The Online Photographer

By Ctein

So, a couple of weeks back readers started talking about "that vision thing" in photography. Here's a slightly left-field take on my "vision thing."

I've got a photographer inside my head. That "me" isn't the same "me" who is writing this column. It's a mental faculty I can turn on and off at will, quite literally as easily as flipping a mental switch. I flip it on and I'm in "photography mode." It's like there's a viewfinder frame imposed on my mental vision and everywhere I look I see photographic compositions. The world doesn't perceptually flatten out into two dimensions, but it's like the three-dimensional world gets overlaid with a different level of perception. A little like (but only a little) one of those TV commercials where pieces of the scene on the screen get isolated and turn into picture postcards. I just naturally see photographs wherever I look when I'm in this mode.

Put a physical camera loaded with film in my hands, and the photographs I see are appropriate to that camera. I tend to be a full-frame photographer; it's not an aesthetic-ideological point of view, I just end up using the whole frame for composition. Put a 35 mm camera in my hands and I'll go around seeing 3:2 aspect-ratio photographs. Make it a Hasselblad and I'll see square photographs for the making. Put a panoramic camera in my hand and that's what I see.

It gets even more specific. When I'm using my Pentax 67, the majority of my compositions are horizontals.  When I pick up the Fujica GA645, it's verticals (when you hold the GA645 "horizontally" the orientation of the frame is a vertical).

Furthermore, it works equally well with all films. Hand me a camera with B&W film and I'll see B&W compositions to photograph. Make it one with color film and that's what my eye finds. I can and will pick them up alternately and make good photographs with them. Back in the 1980s I traveled with two Pentax 67 bodies loaded with B&W and color negative film, and a 35mm body loaded with Kodachrome 25. I swapped between them, sometimes from frame to frame. This doesn't seem to mess with my "vision thing"; that seems to become an extension of whatever camera's in my hands.

I made these two photographs on a trip up to the Pacific Northwest back in the 1980s when I was in the habit of carrying several cameras with different films in them. They were made just a couple of minutes apart. I've always found it easy to switch between B&W and color.

Still, I do seem to have artistic inclinations and preferences. I hardly ever photograph color slide or B&W negative any more. I don't know why; when I go to the freezer to grab film before taking off on a trip I just naturally gravitate to color negative 99.9% of the time. That's what my muse wants to do, I guess. Who's gonna argue with a muse!? But force a B&W camera into my hands, and I'm still happy as a grayscale pig in monochrome mud. The muse may want to do color; the photographer doesn't seem to care. It's all good.

_____________________

Ctein

By Ctein

Film scans are just naturally dirty. Even the most carefully-done, liquid-gate, Digital-ICE'd scan has some dust and scratches, especially at the very high resolutions I'm working at these days. The film itself has a certain amount of irreducible noise from grain clumping and crud in the film coatings.

I have to do lots of spotting to get really flaw-free images to work with. Photoshop's Dust & Scratches filter, selectively applied with the History Brush, is easily four times faster than using the Clone tool or the Spot Healing brush. I have a trick to using it that isn't in most of the books.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 1 shows a small section of a dirty scan at 100% scale. To clean it up I used the Dust & Scratches filter settings shown in Figure 2. You want to set the Radius large enough that it wipes out the largest dust specks and does a good job of obliterating scratches. The precise setting isn't very important. The Threshold setting is another matter. Look for a "sweet spot" where most or all of the bad stuff is gone but the film grain isn't completely suppressed. It's OK if it's softened considerably as seen in Figure 3, the result of applying these filter settings to Figure 1.

Figure 3

Figure 4

After applying the filter, I assigned the History Brush to that history state, and reverted to the history state previous to that one (Figure 4). Since I was scanning negatives, I set the brush mode to darken, because 99% of the garbage is going to be light. This is the trick you won't find it most of the books (for slides, set the mode to lighten). Using the brush in lighten or darken mode does far less damage to fine detail and film grain. You can set the brush radius wider and paint over many specks in one stroke without visibly distorting the underlying image. Figure 5 shows the results. What few artifacts are left can be cleared up with the Clone or Healing tool.

Figure 5

This filter won't work well if the speck or scratch is right next to a sharp edge or in an area with lots of fine detail. It also won't work with really faint scratches. For those use the other tools. Most crud, though, will clean up real nicely this way.

A variant of this speeds things up even more if your photograph has large areas of sky with few or no sharp-edged objects. Create a mask to select the sky area and apply the Dust & Scratches filter with a radius that will obliterate the small dust specks but not the large ones. Use a threshold setting which is just at the point where the grain is slightly smoothed out.

That will get rid of about half the spotting you need to do in the sky in one fell swoop and will also smooth out the grain a little bit without being obvious. If there are few clouds (or birds) that have edges that need to retain their sharpness, use the history brush to paint in the state from just before you applied the filter to restore those edges.

Spotting is still a tedious, time-consuming chore, but I'm consuming a lot less time this way.

_____________________

Ctein

Featured Comment by Edward Taylor: "I still have thousands of negatives and slides to scan from the 30 or more years I was shooting film. I will probably never get it done. Of course, I only shoot digital now since I believe it is superior to film in almost every way.

"In the many arguments that used to take place about the relative advantages of film over digital was the complaint that so much post-processing was needed on digital, while with film there was none. Of course that was never the case, as film required a lot of tedious work even when printed in the darkroom. Now that film is scanned, I think it requires far more work in post processing than a digital file does.

"The craziest complaint in the digital vs. film debate has to do with 'dust on the sensor.' Although this is a real problem which I hope they solve someday, it pales in comparison to 'dust on film,' which has always been a much more difficult and time-consuming problem. Before scanning and Photoshop, a dusty or scratched negative could be very difficult to salvage at all. I have never had a 'scratched' digital file.

"Thank you for this advice. With all the different techniques available to deal with the dust, blemish, or noise problems, we can now get much cleaner prints."

By Ctein

Before I get started on this column, I have a request from a reader that I'm sure some folks here can help with. Please don't post responses here; e-mail them to me at ctein[at]pobox[dot]com. Thanks very much!

"I would like your advice on purchasing a slide & film scanner. I have thousands of both and value my time, so I'm willing to pay more for a faster and higher-quality one. I'd like to keep it under $2000, but will go higher ($3K) if there is a significant advantage. Any recommendations?"

___________________

Robert Roaldi raised some interesting issues in his comments about the Canon G9 Review. If digital cameras have reached 35mm standards, at what point can we say, "Enough is enough?"

Food for thought. Just what do 35mm standards imply? The picture above is the very first color print I ever made (probably; my record keeping was not impeccable in 1970. It might have been the second or third.) It's an 8x10" print from 35mm Ektacolor, cropped to fit the paper. Below is an enlarged section from that print.

Within months, I pulled all my savings and bought my first Pentax 6x7. Why? Because I couldn't make a  color print from 35mm that came close to my grain and sharpness standards. Keep in mind that my preferred B&W film was Panatomic X. The quality of color negative films of the time was more like Tri-X. If that was the very best I could do, I was not going to be a happy camper.

There was always Kodachrome II, but making really good prints from slides required very advanced printing techniques involving contrast control and color correction masking. In truth, that didn't change until digital printing came along. (With all due respect, anyone who thinks they make good prints from unmasked chromes on Cibachrome or Type-R materials is not using the same definition of "good" as I do).

But, by the late 1980s slow color negative film had surpassed Kodachrome 25 in both fine grain and resolution. By 2000, film of any speed that was only a sharp as Kodachrome 25 would be considered a low-resolution film. One could routinely make 35mm photographs that were as fine-grained and sharp as what I could do with medium format 30 years earlier.

This did not stop photographers from wanting further improvements in films. Medium format quality in 35mm is quite wonderful, but why not hope for large format quality? We're nowhere near the ultimate limits of photographic quality, where any further improvements would simply not be perceiveable. We have surpassed "good enough;" we're far from "can't get any better."

Digital, having reached an affordable parity with film, is taking up this challenge. Some low-priced digital cameras produce less grain (noise) at higher ISO's than the comparable 35mm films, although they may not be better than low-ISO 35 mm films. The midrange and expensive digital cameras better even those. But, medium format is more of a tossup, and we haven't reached an economical large format quality level yet.

What is remarkable and noteworthy is that there's nothing fundamental that prevents us from doing so.

___________________

Ctein

Featured Comment by Jean-Pierre Grüter: "As a professional photographer I compared the Phase One 39MP Back with 4x5 inch Film (Hasselblad Scanner) because I have to produce often huge prints like 1.1m x 1.5m. I did this test one year ago and ended up in buying a Hasselblad Scanner. If you scan at the highest optical resolution of the scanner you get a file with 80MP. I found that I got more information in those scans than in the Phase One files. The huge prints are sharper and hold much better together; it feels more realistic. The digital files when highly enlarged look like watercolor paintings but they keep more details in the shadows and in the highlights. If you shoot with 4x5 inch Provia 100 film you have less dynamic range but more resolution and very crispy images. As I do a lot of architecture photography I need wide angles. Here I was very disappointed about the possibilities of the Phase One Back and the available lenses."

Ctein, who writes three posts a month for TOP, has been writing for the site for one year now—actually a little more, since the post below this one is number 38. When I first asked him to come on board, he didn't think he'd be able to think of enough to write about. Now he tells me he has enough ideas lined up and backlogged to last for six months into the future. (I've found the same thing, by the way. Sometimes I do struggle to think of things to post, but much more often I'm faced with the opposite problem: too many possibilities and too much I want to post. I often think of the analogy of airliners waiting in line for the runway at a crowded airport).

In any event, happy first anniversary to Ctein! With my thanks for all the protean contributions, whether arty or geeky, partisan or explanatory, arcane or humorous. Looking forward to the coming year and all those ideas in the backlog.

________________

Mike

All three figures in this illustration have exactly the same number of pixels (about 2,000). From left to right, they're comprised of 1-bit monochrome, 8-bit monochrome, and 24-bit RGB pixels.

More than a little confusion exists about just what a pixel is. Pixels are so basic to digital imagery that it behooves us to understand them better.

A pixel (short for "picture element") is not a measure of image information. It's actually a dimensional measure: a pixel is the smallest-sized "tile" in a picture. All the pixels laid side by side, row by row, make up the two dimensional image we look at.

Why does this simple concept cause problems? Because photographs don't just have width and height; they have (bit) depth. The amount of information a pixel contains simply isn't part of the definition of a pixel.  Pixels can be single-bit B&W (e.g., faxes). They can be grayscale, RGB, or CMYK, at standard sizes from 8 to 64 bytes. Less commonly, they can be hyper-spectral, where dozens of individual wavelengths are represented. In the most extreme case, a pixel can be full spectral, with a complete photon energy distributions recorded (mucho bits). But whether 1 or 100K bits deep, a pixel is still a pixel; that's inherent in the fundamental definition.

Instrumentality matters. It's correct for camera manufacturers to talk about the sensors in their cameras having X megapixels, even if each pixel only records one component of RGB. It's also correct for them to talk about synthesizing a full-color RGB image of X megapixels from that data. All the pixel count tells you is how many little tiles the image is subdivided into; it doesn't tell you anything about the content of those tiles.

Popular and reasonable practicalities also confuse. Thermal transfer printers produce real, discrete pixels—four-color (32 bit) ones. Inkjet printers don't. A computer display has discrete red, green, and blue pixels. The convention of giving the number of tri-color pixels is technically wrong, although it's useful.  Unfortunately, camera manufacturers have chosen to use the technically correct nomenclature  for their LCD displays and count each pixel individually. What a headache!

Sometimes confusion arises unreasonably. Foveon, for example, strongly implies they have three pixels for each real physical pixel, because their pixels capture multiple wavelengths. False! It's misusing the term, and it confuses people. It would be like claiming Hummers get better gas mileage than a VW, because they can carry more passengers. Yes, passenger-miles per gallon is an important measure of fuel efficiency...but that's not what MPG means and Hummer isn't foolish enough to claim otherwise.

Keep your terminology straight and you'll be less confused. Object when marketdroids play fast and loose with established vocabulary. They aren't doing it for your benefit.

_____________________

Ctein

Featured Comment by Jim Kofron: "A history of the 'pixel' ['Pixels and Me,' a talk by Richard Lyon of Foveon for the Computer History Museum]."

Mike replies: Dear lord, Jim, that's more than I needed to know about 'pixel' by a factorial, but it's fascinating, if you have an hour and 22 minutes to spare...(those without quite that much time should start at about 0:50:00; he talks about the Foveon pixel count at about 1:05:00).

By Ctein

Mike's post some time back about the deficiencies of CD audio had more to do with photography than you might think. Audiophiles have long been aware that the 44KHz sampling rates for digital sound are not adequate for full fidelity. Mathematically-savvy audiophiles and signal specialists even understand why.

Only a few folks realize these problems occur in digital imaging (both in-camera and scanning film) as well.

The problem lies in the popular misunderstanding of the Nyquist-Shannon criterion. That's the assertion that in order to record frequencies of X, you must sample at 2*X. It even seems intuitive; you need two pixels to convey a line pair, one pixel for white and one pixel for black.

The problem is that the mathematical theorem doesn't apply to the real world. For the math to work, there can be no spatial (or audio) frequencies of X or greater in the image (or signal) you're trying to digitize. The samples you take must be instantaneous. Finally, to accurately reconstruct the original signal from the samples, you must do an infinite amount of calculation.

The third problem is the lesser one. The first two are killers. The only frequency-limited signals are near-constant ones. Any signal that varies rapidly in space (or time) has frequency components that exceed the sampling limits. Those create false frequencies when you reconstruct the image. Realistically, you're safe if the signal is constant for 15 or 20 constant wave cycles, but most real world images (and audio) have content that changes a lot faster than that.

Audio can approximate instantaneous samples. Photography gets it wrong; a single pixel records the average signal strength over the entire sample window. That creates even more problems. I earlier described a line pair represented by one black pixel and one white pixel. Well, suppose you shift the whole scene by one half pixel (see figure 1). Now each pixel is seeing half a black line and half a white line; every pixel comes out 50% gray. This is not good!

Figure 1. Two pixels can't unambiguously resolve a line pair. When the white and black bars are lined up with the pixels (top figure), the pixels can record the bars with 100% clarity.  But, when the bars are 90 degrees out of phase with the pixels, all the pixels will see half a white bar and half a black bar and report a uniform gray.

Most of you have seen this in action; it's the moire patterns you get when the fine detail you're trying to photograph approaches the pixel size (figure 2). Putting it in mathematical terms, phase differences are getting confused with amplitude differences.

Figure 2.  Sampling failure in action. This resolution target was scanned at 300 ppi. The scan indeed "resolves" around 300 lines (150 line pairs) per inch, but there's substantial moire, inversion and distortion because of aliasing.  It would be a lot cleaner, although not perfect, at half that frequency—150 lines per inch.

You don't notice it much with randomly oriented fine detail, but the distortions still exist. Fortunately our eyes aren't very sensitive to them; unfortunately, our ears are. That is why digital photographs can look so subjectively good and digital audio sound so subjectively bad.

The real-world fix is "oversampling" (really, it's merely sufficient sampling). Sample at four times the frequency you want to record and it's pretty good. Sample at 8 times and it's really good. But sample at the Nyquist-Shannon limit of only two times that frequency? Don't expect "high fidelity"; it's simply not possible.

___________________

Ctein

By Ctein

A friend offered me such a good deal on his Epson 9800 printer that I couldn't pass it up. Learning to print 44 in. wide has been an educational experience in ways I didn't entirely anticipate.

I did anticipate clearing space. The sucker's big. It's 4 ft. high, over 5 ft. long, and over 2 ft. deep. Fortunately, we have a garage that has accumulated many unneeded possessions over two decades (Daly City houses lack amenities like attics). Paula and I tackled the garage and with relatively little trauma had cleared a 6 ft. by 6 ft. open space for this printer.

But the harsh reality is that I'll be needing a lot more square footage. How about large flat surfaces on which I can lay or hang prints, with good lighting? Think about it...just where would you put a 3 x 4 ft. print (which is by no means the largest print I might make) for inspection? Worse yet, where would you put two of them if you wanted to compare successive generations of work?

I'm accustomed to handling fiber-base photographic prints up to 20 x 24 in. I almost never damage a print. I instinctively know how much stress and strain the paper will take. Inkjet roll paper prints have a curl to them that doesn't want to let you lay them out flat; there's no safety margin for stress and it's really easy to put a kink in a large print. In fact it requires constant concentration to avoid it.

I'm learning; I ain't there. I can now pretty comfortably handle 30 x 40 in. prints, but I made a 40 x 74 in. print for Laurie Edison and I managed to screw up the first one. No creases, but I didn't take into account the sheer weight of the paper and I scuffed the surface lifting the print out of the printer basket.

I'm still working out the best way to roll and unroll prints and store and ship them. Drafting tissue looks like a good interleaf; if I cut it longer than the print, I can tape the rolled up prints closed by taping the tissue to itself.

In my big prints even grain (pixel)-level flaws become glaringly obvious.  I'm having to go over images pixel by pixel at 100% scale and get rid of every single bloody defect I can see on the screen. It takes me at least one test print to catch them all; I always miss something.  Even starting with a clean file it's a day's work to prep an image, and almost all that time is spent spotting. Bored now!

I'm going to have to rescan any negatives I want to put in a large portfolio because my previous scans just aren't good enough for really large prints. It seems that every four or five years I have to do new scans. Each time I do it I try to engage in such "scan overkill" that I will never have to do it again. A handful of years later my needs have expanded beyond my wildest imaginings. This time I'm scanning at maximum resolution, which hits me with 800 MB files from my 6x7 cm negs. I don't need 800 MB files right now, but I sure need 400. Which means....

I'm going to have to get a new computer. My 32-bit machine is simply not adequate for this; nowhere near enough RAM. Photoshop works, but it's horridly slow. I'm hitting memory limits on making really large prints that I haven't figured out work-arounds for.  I've got to go 64-bit soon. So a new MacIntel is in the offing. I need a new laptop, which will limit me to 4 GB of RAM, but it'll be a zillion times faster than what I've got now.

It's a real learning experience. Oh, joy.

By Ctein

Of course, you can all tell just by looking at it that this photograph was made with an auto-focus, auto-exposure, motor-drive camera, right?

Friend and photographer Laurie Edison was reading over a digital camera review I had lent her and chanced upon the "25 Years Ago..." column in Popular Photography & Imaging magazine. There was hot and heavy debate going on over whether real photographers deigned to use auto-exposure cameras. She was both amused and bemused that photographers would get so heated up over something like that.

I pondered a bit and observed that it has been this way for as long as I've been in photography. You've had photographers claiming (at different times) that real photographers don't use in-camera/TLR metering, auto-exposure, motor drives, and auto-focus (I may have missed a a few technical innovations they've railed against).** Decade after decade the same old tired battles get waged to the same pointless non-end.

I figured out what it's all about: photographers are incredibly insecure! They are terrified that the world won't take them seriously, because so many times they've heard "Photography isn't real art," "The camera does all work," "Where's the art in just showing what's already there?" ad nauseam.

Repeated over and over, the poor dweebs have internalized this message even if they don't realize it. Deep down inside, there's some part of them that is convinced they must prove that they're Real And Pure Artists™. What's the best way to reassure themselves? Proudly proclaim to the world how they eschew the advanced, soulless technology of the day and rabidly attack those who do for being less Pure and True than they. It's the old "I do serious work; they are mere poseurs" shtick.

It's finding common ground with the enemy: "Well, yes, those other photographers really don't do art, but I do."

Then there's "You don't hear painters discussing which brush they use and marveling over the latest paint technology, do you?" The implication is, "Like them, I am above an obsession with glittering gadgetry."

Hello?! Professional painters (as in, those actually trying to sell their art for money instead of just dabbling on weekends) do just that. It's true they have a lot less to "geek" about than we do, but I hang out with an assortment of them (I used to be one) and, trust me, they're no less obsessed with their tools and techniques than we are with ours. They just much less often have a reason to get that way.

In summary, yawn. The next time this nonsense rears its ill-informed and unattractive head, consider me pre-bored. It was stupid thirty years ago.  It was stupid ten years ago. It's still going to be stupid tomorrow. Some things are constant.

________________

Ctein

*I have no idea if David would approve of the specific opinions in this article, but the attitude I'm copping/copying is pure quill.

**You can add "digital photography/printing isn't real photography/printing, because..." to this list, but I'm not going to devote much space to that because it is so mind-numbingly, oh, mind-numbing. Can you say "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it?" That's right, I knew you could.

Mike adds: Fun story: I used to work with a guy whose predecessor on the job was an old-timer who shot with nothing but 4x5. Apparently he shot everything with a Speed Graphic. He did everything on 4x5, even copy work. He would leave the studio to cover an event taking with him just his Speed Graphic and six sheets of film. He didn't think much of anybody who needed more exposures to cover an event, and was contemptuous of anyone who used smaller film sizes. (My friend said that photographers of this generation would even refer to medium-format Rolleiflexes as "miniature format" cameras(!).) Who knows, maybe he would even have said they "weren't real photographers," just as Ctein says.

by Ctein

Over July 4th weekend I was off at a convention at a hotel in the heart of Silicon Valley. Most of the weekend was spent engaged in activities such as panel discussions, dining with friends, partying, talking about movies and science fiction, partying, getting caught up on the latest gossip, playing with the "One-Laptop-per-Child" $100 computer (way cool!) partying, more partying....

So, around midnight after four days of this, a bunch of us hackers are standing around in the lobby and we start fooling with the big flat screen display in the lobby. It was running a "welcome" program—a big splash screen showing a picture of the Hotel and instructing people to touch it to learn more about the wonderful features of the establishment.

It didn't take long to see it was just running a Windows browser-based HTML program. This display was actually a live Windows desktop. Then one of our party discovers that the task bar had not been disabled, but merely hidden. Click on the correct corner and there's the familiar Start button.

So naturally he clicks on it. And the Start menu opens up for us!

At this point you're entitled to shake your head and ask yourself what kind of people would be foolish enough to put up a live Windows desktop where the public can access it in the middle of Silicon Valley. Well, it gets better.

Because right there, at the top of the Start pane, Windows informs us that we're logged in as "Administrator."

Ohmigawd. Insert astonished expletive of your choice here. We all surely did.

The fellow who pulled this up just looks at the rest of us, grins, and says, "So, where would you like to go today?"

This was just too good to pass up. After a bit of fussing around, we find an accessory that provides us with a touch screen virtual keyboard. Now we really could go anywhere. Faster than you can say "Hackers R Us" we're poking about with the command line interface. Internet connectivity does not seem impossible, but it looks like it would take somewhat more work than we feel like doing, and besides there are parties to get to. And besides we're really not cruel people. We're nice hackers. We want to do something more benign than installing new software.

Sure, it's silly and juvenile, but what would you expect from a bunch of hackers after four days of partying?! Photo of Ctein by Mette Hedin.

I get an idea. I pop into the display properties control panel and disable the hotel's screen saver. Then I look to see what other options are available. Marquee Display...that will do. Go into Setup, pick an appropriately attractive combination of background and font styles and colors, and type in a message to be scrolled across the screen. Back out, set the screen saver to kick in after one minute, save, and exit.

The results are as you see them in the photograph. Much hilarity ensued for the members of the convention.  The hotel staff was rather more puzzled and possibly less amused. And, surprisingly, it took them all the next morning to figure out what had been done to their system.

Once they solved the puzzle, I had a nice chat with their IT person and suggested that it would be much wiser if they did not give anybody who wandered into their lobby Administrator privileges on any of their computers. He agreed and said he would remedy it that afternoon. I sure hope he followed through, for his sake.

So, how secure is your computer system, and who has access to it? Think about it.

______________

Ctein

by Ctein

I hadn't planned on a third installment on this topic, but the level of interest in file recovery was so high that I decided a follow-up piece was an order.

I don't know why I should be surprised. Really, the worst thing that can happen to a photographer is losing their photos. That pretty well trumps any discussions of technique, aesthetics, or gear. If you don't have the photograph, all of that is pointless. So, for the record, this isn't a trivial matter, and this isn't a case of dwelling on minutia. If the subject really bores you, skip on to the next topic. Because, believe you me, it ain't the least bit boring when it happens to you. And it seems to have happened to way too many of us. 'Nough said? Back to the program in progress.

Following the many helpful suggestions I received from readers, I downloaded eight different image recovery programs to try out on my misbehaving card. One of them, Restorer 2000, wouldn't run at all on my system (Windows 2000, SP4) for some reason. Four of them couldn't find any photographs on the card: File Scavenger, FreeUndelete, Zero Assumption Recovery, and Lexar Image Rescue all failed to recover any files, no matter what search options I used.

Three of them, Smart Recovery, PhotoRec, and PhotoRescue, were able to recover 44 of the photos on the card. That's about two-thirds of them. One of those photos illustrates this column. All three programs recovered exactly the same files.

As a follow-up experiment, I formatted the card in the camera and set the data recovery programs loose on it, because it's been reported that in some cases recovery utilities do better with a "clean" file structure than a badly munched one. That wasn't true in this case; after I formatted of the card, none of the utilities found any photos to recover. But, hey, I got two-thirds of them back! I'm pretty damned happy.

The lesson to take home from this column is that if one recovery utility doesn't work for you, try a different one.  And don't give up until you've tried every one you can find.

Next column will be something entirely different, I promise.

______________

Ctein

by Ctein

No matter how you pick at the data, those digital photos add up! A gigabyte of RAW files in a day isn't that hard to come by (though it's a very full day for me). When I get done messing around in Photoshop and adding layers and final corrections, I can easily end up with more than a DVD full of files a day. Writing duplicate copies to Kodak Gold media costs me $3–5. Pretty cheap compared to film, but anyone who says that storage is essentially free doesn't reckon on the multimegabytes of digital photography.

Which brings me to my next point: finding all those photos later. Another pleasant surprise—my old filing approach seems to work pretty well in this Brave New World! Namely, my traditional contact sheets and "catalog" numbers. A numbering scheme that dates back to my college days has worked well enough that I've never had need to revise it—(mmddyy-[roll#][strip letter][frame#]). E.g., (061607-#060) for the photo illustrating this column. I would claim genius on my part, but honestly I just got lucky. This scheme carries over just fine for digital. Photoshop makes proof sheets a snap. So, happy happy joy joy, one problem I don't have to deal with is a new filing system.

On the other hand...

Before they're archived and cataloged, bits are fragile.  I've already made the noob mistake of pulling a memory card out of my computer's card reader and sticking in a new one without dismounting the first card.  That leaves you with unreadable copies of the files on your computer and an unreadable card.  I've put the card aside while I'm looking for utility that can rebuild the file structure for me. Anyone out there wanna make some suggestions? Please??? The data is all there; it's the pointer structure that tells the computer which blocks of data are associated with which files that's messed up.

What really bothers me about this is not that I made that mistake; anyone who was worked seriously with IT for as many years as I have has done this more than once. It is a well-known "human failure mode" to forget to tell the computer to dismount a storage medium unit before physically removing that unit. The consequences are also well known. It's merely become more commonplace as ordinary end-users deal with removable storage.

What bugs me is that it would be trivially preventable: when you mount a chunk of storage, the OS should write a temporary ID byte to the device. Each time it accesses the device, it checks to see that the byte has the same value it did before. If it sees a different value (or no value), it doesn't do anything with the storage medium; instead it alerts you to reinsert the old unit so that it can be properly dismounted. When you tell the computer to dismount the storage unit, it erases the ID byte.

It's that simple. No unique identifier hard-coded into the storage medium (which would require bringing many standards groups and manufacturers into line and also freak the hell out of the paranoid). Just a small bit of code in the three major OS's and the problem would go away 99% of the time for 99.9% of the people out there. You'd think after 20+ years we could eliminate this particular failure mode, because it's not that hard to fix.

So why isn't it fixed? Beats me. Probably for the same reason there's no latch on the battery compartment on my camera and camera manufacturers can't ever be bothered to put a decent viewfinder in the camera. Because when designers aren't being brilliant, they can be just plain dumb.

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Ctein

By Ctein

Thanks to Joshua's suggestion in response to my column on searching for a digital camera I wound up buying a Fuji Finepix S6000 with the money I got from selling my old 35mm compacts and some related odds and ends.

Clawing my way up the learning curve, there've been surprises. A few of them have been genuinely pleasant ones.

The biggest surprise is how satisfied I am with the picture quality. Overall it really is as good, if not better, than what I was getting from my old 35 mm compacts. I can make 8x10s that I'm very happy with if I use the low ISO settings, and I can obtain acceptable results at the high ISO settings if I'm willing to jump through a lot of Photoshop hoops.

Pretty spiffy for a $250 digital, I think! ISO 100, with the zoom at maximum (and cropped down from there).  The moon and Venus look pretty good, I dare say. Heavily massaged in Photoshop to maximize lunar detail and minimize grain and noise, but otherwise pretty much as the cameras saw it. Note that the non-round Venus is evidence of residual aberrations in the lens, not an actual partial phase.

In terms of exposure range, it's no contest; film wins. But, then, this is only a $250 camera and I've been a color negative photographer who did all his own custom printing. This is more like what I would expect from slides or standard prints. I'm getting used to it. On the other hand, my Fuji pictures are definitely less "grainy" than my 35 mm work. That holds pretty much at all ISO's; it's definitely the case at ISO 100.

Which brings me to my next point. Neat Image and Focus Magic are my friends! Anything I photograph gets run through a 25–30% noise filtering by Neat Image and a one-pixel-diameter sharpening with Focus Magic. Invariably this gives me photographs with less "grain" and more detail. Naturally I do everything in RAW; otherwise the quality at high ISOs would be unacceptable, and I'd lose a couple of stops exposure range at all speeds.

Even so, I get 75 pictures on a 1 GB xD card. Let's not forget that I'm the fellow who spent 10 days photographing in the Scottish Highlands and came back with only 118 photographs, one quarter of which were good enough to make dye transfer prints of. A handful of cards will hold a LOT of photos for the likes of me. I fiddle a lot before making a photograph.

Which brings me to my next point. Battery life. I fully believe the CIPA figures of 400 exposures for this camera...but for me an exposure might involve several reframes, a couple of checks of the histogram and adjustments of the exposure, and writing a lot of RAW data. I get barely better than one card-full of photographs on a set of rechargeable batteries; maybe 100 photos if I'm lucky. Since I can delete anything I don't like and reuse the card, I am making more photographs than I used to (though I still make precious few by most photographers' standards). I'm eating lots of batteries.

Which brings me to my next point. The battery compartment cap on the S6000 is on the bottom of the camera, is heavily spring-loaded, and has no locking catch. Bounce the camera around a bit and the cap will fly open dumping your batteries on the floor. After this happened to me twice in one day, I put a piece of adhesive tape over the cap, and that's all it took to keep it from sliding and popping open. I have trouble believing this problem never turned up in any field testing of the camera. You'd think adding a latch to the battery cover would be a no-brainer, wouldn't you? A big boo to Fuji for that one.

And while I'm on boos, let me deplore the eye-level electronic viewfinders in virtually every camera on the market, including this one. They simply suck. They don't have enough pixels to let you see anything useful in terms of composing a photograph. (Minolta once made a camera with a decent electronic viewfinder and then abandoned it in the next model for yet another sub-resolution, sub-marginal atrocity.) Come on folks, if you're not going to give us enough pixels in the viewfinder to get some idea of what we're looking at, then just do away with it entirely and save the money. As it stands, 99% of the time it is worthless. Let's do better.

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Ctein

by Ctein

Photography, as information both cultural and personal, is on the brink of a profound change. Photography has never really been part of the information revolution in a truly integrated way. Computers (and the Web) are fundamentally text-information oriented systems. We can store photos digitally, we can manipulate individual photos, and we can compile them into assemblages, all electronically. But they're still discrete documents, whole unto themselves, and their information content really isn't available except when you cyber-pick them up and look at them. All the Web does is let you look at photos faster, but you can't really search or combine their native visual content the way you can with textual information. The only way around that is via indirect, time-consuming and clunky database and keyword entry by some hapless human being. It's inefficient, it's incomplete, and it's highly fallible.

On my computer, all my writing and correspondence is almost instantly accessible. I didn't have to build cross references or databases; with a gigaflop-plus at my fingertips, I can dig up text and context on just about anything I've written in the past 15 years in a minute or so with some simple search queries. All at my fingertips, and all merged into a single reference if I so desire.

I simply can't do any that with photographs.

Soon I will be able to. Watch this video and be amazed.

I am in awe . I mean it, really serious awe. Seadragon and Photosynth are going to deeply and profoundly change the import of photography in the world. And the import of visual information on the Web.

Take note; this is not pie-in-the-sky technology demonstration and vaporware. These are products that are well advanced on their way to roll-out. Google "Seadragon" and "Photosynth" and you get a bunch of useful links, including being directed to the Microsoft site where you can download some of the beta software and run it now (you'll need a high-performance graphics card and Windows XP SP2 or Vista).

I can't say it's all too cool for words, because I just wrote about it, but it comes pretty close. This stuff is mondo scary amazing. It's too bad it comes from the Evil Empire, but y'know if Microsoft would keep giving me this kind of stuff instead of trying to foist Windows on me, I think I just might be willing to let them take over the world.