The Online Photographer

By Ctein

When you're shopping for a camera, you want to know how that particular model performs. Trend lines and averages are useful for winning bar bets or figuring out where the industry might be going. They're a very bad way to buy a camera. People here are smart enough not to buy a camera based solely on technical paper specs, right? Well, deciding that a camera is or isn't for you based entirely on a trend line or the average performance of cameras in its class is even worse. You're not even basing your decision on the paper specs for that specific camera but how some hypothetical camera of that general class might perform, if it performed like the average of all the cameras that came before it. Does that make sense?!

What you should be looking at is not averages and trends, but scatter. What you're really interested in is how individual models may differ from that average. If the scatter is very small, than the average or trend is a good indicator. If the scatter is large, it isn't.

Back when cameras moved from six megapixels to eight megapixels (and from 8 MP to ten) I warned people that the performance of cameras varied enough from model to model that the best of the six megapixel cameras were going to resolve comparably to the worst of the eight megapixel cameras. Sure, on average eight resolved better than six, but the average was of no help in deciding whether to buy a particular model.

I still read  frequent comments in these pages from readers who pronounce that a camera with some spec  (megapixels, sensor size, pixel count, bit depth, you name it) is ipso facto inferior to a camera with a different spec solely because of some average performance indicator. That's the same mistake. As I said, it may win bar bets, but it's not a way of ensuring that you're buying the camera that's best for you.

Let's take a look at a couple of the graphs on DxOmark to further illustrate what I'm talking about:

http://www.dxomark.com/itext/insights_paradoxical/image001.gif

http://www.dxomark.com/itext/insights_paradoxical/image002.gif

Both of these graphs show trends in noise and pixel count. Note how shallow the trends are compared to the scatter of the individual points (camera models). Even within a single manufacturing year, the variations in camera specs are greater than the trends over four or five years. This year's camera may not only be no better than last year's, it may be worse than one released several years earlier.

Since both plots used introduction date, you can match up pixel counts with noise between them. Sometimes there's a good correlation; sometimes it's really lousy. For example, in the first half of 2007, there is a very nice match between more pixels and worse noise. On the other hand, three cameras introduced in the first half of 2004, with a threefold difference in pixel count, all have essentially the same noise level.

http://www.dxomark.com/itext/insights_paradoxical/image003.gif

The third graph normalizes everything to pixel pitch, which is the new fave metric. And, yes, the data clusters more tightly, but there are still variations of several dB from the average. In fact, if one ignores the two very poorly performing cameras in the early years, there's no obvious trend at all; it's pretty much a flat line with any given model varying by a couple of dB. While useful for analyzing trends, it won't tell you which particular camera model to buy.

As the folks at DxO said, "Another thing to notice is that for a given release year, the dispersion across cameras is of approximately the same magnitude as the improvement over the past 5 years. This means that ...the differences among current DLSRs can be larger than the overall technology gain over the past five years."

They also note, later on, that Canon, on average, has the best pixel performance, but the single best performing full frame DSLR model happens to be a Nikon.

That's it for today's sermon. Go and spend your money wisely!

__________________

Ctein

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Links to schtuff:
Amazon U.S. link
Amazon U.K. link
Amazon Germany link
Amazon Canada link
B&H Photo link
Adorama Camera link
 

By Ctein

Last column I introduced you to diffraction. This time, I'm going to explain why you shouldn't pay it so much attention.

How do the component blurs in an optical system combine? Usually, the following equation is a good approximation to the total amount of blur you'll get:

TotalBlur^2 = Blur1^2 + Blur2^2 + Blur3^2...

In English, the total blur squared is the sum of the squares of the individual blurs.

Just to make sure you understand this equation, imagine you have a camera with a film and lens resolutions of 100 line pair per millimeter (blur circle of 10 µ). Then the total blur will be 14 µ and the final resolution will be 70 lp/mm.

Up the film resolution to 150 lp/mm, and the final resolution will be about 83 lp/mm. If your film resolves 200 lp/mm, then you're near 90 lp/mm. That's close enough to the resolution limit of the lens that further improvements in film aren't going to produce a visible gain.

Rule of thumb: if your worst blur isn't twice as bad as all the other blurs, then improving any of the blurs will improve the image, although (obviously) improving the weakest link gets you the biggest gain.

With film cameras, you've got five major sources of blur to worry about: film resolution, vibration, focus error, lens aberrations, and diffraction. Until one of them is twice as bad as all the others, improving any of them helps.

Focus error is the biggie that photographers don't think about. Cameras usually have SERIOUS focus errors, if you're trying to work on the scale where diffraction actually matters. The error has a variety of sources, from a mismatch between the distance to the focusing screen/autofocus sensor and the film/sensor plane to the finite step size in the encoders and servomotors in electrically-focusing cameras. It's a bigger problem than you would imagine. In an otherwise-good system, it is often the biggest source of image blur.

Film resolution is easy to characterize; digital sensor resolution is almost impossible! For a start, there are all the reasons mentioned in the article by Ruben et al. Add in several more:

• Even a 2 x 2 pixel array is a bare minimum. Does fitting the Airy disk into a square provide high quality image data? Nope. You're going to see improvements in the quality of the fine detail up to at least a 4x4 pixel array.

• Sensor pixels don't even operate entirely as discrete elements. There is charge leakage (analogous to a halation in photographic film) between adjacent pixels. This degrades sensitivity, sharpness, color fidelity, and noise, above what "theory" would tell you.

• Finally, there is the image processing that produces a viewable image. Some of you may have noticed how peculiar it is that the number of lines of resolution in many digital cameras is about the same horizontally, vertically, and diagonally! That's impossible if you're talking about a physical blur circle. This is a synthesized image. The resolution you get is not a simple mapping of pixel data.

Put it all together and claims that pixels have become too small because of diffraction effects loses all credence. There's too much stuff going on that muddies the picture (literally).

The same test photograph as last time. This figure is at 150% full-size [after you click on it to enlarge it —MJ]. The camera is my Fuji FinePix S100fs. Pixel pitch is around 2.5 µ. Nothing much changes in terms of sharpness all way down to ƒ/5.6. Sure, the pixels are minuscule and diffraction is getting worse, but everything else matters much more. Even at ƒ/8, the impact of diffraction is modest, although the Airy disk is twice the pixel size. It's only going that final aperture from ƒ/8 to ƒ/11 where diffraction truly dominates image clarity.

The only way to figure out if diffraction is important in your photographs is to run some very, very careful tests and understand how to interpret the data. For most of you, honestly, it's a waste of your time comparable to running endless film tests instead of making nice photographs.

_____________________

Ctein

By Ctein

Eolake emailed me a good question:

"Logically it seems to me that diffraction should affect small formats much more than large ones. Since it's a physical interaction with the edge of the aperture, wouldn't the absolute amount of the diffraction be inverse with the size of the aperture in millimeters, not with the f-value?"

The absolute resolution is indeed inversely proportional to the absolute size of the aperture...but that resolution is measured as the angular separation of the subject details. Very approximately, the resolution in radians equals 1.3 times the wavelength divided by the diameter of the aperture. In other words,

r (in radians) = 1.3w/A.

To get the separation distance of details in a film/sensor plane, you multiply the angular separation by the focal length of the lens. In other words, the Circle of Confusion is:

C = F*r
= 1.3w*F/A.

And what is F/A? It's just the f-number! So there we are:

C = 1.3w * (f-number)

or

r (in line pairs (lp) per mm) = 1600/ (f-number) for green light.

This is the maximum resolution a lens can produce. Real world lenses can approach this limit but not exceed it.

Diffraction increases as a lens is stopped down. From left to right, these are magnified sections of digital photographs made at ƒ/4, ƒ/8 and ƒ/11. (Click to see larger.)

The term "diffraction-limited" gets used in two different ways when we're talking about lenses. We say that a lens is being diffraction limited when we reach the point where stopping the lens down further reduces resolution instead of improving it (in the absence of diffraction, resolution would always improve as we stopped down, because some aberrations diminish with reduced aperture).

We also talk about a lens exhibiting "diffraction-limited performance" when its resolution is near the diffraction limit. That's not the same thing, and it causes unavoidable confusion. Many lenses will become diffraction-limited before they're stopped down enough to exhibit diffraction-limited performance. In fact, if it's a poor lens, it may never achieve diffraction-limited performance.

On the other hand, really, really good 35mm-format lenses may become diffraction limited at apertures as large as ƒ/4–ƒ/4.7 and exhibit diffraction-limited performance at ƒ/4.7–ƒ/7.

The edge of the aperture doesn't directly produce diffraction. Diffraction isn't caused by photons scattering off of the edges of the aperture. If that were the case, we could markedly reduce diffraction by blackening the diaphragm blades so much that almost no photons were scattered off of them. That improves flare and micro-contrast, but it doesn't do a thing for diffraction.

It's the mere existence of the edge that causes diffraction. It's a quantum mechanical "spooky action at a distance" thing. The presence of aperture blades means the incoming photon is constrained to a particular region of space. That automatically means that the degree to which the photon is moving sideways isn't precisely defined. The diaphragm hasn't warped the paths of the light rays; its presence makes those paths less predictable. The closer together the aperture edges, the less predictable the sideways spreading. In English—as you stop down, diffraction increases.

See, even if you don't believe in quantum weirdness, you deal with it every day of your photographic life!

Next time: what's the practical import of this for photographers? Is diffraction the ultimate sharpness-killer?

______________________

Ctein

Featured Comment by Bernard: "Anybody who is really interested in knowing how quantum physics affects all aspects of photography should read Richard Feynman's QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter, which could have been subtitled 'How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Quantum Electrodynamics.'"

Help! Ctein needs about 100 more people to volunteer to receive their dye transfer print orders after the holidays. It's no risk, really—Ctein is very good about filling orders and meeting his obligations. He's the only writer I know, for example, who always hits his deadlines. If you've ordered a couple of dye transfer prints and would be willing to wait just a little longer to receive them—for the good of the cause—please email him and volunteer. It would make his life a lot easier.

Thanks!

__________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Martin: "Mike & Ctein, just a side note: As an economist, I have been taught that people 'react on incentives.' Surely, it's a fine thing if there are some hundred people who will voluntarily agree to get their prints shipped some time later. However, if you want to systematically lower the number of people who want their prints immediately, you will have to lure them into it. You could either give those who need their prints immediately a negative incentive (monetary or otherwise), or those who agree to receive the prints late a positive incentive (though I admit that I myself don't know what this exactly should be. Maybe a nice bonus or rebate on future orders?). Just my two cents. By the way, I agreed to receiving my prints late. In my humble opinion, Ctein's offer is so generous that this is the only reasonable reply."

As an artist I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers. This month "strangers" have been exceptionally kind to me. (Okay, I know you're not strangers, but I don't want to screw up a fine Tennessee Williams reference).

When Mike and I launched the dye transfer print offering, I figured that if the offer were extremely successful it would be well within my printing capability to deliver 200-odd prints by Christmas (I would be working hard, mind you, but it would be doable). Heck, I could even deliver an unimaginable 300+ prints by Christmas if I really had to (very long hours, lots of midnight oil, etc.); we had ample safety margin.

The gods have an interesting sense of humor. When orders closed last night, some 450 people had ordered about 720 prints.

I am beyond flabbergasted, beyond ecstatic, beyond elated. I'm simply stunned. And at a loss for metaphors; my jaw hit the floor many days ago and I haven't been able to pick it up since. I cannot begin to express how grateful I am to all of you—the folks who ordered, the folks who sent e-mails thanking us for making the offer, the folks who copied the offer and posted it on their own lists, all of you. It's beyond astonishing.

Victim of success
...And it presents me with a difficulty. It's physically impossible for me to make 700 dye transfer prints before Christmas. it will likely take me through February to do this much printing.

So once more I have to depend upon the kindness of "strangers." I need to ask for volunteers willing to wait a little longer for their prints. If you don't need your print before Christmas, please e-mail me (don't post as a comment). You don't need to recapitulate your order; just give me your name, and I'll match it to your order. Folks who really do need their photos by Christmas will all get them shipped before folks who don't, with orders filled in the order in which I received them. So that none of our out-of-U.S. friends worry, those orders will get shipped before domestic ones, because it can take one-to-several weeks longer for overseas mail.

If you do want your photographs by Christmas, you don't need to do anything. Hopefully more than enough of you will volunteer for later delivery that I will not be in a bind.

Thank you all; I'm still in a state of shock. This mixture of elation, gratitude, and sheer terror is one that I am unaccustomed to.

-                                                                                                 —Ctein

Just a reminder—this weekend is the last opportunity to order a dye transfer print from Ctein if you want to.

The demand has been really pretty astonishing—much more than Ctein or I foresaw. One consequence of the high demand is that this will definitely be the last such offer Ctein will ever be able to make. When dye transfer materials were discontinued by Kodak, Ctein literally mortgaged his house to buy a large supply of materials—what he hoped would last 20 years. He virtually filled his basement with supplies. He says he has managed to locate a source for some more small dye transfer paper, which will keep him from having to cut down more of his big sheets to do these prints, but, even so, this print offer will exhaust nearly half of all the paper he has stockpiled.

We were originally thinking that if this offer were successful, we might be able to do another one six months or a year from now. But because of the high volume of the sales this time around, that won't be possible. Ctein can fill all of these orders, but after that he will need to reserve his remaining stockpiles for making full-sized, full-cost prints of the rest of his life's work.

Orders close on midnight Sunday, two and a half days from now. He really cannot accept orders after that, for the reasons we explained last time around.

The original sales notice is here, and Ctein's explanation of the dye transfer process is here. Here again (below) are the buttons for ordering [since removed; sale has ended]. If you previously placed an order and need to contact him, you can email Ctein directly.

{SALE ENDED MIDNIGHT U.S. CENTRAL TIME, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19th}

______________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Carl Blesch: "I'm pleased that I got my order in last weekend; had some Christmas and birthday money stashed away and was thinking of buying a photo book or two per this blog's recent recommendations. But when I saw Ctein's offer, I pounced. I was a real photo geek in high school—tried all sorts of films and papers, even considered blending my own developer at one point (but never got that far). Tried color slide developing (anyone remember Anscochrome?) and color printing (I tried Beseler's Unicolor, which was supposed to be way easier for home darkroom printing than the conventional Kodak processes). Sad to say, many of those Anscochrome transparencies and Unicolor prints sit faded in my photo cabinet. My ultimate challenge was going to be trying dye transfer printing. Had no idea how I was going to do it, but I figured I'd be able to take a crack at it someday. Talk about ignorance being bliss. Reading Ctein's description of the process and watching Michael Reichmann's video make me realize what a mountain that would have been to climb. So buying these two prints of Ctein's will be a small way of fulfilling my unfulfilled dream.

"Trouble is, if I like these small prints as much as I think I'm going to, I'll have to find a grand or two to buy some of his big ones. And I don't think birthday or Christmas money will quite cover those...."

Mike replies: I know what you mean, Carl. I've always had my eye on this one—I've seen it in the original, nearly 16x20, and I find it very powerful. But I have to face the fact that I'm never going to have that kind of money for discretionary purchases. You know what they say: Oh well.

By Ctein

Here's an understatement: dye transfer printing is time-consuming and expensive. Making the first dye print from a negative costs me over $100 in materials and several days' time, and demands extraordinary skill, understanding, and good artistic judgment. It's no wonder that few printers make dye transfers.

A dye transfer picture is not created chemically in paper; it's more analogous to the mechanical printing process that magazines use. Instead of plates engraved with a screened halftone image for each of the colors, though, dye transfer uses three continuous-tone sheet film plates called matrices. The matrices are soaked in water-based cyan, magenta and yellow dyes. The matrices are rinsed clean of excess dye and squeegeed against a sheet of gelatin-coated paper, much like regular photographic paper but without the silver compounds. The gelatin absorbs the dye from the matrix. The result is a continuous-tone dye photograph on paper.

The details are a wee bit more involved...

First, I need to separate out each of the individual color images that comprise a color negative. I use red, green and blue filters to enlarge the individual color negative images onto sheets of Pan Matrix Film. I process that to produce a relief image: the thickness of gelatin left on the film base after processing is proportional to the amount of light that hit the film.

Now I can work by room light. I soak the matrices in "acid-fixing" dyes. Gelatin will absorb just so much acid-fixing dye out of the dye bath. That's what makes dye transfer work. The thickness of the matrix relief image is proportional to the original exposure, so the amount of dye picked up by the matrix is also proportional. More light means more gelatin, which means more dye in the print.

The red-, green- and blue-exposed matrices go into cyan, magenta and yellow dye baths, respectively. I can adjust the contrast of each dye image by changing the acidity of that dye bath. I have sets of different contrast dyes, much as black-and-white printers have different grades of paper. Sometimes, I even use different contrasts for the different matrices to correct for some unusual color balance problem, like aerial photographs that are too blue in the shadows.

The matrices absorb all the dye they can in five to 10 minutes. I rinse each matrix in 1% acetic acid to remove the excess dye from the surface; because the dyes are fixed (held in place) by acid, they don't wash out of the gelatin. Incidentally, the large amounts of dilute acetic acid used in the process leave the prints smelling faintly of vinegar for months-to-years after printing.

I take the first rinsed matrix and use a roller squeegee to press it emulsion-to-emulsion against a sheet of dye transfer receiving paper. The dye molecules transfer to the paper's emulsion. After 5–10 minutes, I peel off the matrix; I now have that primary color's dye image in the receiving page. I wash the matrix in hot water, after which I can dry it or dye it for another print. I repeat this for all three matrices. Voila, a full-color dye transfer print.

It probably won't be right. It'll be too light or dark, too contrasty or flat, and/or off-color. The shadows may not have the right amount of detail, or the highlights may need a little more sparkle. Or etc., etc.

Endless control
Before Photoshop, we had dye transfer for the ultimate print control. Dye transfer printing provides me with a vast (even daunting) number of ways to control the appearance of the print. I can use masks when making the matrices to adjust the color balance, color rendition and tone scale of the print. I can control the density and contrast of each matrix individually during exposure and processing. I can adjust the acidity of the dye baths to change the image contrast and density (which looks different from changing the matrix contrast).

I can lighten or darken an image by changing the composition of the rinse baths; I can even add dye selectively to shadows or remove it from only the highlights. I can make additional transfers from each matrix to fine-tune the image. Each primary color image adjusts completely independently of the others, using any combination of these tools.  Learning how to judge what corrections will take me from a first print to that perfect final one is what's really demanding about dye transfer.

Of course, my technique must be meticulous. If I don't process the matrices with perfect evenness, I get uncontrollable color shifts and blotches. Wet matrices are fragile beyond belief and demand careful handling. If I roll a print too lightly, I'll get dye bleeding and patchy, unsharp prints. If I roll too hard, I'll stretch the paper and get color fringes. Any air bubbles or dust between the matrix and paper prevent the dye from transferring at those spots, making for much retouching and spotting later. I must do everything right while handling large sheets of wet, floppy film and paper.

But, it's like getting to Carnegie Hall. Thirty years of practice, practice, practice and I'm there! Believe me: the results are worth all the effort.

______________________

Ctein

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By Ctein

I would like to make a suggestion, with all appropriate modesty, that would alleviate a considerable amount of current financial woe. First, some background.

Most stuff isn't really worth anything! Beyond the basics of food, clothing, and shelter that one needs to survive, the rest is pretty much discretionary. It's all about how badly you want it. Soft currency, hard currency, promissory notes—none of it has much intrinsic value. Gold bugs treasure their hoards, but gold's nutritional value is insignificant, it makes very uncomfortable clothing, and it's not a good structural material. A bar of gold bullion is attractive, true, but 12 bars are not 12 times as attractive.

Gold is worth something because a large number of people have decided that they will give you stuff you want in exchange for gold. But it's not like one ounce of gold gets you one loaf of bread, now and forever. (Yes, it's really good bread!) It's whatever people decide it's worth today. Ditto, oil wells. Even real estate. That was a "hard" investment. I mean, everyone needs land and there's only so much of it, right? You can't go wrong with real property.

And I have this lovely bridge to sell you...

So, gold bugs have been routinely disappointed, the dot-com became the dot-bomb,the real estate boom burped.

It has to be this way! If one ounce of gold really was worth one loaf of bread now and forever, it might be worth hoarding because it wouldn't go moldy on you, but that would be it. The value has to change relative to what you really want or else there'd be no way to profit. The trick is to buy and when it's low and sell when it's hot. What goes up will eventually come right back down, because ultimately it's human whim.

Hence, investors always need the Next Big Thing. They moved on to commodities. Prices skyrocketed. Now they're coming down again, big surprise. Investors are on the prowl for a New Thing.

...And what would you pay for pie-in-the-sky!?

I suggest photographs. They have just as much intrinsic worth, relative to market prices, as most of this other stuff. In many cases are a lot more portable, and they're certainly more attractive. They even do have some modest utility value, for covering up the stain on your wall.

It makes just as much sense as investing in tech stocks, mortgages, or rice. And like those you can generate more, lots more! Let's not forget the potential of futures ("I will gladly pay you today for a hamburger next Tuesday.") This could be a really big bubble, just the shot in the arm the economy needs! Think of what a gilt-edge Tanaka, or a blue-chip Pierce, or an AA-rated Ctein could be worth! And this rising tide floats all boats, because as the easy pickings get grabbed up by the early investors the later ones look for the less likely commodities. Even Johnstons would grow vastly in price. [Hey! —Ed.]

Like all bubbles, eventually it would burst, and the early investors (and, I emphasize, divesters) would make out like bandits and the later ones would get screwed. Meanwhile the suppliers, like us and our agents and galleries, would get to be part of that banditry, salting away our not-so-hard-earned rewards in non-photographic assets. (Big mistake, plowing your returns back into the same thing the bubble's built on. Not a good long-term strategy!)

I think this has huge possibilities. Any investment firms or brokerages out there, drop me an e-mail as soon as you read this. Get in on the ground floor. You can guarantee I won't be disappointed!

_______________________

Ctein

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Featured Comment by Christopher Lane: "Ctein, My day job is in the financial industry (lucky me) and you are absolutely dead on with your analysis which is the most cogent I have seen anywhere. The money is always looking for a place to flow and right now those routes are getting fewer and fewer. I totally agree with you; however, I would broaden your proposal a bit. I suspect that the entire art market is going to get a shot in the arm from this meltdown. That includes photographs and photobooks. As you point out, the intrinsic value of art is to cover up bad patches in your wall and look at while you eat your grill cheese sandwich. ;~)"

Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "Ctein: '...gilt-edge Tanaka.' I like your thinking.

"I realize that you present this with tongue firmly in cheek. But, in fact, photography is a (slowly) rising star in the art market. Within the past 15–20 years a completely new crop of centimillionaires and billionaires have driven the prices of other art works into space. Witness just this week the 2-day Sotheby's London auction of works by 'artist' Damien Hirst that produced £111.4 million. (Hey, where else can you find a dead adult shark preserved in an acrylic tank of formaldehyde? It's either art or an appetizer.)

"So while newly-minted Russian and Chinese billionaires have their private bankers waving paddles at this stuff other more mortal art investors are looking for better, more accessible values. Photography has become one of those 'bargain' opportunities. Sotheby's auction of Andreas Gursky's '99 Cent II' for $3.34 million in 2007 set the new high-water mark for photographic art work sales. But it looked like an eBay deal to many art investors looking for bargains in new art spheres.

"(A neighbor and good friend, now an octogenarian, has been collecting photographs for 40+ years. A tour though is collection is like a walk through the George Eastman house. Although he calls it a 'modest' collection, another mutual friend, a museum curator, estimates it's worth between three and six million dollars.)

"So dust-off those old dye-transfer Apollo launch prints and head to Sotheby's, Christy's, or Philips de Pury, Ctein. BTW, do you happen to know a lab that can produce gilt-edged prints? I can't find one locally."

Mike adds: For a recent dissenting viewpoint on that, Ken, check out this article from the Financial Times about contemporary art. To quote, "...my suspicion is that it [contemporary art] will fall further and harder than perhaps any other asset class, save perhaps subprime mortgages." (Thanks to David Emerick for the tip.)

By Ctein

About a month back Hitachi released a 320 GB 7200 RPM laptop drive. The new drive offered me 60% more space (the difference between having a mostly-full hard drive and a half-full drive) plus modestly better throughput and lower power consumption. What's not to like?

Well, the migration path! Here it is:

1. Run my normal incremental backup of the 200GB drive to my external back-up hard drive using Retrospect Express. I like it 'cause it does a real file-by-file verification.

(Now the laptop has to go completely off-line or I'll lose data coherency.)

2. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the 200 GB drive to my external drive. Belt and suspenders, because from this point I'm working without a net.

3. Boot up from the external drive. (Y'all make your external backup drive bootable, right?) Secure-erase and reformat the 200 GB drive, because I'm going to sell it.

4. Open up the Macbook Pro, swap in the new 320 GB drive, and close up the box.

5. Boot up from the external drive and partition and format the 320 GB drive.

6. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the former contents of the 200 GB drive to the 320 GB drive.

7. If all has gone well, the 320 GB drive boots like it's supposed to, and I can bring the laptop back online.

It's time consuming and a little nerve-racking.

Just about the time I was getting ready to order the 320 GB drive, Other World Computing offered me a Newer Tech Universal Drive Adapter. The $30 UDA connects any standard or laptop sized IDE/ATA/SATA bare-bones drive to a USB2 port. The Universal Drive Adapter includes a power supply and all the data and power connectors needed to operate an internal hard drive externally.

Left: Here's the Universal Drive Adapter, aglow with power and data. There's nothing fancy about it, but there doesn't have to be to do the job.

Other World Computing also sent me a couple of their $10 ProtectaDrive silicone rubber sleeves, designed to protect a bare-bones drive from shock, electricity, and static discharge. Nice!

Suddenly, life was a lot simpler. I took my machine off-line, hooked up the new 320 GB drive via the UDA, rebooted from my external drive and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the 200 GB drive directly to the 320 GB drive.

This is the setup I used to migrate the contents of my laptop's internal drive to the new drive. On the left is the power supply for the bare-bones 320 GB drive, next to it the drive in a ProtectaDrive sleeve, and connecting that to the Macbook Pro's USB2 port is the Universal Drive Adapter. On the right is my bootable backup drive, plugged into the laptop's FireWire 800 port.

I set the 320 GB drive to be the new startup disk, leaving it attached to the UDA (Intel Macs can boot off of USB drives). Rebooting the system confirmed that the 320 GB drive was operational and bootable. Then I opened up the machine and swapped hard drives, closed everything up, and brought the system back online.

It's a lot less complicated than the old scheme. Plus, I can hang onto my 200 GB drive with data intact for long enough to be sure that the new drive is happy. Once I'm confident of the new drive's reliability, I'll hook up the 200 GB drive with the UDA, scrub it, and sell it.

Overnight scrub
The Universal Drive Adapter worked perfectly. Of course, it only works at USB speeds and on most computers those are pretty bad; on this Macbook Pro it's a paltry 18 MB/sec, which means it takes several hours to migrate all the data. Overnight's a good time. It'll take a very long time to do a secure scrub of the old drive, but it won't take my attention or require shutting down the system.

Two design issues:

• The short SATA cable included has the wrong connector orientation on one end, so you have to put a half twist in that very stiff cable to have both the drive and the UDA right side up.

• The plugs on the SATA power and data connectors are about half a millimeter too wide; you can't fit them onto the closely spaced connectors on the hard drive without forcing things a lot more than I'm comfortable with. Fortunately the connector housings are soft plastic and a minute's work with a hobby knife trimmed the width enough so they fit on with no trouble. Hopefully Other World Computing will see fit to redesign the SATA cables in the next product run to eliminate both of these problems.

All in all, a cost/time-effective solution to migrating data from one drive to another. Hurrah, OWC!

________________________

Ctein

By Ctein

Commercial magazines serve two complementary ends. They need the support of advertisers in order to publish, but if the readers don't like and trust what they read, the advertisers will wind up with no audience. The best solution to this problem is what author and editor Don Sutherland calls "the separation of church and state." The editorial department doesn't tell advertising how to hustle ads and advertising doesn't tell editorial what to write.

By and large it's worked well for the publications I've written for; I really couldn't be successfully employed under any other policy for very long (PhotoElectronic Imaging stopped using me because I wouldn't write inaccurate fluff.). In 30 years I've only had three articles killed because the publisher was afraid an advertiser would be antagonized.

The major manufacturers are all respectful of this. I've written critically of Kodak, Agfa, Ilford and Beseler products (among others) and not once gotten a bit of grief from any of them. I was told that after one particular "buy but with substantial reservations" review for Beseler, the president and owner of the company held up the article at a meeting and said, "We need more reviews like this! Nobody's going to think this is a puff piece. They're going to believe his recommendations and that will sell units."

When I demonstrated that there was a significant oxidation problem with black-and-white RC prints, especially with Agfa paper, Agfa didn't complain nor try to block publication. Instead they requested as many details for me as possible. As soon as they were convinced of the reality of the problem they halted production on the paper and pulled stock from the warehouse. A very smart move; it saved them from losing a product liability suit several years later. Up until the very end, we had a close and excellent relationship.

Similarly, revered columnists like Herbert Keppler often spoke their critical mind in print and he probably had the tightest working relationship with the photo industry of any U.S. magazine writer. That's the good news.

OTOH...
One former editor of mine absconded with a review Nikon system. Packed up, moved away and said, "I'm keeping the camera and if you want it back come after me." Another editor kept a Contax that he asserted was a gift and Contax asserted was a loan. One fellow columnist was notorious for strong-arming manufacturers into giving him free stuff in order to get coverage; if you didn't give him product, you didn't get mentioned.

In a most egregious case, an editor for one of the major magazines refused to return a high-end Kodak DSLR and when pressed claimed it had been "lost." Kodak was pretty damn sure it hadn't been. I said to my source at Kodak that I hoped they had gone after him for pocketing $20,000 worth of camera gear. They said that they hadn't because they were afraid that if they did the magazine might retaliate with bad press!

In fact, in none of the aforementioned situations did the manufacturers do anything except gulp and swallow their losses. I call it the "balance of terror." While magazines may seem pathologically afraid that manufacturers will pull their ads if they're given bad reviews, manufacturers are equally terrified that they'll get bad reviews if they complain about anything. Despite the extreme rarity of such occurrences, both sides are insanely gun shy. Ridiculous!

Only a few times in my 30 year career has a manufacturer retaliated (or threatened to) over something I wrote. Fred Picker and Zone VI refused to pay their bills to Camera & Darkroom because they didn't like some factual (not even unflattering) press they got. Berkey Marketing pulled their ads for six months after I unfavorably (but accurately) reviewed a darkroom timer; my editor and publisher stood behind me the whole time. HP Marketing threatened to pull ads from C&D if we didn't do them some unreasonable favors. Editorial didn't cave in and they didn't pull their ads, but they did slander me online for years afterwards.

Personally, my way of dealing with this kind of extortion is to eliminate their power by cutting off their access and their PR. I blacklisted all three of those companies; Picker and Berkey are long gone, but HP Marketing's still around (as is the guy who tried to strong-arm us) so my ban on them is still in effect. That covers a lot of brand names, but there's no shortage of products for me to review from companies I respect.

Yeah, it's a brutal business, but then I knew this was a silly job when I took it.

_______________________

Ctein

By Ctein

Got a package today from Other World Computing (www.macsales.com) with an external hard drive adapter for me to test. It'll likely figure prominently in (probably) my next column. Accompanying it was a letter suggesting I keep the adapter after I tested it. I looked at the invoice and it was only a $40 item, so I said to myself, "Cool!"

Different realms of the review business have different customs about this. The two I'm familiar with are (personal) computer stuff and photography stuff. The former went from one extreme to the other. In the very early days of computer magazines pretty much anything went. Partly that was because it was a very casual, cozy group and gigabucks were not yet involved; partly because probably less than 100 people were responsible for 90% of the important stuff that was happening. You couldn't swing a cat at a gathering of journalists without hitting three people who were involved in important startups.

Eventually the bucks got much bigger, and serious conflicts of interest surfaced. Some very, very bad reviews got published. The magazines realized they needed to get their act in order and so it became total hands off, no business connection of any sort between writers and the products they review, past or present, and definitely no freebies (beyond innumerable coffee mugs).

The $100 rule
For at least 30 years in the photography writing business, stuff under $100 you got to keep. Stuff over $100 you sent back. Partly moral, partly practical. Few people were likely to compromise their reputation, ethics, and future income for <$100. Few manufacturers wanted <$100 items back; they told us explicitly that for what it would cost them to restock they'd rather we threw them out. It's still a pretty good rule of thumb. It's also kept the business pretty honest (there are exceptional individuals, both saints and sinners).

Hardly any publications purchase the products we test. Contrary to some readers' fears, manufacturers do not try to game the system; we don't get cherry-picked goods. Believe me, with all the quality control problems I've seen over the years, I can assure you of that! Kodak one sent me a scanner with a cracked filter (in all fairness, it'd been to a lot of trade shows). Beseler once sent me an electronic enlarger whose power supply caught fire in my darkroom!

A standard perk is that most manufacturers will sell you a product that you tested at the dealer or internal company price if you want it. This does not incline anyone to write more favorable reviews (there's no incentive to buying a product you don't really like) but it's induced many of us to keep an eye out for products that we think we might like.

Online reviewing practices seem a little different. An unusual percentage of the reviewers are wealthy enough to be able to purchase any products they test (back in the days of just paper publications, the phrase "wealthy reviewer" was an oxymoron). Some of them won't even accept products directly from the manufacturer to be reviewed; they insist on buying on the street. Good for them. No harm done, but in my opinion not usually necessary either.

On occasion there are real slipups, though. We narrowly avoided one at Camera & Darkroom in the early '90s. I got an excited call from my editor:

Dan (not the real name): Ctein, how would you like a studio strobe setup?

Me: Sure, what's up?

Dan: StrobEx (also not a real name) just called me and offered to provide all our senior reviewers with studio strobe kits.

Me: I could definitely use one. What's it going to cost?

Dan: That's the great part; they're free. All they ask in return is that when we write articles and we include any studio shots, we mention that we used their strobe unit.

(Modest pause at my end while I think of a delicate way to respond, because Dan is really, innocently excited about this.)

Me: We can't accept them.

Dan: Why not?! (Slightly plaintive note in his voice)

Me: (with great gentleness) Dan, have you ever heard the word "payola?"

I could hear Dan's face falling across several hundred miles of phone line.

Of course, we didn't accept the strobe units.

Scruples are such a burden.

_______________________

Ctein

By Ctein

In my last column on this topic I talked about how we see tones. This time it's about detail.

For a start, let's consider the canonical 8–10 line pair per millimeter (lp/mm) that folks like to toss out as the limit of human visual resolution. That number is simultaneously misleadingly high and low.

To begin with, those experiments were run on young viewers with good eyes under optimal viewing conditions and illuminance, at a standard close focusing distance of about 1/2 meter. Change any of those conditions and the numbers go down. Poor lighting in particular makes a big difference. So does an inability to focus that close. Under many conditions that are normal for viewing photographs, you really can't see more than five line pair per millimeter. (Conversely, higher visual acuity or closer focusing ability can up those numbers.)

But...

There's a big difference between our ability to resolve closely spaced line pairs and our ability to detect edges. You can easily see a distant phone line that is several times smaller than the resolution limit or stars that are thousands of times smaller. Add in "vernier acuity:" that's what lets you use a caliper or micrometer and tell when the index lines are out of alignment by even a small fraction of the engraved linewidth. We're very good at picking up edge qualities.

Take two resolution bar targets, one of which has sharp-edged bars and the other of which has very fuzzy-edged bars. One can resolve about the same amount of fine detail in both sets of targets, but even at the limit of visual resolution most people will readily be able to pick out the former target as "sharper" than the latter. Even though they're not seeing any more fine detail, they are responding to the transition at the edges—acutance, not resolution.

That means eyes are sensitive to spatial frequencies about three times finer than what they can actually resolve, and experiments bear that out. Take two matched 8x10 prints, one of which resolves 10 lp/mm and the other of which resolves 30 lp/mm. Ask folks to pick out the sharper one. Invariably they can, although if pressed they'll be unable to point out any specific detail that is different.

Visual resolution versus acuity. These two sets of radial bars (you might want to click on the image first to open up a larger version, and pardon the jaggies) have very different edge characteristics. Human vision picks up on that, even at the limits of resolution. Step across the room from your monitor and look at this image. You should be able to resolve about the same level of detail in both targets (the point at which the bars merge into a gray central disk), but the target on the right should appear a little crisper even near the finest level of visible detail. That's your eye picking up edge characteristics well beyond the resolution limit.

-
This is why a print from a sheet film negative looks sharper than one made from a well-made 35mm negative, even though that 8–10 lp/mm number says the big negative shouldn't have a marked advantage. Similarly, I have tested inkjet printers that can reproduce in excess of 15 lp/mm and ones that reproduce 8–10. The naive number says there shouldn't be a noticeable difference in side-by-side comparison prints. Experiment proves otherwise.

On the other hand, small differences in readily visible detail (coarser than 8 lp/mm) are not detectable even in side-by-side comparisons. You can't see a 10% improvement in resolution; around 15% is the plausible limit. The difference won't become particularly noticeable until you hit 25–30%.

This has bearing on the pixel horsepower race in digital cameras. There's little point to trading in your camera for one that has 25% more pixels unless the overall image quality is better for other reasons (tonality, color, dynamic range, better optics or signal processing, or proven substantially-better resolution). You would be hard-pressed to see a sharpness difference because of the raw pixel count. If you're not making at least a one third to one half jump in the number of pixels, save your money.

_____________________

Ctein

Ctein, Moon and Fireworks, Vancouver EXPO, 1986

By Ctein

The Fourth's a-coming. Surfing the cyberwaves I came across some interesting and entertaining material on photographers' rights. I provide links below along with some excerpts of the content that I hope will entice you to read the entire articles. This is stuff all photographers should know.

Now, keep in mind that legal rights are not the same as authority or instrumentality. You may have the legal right to do something but that doesn't mean someone else lacks the capability of bully, coercing or threatening you into stopping. The 98 lb. weaklings might have the law on their side, but that won't stop the 200 lb. thugs from smacking the crap out of them.

I applaud anyone who wants to stand up to the bullies, but I don't disparage those who are disinclined to do so. You want to volunteer to take a bullet for the cause? Yer aces in my book. But, I'm morally opposed to conscription.

http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/02/10/askthepilot173/index.html
Click the "enter salon" button in the upper right corner to get past the ad to the article

The million-dollar questions are: Is it a violation of law to take photographs at airports? And under whose jurisdiction does the matter fall?

"No, it's not against the law," says Anne Davis, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spokeswoman. When asked about jurisdiction, Davis describes TSA as the overseer of all airport security matters, including the supervision of local law enforcement. "The buck stops with us," she says, adding that the agency has no specific policy with regard to picture taking, other than asking people not to tape or photograph screening apparatus.

Phil Orlandella, the media relations director[:] "Who controls security, TSA or the local police?" he says. "They both do, it's that simple. And no, it's not against any rules to take pictures, inside or outside, period. If anyone tells you otherwise, that's a bunch of baloney."

He warns that yes, individuals snooping around with cameras might be approached and questioned, but photography itself is fully within a visitor's rights. "A passenger is free to take any picture he or she wants," he says, "in any public area of the airport, end of story. If you're not deemed a threat, you're free to click away."

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2005-12-29-camera-laws_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2006-08-11-photography-rights_x.htm
And yes, you can shoot on private property if it's open to the public. That includes malls, retails stores, Starbucks, banks, and office-building lobbies. If you're asked to stop and refuse, you run the risk of being charged with trespassing, but your pictures are yours. No one can legally take your camera or your memory card without a court order.

You can also shoot in subways and at airports. Check your local laws about the subway, but in New York, Washington, and San Francisco it's perfectly legal. Airport security is regulated by the Transportation Security Administration, and it's quite clear: Photography is A-OK at any commercial airport in the U.S. as long as you're in an area open to the public.

http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/395284
Is it legal to take photos? A set of Q's, A's, and useful links.

http://www.rcfp.org/photoguide/
What every cameraman, photographer and videographer should know about invasion of privacy standards in the 50 states and D.C.

Have fun, play safe, make trouble, don't blow up anything I wouldn't blow up.

________________________

pax / Ctein

By Ctein

I have never understood what this "lazy photographer" thing is all about. When I was young and too tech-obsessed, Bob Nadler stated it to me very well: "No one cares how hard you worked."

He was absolutely right. If someone doesn't like your photograph, they're not going to like it after they find out how hard you worked to make it. If they already like it, they're not going to like it better hearing of your pain.

The point of photography is making photographs. If you're making photographs that you think are good (or simply cool) you are succeeding. Finding a harder way to do it does not make it better. That's about macho prowess and chest thumping, not about photography.

Some folks suggest that it's really about mastering "basic" photographic technique. The only purpose basic technique serves is to let you make the photographs you want to make. (Well, that's an exaggeration; it also serves to help you pass tests or to get scouting merit badges.) If you are making those photographs, you have sufficient technique. Conversely, if someone is making photographs they are entirely happy with and they don't use some particular technique you consider "basic" well then maybe, just maybe it isn't really basic,  merely useful on occasion?

Lots of photographic techniques that were once considered basic have become obsolete. Coating one's own emulsions, for example. There are still people who do it, but does anyone out there think a photographer is "lazy" if they don't? How about evaluating light levels and exposure without a light meter (let alone auto-exposure). Again, that used to be a basic skill. Many of us old-time photojournalists mastered it because in the bad old days, pre-autoexpsoure, you didn't have the leisure of making light readings.  I could not have made my Apollo 17 launch photographs without that skill, and lacking that skill is why most folks' photographs of that launch were crap. So, are you lazy if you don't know how to do that? Maybe  you were then, but not now.

This was the first night launch of the Saturn V, and the brightness of the scene changed very rapidly when the engines ignited and as the rocket lifted off the pad. There weren't any sophisticated professional auto-exposure cameras and there was no time to take meter readings and dial them in. NASA's guess as to what the exposure should be was off by several stops. If you couldn't gauge exposure by eye (or have a bank of cameras running different exposures) you were in trouble.

I make dye transfer prints which are, beyond argument, better looking than any chromogenic print ever made and 100 times more work. All those photographers out there who never bothered to learn dye transfer printing (which would have surely improved their prints)—that made them lazy?

For that matter, what about all those folks who use slide film? They don't have to master precision printing or how to instruct other people to do precision printing for them, in itself a substantial skill set. All they have to do is get an exposure right. Big deal. That sounds pretty lazy to me; they learn one trick and then eliminate 80% of the craft and let the chemistry do all the heavy lifting. Tisk tisk—clearly these are inferior photographers producing inferior work. So they know how to use a light meter (crutch!); they aren't having to do any of the really hard stuff like I am, the lazy sods!

Pretty silly, eh?

________________________

Ctein

By Ctein

So, I've got a question for all you serious photographers out there (which doesn't mean professionals exclusively, but it does mean more than shooters of casual snapshots or tourist pix*). Do any of you use JPEG in preference to raw, and, if so, when, why, and how much?

What's behind my question is that I'm in the midst of testing the new Fujifilm Finepix S100FS camera for review, and naturally I'm doing everything in raw. There are a couple of reasons for that. First is that I do all my serious work in raw; I can't imagine doing it any other way. Second is that it's easy to find online reviews that talk about JPEG quality, but hardly ever do they go into raw quality in much detail. Third, I have trouble imagining that the folks I'm writing for, not the casual amateur or neophyte, don't use raw except for casual, unimportant stuff.

Why would I want to give up all this beautiful raw quality for the limited exposure range and camera-introduced artifacts of a JPEG? You tell me.

For me, reviews that don't emphasize raw when talking about image quality lack a great deal of relevance.  It would be kind of like reading a professional film test where all the film was processed and printed at the local Target or Walgreens one-hour lab. Yes, that is useful information, especially if on occasion you're relying on such operations for your printing. (And who among us hasn't? Unless you're a total nutter like me, when you come back from your family vacation with two dozen rolls of 35mm film the first thing that comes to your mind is not spending the next several months in the darkroom processing, proofing, and custom-printing all those negatives. You just want your vacation snaps with as little hassle as possible.)

There's no question that if you're going to be taking a zillion photographs and you're cramped for storage JPEG is a much better choice than raw. And if you need to make a torrent of exposures, bingbingbingbingbing, most cameras can sustain a high exposure rate a lot better in JPEG mode than raw. Still, for me these are situations where I would be forced to use JPEG by externalities, sacrificing a certain amount of image quality. Necessity, yes; preference, never.

But that's me. I don't write just for me, I write for the serious photographer. An awful lot of you folks reading this column are my target audience. So I'd like to hear what you think and what you do.

_____________________

Ctein

*Those of you who are still (maybe always) rank amateurs and dilettantes, whether by happenstance or intent, I mean you no disrespect. I think making photographs for any reason whatsoever is a fine and dandy thing. It's only that you're not the folks I write for, primarily. No hard feelings nor disrespect intended, okay?

By Ctein

I've been a Photoshop user since version 2.5, so I've pretty much ignored Photoshop Elements. With good reason. Early versions of Elements lacked even the most basic tools that a serious amateur or a professional photographer needs, like curves (although there were third-party software hacks that would enable curves). Basically, Elements was a software package for duffers and for the casual snapshooter who needed something more serious than the tools built into Windows and Mac OS.

Things started to change with version 4, though it was still not a package I could recommend. With Elements 6 I think it's a whole different world. This is by no means cheap Photoshop (oh, if only!) but it's well worth the $80–90 price tag if you can't afford full-blown Photoshop or if you run a Mac and can't use Picture Windows.

Element 6 includes some serious professional capability. Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW converter (missing some functions of the Photoshop version), are built in. Elements 6 is only semi-16-bit aware, at about the level that Photoshop 7 was. But with Bridge and Camera RAW fully 16-bit capable and containing lots of correction tools, you can do pretty serious 16-bit work in Elements.

Elements 6 has curves and adjustment layers, but no 16-bit or curves adjustment layers. It supports multiple levels of undos, but there's no history brush. It includes the same Photomerge function built into Photoshop CS3, although that only operates on eight-bit images (that layer limitation again). I am a huge fan of Photomerge; I use it to routinely build panoramas out of quickly-made handheld photographs.

I really love making panoramas (as if you couldn't guess). I fired off these three handheld frames and threw them at Photomerge. Voila, a high-quality panorama! Click on the image to see a larger version.

Elements 6 even goes one step further, adding a new Photomerge Group command that can combine faces from several different images into one seamless result. Some folks may think that's cheating, but most serious portrait photographers I know long ago decided it made a lot more sense to get a good group portrait by combining faces from multiple photographs than trying by chance to get everyone to have their eyes open at the same time. I expect to see this in Photoshop "CS4."

Elements 6 incorporates Photoshop's Smart Sharpen (called Adjust Sharpness in Elements) and a stripped-down version of Lens Distortion (called Correct Camera Distortion). Adjust Sharpness is profoundly better than Unsharp Masking. Lens Distortion is, in my opinion, a little bit clunky (Picture Windows does this better) but it's a serviceable way to correct geometric aberration. You can't correct chromatic aberration in Elements. The "Convert to Black and White" function is pretty slick—good, and intuitive.

Stress tests
Performancewise, Elements is not on par with Photoshop. I ran the same Photomerge stress tests that I used to test Photoshop scratch drives a few columns back under Elements. Elements took about twice as long to render the same images. Positive note: Elements didn't choke when thrown truly massive panoramas like these. There's probably a file size big enough to kill Elements, but I couldn't find it.

I can't speak to the redesigned interface in Elements 6. It's just enough like Photoshop and just enough different to leave me fumbling for commands. That isn't Elements' fault; it simply means that I'm not competent to evaluate ease-of-use.

One area that could use improvement is the installer. Under MacOS, on a fast, late-2007 MacBook Pro, it took 25 minutes to run! It was so slow that the first time I tried the installation I thought the program had hung, so I killed the process and rebooted my system. No software glitch; it was just an appallingly slow installer. Don't ask me why.

I need to explore this program in a lot more detail for the next edition of my book Digital Restoration. If I run across cool things I failed to mention here, expect another column. Elements 6 is neither a trivial nor easily dismissible program; it's a really useful image processor.

_____________________

Ctein

Elements 6 Windows from Amazon

Elements 6 Macintosh from Amazon

Elements 6 Windows from B&H Photo

Elements 6 Macintosh from B&H Photo

By Ctein

Back when 28K modems were state-of-the-art, a photographer friend sent me a link to his new "professional" website. I typed in the URL and a patterned background GIF loaded, with painful sluggishness. Then a large title GIF loaded. Then a subtitle GIF. Link button GIFs loaded next, but they were inactive.

Minutes had passed, still no photos. Then a hit counter loaded at the bottom of the page. Finally, I thought, we were done.

And then the effin' site started loading some background music!

I did not wait around to find out what was going to load next.

Fast forward to the present. Photographers sometimes lose track of their objective: getting people to look at their photographs and see them in the best light. There are numerous ways to show one's photos, but you need to pick a way that's appropriate to the material. Here are two basic and common mistakes.

1) A slide show is wrong for a work in progress that is unsorted and incoherent. Think of a slide show as being a lot like a book that readers can't even flip through easily. Consider the recent column on making a photo book in a month. A book is not a haphazard jumble of photographs; it needs to have a structure or people won't enjoy looking at and it won't tell the story the photographer wants to tell. A disorganized slide show is too much like sitting through an obligatory viewing of the neighbors' vacation photos or a public lecture by someone who rambles pointlessly (one can ramble purposefully).

2) Regardless of how well-organized your content, keep things brief! Nobody needs to see more than two dozen photographs to figure out if they're interested in your work. If people like the two dozen, they can follow links to a lot more. If they don't like that two dozen, they won't like having several hundred photographs dumped in their laps. Two dozen won't show the entire project, but it's enough to be representative and sufficient for people to figure out if they care to see more.

If you're trying to build a website that presents your work in the best possible way, think about it from the audience's point of view. Learn to think less about what you want to show them and more about what they'd want to see. That's the key and it's tough, no question. There's the overwhelming urge to add "just one more" photo to the presentation, because it's so damn good. Hence 24 becomes 25 and soon 30, 40, or more.

Fight the urge! Don't think about how great that 25th photo is. Instead, ask yourself, "If I didn't sell them on my work with the other 24 photos, do I really think this one will change their minds?" The answer's so rarely affirmative that you may consider this a rhetorical question.

Not so incidentally, this is a case of "do as I say, not as I do." Ofttimes I fail to follow my own good advice. As an instructional author I try to tell you the right way to do things, but I don't run a cult of personality and you should not emulate me. (In my wet darkroom I use a blade-type paper cutter in pitch darkness, I don't wear gloves when I process prints, I eat and drink, the ventilation is substantially inadequate, and the wet area is adjacent to the dry area. After 40 years of doing this, I am still healthy and whole, but if you think I would ever recommend those practices to others, you're out of your mind!) Similarly, do not look to my website to see this column's sage counsel implemented.

______________________

Ctein

By Ctein

You're about to read a follow-up to an article that's yet to be published. I'll have an article in the July/August PHOTO Techniques magazine on how to extract the maximum performance from Photoshop. Post-deadline, Other World Computing loaned me a couple of high-performance external drives to test as Photoshop scratch drives. I report on them here. Isn't time-twisting fun?

The OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro 'Quad Interface' drive (above) contains a 750 GB, 7200 RPM, 32 MB cache drive and has eSATA, FireWire 800 and 400, and USB2 ports. It lists for $230. I connected that drive to my MacBook Pro with the $39 APIOTEK EXTREME Dual eSATAII Express Card 34 Adapter (right).

The OWC Mercury On-The-Go FireWire 800/400 + USB case with a Hitachi 200 GB, 7200 RPM, 16 MB cache drive runs $190 after rebate. That's not the biggest but it is the fastest laptop drive out there. I installed one in my MacBook Pro and it has a sustained throughput around 60 MB per second, says Lloyd Chambers' DiskTester. That's twice as fast as many laptop drives.

My test was a merge of twenty 35 MB images into a single panorama, which you can kinda see above; the original is almost 60 times bigger! You can view a small section at 100% scale below. Photoshop reserved 26 GB of scratch space to render the assemblage. Using my laptop's internal drive as the scratch drive, Photoshop took around 10 minutes to assemble the panorama.

Next I tested the On-The-Go drive. Connected as a FireWire 800 device, DiskTester reports it's as fast as my internal drive; connected via FireWire 400, performance dropped by over 40%. How did this translate into Photoshop scratch performance? Via FireWire 400, rendering time was identical to the internal drive, while FireWire 800 trimmed a full minute off of the render time. The results would more dramatically favor the On-The-Go drive if I were running a "stock" internal drive or a normal assortment of foreground and background tasks (I can't test that because it's just about impossible to get reproducible results).

Just for a joke, I tried USB2, which slowed the drive by a factor of 3–4! Maybe with the right drive and the right glue circuitry USB2 lives up to its specs, but it never has on any hardware I've used. Worse, Photoshop doesn't play at all well with USB2; it still hadn't finished rendering the file after over 2 hours! You want good scratch drive performance? Stick with FireWire or eSATA.

The OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro sustained eSATA read speeds approaching 95 MB/s. Write speeds averaged 80 MB/s, but there was a great deal of variation in write speeds that I could not pin down; sometimes it was low as 70 MB/s, other times it matched the read speeds. No question it's fast; I'm just not sure exactly how fast.

The On-the-Go Drive

Under FireWire 800 performance dropped by a modest 15%. FireWire 400 racked up 38–40 MB/s, close to the theoretical limits. A drive this good needs FireWire 800 or eSATA. Still, even FireWire 400 scratch performance was respectable, trimming almost a minute off the rendering time. FireWire 800 clipped almost 2 minutes and eSATA saved almost 3. That's really impressive.

Both drives are good ways to goose up Photoshop. If you are a traveling photographer, the On-The-Go drive will perform at least as well as your internal drive and probably substantially better. If you're working from a desk, the Mercury Elite drive will give Photoshop a real kick in the pants.

Two tips—first, don't make the mistake of filling these drives up with other files if you want to use them for scratch. Typically there's a factor of two performance difference between the front and back ends of a drive. You want that fast front space for Photoshop scratch files. Reformat the drive as two partitions, reserving the "front" end of the drive for a dedicated scratch partition.

Second, if you really want maximum performance, set up a RAID 0 SATA array, like Lloyd recommends on his website. I expect that doing that would cut my photomerge rendering times by a full factor of two over the internal drive. For a several hundred dollar investment, that's a pretty good performance return.

_____________________

Ctein