dispatches

The new dougplummer.com is live!

The new website, dougplummer.com, is up and live! I’ve been working with Christine Larsen all summer on design and implementation of this. My last web remodel was in 2002 and, though it looked good, it didn’t reflect my current work, and in particular, it didn’t reflect the way digital has altered my visual style.

Another goal with the redesign was to incorporate my blogging content into my main web presence. There are live feeds on my main site now from both my blogs, this one and my Daily Photo. I was finding I was getting as much or more traffic to my blogs than to my website, so I wanted my website to be "bloggier", with live and changing content. Overall, the site may not be quite so elegant as before, but I’m pleased with the organization. It has that content-rich feel of a blog now, which I think is more current.

That said, I can’t see my own website, at least when I log in from home. This is the start of a blog rant, so if you can’t stand those (I can’t), just stop now. I am captive to an inept ISP, Nationwide Internet. They bought up The River, which previously ate up Servnet, which used to be a charming, little, attentive, quality Seattle ISP when I got online in 1993. But now I’m hostage to Nationwide, who cannot seem to purge its files of the old DNS listing for my domain, which now resides with a kinder, nicer host (Pair). Since I moved out Nationwide is acting like a horrid, clutchy, spurned lover who won’t let go. It’s been a week, with calls every day to tech support, who can’t believe that they could possibly be so incompetent ("I assure you, we’ll handle this today. We’ll solve this problem immediately." "No, I assure you that you probably won’t. I’ll be calling you tomorrow." And I do.)

Because they can’t redirect the DNS setting for dougplummer.com, I can’t download mail that comes to my domain address. I’ve been looking at it on Pair’s webmail all week. I’m leaving town for a week tomorrow, and I’ll be connecting wirelessly through other servers. I could live with that until I dumped them as my ISP, when I get back. But it doesn’t just affect me. Anyone on Nationwide Internet is blocked from seeing my site. At the rate they’ve been assimilating little ISPs all over the planet, I don’t know how many people this is affecting.

China, if you’re looking for someone to handle your internet operations, I have just the firm. They’re really good at what you’d want.

So, how is this good news for me?

DIMdump is one of the blogs I regularly check on, as it gives a unique insight into the stock photography marketplace from Bahar Gidwani, the CEO of Index Stock. Stock used to be nearly my entire income stream, and it still contributes about a third of my gross, so I try and stay abreast. The latest post is a cogent analysis of the trends of stock photo pricing. The short version: Microstock. It makes total sense from a business point of view, and is dreadful news to the artist who expects to derive any income from the rights to their work.

Read more here.

Digital panoramics

I appear to be doing panoramics again, but digitally. The last few days I’ve been prepping files for a client, and I casually shot some pans during the assignment. They ended up using them.

There’s a host of tools and information and arcana on the web on how to stitch images together for pans. Really Right Stuff makes a pan base for doing it right—you can set your camera at the right nodal point so that there’s no parallax, and it’s self-leveling. It’s really a neat device. I rarely use it.

Fot stitching I started with Helmut Dersch’s Panoramic Tools and PT Stitcher. This free, open source software has a cult following in the panoramic world, for good reason. It’s really good. However, you need to have completed a 4 year advanced degree program at an engineering school to understand any of it. I haven’t, and I don’t. However, there’s a front end shareware program, PTGUI, that does a good job of making these tools accessible to wannabe geeks like me.

PTGui has an easy to understand interface to organizing the images for a pan stitch, it calculates all the control points automatically (with manual override possibilities that I’ve never touched, cause it looks way too hard), and a fantastic output. You can get 16 bit layered photoshop files at the end of the process.

Using this tool, I’ve gotten distressingly casual about shooting my pans. On top is an image I shot in my parent’s United Methodist church in Chambersburg, PA on my last visit. It’s handheld. I scanned the room in two passes, level and up toward the ceiling. PTGui knew which was which, and combined everything with no intervention. I didn’t even set the exposure on manual, I just got it close in ACR and let PTGui make all the corrections.

For the Beit Midrash shot at Yeshiva University, I was on a tripod, but not on the pan base. This required some attention to masking various pan components to correct for the parallax issues that PTGui couldn’t. I had a layered PSD file to work with, so it was just a matter of unmasking the pieces of particular images till it looked normal.

The look with stitching, at wide angles at least, is akin to a turret lens style panoramic, like a Widelux or Noblex. There is no single vanishing point. This technique will not replace my work with the Xpan, but it’s another tool in the box.

Kenneally in NYT Mag

Check out yesterday’s New York Times Magazine for an awesome photo essay by Brenda Ann Kenneally on the children in the aftermath of Katrina. The entire magazine is devoted to this one story, and it’s all Kenneally’s black and white photography. Shot on film, not digital.

Go here to see it on the NYT website. You must look at the multimedia version. If you think the printed version is powerful, just wait.

Milepost 4, Hwy 112

  The moment I got out of the car I heard the sound. Like the whoosh of a wave against a sea cave, I thought. But the sea was calm, and I was on a protected rocky beach, not a headland against the open ocean. I heard it again, an urgent whoosh of air. I looked to the sea, and saw a cloud of spray drift with the wind. Whoosh, spray. Whales.

The sea was just past ebb on a minus tide. I scrambled and slipped over seaweed covered rocks to the water’s edge. Kelp floated in the little bay before me, and scores of young harlequin ducks floated among it, or perched on rocks just offshore. I saw a spray of mist, and heard the sudden exhalation. Pause. Then an inbreath. The whale was only a couple hundred feet offshore. Close enough to hear it breathing.

Further out another whale’s back broke the surface, gray and mottled with white. It barely disturbed the water’s surface when it vanished beneath. The ducks it displaced barely noticed. After a while, I discerned that these whales (there were three) were feeding at the edge of the kelp forest, slowly working back and forth just offshore.

The ducks called softly. A winter wren flew up and scolded me for being there. It stood on the seaweed covered rock and stretched, full of outrage, on its little legs. Behind me were whales breaching and breathing, slowly, somberly. Everything felt exactly right. With whales and wrens, this was a place complete and whole.

In praise of the 35mm prime lens

A little over two weeks ago I bought a little 35mm, f/2 Canon lens for my 5D. It’s an old style Canon lens, with the loud auto focus motor. It hasn’t been off the camera since. Every photograph I’ve taken for the past 16 days has been with this lens.

I’m a big believer in prime lenses, even though I rarely use them professionally. It is not for any pursuit of superior quality; the current crop of zooms is just as sharp. It is about the quality of seeing, and engaging with the world through your camera.

I like a 35mm lens (on a full frame sensor) because it best matches our visual perceptual field. A 50mm may give that illusion that what’s in front of us is the same size through the viewfinder. But that’s a restricted, slightly foreshortened perspective. A 35mm is a moderate wide angle, which is about the field we pay attention to as we nagivate through the world. It matches the "frame" already present in our brains.

For many years, a 35mm was the only lens I used. So there’s a hefty part of my brain that already organizes the world in the perspective that this lens sees. It means that I can capture the most fleeting of moments before I ever engage the conscious part of the brain that has to decide, "OK, what focal length should I use for this shot?" There is an immediacy about my seeing with this lens that is hard to approach any other way.

Using prime lenses is a great way to train yourself to see the world photographically. I would go so far as to say that learning photography with a zoom lens is a significant barrier to developing an unconscious competency in seeing pictures. You can’t engage a subject with a zoom lens without going through that conscious crop thing by zooming and zigging the lens in and out. It’s a barrier.

Another side benefit to using one, and only one lens, is that my sensor stays cleaner longer. I've been using the camera for weeks now, and the lens has not been off the camera. I'm preparing for a trip, and just checked the sensor--there's hardly any dust on it. This is unprecedented.

Now, I use zooms all the time, and I can compensate for the way they slow my seeing down. I love the flexibility of zooms when the situation demands it. But when I’m carrying my camera about for no other reason than that I carry a camera about nearly everywhere I go, I love even more how small and light it is now.

More archive arcana

I started to respond to Bruce Nall’s comment on yesterday’s post, and realized that my back up regime is complex enough that it might be of general interest. Here is my routine.

Every night I download the CF cards from the day to my computer, using Photo Mechanic, into a dated folder. If it’s my main desktop, it’s a machine with mirrored RAID hard drives. If it’s my laptop, I’ll copy that folder over to the desktop the next day (or if I’m on location, copy it to a portable hard drive). Every night Norton Ghost makes an incremental backup of the entire hard drive onto another drive on the computer.

At the end of the month I convert the files I shot that month to DNG format. Those files get archived onto another computer on the network that is used solely as a file server. It has four 500gb drives in it. I also copy those files onto an IDE hard drive that is connected via a USB. This is the drive that will get unplugged and taken offsite. I archive the original cr2 files, and the accompanying sidecar .xmp files, on DVD. In a busy month I have burned as many as 36 DVDs, though it’s typically 6 to 8. I feel more secure keeping a set of original Canon files—I’m not ready to say that DNG is the be all and end all of digital formats.

I follow a similar backup regime with the master files from the month’s shooting, the ones I have worked on in Photoshop and have corrections and adjustment layers. This also includes any jpgs I have generated from the original files. These are in a separate "Master File" folder for the month.

I have not been able to completely implement a Peter Krogh style bucket backup format. In his regime, all the files get dumped into "buckets" that each are the size of the capacity of a typical DVD. Those sequentially numbered buckets are imported into Iview Media Pro, and that program becomes the only point of entry into the archive. Again, I don’t like limiting my options to a single structure.

If it sounds like a lot of work, it is. It’s routine at this point, but it took a lot of effort to make it habitual and not onerous, which is good enough for me. People will quibble on some points of it. It’s not a perfect system, but I’m a big believer in what Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

How healthy is your archive?

It appears to be the dog days of summer, and I have time on my hands to attend to all those important maintenance tasks that don’t ever get their proper attention. That pile of disorganized CDs and DVDs of miscellaneous copies of whatnot—they’re in their place now (mostly the trash can). There’s a new space on the shelf, formerly occupied by my contact sheet notebooks, for the backup DVD binders. I cleared up space on the hard drives, and I’ve made new Iview catalogs of my scanned and master image directories.

Per Jeff Goldner’s advice from the Microsoft ProPhoto Summit (see the entry on him here), I plugged in and opened up files on each of the collected hard drives that store my digital archive. Hard drives that sit on a shelf die. You need to plug them in and spin them once in a while, akin to turning the bottles in a valuable wine collection. This is the tertiary set of redundant backups that I keep (one is the primary archive on my online hard drives, two is the DVD archive, three are these hard drives that live across the street). I’d plug in a hard drive, and open up a few files to see if there were any problems. There were none, until I came to the archive holding my files from May and June of last year. I could see the directories in Windows Explorer, and if I had only gone that far, I would not have known anything was wrong. But any file I tried to access came with error messages and file corruption warnings. I could not open up anything on the drive.

When I tried to disengage the drive, there were more "file corruption" messages. Something was deeply wrong. Of course it had to be one of the 250gb drives, not one of the old 40gb backups. But, I had a spare empty drive, and all the files intact on my server. I hooked it up and copied everything over.

Let this be a lesson to you. Are you backed up? In triplicate?

Bruce Fraser's new book on sharpening

So, you feel like you have a handle on sharpening digital images? You understand what all those sliders in Unsharp Mask really do?

Didn’t think so. Me neither.

I have more homework for you: read these 288 pages on this single step in the digital workflow. Bruce Fraser ("he’s not just a Photoshop guru, he’s a god") has a new book from Peachpit Press in the "Real World" series, "Image Sharpening with Adobe Photoshop CS2." It’s technical. It requires a comfort level with Photoshop that includes layers, channel masks, and blend modes. That is, it’s slightly over my head.

I’ve always been conservative in my sharpening routine (low radius, amount set at where I just start to see an effect), and I’ve always judged what I’ve done by what I thought was the right way: at 100% pixel view. I’ve been totally wrong on all counts all this time. Here’s one reason why.

Say your monitor resolution is around 100ppi (it ain’t always 72, another myth). Your output is 240ppi. You need to be looking at your image at around 50% to see the true effects of your adjustments. You need to judge your sharpening at that scale, not at 100%.

Additionally, it’s crucial to zoom out on your image at intervals of 50%, 25% or 12.5%. Odd zoom percentages (66%) brings out Photoshop anti-aliasing rendering which wipes out your ability to see the effect of sharpening on your image. So pick a zoom that’s close to the ratio.

So, why isn’t your monitor displaying at 72ppi? That number is the result of the size of your monitor display, divided by the resolution of your display. For example, my CRT monitor display is 14.25" wide. My resolution is set at 1024x768. I do the math and, hey! It’s 72ppi. My laptop now is 10.6" wide, also at 1024x768. Same number of pixels, smaller screen. It comes out to 96ppi.

Dinner, artmaking and spirituality

It was one of those wonderful dinner parties with family and good friends, good wine, and good conversation. Mary is discovering her voice as a writer. Elly, my mother-in-law, is an accomplished novelist. She was in a mood to give advice.

"Don’t read anyone with too strong a voice. If you read Faulkner, you’ll write like Faulkner. If you read Salinger, you’ll write like that." She doesn’t say reading is bad; she herself is alternating between Proust and Tolstoy while working on her novel. "Virginia Woolf is OK. So is Austin. You have to read, but you need to be careful."

One must permit influence, however; we don’t create in a vaccuum. I read a passage out loud to the table from one of my big photographic gurus, Frederick Sommer. Much of his philosophy about the creative life is about how what you bring to the table is nothing new. You can’t pay attention to what isn’t already contained within yourself, otherwise you wouldn’t recognize it.

"Isn’t it spiritual though?" asked Janis. "Doesn’t something come from outside ourselves?" Well, duh! was my response. "Well, the source is outside the physical realm. We bring it to the material. If that isn’t a spiritual path, what is?"

I told my story of being in Israel. When I was in Jerusalem, I felt deeply the potent energy of that city, and was having spiritual epiphanies right and left. I’m not Jewish, but I felt the deepest connection among Jews and at the Western Wall, and I visited there every day to pray, to meditate, to photograph. The spiritual was knocking loud at the artistic gates for me. Robin was keeping a careful eye on me for signs of psychosis (for something called Jerusalem Syndrome—it sounds like I had a mild case of it).

My creative juices rose to the surface there because something in me needed that climate, and that spot, for it to be realized. There is, at the best of times, a sense that you’re tapping into all available experience in the universe in the act of creating, even if that experience appears to be outside of anything you’ve ever known before. But it’s already inside you, otherwise, how else would it seem so familiar? It is what I regard as the spiritual dimension to creativity. It’s all available, but you have to make choices to make it material in the right way. To not read Faulkner. To decide you’re not undergoing a religious conversion in Jerusalem, just tapping into real good juju. Artmaking is the act of applying form and structure to that cornucopia of available, unconscious experience that lies beyond our individuality. We’re all drinking from the same well.