My LX3 and a Tumblr Mashup

I indulged in a little retail therapy today,  a purely  selfless gesture to help the economy and stimulate growth in the retail sector.   I splurged, quite happily after all the titilation on TWIP and DPReview about the camera and I’ve been carrying it with me everywhere I go.  This has changed the way I interact with photography, sure the camera will never be able to do what my big heavy dSLR can, but I am able to take so many more photos and have it on hand when the light happens.  Amazing sunset arriving late last night at the train station, snap!; arriving early at work this morning and taking a stroll down to the Yarra river, snap! it really is fantastic.

I have also started a mashup via my Tumblr account of this website, my Twitter account, my photosharing site on Ipernity and other random trivia I find interesting.  If this sounds like a fun (ish) ride then you can link up to the rss feed over at http://stuartforsyth.tumblr.com/

I’ve been a little on the scarce side, kinda like a panda bear in a bamboo plantation, which had to do with me going through all the merriment and joviality of moving house – I hope that phase has now passed and I can get on with the more important and asthetically pleasing aspects of my life.

Zen and the Art of Workflow Maintenance

I have received a number of emails asking how I manage the workflow of images from my camera to my library and how I go about protecting and backing up my photos. With this post I hope to share some of the tips (and pitfalls) I’ve discovered in trying to simplify, reflect, readjust and further simplify the way I manage my images.

First things first and this is the most important point before we continue; There is no right or wrong process when it comes to workflow! Every photographer approaches their workflow in a way which makes sense to the type of shooting they do and their own personal preferences. TWIP podcasts #62 and #63 on workflow illustrate how diverse each of the podcast members’ workflows are. I continually seek to refactor my workflow, looking for the simplest set of processes which meet the requirements I have for my images.

Antoine de Saint-Exuper once said:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

This is my ideal, thus this post encompasses a snapshot in time and, if I work hard and keep looking to simplify and improve further, it probably won’t be relevant in a month’s time – it will have changed into something which works better for me.

Setting the Scene

Initially I recommend getting a feel for what resources you have at your disposal. Do you have any external hard drives or USB memory keys lying about. What computer do you use? How many photographs and what type of photography are we talking about; are they family snaps or client’s wedding portfolios?

If you have a lot of photographs like I do then you probably have some of them on your primary computer and the rest floating around in some sort of disconnected storage; an external disk, a set of DVDs or some file host on the Internet. Questions I’d ask here are: Does your primary photo management software (be it iPhoto, Photoshop Elements, Picasa, Aperture or Lightroom) know where all the photos are? Are offline files referenced properly and can you search for information associated with them?

Do you have some way of keeping the important photos offsite? What if, God forbid, the house burns down or someone nicks your hardware in the middle of the night?

Do you have some sort of archival strategy in place? In 10 or 20 years time will those scratched DVDs in the drawer still work?

Below is a diagram of my hardware and storage situation. It may seem very complicated at first glance but it is a breeze to set up and is automated to the point where I can forget about it and get on with the business of taking pictures. I will talk through aspects of the diagram later in this post.

Getting my Photos off the Camera

This is the easiest part of the process. I pop my card into a reader and plug it into my computer. Aperture opens and asks where I want to save my files. I import all new files into the Aperture library. On import Aperture renames the files to reflect the date and time the image was taken and applies an import preset which stamps the files with basic metadata such as Copyright information.

Keywording

This is the next task I perform and I have it first because for me it is the most important way to find information about my photos and search across years of archives. It was the most neglected aspect of my workflow for a long time and the sweat and effort to keyword 4 years worth of photos taught me the valuable lesson ‘keyword on import’. If there are any recognisable events in the photos I can quickly bundle them up in a selection and use the Aperture album creation hotkey to turn the selection into an album to which I can refer later.

First Pass gut feel

 Next comes a quick pass over my import. I go into full screen mode and quickly move through the photos not paying too much attention to the details. I trust my gut feel here enough to know if the composition is good or bad. In Aperture I flag photos I want to mark as picks with a 4 star rating. Lightroom users can do the same or use the ‘flag as pick’ option to do the same. I prefer the star rating because the graduation means something to me which we’ll get to later.

At this point I can leave the process and carry on with it later if I like. I have my photos in a managed environment. They are keyworded, in albums as required and I have identified the couple which are important to me.

 I also usually click the button to backup my vault at this point. The vault backup contains my library (keywords, metadata, adjustments, file library and any managed files). As this process is a synchronisation rather than a full backup every time it is usually really quick and updates only the files/information which has changed.

Adjustments: Time to whip out the Loupe

At some point I’ll want to take a closer look at the technical aspects of the photos. I usually go through my picks with the loupe looking at the finer details and making minor adjustments to contrast, sharpness and exposure as required. Photos which I want to retain as picks but need more serious adjustments I will rate as 3 stars and then attend to them in a later editing session. The photos I will use for my portfolio I will rate as 5 stars. The rating system allows me very quickly to move between all the photos that need work (3), are part of the pool of picks (4) or are my very best shots which will make it into books or onto walls (5). The majority of my Online photos (Flickr, Ipernity etc.. ) come from my 4 star pool. At any point if you feel the photo doesn’t make the grade you can simply remove the star rating.

Second pass gut feel

As this step can happen at any time I recommend you leave a bit of time between your import and adjustments and the second pass on your non picks. In this workflow you will be working only with your picks for most of the time seeing the non-picks only when you look at the contents of an album for example. It is usually a good idea to take a little time at a later date, sit down and browse through photos you felt didn’t make the grade. I am constantly surprised by the little gems I find which then finally get to make it as a pick.

Non picks become referenced files, picks become managed

Photos I’ve selected not to be picks leave my laptop hard disk – there really is little point in them eating up my precious free space. In Aperture you can easily move files around using the ‘Manage referenced masters’ option. Select a group of pictures and put them on a drive of your choosing – in my case above my 1 terabyte drive. The files are still referenced by Aperture and you can still browse and search on the files. If I need to use any old files such as a group of bracketed photos for a HDR image then the ‘Consolidate masters’ option sucks the files back into my library (alternatively I can plug back into the big drive and export the masters to a local folder).

I have set up a couple of smart folders which make the identification of files that need to move easier:

• identify files to reference: looks at any file which has not been rated and exists on the local volume
• identify files to consolidate: looks at any file which has a rating > 3 and exists as a referenced master. This is useful in bringing any photo identified as a pick in the second guess gut feel back into my library.

So that’s really it, a simple set of steps which have ensure I have a set of photos sorted into albums and picks which are easy to browse and search on and are easy to backup.

Make sure your photos walk out the door

The last point I want to make is ensure you have some sort of offsite backup available. You can have the fanciest systems, terabytes of storage, a wall of Drobos but putting all your images in one place leaves them vulnerable to loss through natural disaster or theft.

I rsync (a sync command in Leopard or other UNIX based systems) my referenced photos to a seperate portable Hard drive and ensure that Aperture also keeps a vault on that disk. This disk goes everywhere with me, when I’m going out for the day it is either in my camera bag or in the cool centre console of my car. At work it lives in a bag in my desk drawer. I know that a meteorite can hit my house (in this scenario my family and pets are vacationing in Fiji) and that all my expensive computer equipment can go up in a ball of flame and I will not lose a single image. I can buy new furniture, I can build my house again brick by brick from the foundations but I cannot replace my wedding photos, or the pictures of my son or my portfolio.

Cloud Backup

 Call it simple paranoia but my portfolio photos are very important to me and represent a tangible emotional and dollar investment. These photos are usually converted to DNG as my long term archival file format of choice and a copy of the photo with keywords and adjustments are then saved as a full size JPEG. These files are exported to a local backup folder where a little piece of software picks them up and uploads them to secure cloud storage.

My cloud backup of choice is Jungle Disk. Jungle disk is part of Amazon.com’s S3 storage services. They allow you to create an encrypted drive using a key you provide. You can setup the software to automatically backup files from selected locations to your cloud drive. The main reason I like them as a provider is that you only pay for your files in transit (bandwidth is charged for upload and download only) and having the online drive encrypted means the files are totally safe from being viewed or stolen. I also use Jungle disk to backup my important documents putting them safely in a place where I can access them from anywhere.

Wrapping Up

I won’t hark on much more on this topic of workflow and backups, you have a good idea of one possible workflow which may work in part (or entirety) for you. I am more than happy to answer any questions on actual details of this workflow or my storage solutions; just leave your question it in the comments and I will get back to you.

Now stop worrying about backups and get out and take some photographs!

Extreme Photography: Longest Exposure & Biggest Photograph

Some people like taking things to their extremes and then adding some.  I came across these two links today which I thought would be interesting to you.

The longest exposure:

Taken of the Clifton Suspension Bridge over a 6 month period from 17 December 2007 to 21 June 2008. (source)

Then head on over to the Legacy Photo Project to see the world’s largest camera and biggest photograph.

The pinhole camera was a former fighter plane hanger, the print was a 9.62m x 33.83m black and white image.  The logistics that went into making this photograph were incredible:

• 6mm pinhole 15 feet up
• 80 liters of Rockland Liquid Light (handpainted onto the fabric)
• 1,200 pounds of fabric and rigging
• 600 gallons of black-and-white developer
• 1,200 gallons of fixer
• 114 ft x 35 ft developing tray

Awe-inspiring and well worth its spot in the Guinness book.

Wow your Camera is a Skilled Photographer!

source

I had to include this little cartoon strip because I don’t know how many times this has happened.  Someone takes a look at your photographs and comments on the camera.  In a way it would be like meeting a great playwright and complementing them on the fact that their pen writes great plays or noting that a painter’s brush was an inordinately skilled artist.

The latest in camera and gear does not make you a good photographer! 

The gear: Sure we all like to have nice gear but put a point-and-shoot in the hands of a pro and he/she will consistently deliver great photographs.  Put a D3X in the hands of a complete amateur and the photographs will be horrendous.  I still remember that my first year with an SLR produced horrible photos – I was so disappointed; here I spent the money to get a great camera and the photos were often worse than what was coming out of my point-and-click.

The eye: This is the hardest thing to quantify but the way a photographer sees and then chooses to interpret the scene is a unique quality that cannot be measured.  Even when photographers are shooting the same scenes their interpretations are often radically different.  Here is an example of some photos taken last year by a photographer friend and myself; Rob and I were shooting the same scene, often standing next to each other,  but as we’d read and interpreted the subject very differently the photographs turned out quite differently: http://www.ipernity.com/group/walk.melbourne

Next time you want to complement someone on a beautiful photograph make sure you don’t mention the camera

Pentax K2000 in White

Pentax announces the K2000 in white

I can think of an immediate target audience:

or 

Video in DSLRs … why?

This is my pet peeve at the moment, like the last couple of sips of a really good whiskey it’s a peeve worth savouring and nursing.  Let me explain why, even better and being a photographer let me explain in pictures.

1. This is a video camera.  The form factor and technology which have gone into making this technological marvel means that it is really good at shooting video.  It is light, has that nifty hand strap so it won’t crash to the floor if you suddenly need to salute someone and has a nice big fold out screen so you don’t have to watch the world go by by peering into that satanic little eye-periscope.

2. This is a digital SLR.  It excels at taking still images.  It is streamlined so that all its little nobs and buttons work most effectively in allowing a photographer to take still images.  It’s menus are supposed to be uncluttered and allow you to most effectively select whatever you require for taking still images.  Although it is a little on the pricey side the entire cost of the camera has been justified by R&D into hardware and software requirements for the [still] photographer.  [yes ... I know it's a D700 but I'm trying to make a point here!]

Right so far so good … we have two items which both excel at their core function.

3.  The following revolting metal brick is actually a steaming pile of horse manure, one which I had the misfortune to own recently before the iPhone rescued my sanity.

 

It is supposed to be a phone.  It tries really hard to be a baby computer, a camera, voice recorder, pda, music player and GPS unit.

It was incredibly pricey and failed miserably on all counts.

Get the point now?

Nikon D3X review

I am not sure there is a serious amateur or professional photographer in the world who does not know about DPReview and their excellent reviews and information on cameras and lenses.

They have recently released their review of the new 24 Megapixel full-frame Nikon flagship, the D3X.

Europe today introduced its new top-of-the-range D-SLR, the D3X. Building on the reliability, handling and durability of the award-winning D3, the D3X offers an imaging sensor with far higher resolution than its counterpart, breaking new ground in imaging quality. The all-new 24.5MP CMOS sensor makes the new camera eminently suitable for the broadest range of shooting situations, both in the studio and on location, and will be especially appreciated by uncompromising photographers in nature photography, studio work and fashion.

“This is the camera that many professional photographers have been waiting for,” said Robert Cristina, Manager Professional Products and NPS at Nikon Europe. “Just as the D3 has become the professionals’ camera of choice in sports photography, the D3X’s extremely high imaging resolution will raise the bar for commercial, fashion and stock photography. The results speak for themselves: this is without doubt our highest-quality camera to date.”

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0812/081201nikond3x.asp