dispatches

What Digital Costs

My mate is very interested in what the digital transition has cost me (us) in monetary terms (never mind the emotional toll the transition has extracted). I imagine a lot of other people are too. I went over the books since I started shooting digital and came up with some numbers.

The total outlay for the last 9 months: around $27,000.

The biggest outlay has been for cameras, lenses and accessories: $16,000. I’ve spent over $1,000 on CF cards alone. I bought a Canon 20D in December and three lenses in short succession. Six months later I got the Canon 1Ds Mark II body, which alone cost $8000, pre tax.

Computer hardware comes second: $7,100. I got a laptop (Fujitsu Lifebook), a 19" Lacie CRT monitor, a second LCD monitor and a 2 screen video card, calibration hardware, a major upgrade on the desktop (more memory, a 300gb mirrored RAID array and hot-swap bays), and lots and lots of hard drives for back-up. I also added a couple of printers, an Epson 4000 and a Epson 200 (for printing on CD’s).

Feeding that printer is responsible for the bulk of the $1,400 I’ve spend on supplies ($500 alone for a replacement inkset for the 4000), but it also includes blank CDs and DVDs for which I seem to have an insatiable appetite.

Instruction has cost me close to $1,200, not counting travel. I did one out of town workshop (with Barry Haynes), and any local one that came through. Hundreds of dollars has gone for various books (I recommend anything by Bruce Fraser). Education is the one area I expect to spend a lot more on in the next year. It’s never-ending—I seem to only learn how much more I don’t know.

Software upgrades (two Photoshops, and various other necessities—Noise Ninja, Photo Mechanic) have run about $600. Repairs have run about the same—I had a very expensive splash of water on my laptop earlier this year. Sensor cleaning costs me $50-$100 a month.

Remember that I am operating on a professional level, and I am getting by fairly cheaply at that. I know colleagues who have invested 3 or 4 fold what I have. Your mileage may vary, but the switch to digital is not cheap, and the ongoing expenses exceed analog. Plus, all this hardware will be obsolete in a couple of years.

Bad Mac!

Is this passive-aggressive Mac behavior toward Windows or what?

The wonderful aspect of digital (if you like your art director) is that you can look at the shot as you’re shooting it, on the laptop, and decide what works. And give them the take, right then and there.

I set my camera on RAW+jpg capture (so that I wouldn’t have to run a long conversion action in Photoshop), renamed the files to my convention (date_subject_sequence), and burned a CD of the jpgs. The art director had the results of the shoot within minutes. She’d pick out the best one, and I’d deliver a final file from the RAW capture.

But her Mac renamed all the files when she copied my CD. Why? Out of spite? We spent many emails and phone calls trying to figure out which photo was which. Can anyone explain to me how 050822_GHC_74.jpg turned into 050_0042.jpg?

Migration

There seem to be an inordinate number of Robins about these days. I saw scads of them on my bike ride yesterday, and a group foraged underneath the Douglas Fir outside Elly’s window during dinner last night. It is undoubtedly a migratory wave. Fall migration is in full swing, and reading the Tweeters posts every day makes me excited about getting out there to see it. I am trying to clear my calendar for a multi-day trip next week just to bird.

In the meantime I’ve been making forays down to Montlake Fill, about a mile from my house, an old landfill behind the University of Washington that is now one of the most important bird habitats in the city. In the main pond on Monday was a little flock of Least Sandpipers. I had read a Tweeters post of a Stilt Sandpiper, a bird I had not seen in some years. There is an unusual wave of them passing through the region right now—typically they migrate through the center of the continent. We ran into another birder there, who, after we moved on, waved us back from across the meadow. Next to the rediscovered Stilt was another nice bird, a Solitary Sandpiper.

There’s a new hummingbird at the feeder, a male Anna’s in mid molt and looking ratty. The resident hummers have left and the winter contigent won’t be in for another month, so this one is a migrant filling up at our tank. He’s been around for two days. A large flock of House Finches empties the feeders every day now—they’ve been around only for the past week or so. There is a wonderful sense of change in the air, and the birds are a great window into it.

Climate Change

My apples are falling off and I don’t know why. It seems to be another manifestation of this weird weather year. Normally it is about time for the first of the Asian pears to ripen, and three weeks after that the apples start to come in. But for the past month they have been dropping off the tree. About two-thirds of my crop is rotting on the ground. They look red and fully ripe, but if you bite into one it is still tart and undeveloped. They are all smaller than normal too. I think they are reacting to our hot summer the way I would in their position—it’s too hard to hold on, I’ll just fall off and die now.

It has been a strange year all around for the garden. Everything bloomed weeks before normal. Perhaps it’s a new climate regime, and this is what it will be like from now on. The winter was sunny and dry, with the lowest snowpack in recorded history. Then the spring was cool and wet, which is why I think my plum tree has no fruit this year. There was nothing flying around to pollinate the flowers at the crucial time. A friend’s peach tree shows the same problem. Since June it's been a brutal summer of mid 80’s to lower 90’s and unrelenting sun. I know I’m not getting any sympathy from you there on the East Coast, but hey, we don’t do air conditioning out here. Our climate is perfect without it. Or, it used to be.

I remember a time when our summers were cool and comfortable. An 80 degree day was a rarity. Summer would arrive about 3 in the afternoon when the marine clouds burned off. This year has been a season of unmitigated sun and heat, and the garden blooms have been several weeks advanced the entire season. It’s as if we shifted south by several hundred miles, and we now have the climate of Oregon.

Today was a blessed break in the weather. The onshore flow pushed the blanket of clouds to the Cascades, and I went for a 25 mile bike ride in pleasant low 60’s damp air. Tomorrow it gets better—it’s supposed to rain. This is why I live here. For the cloud layer.

Digital's Achilles' Heel

There is no way to keep a sensor clean, nor is there a way to safely clean a sensor. That is the conclusion I have reached, after trying all methods. There are many weak links in achieving quality from capture to fulfillment; the fragile state of the pristine sensor surface may by the weakest.

The word in various forums led me to think that Visible Dust’s sensor brush might be the safest and most effective method. Theirs is a highly refined nylon brush that is charged with a blast of air (though Peteri Sulonen thinks they’ve overhyped their technology and scaring people into buying overpriced brushes, and that a properly seasoned artist's brush is just as good). The soft bristles prevent damage to the sensor cover, and the charge attracts the dust particles. When my brushes arrived, I gave them a test run.

The first look after a cleaning showed a huge, scary goober in the corner. Where did that come from? Subsequent brushes failed to budge it, and I started getting scared. Did I just scratch my sensor? I tried a Speckgrabber, another allegedly safe sensor cleaner, and all I saw was the warbly-surface of some speck-grabber goo on the sensor surface, and the immovable goober. Eyee!

My other tool is a sensor swab from Fargo Enterprises using a swab and Methonol, which they claim is the most effective method in the world.. The Visible Dust site warns one of the deadly dangers of using methonol to clean your sensor. It has scared me off of using their swabs. If there is one element in common in the available sensor cleaning tools, it is their fervent belief in their superiority over all other methods. They are like fundamentalist sects in this regard.

I gave up. I took my camera into Cameratechs for another $40 cleaning. Bill says, "Oh, the big stuff is no problem. It’s the little dust that comes back and back, and that you have to make multiple passes to get." He peers into a microscope for an hour or more, and uses a formula with Windex as a key ingredient ("It’s what the Canon techs use," he claims).

I’ve been scared off of anything except the Canon-approved blower. And I’ll be making the trek to Ballard at least monthly for the forseeable future.

Ingesting

  I shot a wedding yesterday, and it seemed like a good opportunity to test ingesting mechanisms. Not at the wedding, of course; I waited until I was in the privacy of my own home.

What I’m talking about is getting images from my flash cards to my computer. The verb of choice for this process now seems to be "ingest." The device in question is a card reader.

I have a USB SanDisk reader for my desktop, and it’s pretty fast. A 2gb card takes about 6 minutes to fully ingested into the machine (whereupon I will digest the files in Photoshop and excrete them to a printer or a DVD, where I trust the work will not look like, well, a bad metaphor.)

When I bought my laptop I got a reader that would fit into a PC card slot. I quickly realized that the transfer rate was far slower than USB. So when I would travel I’d pack the card reader from my desk and have one more thing to plug in. My camera store, Glazers, had a SanDisk PC card reader that I was told would be faster, so I got one; it wasn’t.

Somewhere I came across word of the Delkins 32 bit CF card reader and got one of those. It cost 4 times what my SanDisk cost (about $80), but it seemed a lot faster, and I’ve been using it exclusively for my laptop since. From this wedding I had a stack of full cards, so I put all my ingesting devices to the test. I measured the various readers on my laptop for the time required to ingest RAW images from a full 2gb SanDisk Extreme III card into Photo Mechanic.

The results:

• SanDisk USB card reader: 8:15 minutes
• Delkins 32 bit PCMCIA card reader: 8:30 minutes
• SanDisk PCMCIA card reader: 25 minutes

The Delkins is only marginally slower than USB, but much more convenient. Just don’t even think of using a 16 bit reader, unless you have a long novel to finish during the download.

Lost: Train of Thought

Perhaps another manifestation of the 65^th Street ley line, I saw this flyer outside of East-West Bookstore this morning. Performance art? Manic rant off meds?

LOST:
Train of thought

Got derailed when someone bummed a cigarette.
Would like to get back on course.
I don’t remember where I was going,
But among the debris of my lost thought process I found
The following words:
Anabiosis
Theomania
Gorgon
Tin-mittens
These words may be remnants of passengers,
Or they may be critical components of the train itself.
If anyone else has caught my train,
Would you be so kind as to send it my way.

Contact: addtrain@gmail.com

Another Rare Bird Chase

The waitress brought me my crab cakes, setting them next to my binoculars. I asked her, "What do you think of the crowd out there?" Do they ever come in to eat?"

"No, they don’t come in much. The first day, there was a big bunch of them parked, and I thought it’d be real busy. But they were all looking for that bird. We were trying to remember what it’s called. A Stemp or something?"

That would be a Red-necked Stint. It’s an Asiatic species that ought to be on its way to New Zealand. This bird made a really wrong turn somewhere, and ended up in the tidal bay across from the 3 Crabs Restaurant near Sequim. It is the first time the species has ever been seen in Washington State.

When I arrived with Elly (my mother-in-law), there were a half dozen spotting scopes and several expensive Canon camera lenses pointed to the water. The bird has been around for nearly a week. It arrives at the same time on the incoming tide to the same area of the bay, hanging around the Canada Geese. But not today.

Tourists would approach the group. "What are you looking at?" "We’re waiting for a rare bird," someone would explain, as though that would make us look sensible or something. Two women I talked to were from Kansas: "We were wandering sorta north and west, and here we are." "From Kansas?" "Oh no, we flew into Seattle. Is that the ocean?" Another woman was from Minnesota, and knew all about the Great Gray Owl invasion there last winter, though she never went to look for them herself.

I went into have lunch with Elly, who was parked at a window table with a view of the proceedings. She had a glass of champagne and her open journal and was quite content. After the meal I left her to her writing and joined the wait for the bird.

The woman next to me had wanted to come several days before, "but my wedding anniversary got in the way." The bird was not showing, and she seemed to be again regretting her priorities. Everyone out here appeared to know each other—it was something of the A-list of Northwest birders. While conversing we scanned every flock of peeps that flew by, looking for one that might be different.

The woman was getting restless. "Maybe we should check the pond again." I noticed that another group of birders, 10 yards down the beach, were suddenly intent, looking through their scopes all in the same direction. Someone ran down to check. Thumbs up: they had it.

It took me several minutes to locate the bird. "Look just to the left of the Killdeer," someone suggested. I saw several Western Sandpipers beyond the geese, and then one that looked different. A heavier coloration on its breast. If I imagined hard, it could be red. The other sandpipers chased it away. On my own, I never could have called this bird. At best, I would have labelled it a Pectoral Sandpiper. I helped someone else locate the bird, then looked through my neighbor’s scope, a Swarovski. I had instant scope lust. The scene was enormously brighter, and the bird had an unmistakable red wash on its throat and breast. I could see that it had a slightly shorter bill too than it ought to for its build. These were subtle field marks that were beyond my birding skill to find without help. Nonetheless, I was happy.

Elly noticed the change in demeanor of the group, and came out. I found the bird in the scope for her, and for some other civilians milling around. I packed the gear, feeling fulfilled at the tick on my list.

Lens Testing

I am in the middle of another round of lens testing. I did this once before when I got my 20D, wanting to know how my lenses (all designed for film) held up against a digital sensor. My conclusions then—every lens is sharp at f/8, and some lenses are better than others.

There are differences between shooting with the Canon 1Ds Mark II and the Canon 20D. The Mark II is less forgiving. It’s akin to switching from 35mm to medium format—with all that additional film area, there’s more that can go wrong. I have less depth of field and so my focus has to be spot on. The camera is much heavier, and therefore harder to hold still. I’m on a tripod more often. What I wanted to know is, with the increased sensor size, is there an accompanying falloff in sharpness on the edges and in vingnetting?

I have three workhorse lenses for most of my shooting: a 17-35mm f/2.8, a 28-135mm IS f4.5-5.6, and a 70-200mm f/4. I have some primes as well, a fisheye 15mm, two 50mm, an 85mm, and a 400 f/5.6. What I don’t have for the Mark II are lenses designed for a digital camera, like the 10-22mm and the 17-85mm for the 20D. Both those lenses are outstanding performers, and are the sharpest lenses wide open that I own.

Here are the results.

17-35mm f/2.8. For sharpness, this lens is a pretty good performer throughout the range. Between 5.6 and 16 it is a stellar lens. It’s actually a little sharper 17mm at f/5.6 than at 35mm. The issue with this lens, as with all wide angle lenses, is vingnetting. At 2.8 at 17mm, it’s 2 ½ stops darker at the corners. In this regard it’s the worst performing lens I own.

28-135mm IS f/4.5-5.6. This lens is a better performer wide. Center sharpness is great wide open (though edge sharpness is in the toilet). Vingnetting is pretty bad wide open, but stablizes at f/8. At 135mm the sharpness edged into "Excellent" only at f/8.

The 70-200mm f/4 is a lens with great contrast, which can mean more than resolution in the perception of sharpness. Again, it is sharper at the wide end than fully extended, but is a good performer up to f/16. Chromatic abberation and vingnetting are there, but not horrible.

My primes however—these are good lenses. My 85mm f/1.8 is the sharpest lens I own. Iit’s a bit iffy at 1.8 and 2, but by f/5.6 it’s sharp, all the way through f/16. I love this lens.

The other great performer is my 400mm f/5.6. Wide open it’s fantastic, which is great to know about a long lens. It’s sharp even with a 1.4 extender—I couldn’t detect any difference with or without. Its only bad spots are f/22 and f/32, which is to be expected.

There is an area where zooms perform notoriously poorly: chromatic abberation. As a compensation, there are sliders in the Adobe RAW converter to fix the Red/Cyan and the Yellow/Blue channels, and you have to use them. The effect does not change over apertures, fortunately, but it does vary according to focal length on a zoom. The extreme example is my 17-35mm. At 17mm I require a +60 correction in the B/Y slider. At 35mm I need a –25 in the R/C. All the zooms have this problem. My prime stars on the other hand, the 85mm and 400mm, require no correction at all.

The next test: how well does the Image Stablizer work, really? And how fast can I really go on my ISO settings?