some idea of who the folks were. However, I suspect a lot of yearbooks fall off the edge of the planet before any preservation is done… garage sales, estate sales, trash bins.

I made a dent in some of that loss this week by scanning my old junior high yearbooks (posted on the Central High site I run). Got a few raves from my old classmates over that, and they have challenged me to scan our old school newspapers from high school. I think that’ll be the next project….

Photography

Signs of the Times

I haven’t done very many craft shows this fall. Dunno if it’s my energy level, or just not enough time, but I haven’t had the excitement about getting out there this fall. However, there’s a couple that I always try to do — they’re tried and true, and always bring me some business, along with giving me the chance to talk about my images. That alone’s worth the price of admission sometimes!

Today was the show over in Belleville, and I usually get a fair amount of traffic, and a fair number of sales. Today though… nothing. Not a single sale. It’s the first time I’ve been skunked at any of these shows.

I knew times were tough, and I changed what I brought with me to cater to that — smaller pieces, all unframed, with lower prices than I’ve typically run, and yet still…. nothing sold! It wasn’t just me either. The other vendors had the same problem. There just weren’t very many customers through the door, despite a lot of good advertising by the organizer.

I’m beginning to wonder if it would make more sense for me to focus on the gallery (I badly need to get new material up there), my web site (badly needs work), and some of the bigger juried shows in town. Those shows still seem to be drawing, as does the gallery, so those would seem to be some good points of focus, as opposed to schlepping my wares across a 50-mile radius of the house. Even if I sell one or two items at those little shows, I’ve still got to think about the gas, effort and time involved in doing them. If the sales aren’t there to make the event worthwhile, then I need to rethink where my focus is.

Man, I’ll be glad to see the economy turn around!

Geek-Speak, Photography

Backups

One of the things that most of my photographer buddies know is that I’m a freak about backup copies of my work. My work is my work, and my work is my life’s blood. To protect that, I am freaky about making sure I have abundant copies.

My primary working copy sits on a 1GB spindle. I have a backup of that work that sits on a separate spindle. I have another copy on DVD. And then I have another copy on a different brand of DVD, to help insure against early disc rot.

Scott Kelby has written a piece about backup strategies (in general) and his backup strategy. His strategy works for him, and features a piece of gear that I’ve been lusting over — a Drobo. That’s not what forced the muse through my fingers tonight though.

The thing that caused a pause for me was Scott writing about using a USB jumpdrive for backups of his shooting sessions for his clients. I’ve been pondering that concept — it’s relatively cheap, physically durable, and extremely small. The thing that’s made me question this is the durability of the data on the drive. If it doesn’t have a lifespan at least as long as DVD media, then I’m not sure how much it buys me.

The other thing that has me on the fence with this move is the cost to go back and store my old stuff. I think I’m in the 300GB range for my digital imagery since 2001, and that doesn’t even capture my scans of old film and video conversions from old VCR tapes. We’re talking a bunch of drives!

I wonder if part of the storage strategy with jumpdrives would be to, once a year or so, engage in a “refresh day”. This would involve copying all the data from each drive to a harddrive, and then back to the jumpdrive from which it came. This would freshen the storage, but I have no idea if that’s even needed with the technology jumpdrives are based on.

Just some more random ponderin’……

Geek-Speak, Photography

Adobe, CS4, CS4E and 64 Shiny Glorious Bits

This week was full of announcements about the forthcoming Adobe Creative Suite releases. To me, the important part of that gaggle o’ code is Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended (CS4E). I picked up CS3E less than a year ago, taking advantage of an upgrade path from CS2 to CS3E for a premium cost over an CS2 to CS3 upgrade. More on that later.

With the announcements came the confirmation that CS4/CS4E on the Mac platform will still only be 32-bit. I lamented about this a while ago, but it’s worth mentioning again that I’m not happy about being boxed in to only 4GB of addressable memory space. Nothing I’m doing right now is using anything beyond a GB of RAM, so it’s not the end of the world… yet. Adobe is dismissing this as a non-issue, as they measure the impact with an eye toward speed. Speed is great, and I want all of that I can get, but I also want to have wide, green pastures available to me, even if I don’t use it all. 64 bits of addressing would definitely help.

The other interesting thing about the new Photoshop is utilization of hardware acceleration on the graphics card for a variety of typical tasks. However, it kinda reads that the Nvidia cards (GeForce and Quadro) are the favored cards. I’m still trying to see if there’s any benefit from my stock ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT card. To upgrade the video card, Apple sells the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT (512MB) for close to $300; a Quadro is easily twice that. Unless my card will drag some love out of Adobe, I’m probably outta luck on getting any benefit from this upgrade.

This release is the first upgrade to the CS Extended environment, and I expected to see a similar price for CS3E to CS4E as there is from CS3 to CS4. That ain’t the case. CS3 to CS4 is $199, but the move to CS4E from CS, CS2, CS3 or CS3E is $349! I already paid that version change tax once, and it’s ludicrous of Adobe to expect that same path to be paved in my gold twice, especially when there’s not that much benefit in the CS Extended versions for me… for now.

With the lack of functional benefit for me, the appearance that the hardware accelerator may pass me by, the lack of 64-bit love, and the crazy upgrade policy, I believe I’ll end up waiting for CS5E, and see if the pot’s a bit sweeter.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak, Photography

Printing, Crossing the Streams, and How I Spent the Last Three Weeks

As I’ve begun playing with printing more and more, some of my fellow photographers at the office have asked me to begin printing for them. They’ve been pleased, I’ve been pleased, and I’ve learned a bunch from the experience. The latest challenge was stymieing me — how to get good prints on Epson Premium Canvas Matte paper?

After a boatload of permutations through print driver settings on the Apple side, I picked up Windows XP and VMWare Fusion in an attempt to print my work through the Windows print drivers. And that, fair readers, seems to have hit the mark.

I printed comparison runs using identical print settings in Lightroom on XP and Lightroom on Leopard, and there were definitely differences — major differences — in how the driver forced ink through my trusty R1800. With that knowledge in mind, I set down today to try printing the three canvas works ahead of me.

After making a custom paper size (one of the images is a bit oversized at 13″ x 25″), I started cooking canvas with what I’d learned. After all three were on the planks, drying, I took a good look at them, and believe I’ve found my printing path — do the work in Photoshop or Lightroom on Leopard, and them do the printing through Lightroom on XP.

Convoluted? Yup. But the results seem to be worth it!

Photography

Send Me to the Tetons!

The Apple Hot News newsfeed made mention of a photo contest run by Aperture Nature Photography Workshops. The prize package is pretty amazing, including some software, some hardware, and a (mostly) expense-paid trip to the Tetons in late September for some one-on-one time with a pro photographer, and some up-close-and-personal training on Apple’s Aperture.

So, if you get a hankering to click on something, take a click through the link on the left, and pop a vote in my direction. Thanks!