Back from vacation…

Back from my vacation and Yosemite trip. It was, in a word, awesome (except the food at the Yosemite Lodge food court is still very expensive and kinda sucks, and you don’t have many options, but that’s nothing new….)

As usually happens, I came back to a huge block of stuff that needed my attention. I’ve gotten my inbox at work down from about 600 emails to around 250, and if you haven’t heard back from me at work, I’m sorry — working on it. At home, it’s down to about 30, and ditto.

The time off gave me a chance to completely get away and shut down and unwind, and do a lot of thinking and planning, so hopefully soon there will be new and interesting things happening. it also really recharge the personal batteries, which I desperately needed, so I feel like doing something more than site and stare at the screen in the evenings. I’ve spent the last few days reworking my disks and backup strategies because it was clear I was going to run out of disk space sooner rather than later (and you can read more about that here); and I’m spending a bunch of time in Lightroom working through photos and cleaning up my library.

I’ll talk more about the trip as I have time to write it up — but until then, I’ve put some of the photos up on my new Smugmug site, which is where I’m going to be building my professional portfolio (which I’ll write more about as I have time to write it up…).

I did what I honestly think is my best photographer EVER. I still have a bunch of photos to process and upload, but the best of the ones I’ve done are now online. Here’s a sample:

and I’ve also set up the best images in a slideshow:

My complete set is (or will be, when I finish catching up) over on Flickr, but I haven’t had time to put them into sets or organize them yet..

Enjoy!

Tags: About Chuq, Photography

What to do when you realize you’re running out of disk…

One of the things that became painfully obvious during my trip to Yosemite was that I was rapidly running out of hard disk.  Being out on the road is not a good time to realize you need  a bigger disk, s when I came back, I decided to fix things before it became a real problem. Here’s what my overall “bits on things” setup looked like:

Now, there’s one obvious problem there that I hadn’t thought about — the backup disk is smaller than the main disk. I knew about that, knew I needed to fix it, and forgot. Not a huge problem, but one of those details you need to keep an eye on or they’ll bite you at an inconvenience moment. Even though I had 3/4 of a terabyte for my backup disk, Time Machine was only storing backups for about 3 weeks, which means it was no longer large enough. It was time to update and grow and upgrade.

The biggest problem — the new Canon 7D creates much larger images. That’s good, but creates ripples. It also does video, which I’m starting to experiment with. By the time I convert the 7D RAw image to DNG and store it on disk, it grows to about 49 megabytes in size. Pile up a few hundred of those, and “Hell, disk is cheap” starts ringing a little hollow. To give an idea of the change going from the 30D to the 7D, on the 30D I use a 4Gb memory card and get 400+ images on it. On the 7D, I upgraded to 16Gb cards, and I get 500 images on one. Moderate upgrade in number of images, big upgrade in amount of disk taken. Also, since the 7D shoots 8 frames a second sustained where the 30D shot 4FPS with limited bursts, the opportunity to generate LOTS MORE images quickly exists. And it definitely happens, so at the end of the day, I have more, larger images to store. This is, as they say, a good problem to have.

The easy answer — upgrade the laptop to a bigger disk — won’t work here. The biggest laptop disks now available are 500 Gigabytes. Larger than my 320Gb, but not by that much. Upgrading delays the problem by a period of time, but it doesn’t solve it. I considered doing that, then decided to bite the bullet and shift into the “it no longer fits on the laptop” universe.

I mumbled about this on Twitter, and immediately got back the “install a NAS!” response. NAS (or Drobo, or RAID, or name your favorite disk packaging setup) isn’t a solution — it’s a technology. You don’t start by choosing a technology, you start by figuring out the solution and then choosing things that implement them well.

I’ve written about backups and my philosophy on how to do them before, check out this piece as well as this followup, as well as this piece where I talk about why I stopped using an online backup solution in favor of sneakernetting an offisite backup somewhere. I am, for the record, looking forward to when the price/performance and the network broadband make this worth doing again, but not right now…)

So for me it’s time to shift my data into a multi-disk environment. I live on a laptop, which gets carried around. If your data no longer all lives on the laptop disk, then when you need that data, you have a problem. It behooves you to then think about your data and how you use it, and figure out how to store your data across your disks so that you have access to what you want when you want it.

For my purposes, “data” can be defined as “everything on your disk”, but in practice, I see no reason to think about shifting apps out of the Application folder or similar “optimizations”. You might be able to free up a gig or two of space, but why? That’s not significant, and it can lead to potential complications later, especially if you start mucking in your Libraries, preferences, caches, etc. The savings aren’t significant — or worth the future hassles or possible compatibility issues. So for me, unless you’re a font geek with 50 gigs of fonts or something like that, just worry about the data folders: Documents, Pictures, Music, Movies. (in case it’s not painfully obvious: this info is Mac specific. General concepts work for Windows as well — the nutty details are your problem on that platform).

A few key goals

Here are a few key goals of all of this:

• Scales infinitely. Or close enough I don’t have to go through this again for a while
• My data is available when I need it, wherever I am
• Easy and intuitive. I don’t want something that’s difficult to do, or I won’t.
• Reliable and easy backups: if your backups are difficult, you won’t. Keep it simple. Make it reliable.
• Fast catastrophic recovery. I don’t want to spend days getting my data usable again
• Recover a file or a disk. Some backup schemes work best for a crashed disk, others for a lost file. you really need both.
• Backups on the road are even more important, not less. So make sure you can do them. And do.

Here’s what I ended up with. It’s not hugely different than before, but the changes create significant challenges to understand:

I took the bus-powered disk and upgraded it with a 500 gig drive. This means that instead of having 320Gb available, I now have 3/4 of a terabyte I can carry around and use without needing an electrical outlet. This is a significant detail: you really mess up the concept of a “laptop” if you have to plug it in to use it… Or worse, can’t because the data you need is inaccessible because you didn’t bring it.

Digression: for those of you about to tell me “just live in the cloud”, plesae don’t. The dataset we’re talking about is measured in gigabytes trending to terabytes, and it’s not practical. In reality I am using Google Docs and Dropbox more for some things, but for the set of things “the cloud” solves for me, they also live happily on my internal laptop disk. This is about figuring out now how to scale from having 1,000 photos in my portfolio and 10,000 in my collection to having 20,000 photos in my portfolio and 100,000 in my collection without everything collapsing in a heap, and those kind of data sets aren’t going to live online any time soon, nor do I particularly want them to.

So anyway, I now have three drives going. The internal laptop drive (320Gb) is where everything I need 100% of the time has to live. The external bus powered drive can store other files that I need access to on the road — but which I probably can live without for more casual usage. And my desktop drive (AC powered) stays at home and holds the data that I need easily accessible but don’t need to travel with.

I went through all of my data and figured out where it needed to live. There’s also an unlisted “fourth category”, which is data that lives offline, or on a disk that I maybe need access to once in a while but not keep plugged in, and I spent some time pulling all of that data off my disks and sticking it in a corner to archive into a drawer. (one could also say there’s a fifth category, the “why the hell am I hanging on to THIS?” category of things that ended up in the trash. Things like the Parallel’s virtual image of Ubuntu I haven’t booted since I installed it five months ago, which deleting freed up multiple gigabytes. And why did I feel the need for an Ubuntu disto in Parallels on MacOS, which is just a different flavor of the same thing? I don’t remember, but it seemed a good idea at the time…)

I can hear some of you groaning at the thought of sorting through all of your data. I sympathize. If you don’t want to commit the time to that, I understand — but — putting some time and energy into it now helps you understand what you have and how to organize it. It also means that moving forward you’l have a good sense on where stuff belongs, meaning you’ll spend less time thinking it through and organizing on the fly. And if you do it now, you probably won’t need to do it again for a few years. It’s little more than virtually filing everything in your office, and it never hurts to do that every so often.

It shouldn’t be assumed that you need to turn “Save File” into a “Getting Things Done” adventure — I’m definitely not interested in being that anal about all of this, but it is important to understand how you want to manage your data well enough to know if it’ll do what you need it to do and how well it scales. Scaling was the big issue for me. If I’m seriously having to worry about data in terms of terabytes, I’d just as soon not have to architect this all out again in six months. Once it’s settled down, it’s back to the “that pile on the desk is in the way, let’s put it in the files” mode again…

So here’s how I finally settled on filing things. My internal laptop disk:

And here’s what my secondary disk looks like. Note that it only has Music and Pictures folders.

The Music folder is where I’m storing the video files in my iTunes library. The audio (aka “music”) lives on the main laptop disk.  As my creation of video grows, I’ll add a “Movies” folder and split it up the way I do photos, but right now, there’s not much there.

And finally, my third disk, the one that stays at home:

The blue highlighted folders are folders on that disk that I exclude from the Time Machine backup:

which is an option more people should think about if they use Time Machine (or other backups) — some stuff you can live without if you need to, so why back it up? All it does is make it harder to do backups reliably. I flag them with color labels so I don’t forget which ones were excluded — I did that once and had to restore a disk, and spent half a day freaking over “missing data” until I remembered I’d excluded that data from the backups. Oops. It goes without saying, of course, that you should only exclude stuff you really don’t need back if there’s a failure, don’t exclude it because it’s large…

A big part of how this works (or won’t) is splitting up the photo library. In general, I split up my photos into four big piles:

• flickr or better:  images I liked enough to post to my Flickr account (and the subset of those I think are good enough for my portfolio, which I’m starting to build on Smugmug)
• 2nd tier: photos which are technically fine, but which aren’t something I think should be posted on flickr. Most of these are effectively duplicates of ones that go on Flickr (think “eight frames per second burst rate”); you want them around in case you want to use them; you stick them somewhere out of the way because you have no plans to actually do so. In theory, these photos are all good enough to publish, except I have some other photo I think is better — but yo never know when you might want some specific expression or a left profile instead of a right profile, and so they’re here if you need it.
• archive and forget: photos that are clearly not as good as the candidates I’d publish, but not bad enough to throw away. To be honest, as I’m getting more comfortable about my abilities as a photographer, I’m doing less keeping photos around that “someday I might try to fix this”. Instead, I ding them and throw them out. These are flagged to be taken offline and stored, and I fully believe I’ll never look at them again and some day throw them out. More and more, I’m comfortable with my choices and simply throwing them out and saving a step…
• dings: And finally, the dings. As I do edits, the ones that are clearly flawed get thrown out and deleted. There are people who tell you to keep everything. I’m not one of those people. Disk is cheap, but it’s not free. Maybe some day those images will be usable (or fixable in photoshop, or whatever), but the reality is I have thousands of BETTER images I could spend that time on, so why bother? So count me in the camp of tossing the crap, especially when it quickly starts turning into gigabytes and terabytes of crap. Why make it harder to find the good images by having to wade through crap, or worse, create a filing system for offline images to keep around stuff you know in your heart you’ll never use? Let it go. Just because you CAN keep everything doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. It’s not.

This setup looks like it’ll scale for a good long time; I can, if I need to, move some flickr or better onto the 2nd disk and prioritize the internal drive to active projects; 2nd tier data easily moves to the “live at home” disk when I need to. I can subset my itunes library the same way if I want to, and the rest of my data isn’t going to grow faster than disk technology seems to be progressing, and as long as I keep my folder structure sane, I can tell at a glance what’s going on, both within the Finder and Lightroom. I can use Lightroom and Spotlight searching to find things if I need to, but with a bit of care the naming structure will let me browse into it quickly as well. It looks pretty solid.

I’ve spent the last couple of days migrating the data to this new setup and I’m now happy with it, at least for now. As I’ve settled in, I’ve made some changes – originally all three disks had Documents folders, I finally realized that either a document lived on the internal laptop or it lived on the “stay at home” drive; no need for a middle phase, it just complicated things. You’ll notice there are folders on the travelling disks to act as placeholders for the stay at home disk. This makes staging stuff to sweep over there easy, so I can stuff files places on the road and then go home and move them off of the travel disks. It may seem unnecessary or trivial, but I’ve found lots of peopple don’t think about that kind of detail, and when I explain it, they love the idea — it lets me make a filing decision at the time I’m using the data, and merely shove it into the file when I get home and not have to “remember” what needs to be filed days later. Make those decisions while you’re using something and then forget it — it’s a great hint for simplifying things.

And once my backups finally sync up and my data is fully redundant again, I’ll be happier. Currently, I have my superduper backups in place, I’m letting Time Machine sync up now. It can be butt slow at times…

Some technical details on implementing this

The drive I bought for the bus powered disk was the Hitachi Traveler 500G. I’ve been using Hitachi drives for my laptop drives for a while and find them pretty reliable. That doesn’t mean others aren’t, it means thse have worked well for me, so I continue to use them. The bus-powered enclosure I use is the Mercury On-The-Go Pro from Other World Computing. I’ve bought RAM and disk from OWC for years and have been very happy with their price, quality and service. I’ve used that enclosure for a long time with never a failure. Their stuff is well-engineered and solid and I feel it’s well priced, and I haven’t been in the mood to explore other vendors because this one works for me.

For my external drives, I use the OWC Mercury Elite-Pro housing. it’s solid, it’s build like a rock, it works reliably. As part of this rework, I’ve retired the last of my IDE systems and I only buy/use drives that have SATA interfaces.

Digression: Every so often, it makes sense to see how technology is moving and migrate away from stuff that’s aging and heading towards end of life — if you refresh your data onto modern storage, you won’t go looking for it some day and find out you no longer have a way to access it. I’m a big fan of refreshing all of my offline storage every couple of years so the chances of having a stored drive failed is minimized. I’m also a fan of keeping two copies of all offline data, preferably one offsite — just in case. Since I’m also a fan of refreshing my active drives on a regular basis (because the best way to never need your backups is to never run your disks until they die!), a nice way to do this is to replace your active drives every 18 months or so, then use the retired drives and copy all of your archived data onto them, and then take the oldest drives and stick them in your files somewhere.

Digression on the digression: I see no reason to ever give a used drive to someone else, either by selling, giving, or donating. I pull the drives out of computers and housings and file them with my tax papers and other files. Once in a while, I pull the really old mechanisms and “retire” them with a big hammer. That way, there’s absolutely no way someone can recover files off of a drive they bought in Goodwill and end up with your data — because it never leaves your hands. If you trust seven-way zeroing and are willing to spend the time to do so, bless you. I jut don’t think a used disk drive is worth the time and hassle to recycle for re-use…

The drive I’m using as my backup drive now is the 2Tb Western Digital “greenpower” Caviar Green with 64 Mb cache. There are cheaper drives out there, but this one has good reviews and is built for server service. In all honesty, there’s nothing quite so painful as finding out your backup drive has failed, especially if you find out while trying to restore something. I don’t want to overpay for this stuff, but cheaping out bites you down the road.

My backup drive is living in a NewerTech Voyager Hard Drive Dock, which allows you to insert and eject SATA drives easily. This means if I want to I can easily pull this mechanism and replace it with another if I need to “do something” with another disk. I’m just starting to use it so I don’t have reliability data on it, but so far, I like it. It’s solid and well-built at first use. I plan on using it for managing my offline archives as well, saving me paying for multiple enclosures down the road.

Geeky details on backups

The 2Tb disk is split into two partitions, one 500Gb and one 1.5Gb. I use two backup technologies, SuperDuper! and Time Machine. I love Superduper for system backups because it makes bootable clones. That makes catastrophic recovery a lot simpler: take your backup drive, plug it into a Mac, and boot from it (then make a backup of it before something bad happens!). Superduper runs nightly and refreshes copies of my two travel disks, which is why the 2Tb is split into two partitions. The 500Gb syncs up the 500Gb external disk, and the 1.5Tb is the clone of the internal boot disk and also is where my Time Machine backups live.

Superduper doesn’t do versioning or archival over time, it makes a snapshot of now. For the “I need that file I threw out two weeks ago” problem, I use Time Machine. It backs up all three disks (minus the exclusions I mention above) to the 1.5 Terabyte partition of the backup disk. Time Machine is useful for casual backups (it’s better than nothing and pretty good for get-single-file recoveries) but I don’t like it for complete disk recovery and after working with a Time Capsule for a while, I really don’t like Time Machine over a network. If anyone really cares why, that’s a whole different blog posting.

The good news is that SuperDuper and Time Machine co-exist nicely on one disk (thank you, Dave!) so I can do both easily, so I’m set up to clone my two key disks onto the backup disk, and then do a time machine backup onto it for incremental backups as well. If my boot disk crashes, recovery is (almost) as simple as booting the backup disk. Wonderful, since crashes almost always happen on deadline…

What this doesn’t cover yet…

There are a few details this new setup doesn’t cover yet. None of them are time critical, but all of them need to be considered and solved, and it’s important you know how to solve them before you implment (lest they blow up your work when you go “oh, damn, didn’t think of that” later). Fortunately, they all are solvable…

• The new setup doesn’t include “on the road” backups. Since I no longer can carry a bus-power drive big enough to back up my systems, the answer is to carry a bigger, plug-in drive. I’m not worried about Time Machine backups on the road, so the easiest solution is a 1Gb external drive in one of my Elite-Pro housings. Even better, that’s cheap, and if I set it up, gives me an easy “spare backup” setup, because I love having a set of backups I only update every week or so, just in case something corrupts that I don’t recognize right away. So that’s probably what I’ll do. The other option would be to carry the 2Tb backup disk with me in the Elite-Pro housing, which also works, but which limits the number of redundant copies I end up having. I don’t like carrying my backup on the road if I can help it, I’d rather carry a “road” backup and leave the main backup at home. But both are options.
• The new setup doesn’t make explicit the off-site backup storage. What I’m doing in the short term is taking my old backup disk offsite. In 4-6 weeks, I’ll buy a 2nd 2Tb disk, plug it into a dock, build it the same as my new backup disk, and run backups onto it, and then swap between the two (the other going offsite) every 4-6 weeks. That’ll fix this for a good while at reasonable cost.
• The setup for moving files onto offline disks (aka “in the drawer”) isn’t spelled out, but is pretty simple: buy a pair of 500Gb SATA drives, plug them into the dock, copy the files to each, carry one offsite. Iterate until full, and then either start another set or decide some of the files can be deleted (or both). Every couple of years, take all of your offline disks, copy them to new (fewer, bigger) disks, and store them again.

But what about “install a NAS?”

I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of NAS in my environment, but I also realize that over time, the amount of data I’m storing on my “stay at home” disk is going to grow without bounds. My plan at this time is to convert that into a Drobo at some point, but not until I need to, so I’ll hold that off until later this year. I realize that at some point the percentage of data I can keep local to the laptop, even with 1 terabyte (500gig internal + 500gig bus powered) is finite, but I’m only using about 275Gb on those two combined right now, so I have some time before I have to worry about that…

Things like Drobo and a NAS add some capabilities, but they also add complexity, cost and new ways for interesting failures, which always seem to happen on deadline when you least can afford the issues. A NAS works best if you’re sharing data among multiple machines, since I’m not, it adds more complexity than it solves problems. Drobo is different being locally hooked up (and there’s a NAS enabler you can buy for it), but adds its own set of complexities and administration — so as long as (a) a single disk works and (b) I can back it up reliably, I’ll stick with a good single disk. Once you start getting into multiple disk environments and/or your backups start being tougher to keep reliable, the addition of mirrored RAID and some of the other features of NAS or Drobo become good to have, but again, I’m not at that point yet.

Finally — speaking of Terabytes

I’ve been around long enough that the thought of buying disk in terabyte sizes amuses me. My first hard drive was ten megabytes — MEGAbytes, not GIGAbytes — and I remember a time when a terabyte would probably store all of the data at Apple, and perhaps all of the data in the state of California. Today, I’m using it for backups of my personal data set. That amount of scaling in the last 30 years or so amazes me when I step back and consider it. But then, my phone has a lot more processing power and memory and disk than my first Mac did. I think my KEYBOARD has a more powerful CPU than my first home computer did….

Tags: About Chuq, Photography, The Online Life

Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Photocritic: Visualising Studio Lighting.
• Read/Write/Web: first look at snapgroups. I’ve been waiting to see what Mark Fletcher (Bloglines and Onegroup, which became Yahoo Groups)  had up his sleeve. It’s SnapGroups, which is a fresh take on community/group/forum/list type setups. At first glance, looks very interesting. This looks like it might give Yahoo Groups a run for its money. Already beats the hell out of Google Groups, but then, so does a hit to the head..
• Jeremy Pollack: 5 Lightroom Quick Tips
• George Barr: One in a Hundred
• Michael Zhang: Time-Lapse of the Milky Way over Hawaii. Awesome.
• Jim Goldstein: Gates of the Valley, Yosemite National Park
• David duChemin: Confessions of a So-Called Pro
• Michael Johnston: National Geographic ten top photos of 2009. there’s been some grumbling about NatGeo’s choice of photos here. I think photographers need to step back a bit and see that these were chosen as much for (if not primarily for) the story they’re telling as the photo and quality itself. Great NatGeo work, but the photo is the vehicle, not the purpose.
• Rob Knight: unclutter your library with lightroom’s stacks.
• Joe Pelletier: Trail of the Stanley Cup. One of the rarest and most sought after hockey book set. Laurie owns all three volumes as part of her collection. Her collection is around 500 volumes, not including media guides (more or less complete back into the 80’s and other volumes earlier) and programs (a few thousand, something like 20 linear feet of them going back into the 30’s) or my collection of rulebooks (including ones going back into the 40’s). At one point when we were actively collecting we kept hearing about another collector in B.C. we kept hearing about in various stores — one store told us he wanted to meet us as he was buying for the Hockey Hall of Fame and wanted to buy our collection. No idea how true it was, nobody ever followed up with us on it. Most of that was “before eBay”, today, anything worthwhile ends up online there or on abebooks or one of the other used services, and it’s almost impossible to find really rare stuff at non-insane prices, so mostl we don’t… but while we were building this collection, we sure had a lot of fun wading through dusty bookstores…
• Juan Pons: Favorite Images from my “Winter in Yellowstone” instructional photo workshop. (sigh. jealous).
• Mike Panic: 7 things photographers should never do

Tags: Stuff You'll Like

Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• 10,000 Birds: Inaccessible Island Rail. excerpt: The Inaccessible Island Rail is perhaps the coolest bird that neither I nor anyone I will ever meet will ever see.
• Audublog: Klamath settlement could benefit habitat for California migratory birds.
• Google: Google Voice, explained. I’ve been using Voice for a while to manage the fact that I deal with multiple cell phones now, and I’m happy with how it centralizes and simplifies my telphonic life… Which is way more complicated than I ever expected “a phone” to be…
• PDNpulse: dining room/studio in Brooklyn. Because Im’ looking at how to set up a home studio area I’ll actually be able to use….
• Strobist: it’s time for the PC jack to die.
• Rick Sammon: Quick Tip on Fill Flash
• Michael Zhang: Use Bicubic Sharpener for web resizing
• Chris Brogan: attention as a currency and noise
• Mark Williamson: They closed Death Valley
• Jim Goldstein: Mavericks — impact of scale
• Scott Bourne: better skies with lightroom’s graduated filter
• Alan Murphy: Using a water drip to attract birds
• Rick Sammon: Q&A on color space
• Kent Newsome: how to vastly improve your Facebook experience with filters and lists
• Trey Ratcliff: Trey Ratcliff Speech at Google (I had a chance to see Trey speak at Apple on this trip, and had to cancel to go to a meeting I ended up not needing to be at. oh well)
• Trey Ratcliff: how to make a web portfolio (the joys of Smugmug)
• Syl Arena: Speedlighting — learning Canon Flash Photography
• Merced Sun Star: San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge. This’ll give you a feel for what it’s like being at a fly-in. Until you experience one, though, you don’t really understand just how it affects you at a visceral level…
• Adactio: testing huffduffer’s sign-up. Interesting rethink on a signup sheet. The A/B test is intriguing.
• Digital Photography School: Taking Stock of your own photography
• Michael Frye: Oaks. (going to look for this tree next week…)
• Brian Auer: Tone Curves: final tips, tricks and things to avoid.
• Outdoor Photo Gear: Setup Heaven in South Texas
• Michael Zhang: Stop Motion Post-It Animation by Disney

Tags: Stuff You'll Like

Re-visioning an image

As part of prepping the images I donated to Images Without Borders, I decided to reprocess them from scratch and see if I could make them as good as I could given what I know about post processing in Lightroom and Photoshop — consider it a pop quiz on how much I’ve learned in producing quality images in the last few months…

I find some of the differences fascinating. My image of Morro Rock at Dawn, which is one of my favorites (ever!) got a major makeover. Here’s the image as I originally processed it, literally on my laptop in the auditorium at Morro Photo Expo waiting for George Lepp to talk:

I like that version a lot (except for the bird dots in the sky; I later removed them for the version I used to print out for christmas gifts), and the glow on the rock well simulated what I saw when I took the image; I felt I could do better now, though.

So here’s the new image:

The glow on the rock isn’t as noticable, but the coloration is more the golden tone that was evident that morning, and I much prefer the coloration of the water and sky and the better detail in the boats. And there are no bird dots or other junk in the sky…

If nothing else, it’s a very vivid example of how photos may look “photo realistic” but really are heavily tied into the interpretation of the photographer in post processing. it’s always been that way, by the way — the tools in a wet darkroom were just different ones.

Which one do I like better? I like aspects of both, actually, for different reasons. I’d kind of like at some point to take the rock in the original and move it into the image I just finished. Maybe some day I will — but to be honest, I like the new version of the rock as well…But I definitely — today — prefer this new one and how the boats have some detail visible. I was for some reason doing a lot of sillouette imagery last october when I was in Morro Bay…

Another image I redid today, the night herons, better shows how much better I am at this than I was when I originally did it (about 8 months ago):

To me, it now looks soft and grey. The new version of the image has whiter whites, better contrast and stronger blacks, and is much sharper and generally an improved image.

All in all a muc superior image, and I think in this new one the eyes really pop, and they really are the focus of this image, where in the previous version, I now think it came across rather muddled.

To me, it’s good to sometimes go back and re-vision your previous work and see what you can do with it; it can be a really positive way to see the progress you’re making in becoming a better photographer. The bones of that night heron image were always there, I think. Now, I think, the rendering I did allows you to see them.

Tags: Photography

Supporting Doctors without Borders through Images without Borders

A project I’ve been working on in the background for a while has finally all come together and I’m thrilled to be able to talk about it. After the Haiti earthquake I donated some funds to support the rescue efforts there but I realized there was going to be a long-term need there and started looking at the right ways to get involved. One of the organizations that I’ve considered donating to for a couple of years is Doctors without Borders, which fits the kind of organization I look to put my donation money into (low bureaucracy overhead, low marketing expenses, high percentage of revenues “on the ground” and not in the home office, etc..).

Then I ran into another organization trying to create a place where photographers could donate images for sale to generate revenue for Doctors Without Borders. Images Without Borders seemed like a cause I wanted to get behind, so I did some research, decided it was doing the Right Things, and contacted them to see if I could donate some images.

I’m happy to announce that five of my images are now available for purchase through Images Without Borders, and all profits for their sale will go to Doctors Without Borders. Each image is limited to ten prints and will then be retired. I want to encourage everyone who reads my blog to support Doctors without Borders, either by going to Images Without Borders and buying a print (mine or one of the other donating photographers), or by donating to the organization directly.

I will sweeten the pot further — if you buy one of my prints via Images Without Borders, I will send you a free 11×14 signed print of any image in my portfolio as my thank you for doing so. Simply email me a copy of the receipt on the purchase and we’ll work out the details.

Here are the images I’ve made available:

To help spread the word, I’ve created some free mobile phone wallpapers of these images. You are welcome to make copies of these and pass them around or install them on your phone. I will also be doing desktop wallpapers of some of my images, including these, to help support this cause — stay tuned for that.

I hope you all will consider supporting this organization and cause, either by buying a print, by donating directly, or by publicizing this and spreading the word to others. Haiti needs our help, and this organization is there on the ground trying to make a difference, and it deserves our help.

Thanks,

Chuq

(p.s. observant geeks will probably notice that my photos are being hosted on Smugmug and not flickr. I’ve been working towards creating a portfolio site where I can start selling prints and licensing images, and Smugmug was the site I decided to use for this (Photoshelter, the site hosting and donating its services to Images without Borders, came in a close second). I’ll be using Smugmug as the site for my professional portfolio the way I use (and will continue to use) Flickr to distributethings more casually and socially. I’ll talk more later about my plans for Smugmug and how this all ties together, but this situation was a great opportunity to fire up the new site and get this next phase of my photography going….)

Tags: About Chuq, Photography

When your workflow implodes, bad things happen…

One of the reasons I’ve been somewhat missing from the blog is that my photo processing workflow imploded — I came to realize it was broken beyond repair, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

That’s not a fun place to be.

The final straw was trying to integrate some more complicated processing techniques into the workflow, specifically handling multi-image processing for panoramas and HDR. The way I had everything set up in Lightroom just didn’t work for managing all of the pieces well, and everything I tried — well, all of the solutions were ugly and I realized they wouldn’t scale.

Ultimately I came to realize a decision I made when I first migrated to Lightroom was the failure point; I made a decision to use collections to store groups of photos instead of folders. Collections are a virtual grouping, folders are a physical grouping. I felt it made sense to import into a YYYY/MM/DDDD folder, and then use collections to pull related images together. Overall, that worked well (for a while).

Lightroom, however, has a — quirk — a design decision that is impacted by this, and that’s how sets can be used. Sets is another virtual collection that work within folders, but sets are incompatible with collections. that means when you pull everything together, you have to chose collections or sets (but not both). I chose collections. That works, until you need sets. Then all hell breaks loose. It really does make sense to use a set to pull all of those pieces together and tag them with the resulting image as the top image.

Unfortunately, you can’t do that if you use collections. sigh.

In researching options on how to do this (and more importantly, how to do this without tearing it down to ground zero and starting over), I finally decided the workflow I liked best was one outlined by Hal Schmitt at Digital Photo Experience as part of his Panorama screencast. But that meant — of course — starting from ground zero.

So I finally decided I needed to, and I’ve been spending my evenings recently taking everything in my Lightroom libraries and converting all of the collections to folders, one at a time. Of course, once you decide to open up the hood, you don’t just fix what’s broken, you start tinkering, and I did, restructuring my keywords, rethinking a few things in my metadata presets. Little things that flit in and tweak everything to some degree.

This, by the way, makes Time Machine crazy. That reminds me that I need to start planning to upgrade my disks to larger sizes soon. This means I have to think about my backup policies, and… and down the rabbit hole we go again. Fortunately I have a couple of months before I have to worry about the disks, and I’ve got everything back under control (well, mostly. I have a couple of thousand photos flagged with special keywords defining various “needs to be looked at and fixed” to-dos). It seems to work with panoramas:

I’m happy with the structure of the files on disk and how the workflow gets me from import to flickr, and with the keywording and metadata (to a point; there’s more detail that I’m still thinking through and implementing, that’s the “to do” on a bunch of images…).

And I’m pretty happy with the quality of the end image now, but that’s a different blog post. That also wasn’t true recently…

What I haven’t yet done is take it from “post to flickr” stage to the full portfolio, but that’s the part I’m starting to work on now. Most on that, hopefully soon…

Tags: Photography

Yosemite on the horizon!

So having mentioned it was time for vacation a couple of weeks ago, I’ve actually done something about it. I was able to grab three nights at the Lodge on the valley floor, so I’m taking the week of March 1 off and heading off to Yosemite in about a week to get away from email and everything else, and just unplug and unwind and focus on recharging the batteries and taking some photos.

It’s still a ways out, but the ten day forecast for that period (3/1-3/4) is encouraging: maybe some overnight snow but temperatures above freezing during the day, and it looks like a storm will roll through during the trip, which I’m hoping for. Nothing scary in the forecast, and encouraging for landscape potential. So we’ll see.

What’s not settled is what to do around those days. I sat down and wrote up all of the things I might want to do and then started pruning out stuff that didn’t seem to make the cut from a time/energy/interest level:

• Grand Canyon (too much driving, too little time actually there)
• Bryce/Zion (ditt0)
• Vegas for birding and hiking in Red Rock (intriguin, but.. not this trip)
• Disneyland (I don’t want to “go urban”)
• San Diego Zoo (ditto)
• Salton Sea and wandering the deserts for wildflowers (tempting on any number of levels; ultimately more driving than I wanted to do)
• Carrizo Plain wildflowers and then SLO/Santa Barbara/Morro Bay (too early for Carrizo by a couple of weeks, and a bit of been-there-done-that on the central coast. It’s been where I’ve gone to hide a lot the last couple of years, so time to do something different…)
• Out to Tahoe/Reno, then down the 395 to Morro lake and Bishop and out the other side (ultimately, it’s too early in the season for some things I want to do in the Eastern Sierra like Bodie, and just way too much driving, much as I’d like some winter time with Mono Lake; Devil’s Postpile is also buried right now…)

As it turns out, I got invited to go birding with a group down in Monterey on the 7th, so that was encouragment to stay a bit more local. Much as I’ve wanted to get down to Salton Sea to bird for a while (it was the trip that got canceled by my dad’s final hospital visit), I find myself interested in driving less and “doing” more. I’m not making final decisions about what I’ll do until I leave Yosemite, but I’ve got a few informal plans I’ve framed out depending on what I feel like and what the weather dictates.

• Plan A: overnight near Galt so I can spend more time with the cranes and geese at Woodbridge and some of the northern Sacramento flyway stops and do some birding photography and try to observe one or two fly-ins and a dawn up there, then home.
• Plan B: go home (but don’t tell anyone), and daytrip. Lots of things I want to do, from the SF Zoo and the aquarium to exploring the marin headlands and presidio or even play tourist from Pier 39 to Ghirardelli… tempting.
• Plan C: change my mind and head down to Morro Bay (because ultimately I really love it down there…)
• Plan D: who knows? I’m open to suggestions…

In any event, I’m really ready and looking forward to this. Definitely planning a busy week, just a week doing stuff I want to do… Blogging may continue to be light as I get things prepped at work and here at home for the trip; then again, maybe I’ll just start a cube sabbatical and get my blogging caught up…

Tags: About Chuq

Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Dak Dillon: A Photographer’s Guide to Working with Magazines
• Jeff Revell: HDRSoft makes HDR easier with Photomatix Light
• Ed Finkler: We are the stupid ones.
• Heather Morton: Doug Menuez and his new Stock Site
• Peter Carey: How to control multiple flashes wirelessly with a Canon 7d [[ good timing!! ]]
• Kirk Tuck: My idea of a great workshop. Collaboration is key
• David Hobby: After the Light: High Pass Post Production
• Kurt Repanshek: 15 years into the wolf recovery program
• Moose Peterson: What’s the best investment
• 10,000 Birds: Help! It’s raining Brown Pelicans!
• Jeff Atwood: Cultivate Teams, not ideas
• Michael Frye: Coyotes
• Juan Pons: Recording Audio with your video
• Brian Auer: Nonlinear Curve Adjustments and histograms
• Round Robin: We Love Birds launches
• Matthew Ingram: Don’t let the Good Become the enemy of great
• Harold Davis: Split toning in a winter vista
• Paul Burwell: top ten ways to make sure you’ll never be a pro

Tags: Stuff You'll Like

Stuff You’ll Like

A weekly compendium of stuff I found I thought you’d like. If you do, let me know, so I know to find more of it for you.

• Carolyn Wright: How to deal with infringements.
• Kevin Marks: Standards are the Links of the Social Web
• Tim O’Reilly: Google Buzz re-invents gmail
• Don Dodge: Google Apps Developer Blog
• Matt Kloskowski: Four Signs that  it’s time to start from scratch in Lightroom
• Jeff Revell: Tips for better zoo photography
• Rob Sylvan: Customizing your Camera Raw defaults in Lightroom
• Steve Berardi: What went wrong with this sand dune photo
• Greg Russell: Shooting Panoramas with minimal equipment
• Rick Sammon: Crop my pictures and you’re a dead man
• Sean McCormack: LRB Exhibition
• Images without borders: Welcome to Images with0ut borders
• Louis Gray: Low Quality Offensive Ads degrade the web experience
• Nick Nichols: Full Disclosure
• Hal Schmitt: Stitching Together Your Panoramas using Lightroom and Bridge/Photoshop

Tags: Stuff You'll Like

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