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.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Re-visioning an image. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Re-visioning an image

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….)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Supporting Doctors without Borders through Images without Borders. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Supporting Doctors without Borders through Images without Borders

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…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at When your workflow implodes, bad things happen…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. When your workflow implodes, bad things happen…

I’m a bit surprised, but my lens is repaired and back in my happy little hands. Total turnaround time is under a week. Tota cost was about $115 including diagnosis and shipping costs. According to the return info no new parts were needed so whatever broke was likely a screw that came loose and let everything slide out of position, and the tech pulled it apart, put it back together and did a full optical alignment and cleaning.

Hopefully will get out a bit tomorrow and take some test shots and see how it goes…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The lens is back... This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. The lens is back..

Ben Long talks about using a Hackintosh (a netbook hacked to run Mac OS X).

For the last year, I’ve been using a hacked MSI Wind as a netbook, but its keyboard played havoc with my repetitive stress injuries. Something about it made me hold my hands in a way that ultimately caused pain. I recently had the chance to type for a while on a Dell Mini 10v and found that I had no pain issues at all, so I sold the Wind and picked up a Mini 10v on sale for only $275.
Compared to my 13″ Macbook, the Mini 10 is considerably smaller and lighter, making it very usable for backcountry trips – something I would never do with my Macbook. With it, I no longer need to carry my Digital Focii FotoSafe for offloading, and I’m not stuck trying to type emails on my iPhone keyboard.

Obviously, if you’re a Windows user, you can use the Mini 10v right out of the box. If you want to use the Mac OS, though, you’ll need to perform a quick and simple hack.
NetbookInstaller is an application that will take care of the hack for you, and using it is very simple. You’ll need a copy of Snow Leopard, and a USB stick with at least 8 gb of capacity. Detailed instructions on the NetbookInstaller site will guide you through the installation. You’ll image your Snow Leopard disk onto the USB stick. and then boot off of that. The NetbookInstaller application will modify the installation to allow it to work on the Netbook.
When you’re all finished, you should have a Mini 10v running the latest Mac OS (at the time of this writing, I’m running 10.6.2). The trackpad supports tapping and two-fingered scrolling, and sleep, restart, shutdown, the web camera, and SD card reader all work fine. The model I got has a gigabyte or RAM and a 160gb drive, though both of these are upgradable. The computer weighs in at 2.6 pounds.

It’s definitely a viable option if you want to depend on an unsupported computer environment, but he neglected to mention a couple of important points:

1. If you  don’t buy a copy of Mac OS X or have a family pack, you’re pirating the software. Photographers need to be really sensitive about violating the licenses of others, or else we should shut up when people ignore our copyrights and rip off our photos. Can’t have it both ways, folks, although I know a lot of people who try.
2. Even if you do buy a copy of Mac OS X to run on your Hackintosh, you’re putting it on hardware that isn’t allowed by Apple’s EULA for Mac OS, so you’re violating their T&Cs, which depending on how you want to rationalize it means you’re pirating the software whether or not you have a paid license for it.
3. If neither of those keeps you up and night sleepless over the moral quagmire of violating Apple’s legal agreements while being hard-ass about protecting your own, it’s still an unsupported and mostly untested hardware/software configuration which may break at any moment (or which at any moment Apple might choose to “make no longer compatible” with a software update, and no matter what breaks — you have no tech support except your own sweat equity and whatever friends you can buy pizza for. And you’re using this computer in a production environment on deadline?

Wherever your choose to draw the lines in the sand in the great “How dare you do that with my photos; but I”ll do what I want with this software!” moral quagmire, you should at least stop long enough to think about it so you know how to explain it if it gets brought up by a client — or by the other party if you happen to end up in court fighting a copyright and this is mentioned to the judge. Whatever you think of them, these EULAs have been mostly upheld by courts. How are you going to react if someone uses the same rationalization for using your photos that you used for choosing to build a Hackintosh?

But I’m not judging. I have enough challenge manging my personal ethical compass, I don’t need the karma of managing yours. But I felt it was important to point these issues out so that photographers understand that this is more complications than “this is unsupported hardware”.

I, personally, would hate to be in a conference room negotiating licensing terms with a client and taking notes no a machine that has unlicensed software on it, or is running software that I knowingly installed in violation of the licensing terms. That to me seems like I’m tempting the karma gods, and they already have me on speed dial, they don’t need excuses to ring me up. You know?

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Mac Netbooks. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Mac Netbooks

Just a few quick notes on lenses, I finally sent off my broken Tamron 28-300mm f/3.5 off to the recommended repair depot. I’ll let everyone know how fast they turn it around and what it costs and all of those sordid details. Since I wanted a wide angle (you can’t shoot christmas with a 100-400 as your widest lens!) I rented a Sigma 18-200mm from the folks at Borrowlenses.com to give it a try. My experience with Borrowlenses was frankly awesome, and I plan to continue using them in the future.

I didn’t do a lot of work with the lens and I certainly didn’t do the kind of work that would let me make “scientific” evaluations. If you want lines per inch geeking, there are places for that.

Here, just opinions. Maybe even somewhat informed (maybe not).

The reason I bought the Tamron was that I wanted a big zoom ratio and a compact footprint so I could use a single lens as a carry around street camera. It normally lives on my Canon Rebel, and my Rebel lives in the Tamrac 3385 I use as my haul-around to and from work, or in a little Tamrac 3536 I use as a city bag. For this purpose, the Tamron is a nice lens. Given my propensity to photograph small things that fly away if I move in their direction, the extra zoom oomph of being able to get to a 300mm magnification helps.

But the lens has some tradeoffs, and I’m starting to really understand the compromises using it brings. For one, I’m constantly fighting the fact that (for me) that a 28mm on an APS sensor (1.6x magnification, 44mm equivalent) just isn’t wide enough. I want wider. (WIDER! WIIIIDDDDDEEEEERRR!!! BWAHAHAHAH!); by cutting off the wide aspect to get the long aspect, I’ve limited the utility of the lens for what I’d like to do at the magnification end that is the lens’ primary purpose. that’s enough of a mistake that I found myself quietly thinking to myself that the Sigma 10-20mm f/4 lens looked intriguing…

But that really defeats the purpose of having a single lens, no? (not that I’m complaining about having more lenses!), so that made me sit back and rethink the problem from the start not as a “how do I patch what I have” but “what is the right answer?”. Renting the Sigma 18-200mm was an experiment in alternatives.

I was right, the difference between the 18mm low end and 28mm low end was significant. I much prefer the wider available angle. I also prefer the Sigma build quality. Ignoring that I broke the Tamron (hey, it happens), the Tamron has the heft and feel of a consumer lens (plastic construction, light weight) while the Sigma lens feels more “professional” — I’d call it more of a prosumer style lens. It and the other Sigma I own (the 180mm macro) both impress me with the quality of the build and their heft, they feel sturdier and stiffer and generally come across to me as more able to take the kind of banging lenses that live with me sometimes go through. The Tamron is a nice lens — but I like the Sigma lenses better. The Sigma lens seems (subjectively) crisper, but I need to also remind myself that it’s not trying to be such a mega-zoom. the two lenses aren’t directly comparable in performance or intent in simple ways. But all in all, I like the Tamron, I like the Sigma more.

But having played with the 18-200, that made me ask myself how to ‘fix’ my dilemma. Replace the tamron? Supplement it? Something else? SO MANY QUESTIONS! No easy answers.

What I decided, though, was that the idea of a “street kit” made a lot of sense and the Tamron is a good lens for the street kit, but for my “serious” kit, that lens has compromises I’m not really satisfied with; it’s not wide enough or sharp enough for things I’d like to do. So I think it makes sense to plan for an upgrade to the “serious kit” to live full time with the big lenses and make the Tamron a full time street kit lens. Since I think I’m close to buying a 7D, this seems to make sense. (yes, I’m using “seems” a lot tonight, because these plans aren’t final. your feedback welcome).

One change I’d make in buying a lens to fit this need is to do away with the mega-zoom; that causes compromises in the optics that I can accept when I’m carrying a low-profile camera around a city in a walk-about, but I’m not so happy with those compromises when I’m taking landscapes on a tripod in the middle of Yosemite. I can also go wider, but if you push the zoom on the wide side, you start forcing those compromises in the other direction (and besides, I need an excuse to BUY THE SIGMA 10-20! MORE GLASS! NEED MORE LENSES!) — so I’m considering a lens with a more “normal” zoom ratio, and one that’s got a high sharpness and quality.

I’ve been researching lenses that the photographers I follow are using, and one that seems to keep popping up is the Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5 and so that seems to be my leading candidate. I need to rent it and take it out for a spin and see what I like. it gives me a tiny gap in zoom coverage (15-85, 100-400) but that’s more than acceptable to me. It’s also something I can find used if I want to. Dave Cardinal has a nice piece on the Sigma 24-70, and that looks interesting as well. If the Tamron isn’t back for my next trip, I’ll likely rent that and take it with me to try it out.

So we’ll see. No need to make this decision right away or in haste. The fun part of these challenges is that you can solve a problem in a number of different ways.

But right now, if I were to make these decisions again, I wouldn’t buy the Tamron again — I think there are better options. If I wanted to do something similar I’d use the Sigma 18-200 and give up that last ounce of zoom capability, but my general feeling now is that a better option for that street camera is the Canon G11 and not use a DLSR at all and then buy a wide angle lens just for the “serious bag” — or use the Panasonic Lumix DMC line of cameras. Laurie’s used those for years for her hockey photography because they have a great zoom and they’re compatible with the Sharks camera policies, and they really are nice units that live somewhere beyond point and shoot but aren’t quite DLSRs — but they do have two things that help them disappear from the prying eyes of the “camera hesitant”, which is they do not have removable lenses and the lenses don’t pop out far and scream “this is a serious camera” nearly as much as a DLSR, and that’s allowed her to take photos in situations where other cameras have gotten challenged. Sometimes, that’s not a bad thing to have handy…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at A few thoughts on lenses. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. A few thoughts on lenses

There are three rules that seem to be thrown out “by the pros” at new photographers all the time, ideas repeated constantly as part of the “how to be a better photographer” lectures.

• You Must Shoot Every Day. You Must Carry Your Camera Everywhere
• You Must Shoot in Manual Mode (and turn off autofocus, too!)
• You must shoot early in the morning or late at night, not in the middle of the day

And they’re wrong.

Okay, they’re not completely right — cliches are cliches because they are truths spoken until you’re tired of hearing them. These are truths that aren’t really true any more because they need to be updated to the current state of the art in photography. And so I will:

You Must Shoot Every Day. You Must Carry Your Camera Everywhere

This rule has a good intent — to get you in the habit of taking photographs and learning to see with your camera. In the day when people shot film and sent their film off to labs to be developed and printed, this rule mostly made sense.

Today, the photographer is also the lab; to be a really good photographer, you have to not only be strong behind the camera, you have to be strong behind the monitor; you have to work on both your capture skills and your processing skills — and because of this, telling people that they have to shoot images every day is a bad idea. It sets the mental mindset that the capturing of images is what matters, not the creation of the best possible images (this is, by the way, my only possible criticism of The Best Camera, and it’s a minor one as its strongest).

What we should be telling photographers is not to shoot images every day, but to work on their craft every day — although even that bothers me, because if you turn this into a grind, you’re going to turn people off on it. Weekends exist for a reason, and you shouldn’t be setting tasks that remove the joy from it.

What this rule is really trying to do is create the habit of thinking and acting like a photographer: that means spending the time to improve your skills and learning to see and think through your photography, to build the habits that allow you to be ready when a photo opportunity happens — and have your gear handy so you can capture it.

And THEN go back to the digital lab and create the best possible image out of that capture.

The core of the rule is good: becoming a better photographer takes time and commitment, you must be willing to invest in improving yourself, and that takes time behind the camera — but it also now takes time in the digital darkroom, and in many ways, the darkroom can be more important to taking that step from “pretty good” to “wow” as the capture.

Don’t just carry your camera around and take random pictures of random things and think that’ll make you a better photographer. Honor the intent of the rule, which is to commit the time and energy to your craft, both in the field and in the lab. Time spent taking pictures outside of your comfort zone and of subjects you don’t normally shoot is a good idea, but spending time honing your photoshop skills is at least important, and honestly, I think it’s more important to shifting the quality of your images to that next level.

You Must Shoot in Manual Mode (and turn off autofocus, too!)

The intent of this rule is good — if you just stick your camera in “P”rogram mode and let it make the decisions, it will save you (mostly) from taking really crappy pictures (mostly), but it will also prevent you from taking really great pictures, because it’s going to navigate the capture into the safe, conservative areas. As good as digital imaging is getting these days, no camera can make decisions that lead to the best possible images — not without help.

But the idea that photographers have to shoot in manual mode comes from the days when cameras were stupid; that’s far from the situation now, and if you follow this advice blindly you will be hurting your ability to take the best possible images because you will be cutting yourself off from taking advantage of the intelligence being built into modern digital cameras.

The more I read the writings of today’s top pros and the more I hear them speak, the more I realize that THEY are spending less and less time in manual mode. This rule isn’t wrong, but it needs to be updated.

The core of this rule is this: you can’t be a great photographer on autopilot. If you don’t let the camera control the capture, it will not try for a superior image but to avoid a disasterous one; you’ll get mediocrity. This is less true with every generation of digital camera coming out, but ultimately, it’s about who’s in charge.

If you let the camera be in charge, your images will be “safe” and safe images are rarely great.

This does NOT mean you have to shoot in manual, though. What it means is you have to spend the time and energy to learn what the camera can do — all of it. And then take advantage of what it can do and adjust it to make it do what you want. That doesn’t mean shoot manual, but it does mean know WHEN to shoot in manual. It also means knowing when to shoot in Aperture mode, or Shutter mode, or using exposure compensation or bracketing.

It means knowing when to adjust white balance and when to leave it alone, it means knowing how to take advantage of autofocus and when to shut it off and use manual focusing. It means understanding aperture and depth of field, it means knowing the noise characteristics of your camera so you use the proper ISO setting to eliminate that noise — or accentuate it.

There are a lot of capabilities in that camera body — learn them and learn how to take advantage of them. If you are shooting in manual mode, you are making your job harder than it has to be, and in fact, you aren’t putting yourself in control of the camera.

“shooting manual” is the code for telling the camera what to do. Today, there are many ways to do that beyond turning off the camera’s brain and doing it all yourself. If you aren’t taking advantage of them, you are hurting your ability to create the best possible images. In some ways, this makes your job more complex, because there are more variables and options to learn and consider. In practice, once you understand what those options can do and how to take advantage of them and once you learn the quirks of your specific model of camera, many things open up and your life as a photographer becomes easier.

What’s important is that you teach yourself how to take advantage of and control the features, so they don’t control you, and to do it so it becomes part of your habits of creating good images. It’s not enough to be able to think about how to take the next image, you have to just know and do it — otherwise, images will be lost before you get the camera set up.

It’s not about manual mode any more, it’s about not being in that green P of Program mode, and it’s about knowing how to adjust how the camera thinks so it does what you want, not what it thinks you want. Once you and the camera learn to think together, though, you’ll make many beautiful images.

Me, personally? I spend 95% of my time in Aperture mode, and 90% of the adjustments I might have used manual mode for five years ago I do via exposure compensations instead.

You must shoot early in the morning or late at night, not in the middle of the day

This is “the golden hour” rule; that time just before and after dawn, and before and after sunset when the light when you avoid the worst of the glare and shadowing and the oblique angle of light brings out the colors of your subject.

The reality is this: the golden hour can definitely enhance photos. If you can shoot then, do so. I certainly do. That’s assuming you don’t get up at 4AM to find your dawn shooting fogged out or a lack of any cloud cover giving you — well, blah, boring dawn sunrises.This also presumes THAT YOU CAN re-arrange your schedule into the golden hour.  If you are a photographer who isn’t a full-time photographer, that’s not necessarily easy and sometimes not possible.

I take a different view. For many of us, simply being able to go out and shoot is sometimes a challenge. I’m lucky to get to the Grand Tetons, spending a week of dawns and sunsets there waiting for the “right moment” is practically speaking impossible; in fact on my yellowstone trip, we got down to the Tetons for a partial day starting mid-morning. If you follow the “golden hour” rule, I might as well have not brought the camera.

Yeah, right. Fat chance.

So I turn this rule on its ear. It’s not about shooting only during those golden hours. Instead, I think of it in terms of what can I shoot that is compelling when I’m able to shoot. As it turns out, I think my Teton landscapes turned out pretty well, but there were other shots I was hoping for — especially the fall foliage aspens — where it simply didn’t work; in fact there was only one shot I took I felt worth keeping:

And that’s the key to rethinking the “Golden Hour” rule: don’t lower your standards because of the timing of your photography; instead, find the photography that works given the timing. Maybe that means going into the trees and shooting macro instead of landscape, or focusing on animals or birds instead of trees or mountains. Maybe it’s using a different filtration to cut the glare, or a different look to the location, such as my “blue” shot where I went for the distant hills and emphasized the blue haze instead of fighting it. For my Mt. Moran shots, I not only added both a polarizer and an ND, which allowed me to go with a slow shutter speed, which cut much of the ripples and accentuated the reflection — moving the emphasis away from the mountain with the fairly flat lighting. Is it a killer photo? It’s not Galen-Rowell-Alpenglow killer, but I rather like it (although I overdid the sky in post and want to fix that some day, a bit too much polarizer), and I really like the blue photo as probably my favorite of the day’s shoots.

I think they hold their own, even if they were taken mid-day in the glare of a full sun. And it sure is better than not taking the photos. This rule teaches the mindset that if you aren’t doing it “by the book”, you might as well bother. And some days,  that’s true. If I’d visited this spot in mid-June instead of late september, the lighting would have been a lot harsher and it probably wouldn’t have been worth pulling out the camera.

Which is my point. What I don’t like about this rule is that it’s defeatist. My rule is different; it’s that you should pull out the camera whenever you can, and then go find the pictures that are worthy of being taken. This rule is, in fact, in direct conflict with the first rule, which says you should be shooting every day, because it’s telling you not to shoot unless conditions are perfect.

Me? I shoot whenever I CAN shoot, given I have a “real” job and a life and all of the complexities that keep me away from the camera. I’ve been trying, frankly, to get to Mono Lake for three years now and still haven’t seen the damn thing, much less photographed it. Maybe in 2010. Think I’m going to only take the camera if I can do the golden hour dance? Fat chance. If I can get there, I’ll have my gear in hand and find shots worthy of being there for.

Or maybe not. Some days it happens. But as in my Teton’s trip, if I’d followed the common wisdom of only shooting in the edges of the day and avoiding the glare of mid-day, I’d have zero shots of the Tetons. I broke the rules going for my aspen foliage shots, too, and while I threw out almost all of the shots, I kept one, which is better than ZERO.

So here’s why these three rules are wrong: it’s not about shooting bad shots every day just to be shooting, it’s about working on your craft on a regular basis to become a better photographer, but not working so much you grow to hate doing it. It’s not about “shooting manual”, it’s about being in control of your camera and bending it to your will to get the image you see, not the image the camera wants to hand you. And it’s not about the Golden Hour (although, dammit, if you can do it, do it!), because if you wait until conditions are perfect to shoot images, you own’t shoot very often. It’s about thinking about how, when you do pull out the camera, to take images that are up to your standards.

The “Golden Hour” rule really bothers me, because there’s an implicit “it’s okay to not bother” approval given. It’s never okay to not try; it’s okay to fail, it’s okay to throw out 100% of the day’s shoot if what you try didn’t work — but it’s never okay to not try.

So here are my three rules, the ones I think “we” should be telling new photographers instead of these three rules:

• Commit yourself to being the best photographer you can be. Spend as much time as you can with a camera in your hand, but spend what time you have on practicing creating the best photo you can at that time.
• Learn as much about your gear as you can, and understand how to use the capabilities to create the image you want to create.
• There’s always something worthy of a photograph if you choose to look for it. It is better to take photos at a “bad” time than take no photos waiting for a “good” time. When you take photos, take the best possible shots available rather than bad photos of what you planned to shoot. Flexibility and an open mind wins out over giving up.
  

I mean, seriously, who in their right mind does bird photography in a white-out fog, anyway? Wouldn’t it be better to head for the Starbucks and wait for better weather?

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Three rules “they” tell new photographers — and why “they” are wrong.. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Three rules “they” tell new photographers — and why “they” are wrong.

Some thoughts on last weekend’s birding trip to the central valley, but more from a photography point of view….

When the winter birds arrive, it’s time for some special photography. Special and sometimes challenging. For me, the special winter bird is the Sandhill Crane, which winters in various locations along California’s central valley.  We also get large numbers of geese, including Snow, Ross’s and the Greater White-Fronted as well as our dear friend, the Canada Goose (aka “Flying Pig”), as well as a few zillion ducks.

But it’s the Cranes that I find most fascinating and challenging to watch and to capture. This is my third winter photographing in the refuges in the central valley, and this is the first year I’ve really gotten photos of the Sandhill Cranes I like:

It was also the first opportunity I’ve had to get some really good shots of the greater white-fronted goose, because at Los Consumnes I ran into a small flock that was close to the trails and not overly freaked at having people nearby.

So by all accounts, the trip was a success. When I was at Merced I got some nice flock shots, but to date, getting up close and personal with Sandhill cranes has been a real challenge, especially since I’m only shooting at about 400mm (plus crop factor) and not someone who carries around one of the 500/600/800mm behemoths with me. Anyone who wants to donate a 500mm lens to the cause, feel free to drop me email…

What you don’t see if you browse through my flickr sets from the merced and lodi/galt trip is how many images got thrown away….

I ended up throwing out every image taken at Woodbridge Road and Isenberg Crane Refuge because they were flawed. Every damn one.

When you go through your day’s shoot, one part of the processing workflow is rejecting dings. All photographers have dings, and I’ve found as my eye has matured my percentage of dings actually goes up, because I’m fussier about what I keep than I used to.

When you’re editing your photos and tossing out the dings, do you ever sit down and analyze why they’re dings? understanding what’s failing helps you understand the weaknesses in your technology and technique, and through that learn how to improve yourself as a photographer. Photos aren’t “magically” bad, they’re bad for a reason, and a little analysis and introspection can help you understand how to make better pictures.

The first time I raelly sat down and analyzed my failures in detail instead of just tossing them was during a winter trip to Yosemite. Yosemite Falls had some interesting ice formations, and about every 20 minutes, chunks of ice would break loose and create an ice fall — I spent a wonderful couple of hours watching and shooting.

And 99% of the images were crap. unusable. Almost a “toss the camera in the river” moment, because I had no idea why, but I sat down and started going over the dings in detail looking for insight, but after about 30 minutes, I came to realize what I was seeing was camera shake — despite being locked down on a tripod like a good photographer does. It was one of the first times I’d done winter photography, and while I did most of it right, I neglected to use a remote shutter, and it was cold, so I was wearing gloves, which were thick enough that handling the camera and pushing the shutter button was causing me to bounce the camera around, causing motion blur; what finally caught my eye was that the blur was vertical — artifacts were in focus, but elongated.

I’m very good at using a remote shutter release now, and this is frankly one of those things where if you’re used to hand-holding a camera and shooting moving things, and you shift to tripod work shooting relatively static things (especially through ND filters for motion blur) you have to rethink your technique, because what makes it possible to freeze a goose in mid-air also protects you from motion blur and camera shake by freezing the motion of the camera; with really slow (10-30 second) exposures minor shake issues tend to disappear as well, but when you get in that middle ground around 1/4 second, it can be brutal. And the first time it bites you, it’s probably going to be a big surprise…

And that’s part of what happened to me last weekend. I made a couple of mistakes in my technique, both of them quite avoidable. The first was immediately obvious on edit: it was brutally cold (36 degrees) on site when I got there, and what was I doing? Driving around in my nice warm car with the heater turned up, rolling down the window and doing the car-blind thing taking photos of sandhill cranes, through a lens that immediately dewed up with condensed moisture when the nice cold air hit it from outside. oops.

My other problem? It was early morning, heavily overcast (and cold). I’m shooting at 400ISO, about as fast as I want to push the 30D, and I’m shooting my 300F4 plus a 1.4x, for 420 F5.6 before crop factor. And in the low light, I’m seeing shutter speeds of 1/250 to 1/400. It’s going to be tough getting really sharp images at that speed handholding that lens under the best of circumstances, and in this case, I was sitting in a running car, meaning the entire foundation of my shot was vibrating underneath me, and I was facing forward and shooting out the passenger window, meaning my ability to stabilize the lens was lousy. Bad shooting hygiene on a number of levels.

My worst mistake here? Not reviewing the early shots and catching the mistakes in the field. That’s why tools like the HoodLoupe exist and why I carry one in the bag with me. You can chimp this problem in the LCD, but I find it much better to use the loupe to get a good view of an image without glare. Only in this case, I just chimped and missed the problems until I got home.

In retrospect, pushing to ISO 800 and accepting a bit more noise would have helped, but being more careful about holding the lens, or being more persistant about shifting the shot to the driver side and using a beanbag on the doorframe would have helped a LOT. As would have being less interested in warm than good photography. And in this case, I forgot my gloves and was wearing a jacket that wasn’t heavy enough for the weather — don’t neglect the details of comfort, because they can make or break a trip; and the condensation issue would have gone away if I wasn’t trying to keep from freezing my fingers off between shots…

These are all learning tools if you choose to make them so. Was the trip a failure? Far from it; I did get some nice shots of the cranes, and I got some really good shots of the geese, and even if i wish I’d gotten more (and better) shots, there’s always next time. And now I have a better feel for what I need to do to shoot well in those kind of field situations.

And that’s never a bad thing; and there’s always next trip.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at In search of winter birds…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. In search of winter birds…

I guess I qualify as a real photographer now. I’ve broken a lens. My Tamron AF 28-300mm has turned into a 28mm lens, with the zoom not working and the unit stuck in wide angle. It first locked up on me in Morro Bay during the Expo (of course), but it allowed me to manually zoom it; since then, it’s decided to simply turn into a prime.

Oh well. it’s going to have to go off for repair. I’m tempted to open it up myself, but I think I’ll restrain myself and let the experts fix it. But this leaves me with a little problem — my widest lens is my 100-400; not a good lens for family photos for christmas.

So I think I’m going to rent; I have to decide what to take with. My as well use the time as an excuse to scout the replacement, or at least potential.

Do I like this lens? Absolutely. It fit exactly the needs I defined and wanted when I bought it. It’s a bit soft at 300mm, but that was expected and for my use is acceptable. I wanted a general “carry around” lens with a wide range that wasn’t too large and bulky and “obvious” — something I could put on the Rebel XT and carry around with me on a day to day basis with flexibility, but without screaming EXPENSIVE CAMERA everywhere I went.

It fit that role perfectly; now, if only I spent more time outside of my cube where I could take advantage of having a camera with me… (a quick hint to computer geeks with cameras, make your next computer bag a camera bag with room for your laptop. I replaced my laptop backpack with a Tamrac 3385 and I love it.

Having said that, would I but the Tamron lens again? No. Not because it broke, not because of any flaw with the lens itself, but because I’m finding there’s one aspect of it that I’d do differently. it’s not wide enough. I was too worried about getting the extra magnification in the zoom (the bird photographer in me) and not enough about the other side of the zoom range.

So if I were to do this over again, I’d choose a wider lens with a shorter maximum zoom range, because it fits the rest of my gear better. When I’m out shooting I usually hit a point where I want something wider than I have, and while the Sigma 10-20mm is on my list to get, I’ve come to think a better “street lens” for me would be in the 20-200 range instead of the 28-300, and my initial thought there is the Sigma 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3, although I haven’t tested it yet. So maybe that’s what I’ll rent and see if I like it…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at I guess I’m a real photographer now…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. I guess I’m a real photographer now…

Working on things for the holidays, and here’s one of the images I’m making prints of:

This is a reprocessing of this shot from a 2007 trip.

Just a LITTLE bit better, I think. Why spending time on practicing your post processing is a good idea…

The good news is — I’ve finished christmas shopping. The bad news is: I have a bunch of empty frames that need things put in them before I can wrap them…

I decided after thinking about it not to do a calendar this year; instead, I’m doing some prints to give away to some people. It’s making me take a fresh look at some of my images, and I’m seeing I can take some things I thought were pretty good and make them a lot better.

At least, I think they’re better…

(updated. I realized this morning I patched in the thumbnail of the wrong photo; corrected to show the proper previous photo.. sigh)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Half Dome from Tunnel View. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Half Dome from Tunnel View

Following on the idea of Justin Korn, I decided it was time to look at what I felt were my best shots of the year. I keep sets on Flickr for every year in two categories, one for birds, one for everything else,  but I also wanted to look at what I felt were my best few here.

By design (and because of work commitments) I actually spent a lot less time behind a camera this year than last, but I think I took better photos. Part of the plan was to really focus on improving my post processing and spend time and energy thinking about the business aspects and the creative aspects more than mashing shutter buttons, and I’m happy with the results. It was a pretty good year, I think.

So here are my ten favorite photos of the year, with a bit of commentary.

10: Orion over Morro Rock

After taking the night photography class (see below), I got up to do some dawn photography around the harbor. My first stop was near the rock, and I looked up and saw Orion getting ready to set behind the rock, so it turned into some “pre dawn” photography first. This was taken about 90 minutes before the photo that was my favorite of the year below; “dawn” being somewhat of a relative concept, I guess. I really loved how it came out and the night glow on the rocks.

9: Brown Pelican with an attitude

The brown pelicans in Morro Bay are very habituated to people, which isn’t a good thing, but it gives you some interesting photo opportunities. I just loved the composition of this one, it really presents the bird to me as having a bit of an attitude (which was true…)

8: Sea Otter at Dawn

Taken my second dawn shoot at Morro Bay during the expo, the color washing the water just as the sun was cracking the hills was glorious, and so I decided to do silhouette shooting. I also had some early morning equipment challenges, so by the time I actually got the cameras rolling most of the light had faded — but I was able to, ahem, put it back in post. It was literally of those situations where by the time got the camera on the tripod, the light had come and gone, but the image remained to be refound. Why practicing with your gear is essential, folks…

7: Black-Crowned Night Heron Mom and Chick

Mom and a fairly advanced chick sharing a nest, Night Herons always seem to have that “you’re not going to eat me, are you?” look to them? Working around nests you have to be careful not to push the birds too hard, because the chicks aren’t ready to leave and you can screw it up badly if the parent or chick panics. These two were clearly watching me watch them, but with the help of my hand-dandy 400mm lens, I stayed a good distance away and didn’t spend much time near them.

6: Common Loon

Shot during a boat outing on the harbor at Morro Photo Expo, it will become obvious looking at my photos that I have my favorites, and they include loons, pelicans, raptors, egrets and herons. This one was nice enough to sit up and show off for the boat of photographers, and the camera was nice enough to catch it nicely.

5: Flower Buds

Experimenting with really shallow depth of field and the Sigma 200mm macro, I was really happy with the almost abstract quality of this one. it was, believe it or not, handheld.

4: Sea Otters

I do love the sea otters down in Morro Bay. Surprisingly accessible. What you don’t see about this trio is the 45 minutes I spent watching them mostly sleep and do absolutely nothing, although the kid in the middle seemed a bit bored with hanging out doing nothing. Five minutes after this shot, the adult on the right was asleep again. Ah, the adventurous life of the nature photographer….

3: Lark Sparrow

Every so often the birds simply choose to cooperate. And I thank them. A gorgeous shot of a very pretty bird with very little work done on it other than darkening the background a bit more than it was to start, this one just sat up and waited for me to finish…

2: Say’s Phoebe

I traditionally don’t do a lot of “oomph” processing on photos, but I’ve been experimenting more with it to figure out how far I can push a photo I like while still being true to the image (where does improve end and manipulate begin? It depends…). This was a nice shot of a nice bird, but ultimately was a grey bird on a greyish background, so I dropped it into Viveza to try to darken the background and give th bird some better definition. As it turns out, I think it turned out quite well. The like flare behind the bird’s head was actually an accident where I pushed a knob the wrong direction and went “hmm. that looks pretty good!” — never be afraid to experiment.

1: Morro Rock at Dawn

I went to the Morro Photo Expo this fall, three days of seminars and photography that I thoroughly enjoyed. One class I took was the night photography class headed by Howard Ignatius, where we later went out and did some shooting around the rock. The next morning I decided to get up really early and try to do some dawn photography around the harbor, and everything came together just as the sun started hitting the rock. This may be one of my favorite shots — ever.

It’s interesting to me that seven of these photos were taken in Morro Bay, not local to home, and six come from the Photo Expo. Interesting, but not surprising, because the Expo was for me a time to drop everything and focus JUST on photography and to push myself into new areas and experiment as well as a time where I put some energy into locking in various things I’d been studying in post processing to be prepared for the trip; it all really came together well. I really need to write it up, but this kind of outing is something I strongly recommend to you.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Best Photos 2009. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Best Photos 2009

I was tickled when I got the notification that this shot was chosen as the picture of the week this week and is being shown on the front page over at the Cornell Ornithology Lab’s All About Birds web site.

It’s a picture I really love and it’s on a site I have great respect for because of the work they’re doing to not just inform birdwatchers but to expand the body of knowledge on birds as well.

All in all, I’m just thrilled.

For those curious, the shot was made using my 30D and the 100-400 IS lens, handheld, over in mountain view near the Adobe Creek area off of terminal road. The swallows nest under the roof of a building housing a pumping station, and I noticed this one nest was seeing regular flights in and out as mom was feeding a couple of young. I stood off about 20 yards away and tried to time her exit — she would normally pop her head out just a bit to look, then drop out of the hole and then spread the wings and accelerate — think aircraft carrier launch.

It ended up taking 45 minutes and 300 images to get the timing just right (i.e., I finally “got lucky” — luck being a combination of some planning, a lot of patience and the high speed shutter on the 30D and a bunch of thumb mashing on the shutter button….).

Just to the side of this nest was another with three really cute chicks:

well, cute in a “I’m pissed off” kinda way. they seem to be practicing their egret imitations. Their mom was also repeatedly coming in and feeding, and otherwise they just hung out and watched. At least they have a view instead of a door that opens down.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Picture of the week at Birdshare. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Picture of the week at Birdshare

I was asked for a copy of a photo I’d done to be used in a birding guide, so I told them I’d re-do the image and send it along. I just did, and I found the contrast between my previous version of the photo and the new version.

Here is what I originally published:

(view full size)

and here is what I just did:

(view full size)

the differences are for the most part fairly subtle but also stunning to me. Same RAW image. For the new image, I used Viveza to pull out the highlights in the face, reduce some of the blown out whites on the feathering, and to darken the green of the grass to help the bird stand out and make the grass look more natural — I’ve come to realize my 30D has a bit of a yellowish tint to greens that needs to be adjusted out. I also sharped it differently (and better).

It does bring up the debate about “purity”. Where does post processing end? Or should end? I don’t see anything in this photo that wouldn’t be acceptable under any circumstances in a contest, or that I didn’t do with dodging and burning tools in my wet darkroom 35 years ago (in the Good Old Days). And yet the differences — simply because I now have better tools and know a lot more about how to apply them — are pretty intense. It’s a much better photo (IMHO).

What this really does is show why 90% of this “purity” is baloney and should be ignored. There are legitimate issues that DO need to be understood, especially where contest rules and publication/journalist ethics are involved — but those are nothing new, and we’ll probably be arguing about those 30 years from now…

Amusingly enough, in the new photo, I now see a “blemish” near the egret’s eye, which when I magnified it turned into a small flying insect that happened to be crossing the bird at the time I shot the photo. It was basically invisible in the older version of the image. I should probably clone it out, but… would the image still be pure enough for you then?

(ducking)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at The “purism” of post processing. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. The “purism” of post processing

I just recently overheard a self-described “purist” photographer ranting on about how we’re all cheaters and that the photographic masters before us lacked our current luxury–even desire–to “customize” (read: manipulate/photoshop) images. It was “…all about the the composition, a beautiful subject, and a properly exposed picture”.

via Chase Jarvis Blog: Purists Beware.

I was mulling over how to broach this subject myself when Chase Jarvis nailed it for me.It came to me that I’d made a fundamental philosophical change in my mindset when I was elbow deep in Lightroom and madly adjusting lighting levels in Viveza that this whold idea of “customization” of photos being either

• bad

or

• unique to digital photography

is bogus.

I’m old enough to have actually spent a chunk of my life in a darkroom. An honest to god, full of smelly chemicals stick things in the liquids and watch the images appear out of nowhere darkroom. Where I’d print multitudes of test prints and experiment with burning in shadows and dodging highlights to fix exposure problems, where we’d use the photographic equivalent of white-out to fix dust spots and do all sorts of “tweaks” to get the final printed photo to look good.

Nobody was a master of that more than Ansel Adams. His artistry was even more in the darkroom than behind the camera. Thomas Hawk talked about that a while back:

So much of Adams’ work was in the darkroom. One of the biggest challenges, even today, when images are used from the Ansel Adams archive (at the University of Arizona in Tucson) is to ensure that the final image from the negative is a quality image. So much of the final outcome of Ansel’s work came from the darkroom.

via 10 Interesting Things I Learned About Ansel Adams

So much of Adam’s quality in his photos is in how he manipulated his negatives to make them the absolute best they could be. So much of these “purity” arguments are bullshit; I’ve been a questioner of HDR, but recently I’ve come to realize that  most critics of HDR (myself included) only notice HDR when it’s done badly — the well-done HDR doesn’t call itself out as HDR, so the good examples don’t balance out the mistakes; they simply don’t get noticed.

I’ve come to realize these turfing fights aren’t new — and aren’t about creating good photos. And honestly, they don’t matter. What matters is the photo, no? Hey, are you going to argue with Ansel Adams? (not me!)

(also see: G. Dan Mitchell)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Purists beware. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Purists beware

This seems to come up about once a year among the birders — bad behavior by a  bird phoographer. I wrote up my thoughts on this, since I live in all three worlds (birder, photographer of birds, and list admin to both), and decided I’d turn it into a blog post so I can point to it next time this comes up.

The reality is this: bad behavior is bad behavior, and I’ve seen bad behavior by both birders and photographers. I’ve turned birders into the rangers for going off trail. I’ve also done the same with photographers. My favorite “what are you THINKING moment” here was a photog up on the bluffs above Fitzgerald out in Moss Beach, where they went over the fence and ten feet DOWN the bluff to take a picture of a flower.

If you’ve been in that area, you know why I just stood and watched until he came back up safely. Did I mention it to him? no. Why? I’ve found people like this rarely are interested in constructive feedback (and I’m not always in a mood to be constructive!), and honestly, I have no authority. But I do have no qualms about reporting people to rangers and letting them deal with it. Note that since I have a camera, the ranger has evidence of the act, and on more than one occasion has chatted with the person back in the parking lot…

The biggest problem I think both birders and bird photographers run into these days are off-leash dogs and their owners. That one’s a real tough issue. I don’t consider “off leash” to be a problem per-se, but many dogs are a lot less under control than the owner wants to believe, and many of these dogs are being allow to chase birds in restricted habitats. We won’t even go into the ones that don’t bother cleaning up after their animals…

Of course, the core problem here is that as a society, many people feel the rules don’t apply to them, and don’t care as long as they don’t get caught. Or don’t care even if they do get caught, given the abusive reaction some of them have to the rangers and cops who call them on it.. It’s the “what I want is the only thing that matters” mentality. Fortunately, this is really rare in birding circles — just not rare enough.

Here is the scenario: birders chase a reported rarity and congregate to see it once the word gets out. Many photographers are also birders but carry with them digital cameras, big lenses and the desire to get photos. As birders like to accumulate birds on their lists, photographers like to accumulate photos. Nothing wrong with either on the surface. The issues are politeness around other people, and potential disturbance to the bird. If the result is scaring off the bird then others won’t have the opportunity to see it

It goes both ways here. I’ve had situations where I’ve been working a location for a significant period of time, camera on tripod, keeping quiet and letting a specific posture or behavior develop, only to have a birder come tromping up through the brush making enough noise to flush every bird in the time zone. I’ve had them walk up and proceed to stand directly behind the tree in my camera view, ruining the shot. I’ve had them come up and stand directly in front of me — usually oblivious, but occasionally they just don’t care what anyone else thinks.

I had one birder who, after coming up to check out the bird I was trying to photograph, consciously flush the birds when he was done — and smirk at me on the way out. He’s lucky I valued my tripod more than I valued beating some sense into him.

There are bad photographers. There are bad birders. The focus should be on bad behavior, not on one class of person or the other.

I live with feet in all three buckets here: birder, bird photographer, and list owner. There ARE huge differences in behavior and attitude between birding and photographing birds, and they can conflict. 99% of the time, though, if the birders and the photographers just work at it and communicate, everyone can be happy. On lists, it’s important to set ground rules and understand what the primary reason the list exists — and then discourage users that don’t work within that.

In the field, it comes down to cooperation and communication. Someone who gets on a bird first should be given the opportunity to watch it without it being flushed; people who come in later need to hang back and have some patience rather than plow in and ruin it for everyone by flushing a bird. On the other hand — the person doing the watching needs to be sensitive to others who are waiting for them and bring them in as soon as they reasonably can and “not be greedy”.

Note that I specifically leave the camera out of this, either group could be the camera person and either group be the birder. Birders fixed on a bird and oblivious to all around them are fairly common, you don’t need a camera to tune out the universe. A few people skills work for both groups.

Now, on the list, it can be trickier. I’ll be the first to admit I love passing around good shots of what I’ve seen. On a birding-centric list like SBB, there’s some tolerance for that, but it’s easy to overdo it. My PERSONAL policy for dealing with this is this: the birds have to be local to the group; they have to be timely; I post links to rarities or to one or two representative photos and beyond that suggest they look at my flickr for the rest. I try to be sensitive to the fact that the list is about birding, and the photography is documentary to the birding, not the reason for the list, so I try to keep it relevant and subdued. For other birding centric lists, setting written policies that spell that out will reduce the fighting that can happen ON list. (as someone who sometimes has to break up these disagreements on SBB, I’ve tried to set an example and hold myself to a conservative standard. I sometimes fail, but I’m learning…)

It might be worth hashing it out a bit on list, or polling the members and asking them to comment privately, and then set a policy based on that feedback. If it’s a small problem, grabbing a consensus and formalizing it will keep it small, and help everyone understand what’s acceptable. Not having a policy is where trouble lies, because members get upset and start defining policy on the fly, and the fights over who’s setting policy tend to be a lot worse than the fight that led to the meta-fight…

What I’d suggest is focussing on the bad behavior, not on whether it’s birders vs. bird photographers. Like Steve, I have no problem removing someone from a list if they are found to be chronic abusers of the environment or their fellow birders. Fortunately, I haven’t had to. Unfortunately, the last three cases I can think (on various lists I’m on) of where abuse issues have come up have all involved photographers, but four of the last five times I’ve had conflicts in the field have been by birders, not photographers; I think the camera geeks get noted because there’s a perception (not completely false) that “they aren’t birders” — actually we’re many times both.

As list owner I have NO control whatsoever when it comes to stupidity or bad behavior out in the field, a

Actually, to some degree you do. You have the power of expulsion from the list, and you have the power of public chastisement and censure. Neither of which should be used trivially, but sometimes, it can be considered (and threatened). Just as a thought. Now with a list like SBB, which is informally but tightly tied to the county Audubon, I wouldn’t consider doing something like that without consulting with them.

And sometimes that’s the best option; many times these people are known within the birding and/or photo groups. and many times, if you ask the right person, someone who knows them well will take them aside and “have a little talk”. And “things get fixed” without there ever being any formal action or fight. So it’s never bad to spend time learning who the various people are and knowing who you can bring in if you need advice or — a little help with something. getting the right thought in the right ear is sometimes the best way to take a little thing and keeping it from festering and becoming a big one. Especially if the problem is one of naivete or obliviousness. Nothing is going to solve those smirks, though, except a tripod to the temple… but I’d hate to dent a good tripod…

chuq

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at It’s not a bad photographer, it’s a bad person. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. It’s not a bad photographer, it’s a bad person

I had a couple of people email me on my backup article (thank you all for the links and feedback!), and that led to a few more quick thoughts.

Is there significant advantage to Firewire over USB 2 for a backup drive?

Firewire is faster. USB is slower, but the drives are less expensive.

Apple left off the firewire port on the new Macbook. There have been indications for a while that they’re starting the shift away from Firewire. What that implies for now is that any external drive you buy should have a USB interface so as to avoid long-term compatibility issues. That’s not a problem for most drives, but it’s something to be aware of.

I normally run my backup drives via USB now for a simple reason: I can plug them into a USB hub. If nothing else, it’s one less thing to plug in (not such a big deal for macpro, bigger deal for laptop). And it saves me having to think about buying a firewire hub as the drives multiply.

Firewire has target disk mode, but Apple’s also indicated it’s future is limited to the future of firewire. Apple seems to be thinking that the future is USB3, high speed wifi (N speed) and to a lesser degree gigabit ethernet. I’m going to be curious if they start including an eSATA interface, but I think if they were going to, we’d have seen one by now.

As long as you buy external drives that are USB2/Firewire400, you’ll be fine. No need to spend more for Firewire800 for a backup drive, the extra performance is more or less wasted except for the initial backup, and who cares if the initial backup finishes at 3AM instead of 7AM while you’re sleeping?

This drive to me is the sweet spot for archival backups. I’ve used the drive casing and it’s less expensive than heavier duty enclosure I recommended on my blog (only about $40 per drive over the raw disk unit). I’ve used them, they’re nice and reliable. the 1TB is a lot cheaper per gigabyte than the 2TB drives, so if you can use them, I would for now. Buying down a generation never hurts.

(FWIW, a little birdie I trust told me to not trust the 1.5TB drives, that entire generation, according to them, are going to be less reliable than the 1’s or 2’s. I haven’t seen any data to back this up, but given who they work for, I trust them enough that I’m avoiding using them. I wouldn’t freak and replace one, but I’d also plan on retiring them earlier than I might otherwise)

Why the recommendation of that Mercury Elite drive?  I’m trying to understand the price-performance-reliability issues here.  The Mercury you cite runs $160; Newegg, as just one sample, has Hitachi and iomega external drives, retail, USB 2.0 (or “Turbo USB 2.0″?), 1TB, at $90.

I’ve used them and found them reliable. If you have another brand you like and trust, be my guest. To a good degree, these are commodities, but I like to make sure I have a high quality enclosure and then upgrade the drive mechanisms over time rather than replace the whole thing. Some of them, honestly, cheap out on the interface and/or power supply, and some can run really hot under load (or really hot, period), which reduces reliability and lifetime. The OWC enclosures are well engineered from what I’ve seen and I have enough history with them to know that the enclosures rarely fail, so I trust recommending them.

But really, whatever works for you, but an unreliable disk enclosure can make your life hell and be more likely to die early in its lifetime.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Some more thoughts on backups.. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Some more thoughts on backups.

It’s fall, and the Cranes and Geese are returning to California for the winter. This weekend is the Lodi Crane Festival, which if you’re at all curious about this birdwatching stuff would be a great way to get introduced to birding and these gorgeous birds. There seems to be a lot of activity already at Isenberg Crane Refuge, but my favorites are Merced National Wildlife Refuge and Los Consumnes (near Galt). Sunset (above) is a great time because some of  the birds will scatter into the area agricultural lands to forage for the day, and then all fly back into the refuge as the light wanes and watching flock after flock come in can be magical.

Dawn, however, can be even more magical (just not as convenient) — as the birds wake up the noise is indescribable, and then these huge waves take up and circle the area and head off for the day.

And sometimes you see things you never forget, such as when tens of thousands of birds all suddenly take to the air:

That’s one of my favorite birding moments so far — a peregrine flushed a flock of shorebirds, which panicked (that’s the darkish streak middle left), and they panicked flocks of sandhill cranes and snow geese. That photo contains literally tens of thousands of birds (and one predator), and flocks like that can darken the sky as they fly over you.

Laurie and I usually like to hit Merced NWR thanksgiving weekend. I won’t be at Lodi this year (I’m hoping to get to the Morro birding festival in january, though) but I’m trying to decide when a good weekend to go up and do a sunrise/sunset “really long but fun” day up in the Sacramento area around Isenberg, Consumnes and some of the agricultural areas where the birds hang out. We’ll normally try to hit up Merced 3-4 times between now and February when the action fades….

(and that’s why I wear a hat while birding…. )

(hat tip: Audublog)

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at It’s fall. The Cranes are back….. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. It’s fall. The Cranes are back….

It was a topic for discussion multiple times at the Morro Bay Photo Expo. It’s a continuing topic online in various blogs. It’s a continuing problem where the solutions seem simple in theory, but in practice…

So while I’ve written about it before, I realized while I was at the expo that my own backups weren’t in great shape (in theory vs. in practice), so when I got back, I fixed that, and so here’s a snapshot of what I do and why I do it.

George Barr at behind the lens has written a couple of pieces on backups I found really interesting:

• A good computer system requires two separate and distinct components – both reliability and backup
• What are you thinking about reliable painless off site backup?

But first, here’s a good take on backups from the point of view of a developer by Steven Frank.

And now my take. I try to be pretty anal about backups — despite that, in the last year, we lost some data off of Laurie’s disk when it failed because (ta da!) at some point I turned Time Machine off on that machine and forgot to turn it back on, and in Leopard, Time Machine’s ability to notify you of a problem like this is, well, non-existant. They have partially fixed that problem in Snow Leopard, but still: that tells you just how easy it is to screw this up, and not know until it’s too late.

The quest for the perfect backup system continues. It doesn’t exist. For me, “perfect” would imply:

• Fast
• Reliable
• Turn-key and non-invasive
• Cost-effective

Preferably, it works out of the box without requiring me to figure out how to make it work; Time Machine actually takes a huge step forward in this regard, but still has weaknesses. All other solutions simply aren’t close.

Here’s what I do to back up my laptop:

• I split my data between two disks. My key data is on the disk on my laptop and goes with me everywhere. My “secondary” data is on a firewire drive that sits on my desk. That second disk is effectively an archive of things I may want to use (installers, movies and videos retired from itunes, etc) but don’t need on a regular basis. My lightroom catalog and my iTunes library both live on the laptop disk.
• I have a second firewire drive that I plug in when I’m wired onto the desk. That is my primary backup disk; on it, I use Superduper to make a bootable clone of my laptop drive onto this disk. Superduper is compatible with sharing a disk with Time Machine, so that disk also has a time machine backup on it. Superduper runs nightly, so that bootable clone is generally under 24 hours out of date. This is a feature, not a bug.
• I have a third drive, this a bus-powered firewire drive, that I carry with me on the road. It’s a bootable Superduper clone.  When I’m at home, I update it weekly. When I’m on the road, I update it nightly. I do NOT run Time Machine on this drive, just Superduper.
• I’ve been backing up online for about the last year, using Amazon S3 and JungleDisk. I back up “key data” (photos, documents, and itunes) to S3 over the wire.

That is, if you’re counting, up to five copies of my key data, including an automated off-site backup online to S3. A few thoughts on why I do this:

• Time Machine is good for recovering A FILE. I don’t consider it acceptable to recover a disk for various reasons.
• This goes double for Time Capsule. When Apple released the Time Capsules, I bought two, one for my house, one for my mom’s house. I think it does a great job backing up my mom’s laptop at her house (this is the primary use case for this device, I think; non-technical user, light data usage, catastrophic recovery needs). For my uses, it fell short for many reasons — it doesn’t do well in data-intensive situations or multi-computer environments, and recovering over the network is beyond a pain (trust me, I tried). When Laurie’s disk failed, the first thing I did was clone the backups off the Time Capsule onto a disk (to preserve a copy, just in case) — and then found I couldn’t use that clone to recover the disk after plugging it into the computer. That forced me into a recovery over the network, and even running a long ethernet cable from the Time Capsule to the Mac made that recovery pretty painful. That along makes Time Capsule not acceptable to me in my environment.
• You should plan on your backup drive to be 3X the size of your drive that you’re backing up if you use Time Machine. Anything less, and it’ll probably end up thrashing with limited space and not keeping backups around as long as you’d like.
• Why backing up via superduper nightly is a feature, not a bug: If something corrupts and you don’t notice right away, one of the best ways to ruin your day is to realize that your backups are so efficient that they sucked in all of the corruption as well. That’s why it’s good to have a backup that’s only backed up once in a whilte, and even better, have a backup that you have to PLUG IN and MANUALLY back up. Because that way, you know you have a good backup even if your disk controller fries and writes gibberish over everything plugged into your computer. That’s why having a week-old backup in a drawer is a REALLY good thing — teach yourself to maintain it.

Bootable backups rock, as do bus-powered (i.e, don’t plug into an electrical socket) drives. If you’re on the road and your laptop fries (or runs away from home), a bootable, bus-powered drive means all you need to do is find a Mac and you can plug in and boot YOUR system; if you’re on the road with another Mac user, it makes surviving a lost computer a lot less painful (been there, done that); or you could even depending on circumstances find a cybercafe, or even overnight a new laptop from Amazon or Apple if that’s what it takes and be on the road again right away. That’s another reason why Time Machine shouldn’t be your only (or primary) backup.

I’ve bought my disks from Other Worlds Computing for years. I use their Mercury On-The-Go drives for my bus-powered carry-arounds. I user their Elite AL-Pro drives for my sit-on-desk and my archival drives. Laurie has an Elite AL-Pro dual-mechanism as her primary data disk on her Mac Mini, running mirrored drives via Softraid. SoftRaid rocks. The only reason I don’t use that configuration is that the ONLY failure I’ve had with a drive enclosure in the last half-dozen years was my RAID/mirror drive where the firewire interface died; I lost no data, but I never got around to replacing the enclosure; by the time it failed, I’d outgrown the drives anyway, so I just but a single-drive, much larger drive. Funny how data grows to fit available space.

That’s the first warning on RAID systems; there are still single points of failure in them. Two drives in a box is nice, unless the box itself fails.

RAID? SAN? NAS? Drobo? WTF?

It’s really easy to get lost and confused in the jargon. RAID? RAID 0? RAID 1? SAN? NAS? Drobo?

My view of all of this is simple: unless you NEED it, stay away. Keep it simple. The more complex you make your environment, the more pieces exist to go wrong, usually on deadline.

• RAID: RAID is a set of technologies that take multiple drives and hook them together in various ways. RAID 0 wires them up as one really large virtual drive. RAID 1 wires them up in parallel and writes the same data on each disk, in theory meaning the data will always exist even if one of the drives fails. Because theory rarely works as well in practice, they invented a bunch of other RAID options (RAID 5, RAID 10, RAID 1+0, RAID WTF) to try to accomplish in practice what RAID 0 and RAID 1 do in theory.

RAID is not a backup. RAID adds redundancy, but it is not a backup. If you don’t understand that concept, give a phone call to the people at Microsoft and Danger and ask about their Sidekick “oopsie”. Ask for Roz Ho (Hi, Roz!). RAID 1 has no capability to recover from many problems, including deleting a file off the disk (and wanting it back) or corrupting your data, because that data will be corrupted on  all of your copies. that’s a bad thing.

RAID save you from a drive failure, but the drive you’re most likely to kill yourself when it fails is the one in your laptop or desktop computer, and it’s not set up for RAID. To me, RAID serves many useful purposes. I just don’t consider one of them to be backups. RAID can make it less likely for you to need to restore from a backup, but it doesn’t create or replace backups.

• SAN: Storage Area Network: If your data needs are complex enough to need a SAN, you either have an IT department, or you better plan on budgeting for one, at least with an IT guy on retainer.
• NAS: Network Area Storage: NAS boxes are hot among the geeks right now, for good reason. It’s basically a big fileserver that lives on your network. Your files are wherever your are, and in the days of Wifi and laptops where you carry your computer around the house, a very tempting option. you can find NAS boxes that are compatible with Time Machine, NAS boxes that are compatible with windows boxes, and NAS boxes that make breakfast and brew coffee in the morning.

I have a couple of problems with NAS boxes: first, all of your I/O goes over the network. I don’t care how you’ve built your network, unless it’s fiber optic, it’s slower than a disk attached to your computer.

The other big problem I have with NAS boxes; you are buying a computer that has a bunch of disks on it. That adds cost and complexity (and things that can fail) to the mix. The more complex your environment the harder it is to make it work reliably and the more likely something will fail along the way. I like SIMPLE. Plugging disks into my computer is simple. NAS is a lot less simple.

Now, if you are in a multi-computer, multi-user environment where sharing files happens regularly, then the cost and complexity of a NAS may well make sense for you. Buying a NAS just to back up one or two computers? To me, that makes no sense. Using it for backups as well as file sharing and storage for a small office of a few people? Different story. But for me, a NAS would make backups slower and less reliable, and not bring much to the equation to offset that. Your mileage will likely vary.

• Drobo: The Drobo is another toy that a lot of geeks are drooling over. Basically, it’s a really smart, RAID-capable disk enclosure that worries about the details of data storage and tells you when you need to feed it more drives, and it worries about data migration and all of that. When they work, they work great. When they don’t — I know people who’ve gone insane dealing with them (but most of those were early adopters; Drobo’s done a good job of dealing with this stuff).

My complaints about Drobo are similar to the NAS — it adds cost and complexity, and for my needs, I just don’t see that I need it. Well, not now. But I’m going to buy a Drobo at some point, unless something better comes along, but not as long as I can live on (and backup with) simple drives reasonably, which is, right now, 2 terabytes.  When my backup and data needs outstrip the size of a standard large hard drive, then Drobo is a good option. Until then, I’ll go with SIMPLE (and cheaper).

It is, honestly, hard to argue with inexpensive and simple, and inexpensive and simple is to take a nice, 2 terabyte drive and plug it into your computer via USB or Firewire and back up via Time Machine and Superduper.

The combination of Time Machine (for short term backups and needing “that one file back”) and Superduper (nightly to online disk, and weekly to offline disk) is simple, manageable and it works, and it protects you from just about any kind of data/hardware failure below massive catastrophic problems like your house burning down.

If you can store your backups on a 2 terabyte disk (the largest standard drive generally available right now), then all you really need is a couple of 2 terabyte drives. Anything else adds cost and complexity, not reliability or better backups.

If you CAN’T live on a couple of 2 terabyte drives, the first thing you should do is ask yourself whether you really need access to all of that data all of the time? It not, come up with a plan to subset your data into your active data and your archived data. Data you know won’t change much is a lot easier to back up and by figuring out what you dn’t need to carry around, you can probably get to the point where you don’t need the complex solutions to make your backup work. And you lower your risk at losing data if you can figure out what data doesn’t have to be carried around to be lost.

Offsite backups

What about that catastrophic problem? Your house just burnt down. Your office is underneath that mudslide. Now what?

For that, you need a copy of your data in a safe place. I’ve been using Amazon S3, others use a safe deposit box. Literally, any place where you can reasonably say “the chances of both places being destroyed at the same time is very small” works; I’m comfortable with leaving a disk in a locked drawer at work, for instance. Any disaster that takes out my house AND my office — I probably have bigger worries, if I’m around to worry about them.

The easiest way to handle an offsite backup (there’s that word again, SIMPLE): buy two firewire/USB 2 Terabyte disks. Plug one into your computer, do a time machine and Superduper backup. unplug. Take to work, lock in a drawer. Plug in the other computer and run backups.

Now, once a month, take your backup disk to work, take the disk at work home and plug it in.

How tough is that? So why don’t we? (hint: just do it)

I’ve been doing offsite backups to Amazon S3 for the last year. There are some nice advantages to it; it’s trivially easy (when you, say, don’t forget to turn the backups back on, when the network doesn’t fail, when… ) — I’ve had no complaints — zero, none, nada — with Amazon S3 and Jungledisk. It works great.

I’m going to stop doing it, too, in favor of the “buy another disk, swap it with the one at work” method. Here’s why:

• Cost: I’ve got about 45 gigabytes backed up on S3. That’s not all of my data. That’s the data that I can’t afford to lose. That data is growing every time I take a photo, and it’s not going to shrink. Currently, this is costing me $15-20/mo in storage and access charges. That’s roughly $200 a year. That’s a couple of terabytes of disk a year I can buy. This isn’t the cheaper option.
• Reliability: it’s only as reliable as the vendor you entrust your data to. That’s why I’m using Amazon S3. I know I won’t wake up some morning to find out my backup storage vendor ran out of funding and is shutting down (or shut down without notice). It’s happened. A soon as you start bringing in services like this, you start having to qualify your vendors (i.e., all that nasty stuff I.T. does for you at work) and monitoring their operations and validating their services and paying their bills. Do you want to be your own IT department more than absolutely necessary?
• Recovery: Okay, pop quiz: how long will it take to download 45 gigabytes? If I ever do need to recover a catastrophic failure from S3, not only will my data set be incomplete, it’ll take me days (I’m guessing 2-3 weeks) to pull that data down. Assuming nothing goes funky and my ISP doesn’t decide I’m pirating music and turns me over to the RIAA or rate throttles me.

That latter’s a killer. I could handle “really slow” if it were cheaper, but the cost-benefit of online backups doesn’t match simply buying a couple of disks and stuffing them in a drawer at work. It’s slower, it’s more expensive, it won’t scale, your recovery will be more painful, AND you’re adding complexity and the need to manage a vendor relationship or two.

So I’m doing away with online backups. Convenient in some ways, but not cost effective, not simple, and if you ever need to recover more than one or two files, incredibly painful. And for one or two files, Time Machine works.

Some day, online storage will happen. But not now. If you’re considering it, think long and hard about the costs and hassles — and go buy another disk.

Some final thoughts

• Here’s a hint many people don’t think about; you don’t need to keep buying disks with enclosures; it’s quite easy to replace the mechanism INSIDE the drive. That can save you $50-100 per drive, which over time really can add up. Or use a drive dock, which allows you to buy bare drives and plug them in as needed without opening an enclosure. Simply wrap the drive back in the non-static bag (or buy some to keep them in), and they take up less space and cost you less money. It’s an easy operation even for a non-techie.

• Don’t wait for a drive to fail. You don’t have to wait for a drive to fail to retire it. If you copy your data to a new drive and retire the old one BEFORE it fails, you can stick your old drive in a drawer (as an emergency backup!) and save yourself the pain of having a drive fail. A little preventative maintenance does wonders here.

• Always buy bigger than you think you need. If you are currently on a 500 megabyte drive, replace it with a 1 terabyte drive. Or better yet, a 2TB drive. you’ll find ways to use it.

• Think in terms of “active” data, “accessible” data, and “archival” data. You don’t need instant access to every file every moment. If you come to grips with a plan for “what’s available”, “what’s handy if I need it” and “what I might need”, you can REALLY simplify your life and your backups.

• I handle archival data really simply: it lives on my secondary drive until I get around to copying it to an archival drive.  I make a clone of the archival drive. One lives in a drawer at work. One lives in a drive at home. Once every year or two, I take the oldest drive and retire it, and copy all of the data to a brand new (probably larger, because I’ll need it). That way, you continue to migrate that data to new media and minimize the chances of “it died sometime when we weren’t looking” or “wow, we can’t READ that zip drive any more”.  By making data migration to new media part of your backup/archival plan, you limit the problems you have going back to old data down the road, at minimal cost and no real pain.

• Burning to DVD? CDs? Don’t bother. First, if you aren’t using gold archival DVDs in your burning, the chances of having bit errors down the road are high, especially after a few years, and even archival Gold DVDs have longevity issues. And when you look at the cost per gigabyte of DVDs vs buying another hard drive, it’s a no brainer. We outgrew burnable media years ago.

If you take nothing else away from this article, do these two things

• Keep your backups as simple as you can while still doing the job: two copies of your data (three is better. Four is even better), at least one copy of data off-site.
• The best way to make backups painless is to never need them — and the best way to do that is to retire/replace your PRIMARY drives every year to 18 months. This is especially true for laptop users where drives get bumped around. Upgrade your working drives on a regular schedule, and you’ll significantly reduce the change of a drive failing on you at a bad time. And you’ll get a bigger (and probably faster) hard drive in the bargain. A 500 gigabyte, 7200 RPM Seagate laptop drive will run you under $10o. You can clone your data to it via Superduper (using one of the bus-powered enclosures, say, or the disk dock…) and then even if you pay someone to install it in the laptop, that’s still $150 — and that $150 could well make sure you never NEED the backups in the first place, and people never seem to think about doing this. Do it. To me, that’s money well spent.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at More than you wanted to know about backups. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. More than you wanted to know about backups

I haven’t talked about photography much recently, mostly because I really didn’t have much to talk about (not that this ever seems to stop me).

Truth be told, my photography’s been “in between”. I’d shifted from using Photoshop/Bridge to Lightroom 2, but I only had my new photos in Lightroom, not my entire library, and while I was using Lightroom, I wasn’t really comfortable or felt I was using it effectively — to call what I was doing a workflow would be an exaggeration. I was in that “dating but no committed” phase, and stayed there for an extended period of time because I just didn’t have the time and energy to dig in and study the tool and make decisions on how I wanted to use it. It also didn’t help that work and other things were keeping me busy enough that I wasn’t doing much with the camera, so there was little new photography in forcing me to figure it out.

I finally decided to get serious about this, so I spent a couple of evenings importing my library. The import was painless, but — of course — created a couple of problems, the most serious one being that the keywording on my old photos and the keywording I was using weren’t the same. This led to two days of intermittently rearranging, merging and rethinking — I’ve come out of it with a singe hierarchy of keywords I (mostly) like that have (mostly) been reconciled and is finally (mostly) unambiguous and without duplicated functionality in different places (mostly). Another day or so of refining will resolve most of the (mostly) remains, but that can wait (famous last words).

I also realized I needed to change how I was handling exported images. In Bridge when I generated an image for, say, Flickr, I ended up importing it back into Bridge and pulling all of the versions of an image together into sets. In Lightroom, you can’t use sets with collections, which initially seemed like a real annoyance, but I later realized that between using snapshots to generate master images in the appropriate formats (8×10, 11×17, etc) and export presets to automate the image creation that storing the final image isn’t necessary in most cases; instead, regenerate it if you need it (duh). throw in a few lightroom plugins, and suddenly the workflow works pretty well.

I’ve adopted in a few Lightroom plugins to make this happen, the major one being LR2-Mogrify from Jeffrey Friedl. the other ones I’ve started using are his Geolocating plugin (which allows me to add location data within Lightroom using Google Earth), his plugin for finding photos near a given geolocation (so I can find all of the other images from that spot — once I get them all geolocated), and his flickr uploader.

Using LR2-Mogrify I’ve created some export scripts to do my framing and watermarking, and for flickr, I now upload them directly from Lightroom, which has simplified things massively for me. Now that I have this basic workflow done, I can adapt it for other formats that I plan on supporting (such as creating wallpapers in various sizes, more on that later).And I finally feel like I understand how to work the way Lightroom expects me to work; things are finally clicking, so I feel comfortable that what I’m doing is going to scale. I still have some work to do on the workflow, but at least it’s — flowing.

Along the way I made a couple of other changes; I changed the frame I use on flickr (again); I’ve shifted to a transparent watermark that I think will work better but be less obtrusive.

And maybe most significant, I’ve shifted photos posted to flickr back to a Creative Commons licenseon imagesI publish onto the net. Those images will continnue to be smaller images (1024 pixels max on the longest side), watermarked and with embedded information. I’ll continue to reserve non-watermarked images for license, and I will continue my policy of licensing them to non-profit and other worthy (as I define it!) organizations at no charge on request.

I’ll be updating my web site’s policy pages on this over the next few days. For now, I’ve left existing images under the old license for now. I haven’t decided what I will do there, whether I’ll change them all to CC or do it on a case by case basis. As I start gearing up for creating an updated web site with a portfolio and real licensing options, I’ll be re-processing and re-uploading my best images anyway, so I tend to think the status quo is less confusing than shifting things around…

I am in fact getting back on the planning process towards what I need to do to upgrade my web site to support my goal of moving from amateur photography to semi-pro (and from there to pro); I have a business model worked out and a strategy to implement it, and over the next few months, I hope to get it going and see what happens. After a lot of thought and research I’m comfortable with the idea that even though thousands of others are all buying digital SLRs and hanging out shingles as “pro photographers” during a time when many tradition revenue streams for existing pro photographers are either going away (newspaper photojournalism) or being significantly disrupted (stock photography) there are still options and opportunities to succeed.

So we’re going to go for it. Unlike most of those other photographers, I think I can succeed; for one thing, I know it won’t be easy and I know it’s a long-term investment. For another, I’ve put a lot of time and energy into technique (especially post processing) the last couple of years, and I think my imagery is now pretty good (but can still get better) — I look back on older stuff and wince a lot, which is a good thing. And I thnk I understand how to leverage the new technologies and marketing opportunities and my lack of dependence on the old days” of photography business models to my benefit.

We’ll see. I could also prove myself to be a blithering idiot. Wouldn’t be the first time. But heck, it’ll be a fun hack.

what’s my plan? That’s another blog entry on another day…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Battling Lightroom to a truce….. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Battling Lightroom to a truce….

Snapshots in Lightroom are a little discussed feature, underappreciated and often undervalued in many a workflow. Most often, Snapshots are overlooked in favor of Virtual Copies, but in certain situations Snapshots can be useful.

A Snapshot in Lightroom is like a picture of an images development settings. You can process an image, create a Snapshot and then revert back to the image as it was upon import. Then you can proceed to reprocess the image and save your new version. Many photographers and their respective workflows do without Snapshots, utilizing Virtual Copies instead.

In general, Virtual copies are more versatile and as they create a second version of an image in your catalog, are generally more visually appealing.

Virtual Copies are treated much like separate images in Lightroom, containing its own develop settings, referring only to the original RAW file for its content. This is an advantage as you can have your original version and the virtual copy both active, to compare and alter side by side.

The downside is, you can clutter up a catalog rather quickly if you need to produce multiple versions of the same image. This is where Snapshots improve upon Virtual Copies, you can have multiple image revisions inside the metadata of a single image and spawn Virtual Copies of said revisions as needed.

via +Snapshots – Versioning Made Easy | x=blog+stay+informed.

This seems to answer in a very elegant way a question I’ve been exploring in Lightroom recently: How do I manage a set of variations on an image once I’m done processing it.

Take this scenario: I take a RAW image and do my normal post processing. Eventually I decide “I’m done”, and I have a final image. This is effectively the “digital negative” of the image that I want to use moving forward.

Now, I want to take that image and make various versions of it – wallpapers in eight sizes, an 8×10, 11×14 and a low-rez, watermarked version for flickr.

I can do that with virtual copies, but catalog management gets interesting fast. Snapshots seems to be a cleaner way to do this, and an interesting hack to explore. which I’m going to go do, and see if it works like I hope it will…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at +Snapshots – Versioning Made Easy. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. +Snapshots – Versioning Made Easy

One of my favorite sparrows in the summer is the Lark Sparrow, and on one of my trips out to Marsh road in the Calaveras area, this one sat on a fence and cooperated for a really nice portrait.

With migration, it won’t be too long before our winter visitors, the White-Crowned and Golden-Crowned Sparrows, will show up and move into our birding spots…. They’re beyond common around here during the winter season, but the White-Crowns really are my favorite sparrow to watch…

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Lark Sparrow. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Lark Sparrow

yeah, a boring title. Another way to say “I’m running out of witty ways to say ‘I’m too busy to blog for real’”

• Scott Bourne: Emerging Photographer of the Year award. Interesting idea for helping photographers get some visibiliity.
• Light Workshops: 36 image stitched HDR. A great example showing that HDR isn’t a bad thing, that bad use of HDR is a bad thing. This is an awesome image.
• duncan davidson: advice for a $2K photo equipment budget.
• Rick Sammon: don’t crop my photos!
• PetaPixel: 7 awesome newspaper photoblogs
• Scott Bourne: mini review of Pocket Wizard Minitti and FlexTT5
• Lightroom Lab: Speeding Up Lightroom

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at this week’s photo link list…. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. this week’s photo link list…

I’ve been collecting links again. I am hoping this is the last link-post for a while, because I really am trying to commit to getting back on a writing schedule. Real writing shall return to the blog shortly….

• Jan Klier: balancing color temperature
• Pixsylated: two weeks with McNally. I find Joe McNally’s work — absolutely fascinating. And it is so absolutely different than what I do in all forms it might as well be a different universe. Which is part of what attracts me to it, because I know I need to grow in that direction…..
• Photoblog 2.0: touching the rainbow. On the other hand, more and more, I realize the type of landscape work I want to do looks a lot like what Harold Davis does….
• MooseNewsBlog: It wasn’t along for looks… I’ve long looked to photographers like Art Wolfe for inspiration in my wildlife and bird photography. The more I look at Moose Peterson’s work, though, the more I see a style that really speaks to me — technically very strong, works hard to bring the personality of the animal out, and really putting the animal front and center. His son Jake isn’t exactly bad, either. (astute viewers of my flickr stream might see the inspiration for my new image framing here…)
• Jim Goldstein: 11 must-have photography iPhone Applications. (I’ve been experimenting a bit with Photocalc and Focalware, plus things like GPS locating sites with Compass and I’m currently trying out three different apps for tracking tides because none is a clear winner. All research into what apps I really want to encourage porting to my new phone….)
• Online Photographer: Depth of Field Hell, the Coda. This, to me, looks much like the religious fight over whether or not to use a UV filter over a lens. I use one — it’s saved a lens from death for me once, a good investment — and I’ve never seen a photographer with a set of photos be able to actually show which ones did and didn’t have the filter on. Theoretically, yes, an extra filter might soften an image or otherwise modify it. But using good quality filters, if nobody can tell you which pictures were taken with the lens, arguing over the theory seems rather silly. (this all started with this posting)
• James Duncan Davidson: sunset along Interstate 5. In which Duncan compares and contrasts his iPhone images with his Nikon. the iPhone 3GS actually does a decent job, but the comparison shows its limitations. Not a complaint — but not a DLSR, either. And because I’ve done the same thing driving up and down the I-5, there’s and . Not sure there’s much worthy of photographing up and down the central valley — it’s a tough capture — but it can get some awesome sunsets and sunrises.
• Digital Photography Schoool: Fixing animal’s eyes in lightroom. I do something similar now; more generally, especially with animal and bird photography, I find you simply can’t process a photograph on a global basis and expect it to be a great photograph; too many angles and shadows and textures, so you need to make local adjustments. The eyes are just an important (maybe the most important) feature to evaluate for local enhancement; it’s what draws a viewer into the picture. My adjustments are now primarily done in Viveza as a LR plug-in. Very nice and convenient.
• Photocrati: spoiled! — something we forget with modern camera technologies; just how much easier it is to take photographs today because of improvements in capture and lens quality. I routinely shoot at ISO 200 now on my D30, where “in the day” when I was shooting film, ISO 200 scared the crap out of me as far as noise. Heck, I remember shooting high school football with Tri-X,where you reveled in the grain. Today, grain is artificially ADDED to photographs by some as an artistic enhancement. think about it…
• Layers: Confession of a compact-camera shooter. Yes, you don’t need an expensive DSLR to shoot quality photos. Laurie’s used a compact for her hockey photography for years because it creates less — angst — at the door. (FWIW, it’s the Panasonic Lumix line with Leica glass and a 35-400 optical zoom…). I’ve used them, too, but these days, I have decided to live with my D30/RebelXT and use the RebelXT and my tamron len 28-300 as my carry-around pack.
• Paul Burwell: Secrets of the Photo Workshop Business. A nice cautionary note for those looking to take workshops. Since I’m doing my first this fall (in Morro Bay, where George Lepp will speak)
• Chase Jarvis: Photographic Assistants, what I look for. I’ve considered trying to do a few assistant gigs, just to get the experience. Of course, I need free time to even consider that…
• PhotoShelter: Michael Jackson Memorial Images and Distribution workflow: fascinating stuff here.
• Juan A. Pons: Why I shoot in Av or Ap mode. Yeah, me too, a lot. Nature work is a lot different than studio or landscape work where you can lock in an exposure over time; I find I end up looking for the right compensation, and then needing to trust the camera. When  the subject is outside and moving, too much goes out of your control…
• DIYPhotography: one. two. three. white background. cute. and nice technique, too.
• Steve Berardi: sometimes the view is better from above
• Steve Berardi: should you always isolate your subject? I have found I prefer not compltely isolating out from the background a lot of the time. Sometimes that “portrait” look works best. Honestly, if that’s what you want, you can mechanically make it happen in post processing now, too. Which would merely start various debates about the ethics of doing so, I bet..
• David duChemin: Your Oh Sh!t Kit. You do carry one, right?  Another thing I always carry in my car — a supply of water; if you break down out in the middle of nowhere, having some water can significantly reduce the hassles of trying to be okay until you get found or can hike out…
• Jim Goldstein: five reasons why metadata should be part of your workflow. I’m reasonably good about metadata, but I’m not reliably geotagging things yet. That’s going to bite me down the road…
• James Duncan Davidson: A sneaking suspicion. Oh, yeah. the airlines have been allowed ot create a situation without accountability, so of course, there are problems. It’s not rocket science. The casinos figured it out decades ago. So why do we allow airports to get away with this?
• James Duncan DAvidson: end of the line for Kodachrome. I admit it — I was always more an an Ektachrome shooter. And Tri-X. And Velvia. But film is continuing to fade away, and while I never expect to ever have to shoot film again — this is a bit of a sad milestone.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Some photo link-love goodness... This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Some photo link-love goodness..

Funny thing, my company evidently launched this new product; not sure the name. And coincidentally, I’ve not had a whole lot of free time.

But I am collecting links still. And even though I’m finally comfortable in LightRoom and publishing photos again, I still have all of these links…

• Photocrati: The Kacey Beauty Reflector (looks intriguing; potentially very useful)
• Photopreneur: Photo Keywording 3.0 (one of the things that I spent a lot of time on moving to Lightroom was the keywording. I hated how Aperture keyworded (still do), Bridge had it’s strengths and weaknesses — and quirks, but worked better for me. Lightroom? I’m starting to really like, and in fact does a number of things I critiqued Aperture for NOT doing and wanted to see implemented. Some day, I’ll stop reinventing everything every year or so — but every time I do, it gets closer to what I really want)
• Doug Menuez: Notes from the Road, Walking the Talk (What am I doing? Basically I’m starting over. — And me? I’m trying to figure out how best to start, and how not to screw it up when I do; pushing myself off the plateau and taking that next switchback climb to where I need to be)
• Epic Edits: Making Fine Art Prints (read the whole series, very well done)
• Digital Photography School: Orbis Ring Flash (this one is definitely on my short list)
• David duChemin: King of What? and Other Stuff
• Digital Photography School: Moving a Lightroom Catalog.
• Photocrati: Hey, photography is legal. how about that? (how New York City backed down)
• Digital Pro Talk: A frugal man’s approach to off-camera flash (I really need to get going in the studio and practicing with flash. it’s been on the to do list for months)
• Joe McNally: Getting High (um. feel a bit. dizzy. don’t look down. DON’T LOOK DOWN)
• Kirk Tuck: What I want out of my assistants (just read his books on lighting. detailed reviews someday. thumbs up; I’ve thought some day of trying to become the world’s oldest novice assistant, just to see what I can learn…)
• Wade Heininger: Color vs. B&W (I cut my teeth in high schoo doing B&W sports photography and work for the yearbook. I also admit that for many years, I just really care much for B&W; Ansel Adams didn’t sing to me, any more than Emily Carr does anything for me with Northwest Art. But I’ve been spending time experimenting, and I’m starting to see when an image might be improved with less color instead of more. but honestly? I’m still a color kinda guy. unrepentant).
• Jim Goldstein: why social media matters to Photographers. (The downside of social media is that it can easily suck all of your time and energy into it, leaving you not doing what you wanted to use social media to promote and discuss. It’s something to keep a leash on).
• DIYPhotography.net: Studio@Home (a continuing series, well worth reading)
• PhotoNaturalist: Why timing is everything in photography
• Gary Crabbe: Should I work for free? (my policy is simple: as a way to pay forward to organizations I support, and to get exposure, I give images to non-profit and ecological organizations happily. I saw this in the writing world, though — there are far too many people willing to take advantage of the “I’d do anything to get in print” crowd, and I try to not play there. The benefits, if any, are rarely worth it).
• Duncan Davidson: Photoshelter and Color Management. (hmm… all of the photo sites seem to do some tweaking. I wish they had a “I know what I’m doing, leave it alone” preference)
• Morro Photo Expo: I’ve registered, and am looking forward to it this October. Have you?
• Chase Jarvis: When was the last time? (really. I’ve been having some frustration with my photography, partly lack of time, partly — and it took me a long time to realize — I was simply shooting the same stuff again and again, and going through the motions. I had to sit myself down and make myself focus on technique, and I’d really like to get out for a bit and shoot some new locations, but given my current committments, ain’t gonna happen. so I need to invent some opportunities. All I need is some, ahem, freee time…)
• PhotoNaturalist: what to do when autoexposure doesn’t work (This is one reason I love carrying about my HoodLoupe)
• Digital Photography School: how to get the most from a photo workshop (my first is October; I have my eyes on some others — I’m at that point where I think it’ll do my craft and vision some good)
• Harold Davis: The Photoshop Darkroom a new book. (his book is pre-ordered, and his workshops are on ym short list for when I can break free to take one).

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at Yes, I knew you couldn’t live without it: the return of photo links. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. Yes, I knew you couldn’t live without it: the return of photo links

catching up on my processing backlog a bit, I’ve uploaded some photos of the Calaveras Eagles from March, when she was sitting on the eggs. there are flight shots of both male and female, with the male coming in with a ground squirrel in his claw. They’re okay (but heavily cropped), so if someone has a spare 600mm Canon lens… No? Oh, worth a try, I guess…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chuqui/3605737067/

There’s some other recent uploads including photos of my trip to Morro Bay (otters, loons, spotted sandpiper and their cormorant rookery) and a few local birds up there now, too.

This article was posted on Chuqui 3.0 at More Bald Eagle photos. This article is copyright 2009 by Chuq Von Rospach. This content may not be republished on another site without explicit permission from Chuq Von Rospach. Please consider subscribing to my RSS feed so you don't miss a single one of my carefully crafted, emotionally satisfying and Pulitzer-quality words. More Bald Eagle photos