dispatches

Taming the Data Dragon

I have been transferring gigabytes for weeks. It feels like a near Sisyphian task, moving mountains of data from one hard drive to another, while more pours out from the pipeline of my current shooting. I am still waiting for the day when this is a routine background task, and not the core of my working life.

Through my early months in digital, I vowed that I would make a clean start of my file organization. I failed. Or rather, I picked an organizational mode that didn’t work. File names that referenced content. A file heirarchy that stressed sequence above anything else. As I have jobs that span across several months of shooting, I ended up using the least reliable metadata system for finding stuff—my head.

About 6 weeks ago I got Peter Krogh’s book, The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers. It changed everything for me. Two weeks ago I attended an evening presentation by him, put on by our ASMP chapter.

My 600 gigabytes of RAW files are converted to DNG format and stored in a separate file server computer. So are about 180 gb of derivative files, all the tifs and psds and jpgs. I access it through a gigabit network, so the hard drives on it are as accessible and speedy as my local drives. During the transfer I suffered a major computer crash when I was downloading the data from one of my stored-on-the-shelf hard drives, which set me back about a week. This data transfer task is nearing completion. Everything I have ever shot digitally is immediately accessible now. I'm now making back-ups on hard drives that will live off-site.

I’m learning a new software program to manage all those files: Iview Media Pro. It is quickly becoming the cataloging program of choice for photographers. I wish to heck someone would write a book on how to use it. Peter devotes about half a chapter in The DAM Book to it (he says he’s working on the book I want). I downloaded and printed out the 144 page pdf manual, which is obtuse and in engineer-speak (is there a style sheet in circulation on how to make these things uniformly unintelligable?). I am making baby steps in figuring it out, and probably picking up inefficient habits I’ll have to break when I find out how I’m supposed to be doing it.

Here’s where I am so far. The most recent two months of work is imported, keyworded, and placed in catalog folders. It makes a nice analog to my current slide filing scheme, except that it doesn’t matter where the file itself lives. I make these catalog sets that point to the files. A given file can be in more than one catalog set, so I can have a given shot be in the "Portraits" file, or in the "Assignment: Rural Development Institute" file. I don’t know if my keywording scheme is the right way to go—it seems to be getting unwieldy.

Assignment work is in a lull at the moment, so I have the time to learn this stuff. It’s another steep pitch in the digital learning curve.

I Made Shutterbug

Here’s a nice surprise I got today via 2nd Day UPS: the May 2006 Shutterbug Magazine, with an extensive quote from me in Maria Piscopo’s Business Trends column, titled "The Business of Travel Photography."

"For new technology marketing, Doug Plummer (www.dougplummer.blogs.com/daily) gets the most out of using the Internet. He says, "I think marketing is getting more casual in terms of portrayal of image and what some clients are looking for. Case in point: my primary creative outlet lately has been my daily photoblog. It is the opposite of a refined, thought-out, structured portfolio. There’s no sexy titanium case. There’s no fancy Flash code. I just photograph every day. I pick one to post. It’s just one photograph after another, day after day. I printed and bound the first hundred days of my photoblog, and started showing it as my portfolio. One designer completely keyed into what I was doing and she’s someone who has been on my "hit list" for years. I think what the blog shows is my truest photographic sensibility, my daily response to the world. Formatting is less important in this environment. I think the image really is the message. That I’ve kept it up, and at a high level visually, speaks to a level of discipline and commitment that is the meta-message about how I’ll act with a client. The right people are going to get it."

The article also included two of my photographs from Israel. The piece is not up on the Shutterbug website yet—you’ll have to visit an analog newsstand to see it.

Panoramic Images for dinner

Michelle Alvarado, the director of photography at Panoramic Images, was in town for the day, in meetings at Getty Images. Afterwards she met with a group of us PI photographers for dinner in Ballard. Kevin Schafer was there, just back from India. So was Pete Saloutos (soon to leave for China), Greg Probst and Terry Eggers.

Panoramic Images has been through some transition and turmoil over the last few years. Back in 2002 they had a new director of photography and a new business manager, and at a meeting in San Francisco they announced new and vigorous plans for the agency. They were going to be more than that "city skyline agency". Send us your people, your lifestyle, your edgy work, they told us. It invigorated me, and I shot a ton of panoramic work that year.

With 2 years the DP was out (and moved on to OnRequest Images, a photographer-unfriendly concept if there ever was one). None of my family lifestyle and urban life panoramics ever made me a nickel.

It was no surprise that I was a little cold-shouldered to Michelle when she joined the agency. She urged me to keep sending work though, and said they were gradually getting their scanning workflow and marketing in order (and was honest to me about the problems they had). They became a Getty portal, and recently I got a nice $1000 share of a black and white Chichen Itza shot.

"There’s more on the way," she hinted to me. PI might be coming around, and one reason is that they don't compete where they shouldn’t. "Lifestyle images have a lifespan in the marketplace of about a nanosecond," she said. There is such a volume of that material, and so much new work always coming on the market, that there is no point for Panoramic Images to try. "Fine art travel, like you do, lasts a lot longer," she told me. She’s very interested in my Israel material. "We have the Western Wall, but that’s about it." Because she edits the work that goes onto the Getty site, she can get material onto the site, like black and white, that probably wouldn’t make it through the Getty editing process. It may be that black and white has passed through its nadar of commercial unpopularity, and might be resurgent.

Then there’s digital. She sees few photographers who are able to construct decent digital pans without stitching artifacts. I’ve tried it, and I can’t do it. But she’s open to the "David Hockney" conceptual look, which I’m actually pretty good at.

It was a hopeful meeting. There may be a life for me in stock yet.

Collaboration

I’ve been wanting to work with Tyler Boley for years. He is the pre-eminent digital printmaker in town. His company, Custom Digital, makes gorgeous qaudtone, black and white digital prints for fine art photographers.

At a hundred or more bucks per print, I’ve been waiting for someone else to order one of my prints so I could see what Tyler could do. A corporate art buyer has bought one of my panoramic Mexico images for a restaurant. They want it big: 38" wide. Finally, a chance to have Tyler show what he could do.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

One, a drum scan introduces its own artifacts to the process. I had Cosgrove Editions, another jewel in the Seattle digital scene (they specialize in high end scans and pre-press file prep), scan my negative. It’s a juicy, big file, and they made their corrections with Photoshop layers so I could change their mind about what looked good (more on that later). The thing with a drum scan is that it is very harsh and unforgiving. The look is like a print made with a condensor head enlarger, meaning contrasty with accentuated detail. Like golf-ball sized grain. I print my silver prints with a cold light head on my enlarger. It is a diffuse light source, which gives creamy tones and really minimizes the film grain. The look from the scan is different, meaning I’m seeing a lot more in the negative than I’m used to.

I did a little burning and dodging on the scan (Here’s how: make a new layer, select soft light as the mode, check the box to fill it with 50% gray. Then use the brush with either the white (to dodge) or black (to burn) to adjust areas of the image. Use a greatly reduced opacity.) I also made some global changes with a level and a curve layer. Cosgrove had made some adjustment curves on a couple of areas already, to corral in the highlight detail in the background and preserve the shadow detail in the figures.

The first proof was off. The midtones in the background were dead and flat, and the grain structure was uneven—prominent in the shadows up to about Zone IV, then flat and nearly non-existent in the midtones. The transition was abrupt, in that way that often marks a print, unattractively, as digital. I could see that the file needed further work.

I proofed it on my own printer, using Quadtone RIP. Tyler uses Jon Cone’s Piezography inkset, which are multiple shades of black ink in place of multiple colors. My print had less contrast, less dmax, (density in the blacks), but was softer in feel in a not unattractive way. The transitions between tones was gentler. The background adjustment layer needed a complete reworking to get a normal looking contrast gradient in there. Cosgrove had erred on the side of preserving highlights. Since the shot was backlit, those could look blown out—I needed the trees and the figure in front to have a zip in them. I also ran Noise Ninja to reduce the grain, which helped minimize the transition issues.

I see another proof tomorrow. The image looks nothing like the silver print, but that’s not the point. I’m learning a new language.

Almost recovered from the Crash

Yesterday I had to be just operational enough to finish 15 files for a client that were due by Friday. I had yet to install half of my applications, and almost none of my preferences. It took awhile, but I was able to find the right driver for my LaCie monitor, which had to be done so my Monaco profiler could calibrate it, because no photo editing can be done without a profiled monitor. I just barely had Photoshop installed with the minimal preferences set, but with none of my library of Actions (does anyone know where actions that you write are stored? I appear to have lost them.) After 6 hours of work, with a 15 minute break for lunch, I had a disk in a Fedex envelope.

Latest word on the patient

The hard drive is fine. I’m Ghosting the data onto another computer now.

A recovery disk did not work. It appears that Windows is irredeemably corrupted. I will need to do a full Windows reinstall, which will wipe all my applications and settings.

I’ll get back to my real job (which is NOT a computer geek, much as Robin intimates that I have mutated into) in a couple of days.

Grumpy Biking

I wanted some relief from my computer anxiety, so I took a long, hard bike ride on the Burke Gilman. Nice try. Today was the first sunny, warm(ish) day of the year. The BG was like I-5. Except it was I-5 with pedestrians. Walkers three abreast oblivious to the world, bike racers flashing by in blurred spandex, guys with ipods and no helmets, boy-and-girlfriend out for their first slow, romantic ride of the season, kids on baby bikes, teen ages boys careening and weaving, women with baby strollers. Don't get me started on the dog walkers.

Oh the Horror

There is a phrase you hope you never hear uttered by the professionals in your life. Like your health care provider. Or your computer guru. In this case, I think the latter may be more distressing.

"This is so weird. I’ve never seen anything like this before."

My main computer is dead. Black screen dead. It is not a routine hard drive failure. It seems to be some weird Windows corruption that has never been seen before. The data may yet be retrieved, I haven’t had a chance to try. I think the problem might be related to a non-corforming setup of my computer that my "friend" the computer expert (I only pay for expertise anymore) constructed for me last year. My boot drive is on a mirrored RAID array of 2 300gb drives. I have two swap drive bays, on the motherboard IDE cable, because he couldn’t get them to work on the RAID card. The original plan was to have hot swappable drives on the RAID, so I could backup on hard drives, and store my burgeoning data on the collection of hard drives that I found myself buying in bulk. As it is, I’ve been following the original plan, just shutting down the computer to swap out drives.

I’d been near the end of transferring all my data from said hard drives onto my new file server computer. Something happened when I tried to access one of the drives I had just put in. The screen went all blue, and then I couldn’t reboot. I had yet to transfer my application data and other important stuff from my main drive. I’d also been lax in backing up the most recent image data from the last two weeks (no assignments are involved, at least.) I don’t know what’s on my calendar for the week anymore (Yes I do. Computers.) But, with the mirrored array, I can take out one hard drive and not subject it to any further recovery operations that might imperil the data.

"Any data you have only one copy of is data you don’t mind losing," said Peter Krogh (the DAM Book guy) the other night at an ASMP presentation. I got it, Peter. I got religion.

There is no bad weather, only insufficent clothing

There is nothing so pleasurable as being in the elements yet feeling impervious to them. Such was the feeling I had on my hike out to the tip of Damon Point at Ocean Shores this afternoon. It was typical Washington spring weather—sunny one moment, a black rain squall the next. Out on the exposed south side of the point, the wind and rain whipped unimpeded across the Pacific and through the gap of Grays Harbor, onto my Goretex encased figure striding purposefully, into the storm.

Damon Point is in a losing battle to remain attached to the mainland. The interior lake has been breached and is an arm of the sea now. An old wreck of a ship is being uncovered at the mouth of the breach, which is making the news as it hasn’t been visible for 40 years. The entire peninsula is covered with large driftwood trunks and roots. There was once a road to the tip, which was hubris on someone’s part, as it is mostly buried by sand now, covered in tree trunks and carved away by the sea in places. From the thorough scattering of sand and debris it is obvious that in storm the entire point is awash.

I came out here to seek owls. On Tweeters six Snowys were reported out here on Sunday. I found one, close to the beach, about two-thirds of the way out to the tip, then three more on an interior row of tree trunk flotsom. They were all huddled on the lee side of the protective wood. I was within 30 yards of two owls, one of which flushed, which meant I was too close. I backed off, then saw a Snow Bunting almost at my feet. This is a modestly rare bird in these parts, there’s some around somewhere nearly every winter, but you can’t reliably find them, so it was a treat to come upon this one. Three of its buddies were nearby, and they flew off together.

For much of the drive home I was accompanied by a brilliant double rainbow.

Scavenging for a Signal

It feels vaguely illicit when I do this. I cruise the streets of a small town, laptop open in the passenger seat, looking for a wireless signal to parasitize. Any more, there are never less than half a dozen or more wireless signals at a given spot. Many are security enabled, locking me out. Some are unsecured, but land you in a fee-zone, like by a MacDonalds or a Starbucks. Then there are those that seem like perfectly good signals, but I get a "Limited or No Connectivity" error, which I don’t understand.

The best bets seem to be at independent or low budget chain motels. Which is where I just was, on the edge of Twentynine Palms in the California desert trying to park inconspicuously by the motel office. I was uploading a mailing list to Andrew Parker Realty in Ballard, who is going to host a show of my Ireland work for this Saturday’s Ballard Art Walk. I also uploaded a photo to a client, then headed back to the motel to pick up Robin (she got a nap) to catch the evening light among the rocks in Joshua Tree National Park. Watch the daily photos—I’ll be uploading one by the side of the road in a few hours.