dispatches

Change of environment

I have ergonomized my work environment, and it didn't cost me a fortune. Ergonomics consultant Carol Nicholson (206-383-3740) came to my house, watched me work, got out her tape measure, took photos, and told me what to change.

The big, but simple adjustments were where my monitors sat, and how high I sat. I have a dual monitor system, and I have them to the left and right of the center of my desk. Carol made me choose one as the main monitor, and centered that one in my line of sight. She moved it a lot closer to me, and lowered it.

Then she raised my chair to the point where I needed to remove the pencil drawer of my desk, and found a couple of 3-ring binders for me to use as footrests. My keyboard is now practically in my stomach. She wants me to get a mini-Mac keyboard, one without a number pad, so that my mouse will sit closer to the keyboard. The only other immediate things she wants me to get is a soft gel wrist rest for the keyboard, and a footrest. She has a recommendation for a chair (an RFM Internet chair, model 4834, without armrests), but says I can wait and see how these changes work before committing to that expense.

I just worked for two days processing the files from the Stanford University shoot using this new setup, and survived the effort just fine.

What do I think of the iPhone now?

Jeff Carlson's column in Saturday's Seattle Times Personal Technology page is on his iPhone, a year hence. His opinion largely matches mine, which is that the iPhone is the best small portable tech device I've ever had.

Jeff is the classic early adopter, and he bought the phone at full fare when it came out. I'm a big believer in staying away from the cutting edge, as I've mostly been burned when I've not obeyed my own sensibility (witness the Drobo debacle). I also couldn't stand the hype surrounding this device when it came out, which kept the recalcitrant anti-cool part of me from wanting one.

But you know what I still keep saying? The hovercraft and those futuristic gizmos from the Jetson's cartoons, about how the future was going to be, about now? The iPhone is the first arrival from that world. It pains me to no end to mimic the Macinista's, but it's really that cool.

Jeff's first rave about the phone is the same as mine—ubiquitous Internet access. That I don't have to fire up the laptop to check my email on the road is a huge boon. I do some web surfing on the thing, but I haven't delved into the world of mobile-friendly websites, and Jeff's column gave me some great ideas to pursue.

I have no idea what he's talking about though with Twitter, a concept whose functionality utterly eludes me. Why would I want to know what coffee someone in my “social network” just ordered? I really don't get this one—can someone explain it to me? Or am I really just that old now?

I've also never considered the possibility of watching a movie on an iPhone. Isn't that what theatres are for? I'm also one of those dinosaurs who has never made an iTunes purchase either, and I get supremely annoyed when I plug in my iPod or iPhone into the wrong computer, and my entire music library is deleted from the device (I've since learned to check the “manual sync” box on everything I can find that has one).

Other annoyances. Battery life is abysmal, though I'm coming from an old, monochrome phone which seemed to hold a charge for months, apparently. With the iPhone it's pretty much a daily routine to plug it in, particularly if I'm on the road and using the web features a lot. I dearly wish there were a way to organize my email into folders with a POP account, but even more, I wish there were a way to delete the 80 messages a day all at one go. Right now it's a one-at-a-time chore. If my iPhone sits anywhere near my computer, the speakers pick up an interference hum. Yet if I'm charging my iPhone from the computer, it's sitting right by it.

I think there is a chip in the thing that detects the age of the person using the phone, and makes using the keyboard progressively harder the older you are. I've had this phone for months now, and I can barely complete a simple Google query without two or more misspellings from hitting adjacent keys. As you can guess, my email replies from it are extremely curt.

I've had two occasions now where my address book/contact list has completely vanished. Whether it's an iPhone thing or a Macbook problem I don't know, but I've detected the problem both times when my contacts had vanished on the phone. I have a .Mac account, but I don't know how to control the sync directionality (and a Mac doesn't ask you, it just assumes it's smarter than you are) and I've been afraid of spreading an empty address book throughout my whole data set. I now carry a backup on a flash drive when I travel.

What has been a nice surprise is that my cell phone bill didn't go up. It's actually lower than on my old Verizon account.

Balancing acts

It is spring back here in the Northwest. I came home to daffodils and the current bush in bloom and the pear and maple trees in leaf. Today at the Fill the sky was full of swallows, which made me inordinately satisfied. The swallows are back, which tells me that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the world is still set right. There was a lot of migratory activity, way too many Robins around to be local birds, and the ones on territory were having a fit chasing off the clueless out of towners. The winter ducks, like the Wigeons, are still thick, but there are big rafts of Bufflehead in the lake, and I saw a group of Ring-necked Ducks, which I have not seen all winter.

It is an interstitial moment in my busy spring schedule, between work last week in Chicago and week after next in DC. The last assignment is delivered. I can work on other projects, but it seems far too much time is generally taken up with managing the files. Just making sure they're all in their triplicated places and up to date. For my off site storage I use internal hard drives that I've replaced with bigger ones, which means some of my data is scattered across drives as small as 60gb. They're old style IDE drives, formatted for PCs, and I've been having a time making sure I still have a means to access them. My last external drive box bit the dust and I replaced it with a nifty USB to IDE cable, but for some reason the Mac is balking at reading these drives, or at reading more than one in a row.

I have a stack of newer SATA drives, since I've upped the capacity in my Mac Pro, and I have a decommissioned Drobo that once held four drives, and that seems to no longer have a place in my backup regime. It's going on Ebay. The Drobo is problematic and slow—I once tried to use it to back up one of my full terabyte drives, and it took 29 hours to transfer the data. Then I used a SATA cabled box, and it took under two hours.  So now all my data fits on seven hard drives, ranging from 250 to 1000gb. These will live across the street at my mother-in-law's house. 

So long as I don't spend entire days at these tasks, and I can get out and count the ducks and do my Daily Photo, life is in balance.

Throw away your old blower

"What have you been doing with your sensor?" asked Bill at Cameratechs. "There was soapy gunk all over it."

I take my cameras in to be cleaned before every assignment. The only cleaning I ever do myself is to blow the dust around with a blower. I won't touch a sensor with a pad or a brush--I've only ever made them dirtier that way. The professional cleaning is just another business cost for me.

"I haven't been anyplace particularly dirty," I said, meekly. I felt like I was being chided for poor hygiene. If I'm someplace dry, like an overheated building in winter on the East coast, I will run the shower for a few minutes to knock down the dust level in the air, then clean my sensor in the bathroom. "That wouldn't do it," Bill said. "It looks like something greasy was blown onto the sensor."

And it was me blowing it on, I figured out. It's my air blowers, which I've been packing around in my camera bags for years. Who knows what kind of crud has built up inside of them?

When I picked up my camera I also bought a new Rocket blower (with the fins trimmed off so it'll pack easier). When I got home I threw away all my old ones. 

Yes, it really is a toy

Well, here's something the iPhone doesn't do very well. I don't know how to compare the quality of the photos to other phones, but it's certainly no threat to my Canons.

There's almost a pastelly, autochrome looking feel to the image. It actually might be a useful aesthetic to explore. And it nails the color balance pretty well actually, even if it can't do saturation.

 

There is almost no metadata attached to the image as it comes out of the phone. The camera make is Apple, the model is iPhone, and then there's a date code and an f-stop (f/2.8). It does assign a color space, which shows up as "Camera RGB Profile," whatever that is (the metadata displays it as sRGB). The native file size is 1600 pixels.

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

“Look at you. You've turned into one. Now, when I say, put it away now and pay attention to me, will you?” says my long suffering spouse.

The object of my distraction is my new iPhone. I have indeed turned into one of those Mac cultists who are stunned by the capacity of this device to amaze me. Actually, that it's by Apple is only notable in how seamlessly it fits into my new 100% Mac Life. Despite the hoopla and the annoyingly smug adverts it's still an amazing piece of engineering.

I feel like, finally, we're getting that cool Jetson cartoon stuff from the future.

What finally drew me in to drink the kool-aide was the online map capabilities. And that it seemed to have better features than any other phone I was seeing on the market. Walking around in a strange city, how great is it going to be to know how to get where I want to go, I thought, without pulling out the map in my back pocket and looking like a doofus tourist. Now I can stare at my phone and look like a cool doofus tourist.

Then I discovered how easy it was to sync my calendar and my address book. And how it gets my email (though it doesn't let me make mailboxes to sort it, grrrr!--unless I take the next step and use a .mac email as my primary account.). And that cool way of pinching and unpinching your fingers to make a web page change scale, and it's all so sharp and you can actually read stuff on this thing—who knew?

The one thing I may never use it for may be music. I have an iPod on the shelf that I haven't touched in months. It's just not my habit to listen that way. And anyway, Mac earbuds don't fit my small ear canal. I'm physically incapable of using them.

Finding a new photograph

With situations that I am called upon to photograph frequently, like college campuses, one of the challenges is to keep it new. Particularly so that the work keeps my interest, I want to find photographs that I have not seen before.

The University of Chicago is such that it is hard to take a bad photograph here, particularly during a snowstorm. I know the campus well by now, and I know where the pretty spots lie. This was the fun part of the day, and there's some great material to show for it.

But Crown Fieldhouse, the old athletics building, that was my challenge today. The big gym, where all the action is, has these horrid sodium vapor lights that suck out all the “good photograph here” potential. This was my struggle, and it made for some of those photographs-that-I-haven't-seen-before moments, partially out of desperation.

I try and do most of my work available light, but I do carry a couple of Speedlights and the Canon IR Transmitter. This was my only hope under this light. The other novelty element for me is sports in general, about which generally I know nothing and pay as little attention to as possible.

At one end of the hall they were practicing what I think was hammer throw, which has never, ever before crossed my radar. Superficially, it looks like the ultimate, primal sport. Throw a heavy thing as far as you can. Here was my chance to watch and understand what this strange activity was, and to try and make an interesting photograph out of it.

My lens didn't fit between the netting, but I quickly realized that making the net part of the image added a neat layer of complexity to the shot. I would have to light this situation, and it turned out the netting was perfect for jamming the Speedlights into them at eye level. I put one on each side, and started taking pictures. As watched the throw through the camera, and tried to understand the pivitol moment of the action, I understood that there was truly a lot of technique at play in heaving a heavy ball as far away as possible. Apparently you rotate around the center of gravity of yourself and the ball, you get the centrifugal force to help elevate the ball over your head, and then accelerate and let go at the precise right instant.

I took about 30 shots, knowing that I was beseeching the gods of accident to give me the compelling shot. This is very different than accidentally getting a great photo. I tend to let a lot of room in my process for accident, but I'm very aware of what part of the moment I'm letting accident have its way. As it turned out,most of the shots aren't worth a second look. I knew that would be the case going in.

But in the end, I got one photograph I haven't ever seen before.

A case of OCD would be useful about now

As in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It would solve a lot of problems.

As I approach the 1000th post on Daily Photo, I've been gathering the source files for that archive from my various disk drives. It has been an alarming eye opener to see the state of my archive.

One startling fact is that, even though I am moderately compulsive and one of the more organized photographers I know, I lose pictures. As in poof, gone. I had a major hard drive failure a couple of years ago, which took out a swath of data, and I am a big believer in triplicate backup now. Nonetheless, there are gaps in the record over the three years that I've been shooting digital.

A workflow problem I've been struggling to overcome is the issue of using more than one computer to ingest and process images, and managing multiple portable hard drives on location. Keeping the main archive synchronized has been a big headache, and I've royally messed up sometimes. Once I overwrote a half day's shooting on a hard drive, not realizing that two identically dated folders held different images, and I deleted the backup after I thought it was safely on the desktop. I didn't realize my mistake for months afterwards, and after the portable hard drives had been through multiple reformat cycles and the images were long gone from the laptop.

A weak link I didn't know I had is my archiving protocol from cr2 to dng. I just found an entire day's worth of shooting at Williams College, in 2007 no less (by which time I thought I'd worked out the wrinkles in my workflow) that never made it into the conversion queue. I have the original raw files on DVD, and I'm adding them back in now. I only caught this by wondering why there wasn't a link to the original file in my Iview Media Pro archive.

Then there were the three dozen corrupted dng files that Bridge wouldn't open. Again, I restored this from a backup on an optical medium. Another time I couldn't find one raw file, but I knew I had a Photoshop derivative on a DVD. But my Mac wouldn't open up the file, telling me the data on that file (and only that file) was corrupted. My old PC read the file just fine however. It makes me wonder what other disks burned with previous DVD burners are going be troublesome in the future.

There is no end to this problem, so far as I can see. Caring for a digital archive is a little like caring for something that's alive. Ignore it, and your data will die, either because the storage is ephemeral, or, more likely, because technology will abandon the medium (look at the problem we have reading Photo CD files).

Is it a bribe?

Congratulations! You've won! You know where these emails end up, in your spam filter with the Spanish lottery winning announcement and the heartfelt Nigerian 419s. In this case, the win was legitimate and a nice treat.

The email was from John Paul Caponigro for a free workshop, and I did have to recover it from my spam mailbox. Apparently, someone signed up for Paul's fantastic newsletter, Insights, because of my blog posting, and thus I was automatically entered into the drawing.

Then again it could be I'm so influential that I'm being bribed. It's happened before, believe it or not. A hardware company, I won't name them, actually offered to buy back a piece of gear, at full price, if I would please stop writing about them, thank you very much. I was touched by the thought, but I didn't take them up on the offer. JP did ask that I mention the prize, which I'm happy to do, but it was hardly a requirement. Luckily, no one can access my visit logs, or these offers would cease immediately.

I did write a series of blog entries from John Paul's Black and White Mastery workshop last winter, and can heartily recommend his workshops, so long as you have a firm foundation in Photoshop layering techniques under your belt. I took the workshop when I thought I was going to embark on a concerted effort to wean myself from the darkroom, but it turns out I've hardly had any time in the last year to do any printing of any sort. Most of my shooting is for publication, or for web. I still have the notes, if I ever want to get good at this.

And in the next year or two, I might want to know how to print again. Or, maybe I should come up with a contest of my own: the free workshop is transferable.

A milestone approaching

Posting to my Daily Photo today, I noticed that I have over 950 posts to that blog. Every day, I post a photograph that I took that day. In less than two months I will have posted 1000 photographs to that little-noticed blog (it averages 25 view a day, a tenth of Dispatches). How should I mark this achievement?

I started Daily as a mechanism to get myself fluent in a digital workflow. I had just switched over six months earlier, and I was still at that stage where it felt like, despite 20 years in the business, I was just pretending to call myself a professional photographer. I barely knew what I was doing anymore, and I had to get better at working in this new environment. Dispatches started then as a blog to document that transition, and the Daily Photo soon turned into a regular, daily discipline where I learned to become comfortable in this new digital realm.

Now it is a part of my day, and barely takes any time at all. It makes me carry my camera nearly everywhere I go. It forces me to "get in the zone," even when I don't feel like it, and to find a photograph somewhere around me, even if the prospects don't look promising. It has had an effect on my creative process much larger than I could have imagined.

There are two ways I could mark this. In 46 days I will post my 1000th photo. My first post was on May 11, 2005. But, I missed a day early on, June 8, 2005 to be precise. If I wish to count this as a continuous series of photographs, I can start the odometer on June 9, and buy myself another three weeks to decide what I ought to do. What ought that to be? A party maybe? An exhibit of 1000 (really small) images? Another book to match my best-selling (I've sold 10!) "365", the record of 2006 in daily photos ?  Got some ideas for me?