Digital photograph has a big problem with long lasting storage. Hard drives and SSDs fail and degrade with time, with a 3-5 year service life in most cases before the drive fails or the data degrades, a fact I think most photographers are oblivious to, because for the most part, digital photography works well…until it doesn’t.
If you think you take storage seriously, you might want to compare your efforts to those of Warner Bros. They’ve partnered with Microsoft on Project Silica to create a truly archival form of digital storage. Engadget just did a great writeup on it:
Project Silicon encodes digital data onto stable quartz glass that is resistant to many forms of damage and degradation. The article provides a fascinating look into the challenges with preserving both film and digital data. I hope we still photographers can someday reap the rewards of this technology.
Interestingly glass has a long history in photography as it provides a dimensionally stable base for film emulsion. Ansel Adam’s famous Monolith, the Face of Half Dome was made on a glass plate. Glass plates were widely used by astronomers for most of the 20th century because they allowed precise measurements of star positions. There is a certain poetic beauty that photography is about to come full circle when we again store our photos on glass.
At what point is buying a Drobo worth it compared to using single external drives? And what size drives should you buy for the best value? To help a friend with this question and satisfy my curiosity, I created this spreadsheet that you can access on Google Sheet.
Using 8TB drives gives the best value per TB. If you need more than ~21TB (dual drive redundancy), it’s cheaper to buy a second Drobo than it is to use 10TB, 12TB, or 14TB drives. And “upgrading” the drives in an existing DROBO usually isn’t worth it, unless all your drives are so old that they just need replacing anyway.
PRO TIP: Drobo is NOT a backup. It merely makes your master data more resilient to drive failures. A backup is a separate copy on a separate device, and you need two backups. Keep one backup off site to protect agains fire, flood, theft, tornados, hurricanes.
If you are going to buy a Drobo, use my Amazon Affiliate links and I’ll get a small commission:
Tamron has announced three new lightweight primes in 20mm, 24mm, and 35mm with a weight of about 220g per lens and an unbelievable price of about $350 per lens. As a landscape photographer, I’ve been hoping someone would offer a truly lightweight lens with excellent MTF scores, and it looks like Tamron was first to the punch.
Why and I making a big deal about weight? When you are on long hikes, particularly in rugged terrain or at high altitude, carrying less weight makes the experience far more enjoyable, and leaves you in a better mindset to photograph. I’ve packed for days in the Sierra with 70-80 pound packs and my 4×5 film view camera, and at the end of most days, I was totally thrashed, even in my mid 20s. When hiking, weight sucks, and is an impediment to making great work.
Weight was a big reason I decided to go Sony, because they offered the best range of lightweight high resolution bodies with a good range of lightweight Zeiss lenses.
The last few years have given us a number of superb f/1.4 primes, but at a cost of weight. My Sigma 35mm f/1.4 is a brick. It feels as heavy as my old Nikon 180mm f/2.8, but is even less well balanced. And while I love being able to play with shallow depth of field, for my primary landscape work I’m almost always stopped down to f/11. I don’t need f/1.4 performance on a hike, and I don’t want to pay the weight penalty.
By making these lenses at f/2.8, Tamron is able to make a much lighter design, as well as offering a lower price. And from the MTF charts, they appear to be top performers…as good or even better than other primes in these focal lengths.
These lenses just made it to the top of my wish list. I can’t wait to try one out! Kudos Tamron for seeing an unfilled niche and filling it.
More info on the Tamron website and in their press release:
Nissan Stadium Parking Lot, Nashville, July 4, 2018
As I walked to my car across the Korean War Veterans Bridge in downtown Nashville, the crazy tire patterns juxtaposed against the orderly parking lines immediately reminded me of the structured disorder of modern artists like Miro and Jackson Pollock, and amused picturing who made these tracks and if the police caught them. I was jealous, because it looked like they had a lot of fun. Through pre-visualization, I knew that I would be able to convert the photo to black and white and bring out the patterns through contrast. It seems like a good fit for my Signs and Wondering series
Curve equivalents of Contrast Slider in Adobe Camera Raw at +25, +50, +75, and +100.
I’m working on an article, and it turns out the Curves slider in Adobe Camera RAW is very limiting. The graphic above shows the curves required to produce the equivalent of +25, +50, +75, and +100 with the curves slider. The most pronounced curve is the +100, and the least pronounced (from the 1:1 slope baseline) is +25.
I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, and honestly I’m a little shocked by the results. Even at +100, the curves slider is weak sauce, and doesn’t even begin to harness the power of curves.
What I’ve seen so far makes be glad I bypass the contrast slider and go right to curves. I’m looking forward to running some more experiments and developing a more in depth article.
That’s the problem one of my workshop participants was having and asked what could be causing it. This is actually a pretty common problem, but it can be easy to miss until you’ve trained your eyes to see it.
The prints in question were made with the Epson Stylus Photo R1900, which lacks the Light Gray and Light Light Gray found in some other Epson models. That means when it prints a B&W photo, most shades of gray are being made up from the color inks.
It’s very difficult to make a neutral gray from color inks, hence the color cast. The 24 and 44 inch epson and Canon printers, as well as some smaller printers, use two shades of light gray in addition to black to solve this.
Yet even with those extra shades of gray, profiles can be to blame. You need an accurate profile to get neutral color, and canned profiles (the ones that came with your printer or you downloaded from the paper manufacturer) rarely achieve perfect neutrality.
In the case of the Epson R1900, if the photographer wants a better result, they will have to print on a printer that has gray inks and a decent profile.
I’ve been having issues with the latest i1Studio software version 1.5 and 1.5.1. It doesn’t let me successfully “save session” which means I loose my work if I close the app or start a new profile , and that interferes with allowing extended drydown time. Till I hear from X-rite, my solution was to roll back to the 1.1.1 version which is working properly and I know produces good profiles.
Finding the right version can be a little complicated because x-rite spreads their content across several URLs, but these links should work for you.
As a side note, this is why typically turn off “auto update” on my software and I don’t install updated unless I have the time to troubleshoot and validate that the software has not changed the behavior of my printing or viewing environment. I’ve been bit too many times by updates messing things up while on deadline projects. This was one of those times, said, what the heck, I’ll update” thinking it would be no big deal, but it turned into a multi-day setback.
The fields of cotton near my house have been captivating me. I grew up in Ohio when corn was the dominant crop, so this is a totally new visual experience for me. Besides its visual interest, cotton is an iconic crop, woven into the fabric of the American Experiment. None of us would know who Eli Whitney was without the cotton gin, nor can we forget cotton’s former role in the horrible practice of slavery.
In this present age, it’s planted in neat little rows, with highly bred strains designed for maximum yield and mechanical harvesting. While contemplating the past, I could also be in the present and appreciate the beauty of the plant in the here and now. This photo was taken nearly an hour after sunset, with the light and color provided by the incredible purple volcanic sunsets we’ve been having. I wanted to capture the tranquility of a cloudless Tennessee autumn sky lit by the post-sunset glow and a half moon rising over the fields. The beauty of that night is well conveyed for me in this photograph, and makes me interested in photographing more of the crops of Tennessee.
This photograph was the efforts of nearly 2 hours of working the subject through sunset and changing light. I approached it with my initial preconceptions, but turning 180 degrees from sunset, I saw the beautiful purple sky and moon and raced to a field that would let me show these elements int eh beauty I was seeing. I worked through various angles close to the ground and lenses until finally I settled on this wide view and was able to make three exposures before the color dropped from the sky. I’ve been putting more effort into working the scene when my first attempts aren’t creating the visual impact I want, and this night, the hour I spend on my knees in the dirt were rewarded with a nice frame that captures part of the beauty of Tennessee.
Sony A7RII with Nikon 20mm f/2.8 lens, exposure 30 seconds f/11 iso 640
Reflections, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park
Not sure why your prints aren’t coming our the way you want? Want better prints? Then it’s time to look at how you process.
Processing is where we take creative control over what a print will look like.
The printer (output device) is supposed to be the dumb part of the process. It’s not supposed to interpret, fix, or change your processing decisions. It’s just supposed to render the processing accurately.
A printer should be like a player piano. You put in a piano roll, and assuming the piano is in tune, you hear the music as the musician intended.
Our file is the piano roll, and processing is where we decide what notes should be played, when, and for how long.
Processing is where the really important stuff happens. Processing creates a file that tells the output device what to do; what colors to print, how dark and how light, how saturated, and what color balance. The output device isn’t supposed to be deciding those things, YOU ARE!
One of the challenges you may be facing is that making something look “good” on a screen is easier than making it look good in print.
Screens are more forgiving because they they can’t display the same subtle variations of color, highlight, and shadow that a print can. They hide small (and sometimes not so small) differences in processing. This is especially true of phone and tablet size screens.
If you are processing for web and social media, the screen becomes your final output device, and you can see it instantly in its final form. But not so with prints.
There is always a screen to print translation as we switch from transmitted light (screen) to reflected light with ink on paper (print.)
Prints are less forgiving of processing errors. Things that will hide on screen become glaringly evident on the print. The “pop” of a screen isn’t there to mask these processing errors.
So when we’re printing, we need to learn how to “read” the monitor and anticipate what it will look like on the print. Like any art, that means practicing, gaining experience, and refining our techniques.
Printing is sensitive to very small changes. If you can see the difference between a one point slider move on screen, assume you’ll be able to see the difference in print.
So instead of trying to see if 50 contrast is better than 30, try and see if 34 contrast is better than 35. Or instead of deciding between a 5000k and a 4950k white balance how about trying a 4975k setting?
It may sounds like splitting hairs, but these very refined changes is where you bring out the magic in a print. I often spend half my processing time on an image going back and forth between small changes to asses their effect. I’m looking for the “perfect” setting that matches my artistic vision.
This fine tuning is really noticeable in highlights and shadows because those tonal areas simply do not display accurately on screen. So I rely on the info tool to read the numbers. This gives me a mathematic measure of what the print will show instead of the visual measure our eyes give us. For shadows and highlights, the numbers are more accurate than our monitor or eyes.
Processing for print is a culmination of all your photographic experience and knowledge to express your vision. The more you grow your skills, the more you gain experience, the more satisfied you’ll be with your results. Next time you don’t get the print you were expecting, go back to your processing to make it better.
