dispatches

Still bipolar

I have passed through the trauma of the digital conversion, and sometimes I take the stance of the converted zealot. What I like about digital is the greater risks I can take visually. With no per-unit cost (only a considerable cost of admission), I can whack away at a situation until I feel it's done, and more, through to something new I would never have allowed myself to visually investigate before. I take a lot more photographs. I take a lot more bad ones. But, in that vat of new imagery are hints and suggestions, evidence of where I will grow as a photographer.

But today I am reminded of what I don’t like about digital. This latest assignment, for a specialty magazine for lumberyards (I drove down to Salem, Oregon and back this week), is illustrative. Previously, I would have sorted the slides, thrown out the bad ones, and FedExed the rest. With a bill. It would take me an hour, maybe two. I’d be done. Now, I have probably a full day ahead of me, in addition to the hour and a half I was able to steal for the task today. Assessing images is harder on a screen. Processing the RAW files takes time and judgement of a sort I still lack some confidence in. This job is not work that is my creative zenith, and thus it feels like a chore. And there are so many more photos to sort through than there would have been with film.

Busted

I had just had my coffee at Peet’s (marketing identity--"We’re Not Starbucks!"), and was wandering the premises to see if there were any interesting photos to be found. They had an upstairs, and a balcony view. Balconies are good. I like the skewed perspective they can offer. I fired off an initial shot to see if there was anything worthwhile, but I wasn’t seeing anything.

The manager down below heard the camera (why is the MarkII so loud? Why does it sound like a motor drive advancing film?). "Excuse me. You can’t take pictures in here. It’s corporate policy." I played dumb and nice ("Oops, busted!" I replied), said I was just shooting some stock shots of Fremont, assured her I wasn’t a corporate spy ("…especially any photos of our logos or our prices…" she warned) and apologized for her having to confront me. We both had smiles on, mostly to cover up the tension we both felt about the encounter.

I tend to ask for forgiveness rather than for permission. The cost is an occasional encounter like this one.

My usual rant

I’m on my publication quality rant again, after getting the latest Lindblad Expeditions catalog. The ubiquity of digital, without a corresponding expertise on image quality, is showing up as a deterioration in the way photographs look in print.

This is the cover photo for the primary marketing piece of a major eco-tourism cruise line. You’d think they’d want to put their best foot forward. My first take was, this is an underexposed, over-corrected and over-sharpened image. There are halos around the water drops, and the shadows are full of noise and are nearly posterized. I have seen worse from Lindblad, where they’ve run full page shots of their ship enlarged from an overcompressed, tiny jpg, and all you see are nasty artifacts. The problems with this photo are subtler, but still.

The deeper issue is that no one is minding the store for image quality anymore. It’s a rant I’ve carried on previously here. It used to be that film had to pass through a bottleneck--the pre-press process--before becoming a printing plate for reproduction. Expert hands drum-scanned a piece of film and corrected the file to fit the limitations of the CMYK printing process.

There is no expert at the helm anymore. Photographers, who may or may not know what they’re doing, hand off a file to a designer, who may or may not understand color management, who hands it off to a printer who then has to clean up the mess, if they care enough. A given piece will have multiple photographs from many sources, all worked to different standards. I don’t think I’d want to be a designer in today’s environment. We used to have a common understanding of the process required to get from film to print. Now, everyone had their own opinion on the best way to proceed. There is no consensus.

Google status

If you Google "broken clavicle bike accident," my site turns up as number one. I suppose it is a big deal to have a top listed Google rating (the same thing happens if you Google "contra dance photography"), but I’m not trying to sell anything. I posted my report back in 1998, which in Internet terms means I am deep in the sedimentary structure now. I get about an email a week from someone who has broken themselves falling off a bike, and wants advice.

You can read all the gory details on my website: http://www.dougplummer.com/accident/accident.html. I keep the page up, and assiduously answer these emails, as a kind of public service. I wish I had had the ability to ask someone what to do when it happened to me. But, I imagine my knowledge is starting to get out of date. It certainly is for "Australia Travel Tips," (I show up as #6 in Google), as that posting dates from 1997. But I still get regular emails from people wanting to know what to do and where to go in Australia.

A different problem

Part 2 of the story. My back-up disk is fine. It’s my DVD drive that is the problem.

My computer ground away for 8 hours while the recovery software tried its best to read the missing sectors. I gave up and downloaded another program that seemed to work faster. However, the files it recovered were not readable in Photoshop.

Then I tried the bad disk in the laptop. Everything worked fine. I tried Robin’s computer. No problem.

You can bet I have a new DVD burner now—a Memorex. The HP 230i is on the obsolete-decrepit hardware pile. And the files are copied over onto a hard drive for redundancy.

Yet another problem

So, here’s yet another problem we didn’t use to have.

I decided to make this a digital housecleaning day, and put to use a hard drive from this stack of 80gb drives I bought for backup. My first priority was to gather my assignment work and duplicate that.

My Whitman College RAW files are backed up solely on DVDs. I started to copy the first disk onto a hard drive, only to encounter a series of copy errors, and something called a "cyclic redundancy check." I Googled the term and found out I was in trouble.

Apparently I have a DVD with some bad sectors. I first tried cleaning the disk, which didn’t make a difference. Google led me to a link to a program called CD Check, which can evaluate and recover damaged data on a CD or DVD disk. I understand very little of the jargon in the instructions—details on "Hash files" and the like. But there’s a button labelled "Recover," and that’s good enough for me. It’s running now and has found about a hundred bad files to fix. It looks like it will take over 4 hours to process the disk.

The cause of this trouble could be that the drive I am using to read my DVD is a replacement for the one I used to burn it in the first place. Whatever the cause, it makes me now mistrust my entire DVD archive.

More on sensor cleaning

A great perspective on sensor cleaning on Peteri’s Pontifications. My favorite part of it is how to minimize the dust in the immediate surroundings so that you don’t just blow more onto the sensor. His suggestion: naked with a shower cap.

I wonder what my clients will think?