dispatches

What to Do with All that Data

For something that has no tangible existence, digital images require a lot of care and attention. Slides and negatives I can put in a file cabinet and forget about them. A digital image will need my active participation to maintain its integrity for the rest of my life. It is a little like caring for something alive.

Up to now I have been buying hard drives in bulk, dumping my archive on them, and putting them on a shelf. I have a couple of bays where I can swap out the hard drives (but not while hot). I also have a mirrored RAID array, meaning that every file is written simultaneously to two hard drives. I also back up onto optical media. The operating strategy to my storage is paranoia.

But once a week I seem to need to dive into the archive. With slides, it’s easy: open up a file drawer. Pull out image. Put in FedEx envelope. With hard drives stored on a shelf, or a binder full of DVD’s, it’s a huge hassle to access old work.

Peter Krogh, who has the state-of-the-art book on the subject—The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers—suggests a Firewired JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) box. My computer guru (Tom Vogel) had a better, safer and cheaper solution—a networked computer full of hard drives. I’m going to have local, live access to all my files on 1.5 terabytes of storage. And the hard drives that the data is currently on will live off-site, at my mother-in-law’s house.

It will take many all-night sessions to transfer all that data. I’ll let you know how it’s going.

Where Were You Five Years Ago?

Tomorrow is the 5th anniversary of the Nisqually Earthquake.

I missed it, which in a way was worse than being here. My assistant was in my office when it happened, and it scared her half to death. My wife was at her office, and enjoyed the ride. I was on a plane, and when I deboarded at Laguardia CNN was running footage of a 6.5 magnitude quake in Seattle. The instantaneous panic I felt at that moment is something I don’t care to go through again.

The hardest part was not having information. Phones were down, and I couldn’t get through to anyone. I didn’t know if Robin was OK, if my house had fallen down, if my street was in flames, or what. News footage showed brick building facades spilled onto cars in the one block in the entire city where that actually happened, but from the newscasts you thought half the city must have tumbled. When I made it to my friend’s house in Brooklyn, I collapsed into her arms and wept from the tension.

"Oh, everything’s fine here," said Robin, when I finally got through. "Nothing moved in the house. The cat didn't budge from her perch until I got home, and she really needed to pee."

Oh No, I'm a Gear Geek!

I never used to be like this. I didn’t read reviews, I didn’t keep up on the latest and greatest in equipment. I dislike the attention that so many photographers place on gear, and I have always been something of a contrarian in that regard. Digital, however, does not forgive inattention to current technology. I’ve had to recalibrate my attitude in this new environment.

A digital sensor records light differently than film. It shows this sharply with wide angle lenses. Film can record light falling on it from any angle. Digital requires light to fall upon the sensor perpendicularly. For a wide angle lens to deliver light in this way at the corners is a tall order.

My old lenses are not up to the task, I have reluctantly been forced to conclude. I have been avoiding my old standby lens lately, my 28-105mm zoom, out of an inarticulated feeling of disappointment with the resulting images. It seemed too soft on the corners, noticably so even at a full frame view. At Glazers I asked to borrow a new 28-105 to see if it was just my version. "That’s a terrible lens for digital," I was told. "It's a great lens for film, but it has serious falloff." This I knew. Even at f/8 the sharpness was marginal. "You should be looking at an L lens." He pulled out a 24-105mm f/4 for me to try out. It was big. It was heavy. It had Image Stabilization, a technology I had pooh-poohed before now.

I went home and looked at reviews. It seemed that my digital sensor resolution was indeed exceeding the resolution of my old lenses. And that this lens was very good. I went back and bought it this afternoon.

Typically, if my exposure is under 1/60th of a second, I reach for my tripod. Here is a tack sharp image I was able to make this afternoon, at 1/8th of a second. Handheld. With the lens racked out to 105mm. This could change my life.

 

Wide World

I gave a talk tonight at Wide World Books, our premier travel bookstore in Seattle, titled, "How to Take Better Travel Photos." I tend to ad lib these things, as they seem to go better when I think on my feet (kind of like my photography). Robin joined me in the presentation, as she has a unique viewpoint in how a photographer operates on location ("When he’s in that mode of ‘chasing the light,’ bring along a supply of food and water. And if you see an opportunity to pee, take it.")

In selecting work to show, I didn’t just want a reel of my "Greatest Hits." In preparing for this evening, I started pulling work from the foreign slide file, and stopped after three locations. Australia, Paris, Yucatan. This is diverse enough, I thought. I found examples of where I entered a situation, worked it, and came through in the end with the fulfilled image.

I talked about the task in understanding the gap between what we see and what the camera sees, and how to keep that in mind. When we see something we want to photograph, we often don’t see clearly what, precisely, it is that is generating this response. We have a kind of sensory tunnel-vision to emotional states. You think, oh, this scene/person/flower/mountain/building is so compelling, the photograph, of course, is going to capture that. Well, the camera doesn’t have an emotional response. It doesn’t care what you think or feel. The camera is dumb. It just records what is in front of it. We are poorly trained to see what is in front of us, because the details that trigger our response become so distorted when filtered through our emotions. The camera can be a powerful tool to understand more precisely how the external world connects with our internal state.

This is a topic I harp on a lot: Don’t allow the camera to become a barrier to being there. Use the camera to slow down and observe. With digital that means resisting the siren call of the LCD screen on the back of the camera. There’ll be time enough later on to see what you did. It means making connection with that person that looks so interesting, and having the camera be the beginning of a meaningful exchange. All the people photographs I showed were with a wide angle lens. I was never more than 5 feet from them. With landscape it means patience. Waiting out the light. What better reason to stay in one place and just observe?

In summary: Photography is the window through which I pay attention.

Cold Hummingbirds

Last night, well over an hour past sunset, a hummingbird was perched on the feeder. Our feeder is hung a few inches from our big plate glass dining room window, right by the cat perch. It’s a form of kitty tv, though the hummingbirds and the cat have come to ignore each other. It has been cold at night lately, and a deep freeze is on the way. Had I not disturbed the bird, I think it may have roosted on the feeder all night.

There are two hummingbirds that are sharing the feeder this winter, a bright red-headed male and a female, or maybe a sub-adult male. A third young male, with just a little red feathers on the throat, also makes an occasional appearance. Anna’s Hummingbirds are a common over-wintering bird in the Seattle area. They’re very talkative--in nearly any neighborhood, you can detect their insect-like clicking chatter, and then maybe a blur as it zips past. The abundance of hummingbird feeders in the city must be playing a role in the expansion of their range.

Generally, my two hummers are at war. We are fortunate that hummingbirds are as tiny as they are. I think of them as one of the most aggressive members of the animal kingdom. When one sits on the feeder, it keeps a watchful posture between sips, jigging its head back and forth as though it was watching a tennis match. Then the other will zoom down, chasing the feeding bird away, and both hummers will hightail it at a million miles an hour around the corner and up into the Madrona tree, chattering up a storm and obviously saying nasty things to each other.

At sunset tonight the temperature was a little above freezing. The bright male hummingbird was at the feeder, taking long sips to tank up before the onset of darkness. The other hummer came up and hovered just off the feeder. The male rose and made a half-hearted protest, but you could see that his heart wasn’t in it. Then something happened that I’d never seen before. Both hummingbirds settled on opposite sides of the feeder, and drank under the cover of a momentary truce.

College Assignment

Matthew is on the phone with me (while I’m driving to a job in eastern Washington), scanning the disk I sent to him by FedEx yesterday. "These are so great! There’s so many more than we can use. The portraits, the classroom shots, oh, this series of the student in the city, these are perfect! There is more than enough to finish the IIT viewbook. Great job!"

This client gushes almost as much as a bride does when I show her the wedding shots. A big chunk of my work for the last year has been for one design firm that specializes in college marketing materials. They’ve been sending me around the country to photograph Viewbooks (the major marketing piece for a college—if you have a kid in 11th grade, you know all about these). It is work I am perfectly adapted for—documentary, but with structure, real-life, but often composed to look that way, and interacting with subjects posessing intellect and curiosity that match my own. The assignments involve long days that require physical and mental stamina. And it pays reasonably well. What more could I ask for?

One of the Illinois Institute of Technology shots I did this last round was for the Psychology Department section of the book. This has been a difficult sector to illustrate. We created a set-up in their play-therapy observation lab, borrowing a 4 year old who happened to belong to the woman at the college responsible for hiring me. She told me the story. "Why should I hire a photographer from Seattle when we’re in one of the largest media markets in the country? Why can’t we use someone local?" she complained to the account executive at the design firm. The design firm won out, and I was hired. After the first round of photography last fall, after she has seen the work, she talked again to my AE. "Matthew, you were so right. Thank you."

Well Thank Goodness That's Over

I almost titled this, "We Was Robbed," but that would imply I had more attachment to this game than is the case. Yes, if the referee calls had gone differently, we would have won. Had we played cleaner, and didn’t foul so often, we could have won. But this is not Bush-Kerry, where the other side played dirty, and we was robbed.

For two weeks I have been amused and bemused by the incessant chatter in the media about the Super Bowl, and that, of all improbable possibilities that could come to pass, the Seahawks were in it. My favorite was an above-the-fold headline one day in the Post-Intelligencer which read, "Frenzy Slow to Build." Frenzy? About a football game? In erudite, elitist Seattle? And that it’s news that there isn’t one?

I think this may have been the first football game in my life I have actually sat through in its entirety and watched all the plays. I have though, on occasion, taped the Super Bowl so I could scroll through the boring bits (the Game) and watch the commercials.

But now it’s over and done with. I think there will be a collective sign of relief in this city tomorrow. It wouldn’t do to upset our smug sense of superiority and actually care about a winning sports franchise like those lesser, decrepit cities in the East do because they have no other way to sustain their self-esteem. We’re not likely to have to face this challenge again anytime soon. The Mariners start up in a few weeks. I have high hopes for another year of failure snatched from the jaws of victory. Some things never change.