I had a CF card fail on me yesterday. Nothing lost (except the card), because it was an empty card that I was putting in a camera for use. Neither that camera, nor another camera that I could temporarily borrow recognised it as a card. Dodo.
It was a one gig Sandisk Ultra II. Probably quite old. I haven’t been using CF cards much recently as what with my sofobomo project being film and my favoured digital using SD cards there hasn’t been much call. Consequently I can’t remember when that particular card was last used or what it was used for. It may have been sitting around for months and months.
In rummaging around for another card for the photography that I was wanting to do right then, I found an even older card at the bottom of a box with….wait for it….a whopping 8 mb of space. Oh my. History. It is Nikon branded and dates from early 2000. It is, of course, now utterly useless except for proving that it was the other card that had failed and not the camera. At the time it was something of a gamble. Would I use this new fangled digital camera enough to warrant buying a second card for it?
The card failure has come at an opportune moment, because I was planning out a photo trip later in the year and thinking of just stocking up on cards and not carrying any hard drives or computers. With mid-quality SD cards now running cheaper per shot than film they can be thought of as relatively disposable items. Just not when they are full of photos, thanks.
At least with cards each 2 Gb, or whatever, risk is independent of the rest. I mean in comparison with transferring everything to a single hard drive. I guess with cards that are looked after reasonably well having one card fail whilst sitting at the bottom of the bag for a couple of weeks would be bad luck. Having lots of cards fail would be freaky.
I’ve written about this is a slightly different context before, but the question of risk here is an interesting one. With film, one takes the photo and then drops the roll into a bag. Sometime later one retrieves the bag from one’s luggage and then trusts the local lab, or worse, the post office to some distant lab, to take care of it. With digital I have this urge to take backup copies immediately. Probably just because I can. I know that in long term storage not having digital backups is dumb, but in the short term how much gear do I want to carry to make an SD card a safer bet than a bag of film?
I’ve been clocking some Scanhancer experience miles on my Nikon 5000 scanner. I’ve done some back to back comparisons (the same negative with and without the Scanhancer) and also I’ve done batches of negatives split into two - half with and half without. I think that I’ve got a fair handle on what I think about the device. Which, if you are not familiar with it, is a diffuser for scanners.
Before I go any further please bear the following in mind. All my testing has been done with ISO 400 black and white film (HP5+) which has been commercially processed. It has all been scanned into linear raw using VueScan. My testing hasn’t been rigorous. In fact I’d hardly call it testing. Experience is a better word. My experience may not translate to slow film, positive film or colour film.
Attaching the Scanhancer to the scanner is easy, but basic and crude. It all works with double sided sticky foam and luck. Take heed the advice on the Scanhancer site to buy a second insert for your scanner if you intend to sometimes scan with and sometimes scan without the diffuser. As a secondary note, also be aware that switching between holders is, at least with the Nikon 5000, a lovely opportunity to introduce dust into the innards of your scanner. Take care.
The first and most obvious observation is that the Scanhancer turns the speedy 5000 into a chug chug slug. Without the Scanhancer installed it is about all I can do to keep up with the scanner, mounting and dusting the next neg whilst the first one whisks through the scanner. With the diffuser in it is more like time to cook supper. This suggests to me that the primary difference between the fast 5000 and the slow 8000 scanners isn’t any generational improvement in processor power or increases in useful memory or anything like that. It is the presence or absence of a diffuser in the light path.
Observation number two is that all small dust motes and minor negative blemishes disappear on Scanhancer scans. Bigger bits of dust still show up, but the inevitable multiple white speckles don’t. Scanning may take longer, but spotting is much faster. One of the practical questions for a prospective user may be whether they edit on a light box or whether they edit on scans. The more scans that you do the more the loss of speed matters.
Related to observation number two is that tones become smoother. Light grey areas are light grey rather than white with black specks. The scanner no longer resolves at the level of the grit in a negative.
Theoretically this should mean that Scanhancer scans have less detail. In practice I’ve found that that isn’t so. And this is where one of my ‘bear in mind’ points comes in. Handheld photos using grainy black and white film are rough sketches. They are not full of fine detail in the first place. At the level of detail that I put into my photos, I haven’t been able to detect any loss. Your resolution experience may vary.
It is also possible that the grit level of resolution isn’t real in the first place. I’ve never managed to be sure when what I’m seeing is grain aliasing (that is, more scanner noise and artefact than grain). Whatever, losing the grit doesn’t seem to matter.
It took me a while to separate out the resolution effects from the contrast effects, because I’m also seeing less contrast. This makes the photos appear less detailed until you look closely. I happen to find the Scanhancer scans tonally much easier to work with. This may be because I learnt my monochrome Photoshop skills using the Nikon 8000 scanner, or it may be because I’d have found them easier to work with anyway. I can’t tell.
It is difficult to demonstrate the contrast question because the linear scans by themselves are dense and in negative form. What I’ve done here is to take the same negative and scan it twice, once (left) with and once (right) without the Scanhancer. I’ve then added a gamma curve and done an inversion using ColorNeg. Because ColorNeg is making a judgement based upon the clipping points, there is some possibility that these charts are not exact equivalents. On the other hand, they are the histograms that result using my standard workflow at my standard settings. They represent the images that I would get before any interpretive editing for my chosen real world negative.
The histograms are just the standard Photoshop display (taken as screen grabs), and represent, don’t forget, positive images here. The difference is quite striking in the lower (darker) half of the image.
Here is another negative with a different sort of profile:
The change here isn’t so striking, but is of the same sort. More mid tones and lower volumes in the darker areas.
The differences that I’ve seen are nothing that I couldn’t replicate in later processing. That is, I can make a Scanhancer scan look like a pure Nikon scan and vice versa. But as I said, I happen to find the Scanhancer scans easier to work with.
For the coming months I intend to scan with the diffuser in. The Scanhancer may not be right for you, but it is a genuine option. It isn’t one of those gimmicky gadgets that photo retailers so love. For the modest amount of money involved, it would be worth the experiment if you have a Nikon 5000.
I rather enjoyed reading this New Yorker article on Pascal Dangin’s photo retouching business. It is a bit long in a New Yorker sort of way, but it more or less keeps its pace throughout and, well I read to the end.
It is written for a non-technical audience, but even so you get to find out a bit about the technology behind state of the art photo retouching, and rather more about the business. Those are reason enough to go and have a look, but not the reason that the article stuck in my mind.
This got me thinking about landscape photography:
But playing with the representational possibilities of photographs, and the bodies contained therein, has always aroused the suspicion of viewers with a perpetual, if naïve, desire for objective renderings of the world around them. As much as it is a truism that photography is subjective, it is also a truism that many of its beholders—even those who happily eliminate red-eye from their wedding albums—will take umbrage when confronted with evidence of its subjectivity.
And this even more so:
“But what was fascinating was that I had to learn someone’s life in a very short amount of time. Like, fifteen seconds to figure out, Where does she go and eat? What does she wear? Is she married? Imagining this whole life and then defining a style for the person. Hair, to me, is really one of the most important retouchings that you can do. Because I look at life as retouching. Makeup, clothes are just an accessorization of your being, they are just a transformation of what you want to look like.”
Does this landscape need retouching, or what
I’m not talking about the temptation to clone out the vehicles from the “idyllic” mountain view, or even the fact that there is very little landscape in the world whose appearance hasn’t been created by man (essentially none in Europe I would say). No, I started thinking about how many landscapes there are that are now managed to preserve a given look.
These specific examples are English and you’ll have to make up your own to suit your locality, but when sheep are put on downland not because of their agricultural value but because the grass needs to be cropped close to create the style of landscape that we associate with the downs, or when the National Trust maintains upland farms in order to keep the bracken at bay and the dry-stone walls maintained, what we are doing is retouching the landscape to present a perfect appearance on our current definition of perfection. The difference between lip gloss and spending money putting in hedges in a place where we expect there to be hedges is not great.
The look of perfection that we seek to maintain is, of course, fairly random. It just happens to be what the landscape looked like when the music stopped and the land was no longer economic in the use that had created that particular look.
There is nothing wrong with this preservation, and if it gives pleasure to people there are things that are positively right about it. I happen to like dry-stone walling, hedges, and, especially, walking on chalk downland with short cropped grass. But they are the longer-legs-and-less-chin equivalents in the landscape.
Petteri Sulonen has posted 10 pages of field notes about his week with a DP1.
Although I don’t agree with everything he says (in particular I think he is overly kind to the raw converter), I do agree with the overall conclusion and I like the tone of the article. If this is a camera that interests you, then this is well worth the reading time.
…In the end, the DP1 left me wistful. It represents a digital camera design direction I desperately want to succeed. There is no justice in the world if it proves to be a once-off, rather than the first in a new class of digital cameras — worthy successors to the likes of the Konica Hexar, the Ricoh GR, or the Olympus XA. The size is there, the lens is there, the image quality is there, and basic handling is only a little bit behind these classics. With one more step Sigma could turn this into the extension of the hand and the eye that makes a truly great camera.
Until then, I’m going to have to regretfully hold off on giving this a full thumbs-up…
As I said, in my book there is more than one step that Sigma needs to make, but the camera is useable as is.
A DP1 shot - showing no relevant characteristic
You may have already seen this as a couple of sites are carrying it (original source on the web), but I think it is significant enough to warrant repeating.
I think we need to change our philosophy of what a magazine is. We are no longer a cheap means of dispensing information, and that’s what we were until the Internet came along. Now we are an inefficient and expensive means of distributing information. … We need to reinvent ourselves as a luxury item that people want and are willing to pay for. And until we change our own image of who we are, we’re going to find out that our vendors are gong to change it for us. Because, right now, postage is a premium. Paper is a premium. Soon printing will be a premium. How long can we buy at a premium and sell at a discount? We can’t.
It has been retyped (complete with typo) from a magazine called ‘Publishing Executive‘.
I’d add to the list that paper magazines are also expensive to dispose of, both in real terms (fuel, landfill etc) and also in terms of the financial charges that pay as you throw schemes are experimenting with.
If the product changes then the distribution channel must also change. Newsagents are not, on the whole, places that one associates with luxury items.
There are luxury photo magazines around already (Lenswork, Ag), and I’ve been interested to see how well they appear to be doing in comparison with the general news one hears about magazines and newspapers.
I don’t think that luxury is the only viable model for the magazine industry. Another one is the ‘joining’ or club model where you create some feeling of insider-dom. Although I can see this working in other fields, I don’t know of a mainstream photo title that has managed to pull it off. Maybe there is one in another country.
I’ve been asked by various people why I chose the medium and/or the gear that I did for my sofobomo project. The only answer that I have is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.
An interesting variant upon the question is ‘what difference would shooting in colour have made?’. That is a question that I can answer, or at least in part.
On several days during the project I carried a digital (and hence, colour) camera along with me, and whilst I am no good at switching between colour and monochrome on the fly, what I did do a couple of times is switch cameras when I turned around. When the walks were linear rather than circular, this gave me an interesting opportunity.
I’m not sure that I would have shot the above picture in monochrome, but I do know that I didn’t. I don’t remember even seeing the possibility. On the way back though, it was irresistible. That red really was that red. Ouch.
As I type this there are twelve completed sofobomo projects on the project page of the new sofobomo.org site. I know that there are people who haven’t yet submitted to that page and, of course, there are the many people whose fuzzy month hasn’t yet finished. I guess there are some whose fuzzy month only started today.
The variety and quality is astounding. A whole photo library in one place. And its only going to get better.
Many thanks to Bernie Sumption for putting the project page and the submission page online.
It is most definitely not my intention here to start one of those fake internet controversies by setting up two other people to look as if they are disagreeing with each other (you know, of the ‘cameras are important’, ‘no they are not’, ‘yes they are’ kind). The two people that I’m about to quote were talking about different things and in different contexts, but I read them on the same day and they set out quite clearly two very different views about why one might take photographs.
First, Mike Johnston, talking about creating a body of work that has an identifiable style:
One test I apply to artists to judge whether a certain style or a subject or a mode of working is central to them or not is to ask, if you threw it out—if it disappeared—would it change our estimation of them?….These thoughts don’t apply to a great many hobbyist photographers, who are just trying to have fun, who will try anything, and who really have no idea what their strengths might be. For anyone hoping to create something coherent and lasting, though—anyone trying to accomplish something—knowing your strengths and not spinning your wheels chasing things you’re not good at is key.
Sensible advice for anyone hoping to create something coherent and lasting.
What the Sam Hill is a ’strategy improver’ when it is at home
Secondly, Guy Tal talking about doing photography as a part of our sense of exploration and love of the things around us:
In my experience, most of us who found our way to nature photography (in the broadest sense of the term) did so out of a sense of discovery and adventure, because we are inspired by the unbridled freedom of the wild, the challenge of unexpected opportunities and rare encounters with primal beauty. Why, then, once we have achieved a foothold in the field, we start moving in the opposite direction: narrowing down our scope into well-defined little categories that we dare not stray from?
The answer is, perhaps, that this is what the art world expects of us. Artists are celebrated for having distinct and consistent styles, recognizable work, something a critic can peg into terms like “abstract” or “post-modern” or, if we’re especially lucky, invent new terms for.
…
There is a danger in pegging ourselves into little boxes. By doing so we may gain in peer recognition but lose valuable insights.
No prizes for guessing which view I associate with most. Spinning my wheels and chasing things that I don’t know about (and hence, by definition, am not very good at) is what I do. That’s what makes life fun.
But what is right for me, or either of the above writers, isn’t necessarily right for you. I’m just very glad I don’t work for that strategy improver.
Or rather, I’m done in. Whilst the calender tells me that I have several more days in which I can work on my sofobomo project, my life tells me that that isn’t so. I’ve stopped.
I’ve done more than stop. I’ve redefined the project and downsized the ambitions. As with all downsizing exercises it is best to concentrate on the positives, so rather than say stuff like ‘all my photos need further work and some of them need to be rescanned’, I’m going to say:
- I’ve learnt a lot
- I’m pleased with the book that I’ve produced
- I’ve fired the project management department (hey, everybody dislikes the project manager, right?)
- And as a Special Bonus for you dear reader, there will be a volume two of my sofobomo project book out later in May. When I’ve got the time and energy to face it.
I’ll be putting html versions of the photos online in the next day or two, but …. ta da …. here is the pdf: Walking Aberdeen. Best to download rather than opening in a browser. It is 6.4Mb. The underlying picture size is 850 pixels so don’t stretch the pdf too far on your super large cinema display. This is very much a first draft, so download this collector’s edition TODAY!
