One of the major problems with modern digital photography is that we tend to take a lot of pictures and need somewhere to put them. Strangely enough, I don’t shoot that much in comparison to most photographers, even many amateurs. For instance, my typical editorial shoot is 150 images on average. I have some event shooting friends who take more pictures in a day than I shoot in a month. So all together once I do all the math, almost everything I’ve ever shot can fit on a little over 3TB. Nothing for most photographers, I know. I still need to work on those files and backup my data however, so here’s what I’ve come up with that works for me.

The Jump to a RAID Array

I found myself waiting for 2GB heavily layered PSD files to be read and written to disk and so started looking for ways to speed up the process. The thing is that I’m a real stickler for noise and so moving to 7200RPM drives, which I find much more noticeable, was a no go. I’m also not made of money so the idea of swapping out all of my photo drives for SSD is not yet a reasonable solution (though it may be soon, more on that below). So the answer I came up with was to bond two of my WD 2TB Green drives together in an OS X software RAID-0. This doubled my throughput to around 180MB/s which is pretty good. Reducing my save/load times by almost half. Of course the big problem with RAID-0 is that if either of those drives died, all of the data on both drives dies. So when you play with RAID-0 make sure you have an extra special backup strategy in place.

Off Site First

The most important part of backup is to get data off site. So if your house burns down or gets pulled down a river, you’ve still got your data. Now for me with a 5Mbps upstream connection, having a true one to one backup of my data drives up on the cloud just isn’t a reasonable thing to do, it would take months and months to upload. And honestly, if my house burns down, do I really need the RAW files for outtakes that didn’t make the cut in the first place?

So a while back I instituted a system of exporting my final images as full-res jpegs at 85/100 quality and uploading them to Dropbox.  This both gets them out of the house AND allows me to access final print-ready copies of my work when I’m out and about or on vacation. I can send email links to any of the files right from my phone. So it’s convenience AND backup for which I pay $100/year.

Plus, instead of 3.2TB of data, my entire ‘Finished Images’ folder, everything I’ve ever shot that I care to keep, totals a whopping 20.5GB  I could keep a copy local on my phone if I really wanted to. Or on a keychain USB drive I guess, that’s not a bad idea actually…

Tag Team Backup

The proliferation of inexpensive USB 3.0 drives has been a great boon to backup users everywhere. For one thing they’re cheap. Often cheaper than the bare drive that’s enclosed within goes for, and they’re seemingly always on sale somewhere. I’ve bought two 4TB Seagate drives in the past few months for about $150 each. That’s just nuts. Here’s one on Amazon right now for instance:

Seagate Backup Plus 4 TB USB 3.0 Desktop External Hard Drive on Amazon.com

The trick to my backup solution is to have two drives to backup to, but only backup to one of them at a time. One drive is on my desktop, the other is in my closet. Once a month (I switch them when I write my rent check) I swap the two drives so that the one in the closet becomes the one on my desk and vice versa.  You may ask ‘Why?’, but I assure you there is a good reason for this.

Once you have a backup system working, the nightmare scenario is that data on your main library drive becomes corrupt or something gets accidentally deleted and an automated backup goes and clones those mistakes to your backup drive before you realize it. So now you’re left with not one but two drives which don’t have your data on them. By having two backups that you swap in an out, you always have a backup that’s not going to be automatically overwritten which is no greater than a month old (or a week old if you swapped them weekly, or a day old if you swapped them daily, etc). Another ancillary benefit is that the drive in your closet is not connected to power, so that if that random power surge or lightning strike kills your electronics, your data is covered.

Image Library on SDD

I mentioned above that the idea of putting all of my images on fast SSDs had occurred to me. The prices of the drives has fallen A LOT in the past year or so. To the point where you can currently buy a 960GB drive for $500. Still a little too rich for my blood, but if I archived the old stuff to a couple of external drives and kept my library tidy, I could probably get it to fit within 2TB or so. And that would only cost about a grand. A lot of money? Sure, but not completely astronomical like it would have been a couple of years ago.

It’s certainly to the point that the next time I build myself a new computer, I’ll probably make the switch. Hopefully by then the price will be down to $250/TB.  Imagine two or three of those drives as your RAID-0 array. Loading images at 1.6GB/s would be pretty nice. Necessary? Nah. But pretty nice.

If you needed another reason why you should never wait to do that thing you’ve been meaning to do, or tell someone that you love them, here it is.

Below are a few of the photographs I made with Eleanor over the years.

My partner brought a little present home for me from her mother’s house. Less a present really, more of an assignment. Her mother had found this picture of HER mother and sister and grandmother in some drawer or other. It had been battered and beaten and probably put through the wash a few times, but they wanted to see what I could do with it.

Step one was to scan it in order to get as much information as possible out of the original. Pulled my old Epson flatbed out of the closet and plugged it in, fired right up. Scanned it to a TIFF file at 1200dpi. Not that there was anything near that much information in the print, but I find that when doing restorations like this, the higher resolution let’s you more easily discern between the image and any physical flaws that have befallen the print. If you don’t have a scanner, you can also take a well exposed picture with your camera and start with that. Just make sure you light it from the side so you don’t get reflections in the image.

Most of this kind of work can be done in Photoshop using things like the spot-healing brush and stamp tools. Certainly when it comes to creases across a largely white sky those techniques work pretty flawlessly. The problems come when you need to invent information. The places on the print where the image has been torn away for example, that’s information I have no way of getting back. For things like the pattern in their dresses, you can use the healing tools to mimic or clone in the pattern from elsewhere to good effect. Other areas like the swing set to the right of the central girl, I can’t accurately recreate that. Best I can do, within reason, is to use the surrounding image to guess, and that’s just what I did.

Overall not bad considering I only spent an hour or so on it. Is there room for more work? Sure, but you’re quickly approaching the limits of your return on time invested. We want to save and perhaps restore the memory a bit, no need to go all Ken Burns.

I also could have increased the contrast even more and desaturated the whole thing entirely. That would probably deliver an image that was much closer to how the print looked in the 1930’s, but also kind of loses some of the Age that the print has imbued on the memory. So in the end I pulled back the contrast and desaturation layers to let it feel a bit more like the original.

Either way it’s a good ‘waiting for the snowstorm’ project, and a great way to get your feet wet in PhotoShop. You’ll learn how to use layers and healing/clone tools, as well as adjustment layers and color. I highly recommend you get a tablet to do work like this. Trying to do this with just a mouse would be like doing a fine pencil drawing while wearing ski gloves. The less expensive Wacom tablets are a great deal, and a good place to dip your toe in the water.

So go rummage through some drawers and give it a shot. Your children and your children’s children will thank you some day.

Conrad sat in for me while I shot her from approximately two feet with:

A Paul Buff Einstein w/
– 7″ reflector
– 32″ shoot-through umbrella
– 32″ silver umbrella
– 22″ beauty dish
– 22″ beauty dish with 30 degree grid
– 22″ beauty dish with sock
– 24×36″ softbox
– 24×36″ softbox with grid

A Lumopro 120 Speedlight w/
– bare
– 32″ shoot-through umbrella
– 32″ silver umbrella
– 16″ softbox

The images were color corrected in Lightroom using the color chart on the wall.

And you know what? At least for the soft sources, they all don’t look THAT different from one another. So maybe I’m wrong. What do you think?

UPDATE:
So I’ve taken a look at them after a short night’s sleep and I wanted to point out a few things. While the light from the umbrellas and softboxes and such look pretty similar from a couple of feet away, you will notice that there is a huge difference in their spill into the rest of the scene. So if you need control over your lighting, some options are definitely better than others.

Also even though I was using strobes that ‘should’ more or less be about daylight balanced, there was a wide variation of white balance settings in post to get them in line with each other. The light from the Einstein for instance had color temp of 6000º, 5950º, 5250º, 5100º, 5500º, and 5000º depending on the modifier being used. The speedlight was even worse, 6600º, 6900º, 7500º. Remember that next time you use a strobe and think you can just set your WB to Daylight or Flash and call it a day. Nope. When in doubt, shoot a grey card at the beginning of your session so that you have a reference in post.

For me, it comes down to convenience to a large extent. If I have to carry my gear to a shoot I want to get the most bang I can get for the size/weight buck. For me lately that has been a couple of 36″ Softlighters from Photek. They fit criss-cross in my Pelican rolling case and can be used as white umbrellas, shoot-through umbrellas, and as designed with the front diffuser. Three tools in one. (Plus they’re cheap!) That said, yesterday I was shooting some corporate headshots and brought along an Alien Bee with a 46″ Softlighter and the light from that much larger source (remember, the area of a circle is π times the radius squared so it’s about 50% more area than the 36″) was lovely. Wrapped around so nice that I didn’t even need a reflector.

In the end though, soft light is soft light. How you make it and how ‘soft’ it is largely academic. If what you’ve got is an umbrella, it’ll be fine. If you’ve got a softbox, use the softbox. Stop worrying about the 5% difference in the quality of light and start worrying about making better photographs. Let me put is this way to wrap up: If you’re pictures aren’t good enough, it’s not the umbrella’s fault.

This week, should exceptional talent be a gift or a chore? Does what you do have to feed your soul to be important, or is just doing the work enough? Also, when are too many options not a good thing? Plus, we discuss the new documentary “Everybody Street” and Tim Flach is our Photographer of the Week.

Show Notes

Bruce Springsteen – Wings For Wheels – The Making of Born To Run
Are We Happier When We Have More Options? : NPR
Katy Perry ‘Prism’ Good Example How Albums Don’t Work Anymore | Variety
EVERYBODY STREET
Writing Wednesdays: Resistance and Self-Loathing
French newspaper removes all images in support of photographers – British Journal of Photography
Analogue Forever: Film Talk with Lars Fielder of Kodak Alaris – Lomography

This Week’s Sponsor
Squarespace Use the coupon code PUSHTHETRAIN at checkout to save 10% on your order.

Photographer of the Week
Tim Flach

Books We Recommend
Equus
Dogs
More than Human

The camera did an admirable job and proved itself a solid piece of kit, but not without it’s foibles. Read on…

Image Quality

Assuming your focus, exposure, and technique are solid, the image quality of the Fuji x100s is really incredible. Especially within it’s limits of an 16MP APS sensor, the per pixel sharpness was just amazing. Much of this has to do with random RGB layout of the X-Trans sensor which lets the engineers do without the standard anti-aliasing filter while still avoiding any moiré that would normally crop up.

I had my camera set to auto-ISO with a max of 3200 for the whole trip and image noise was never a problem. It’s not to say that 3200 was identical to 100, but the camera’s noise reduction functions did a great job of not being too heavy-handed in its work. Files taken at night have a bit of grain, but honestly, they should considering the amount of light they were taken in.

The files were so good that I shot jpg files the entire trip, and I’m a die hard raw shooter from WAY back. I didn’t want my trip to feel like work and I wanted my use of this camera to more closely mimic a film rangefinder. I didn’t want to come home and play with every image in ad infinitum. I wanted to be satisfied with the images out of camera. This was possible because the jpg engine in the Fuji is top notch, and is much better than in any Canon I’ve ever used.

Its auto white balance was typically great as well. The handful of situations where it struggled involved terrible mixes of argon street light and fluorescent signage; a scenario where there is no right answer anyway. However, once again the auto setting did much better than my Canon has ever performed in these situations.

Focal Length

The x100s has a fixed 35mm equivalent f/2 lens on it and the glass is great. I rarely shot wide open, but there is little for me to fault. Much like the little 40mm STM lens for my Canon, it’s a great little lens in a small package. Anyone complaining about the optics either got a broken camera or doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

As for being stuck at a single focal length, my readers will know that I like primes. I also like being limited when I shoot so that I have to work a little harder to get the shot. For a trip like the one I was just on, a slightly wide lens like a 35mm is perfect. Wide enough to get a sense of the environment in the shot while not being so wide that you have to get 2ft away from your subject.

Were there times when I would have liked something different? A few, but those situations typically required something even wider. A nice 28mm would have come in handy every once in a while. Fuji makes a 28mm adapter for the camera, but it’s far too expensive in my opinion, so I never really considered it. If they had offered the camera with the option of a built-in 28mm, then I would have had a hard time deciding. I like wide.

For the handful of times that a longer lens would have been useful, you can always crop. Personally, I’m fine with letting some pictures go. I’m in Italy to see the art with my eyes, not spend the whole time with my face in the camera.

Viewfinder

The viewfinder is really a tale of two technologies. The x100s has a hybrid viewfinder which lets you switch between optical and electronic, so we’ll take each one in turn.

The optical viewfinder drew me to this camera in the first place. I wanted a digital Leica M without having to spend 8k, and the Fuji has a few neat tricks up its sleeve. For example the frame lines in the viewfinder are created by the LCD screen from the EVF. This means they can move to compensate for the parallax between the OVF and lens when you’re focused on subjects close to you. This feature gives a more accurate framing in these situations, but accurate framing on the OVF became one of its downfalls.

You see, I found that the camera captured a lot of image outside the framelines in the OVF; about 5% more ended up in the picture outside of what the framelines suggested. This was very annoying when you were trying to frame the image in a way to keep distracting elements out. In these situations I ended up switching over the the EVF so that I knew exactly what was going to be in the shot.

I didn’t expect to use the EVF much, but I did in the end, often to get an idea of the exposure the camera was giving me. When you’re inside a dark church with bright sunlight streaming in a window, it’s often hard to tell what the auto-exposure sensor is going to highlight. There were a number of times that I dialed in a -1 exposure compensation only to find an image that looked like a +1. It seems my idea of what I wanted and the camera’s computer were a bit out of sync at times.

The EVF did its job, but I still don’t like it. It feels like I’m staring at a low-quality LCD screen, not a viewfinder. It’s not that there was a lot of lag, it just feels one step further removed from the subject to me. Also, the highlights and shadows in the EVF often looked blown out or crushed when in the final image they were within the histogram. The panel they use for the EVF apparently doesn’t have the dynamic range that the files do, which makes it hard to see what you’re going to get. If the whole point of an EVF is that you get a WYSIWYG preview of what the final image will like like, then it looses a lot of it’s value to me.

Battery Life

Before I left, I took the fully-charged x100s with me on a photowalk down in New Jersey, where over the course of 3 hours I took 102 photographs. I wanted to take a few more, but at 102 pictures that the battery completely died. This was worrisome. The last thing I needed while walking around the back streets of Venice was to run out of juice.

In the end this fear was unwarranted. Even though I always kept a charged spare in my pocket, I never needed it. But then I didn’t take very many photographs each day, averaging about 80, under the 100 picture cliff that I had fallen off on my test run.

Sounds

The Fuji x100s is a VERY quiet camera, almost too quiet. There’s a selectable shutter sound that will play out of a small tinny speaker on the bottom to let you know when it takes a pictures. I turned mine off because it felt like an iPhone to me. I don’t want it to “play” a shutter sound, I want a shutter sound. Not a loud one, just an audible click so that I can tell when the picture gets taken. Over the course of the trip I handed the camera to a dozen of other photographers to take pictures of us at various locations, and every single person took a picture then looked up puzzled, wondering if the camera worked.

The one time that the silence was awesome was while taking illegal pictures in places where photos were forbidden. I snapped a few in the Sistine Chapel for instance, from the hip, and no one was the wiser. I didn’t really need to take those pictures, better ones undoubtedly exist in the world, but I like to live life on the edge. Mostly I just wanted to see how they would come out.

Handling
If I have fault with the x100s it’s with the quirks of its handling. I loved the physical knobs for shutter speed, aperture, and exposure compensation; those were nice and feel great. My hang ups were with the digital interfaces. The menu system was fine once you got familiarized with it, but I found the dial around the 4-way pad to be far too easy to turn. I changed settings accidentally while trying to click through the menu items, especially in the Q for ‘quick’ menu which let you fiddle with ISO, flash, custom presets etc.

I also could not get comfortable with the shutter release. I never felt like it took the picture when I wanted to take it. Either I didn’t half-press early enough so that there was a delay before taking the picture, or I half-pressed a little too hard so that I took the picture before I was ready. I think the only way I could use this camera in a split-second kind of situation would be in manual focus and exposure mode where the camera didn’t have any decisions to make. When it had those jobs to do, I felt like I was waiting for it to finish. Even with the physical aperture ring set to f/5.6 for instance, the lens still starts wide open has to stop down before the shutter fires before each shot; there’s always a slight delay. It is definitely not the ‘Ooh, look at that! <instantaneous snap!>” camera that some other reviews have touted it being. It’s not even close to the shutter on a manual film camera. If there was a time element involved in getting a picture, the camera was slowing me down.

Accessories

On the advice of David Hobby I ordered an inexpensive hood and quality UV filter for the front of the lens so that I wouldn’t have to worry about the lens cap, which tended to fall off. The problem with using the hood is that it obscures about an ⅛ of the frame when you’re using the OVF, but that would be true with a hood on an analog rangefinder too. Also note that the cheap hoods tend to become loose if you take them on and off a few times. I lost mine on a bus in Rome when it popped off while I was trying to exit out the door. Luckily, it only cost $12. The better plan would be to superglue the mounting ring and hood together before you screw it on.

If you’re going to get this camera, make sure you order an extra aftermarket battery or two. They’re only about $10 a piece on Amazon and could save your bacon if you take a lot of images on an outing.

Lastly, I’d like to mention an accessory that I really liked. JB Camera Designs was nice enough to send me one of their Grip Cases. It is a soft plastic half case which slides over the bottom of the camera and stays in place with a screw into the tripod mount. This  protects the bottom of the camera when you put it down and stops the rear lcd from getting scratched if it falls on it’s back. The case also gives your right hand a little more bulk to hold onto, and due to the textured surface, the camera is less likely to slip out of your hands. Seriously, for $35 you can’t go wrong.

I also taped up some of the exposed metal for the trip, both to protect it from scratches and to make it even more incognito. A number of people thought it was an old film camera, exactly what I wanted them to think.

Conclusion

I mentioned on the podcast last week that returning to my Canon 5D Mark III for a shoot the day after I returned felt like getting into a Porsche. It’s a far more responsive camera than the Fuji, but then they’re not really playing in the same league. The x100s is a very different tool. In those situations where I had time to fiddle and play to get the picture I was looking for, the results are outstanding. However, I often felt like I was fighting the camera a little bit to get those results. I love the sensor, I love the physical knobs, I love the design, but ultimately it never ‘disappeared’ in my hands. To be fair, I only took 602 pictures the whole week so it’s not like I’ve shot tens of thousands of images with it, but then again, the camera didn’t really make me want to take 10,000 pictures. So who is at fault?

Ultimately, as far as the trip was concerned, I think I made the right choice. The Fuji x100s helped me make some lovely photographs and my back was very happy to not to be lugging around a Canon system that weighed 3 times as much. Much like the Millenium Falcon, the x100s has got it where it counts, kid. The lens is sharp and contrasty, the sensor is amazing, and the body of the camera harkens back to the late 1970’s in a good way. I just wish the modern sections of the camera were as elegant and well performing. My conclusion is that it’s a great camera, but it’s just not the best camera for me.

—–

If you’re planning on purchasing a Fuji x100s from Amazon, do it through this link and help support the site.

This is certainly not going to be a full review of any kind. For now it’s merely a list of observations from my first few days of owning the Fuji x100s from the point of view of a Canon dSLR and Leica M4 user.  Here we go:

– It’s small, somewhat smaller and lighter than I expected. I have a JB Camera slip-on case coming that will add to the bulk just a bit, perhaps enough for it to fit my hand a little bit better. Overall it’s almost exactly the size of the broken Canonet I bought off of ebay a few years ago.

– The battery life is pretty horrible, but take that with a grain of salt as I’m typically used to my 5D3 which gets 1500 photos on a battery. So many that I don’t carry and extra or a charger with me on vacation. I already bought an extra aftermarket battery on Amazon.

– Also added an aftermarket lens hood so that I could worry less about the lens cap and scratching the front exposed element of the lens. However at this focal length the hood covers a good 1/8th of the frame, sort of putting a poison pill in the use of the otherwise lovely OVF. And I bought this camera because of the optical viewfinder.

– The lens and image quality of even jpegs straight out of the camera is superb. As is the auto white balance, which is something my Canon cameras have never done particularly well. Here’s a 100% crop from the image above. Again, straight out of the camera. Oh and it was taken at 1600 ISO. Try to get a color image on ISO 1600 film that looks that nice.

– It is does not however have the same feel or responsiveness as a more simple and manual camera like the Leica M. Even with settings optimized to ‘high performance’, manual exposure, and the use of manual focus it feels like too much computer between me and the shutter. I feel required to ‘half-press’ to have it ready. Maybe this will improve the more I handle it, but it’s a little frustrating coming from cameras which take a picture the instant you press the shutter. It feels like the exact opposite of an extension of me, at least so far. Maybe I’m missing something, but this feels much more like an overachieving compact than a slimmed down digital rangefinder.

– It’s quiet alright. For me it’s too quiet. To the point where I have a hard idea knowing when the picture is being taken. Tactile feedback it does not do well. Oh, and a crappy 8 bit recording of a shutter sound being played through a 1cm speaker is not the panacea that they’d like to make you think it is.

– While I get the handiness of the Q menu, the thumb wheel is way too loose and responsive, to the point that I end up changing settings when I’m trying to move between menu items.

– I can’t quite get the View Mode to be what I want it to be. I want to change settings and see image playback on the rear screen and only picture taking in the viewfinder, but I can’t seem to make that happen. I end up getting the viewfinder on the rear screen and settings in the viewfinder far too often. Can’t it just act like every other digital camera I’ve ever used in this regard?

So, overall some good stuff and some bad stuff. Overall I like it, but it’s handling is very very different than the Canon’s I’m used to. Tomorrow I’m going to take a nice long walk with it and see if she and I can become better friends. I want it to disappear for the trip to Italy that I have coming up. That’ll be the ultimate test.

So I was doing a little research about film scanners today and came to realize that most of what’s left in the market are either way too cheap and low-res (basically to preserve family photos) or too expensive and from companies I can’t trust will be around in 6 months. I’ve been unsatisfied with scanning on my Epson 4990. It’s fine for large format and even 6×6, but for 35mm I’m never happy with the results. I’ve tried using the film holders and end up with soft images; I’ve tried laying the film on the glass and then have to fight Newton’s Rings.

I remember a few months ago I read a post somewhere about using your dSLR and a macro lens to shoot slides and thought about trying it with negatives as well. In the end I found this post on petapixel which was very helpful. I didn’t have a light table handy, but I had a little battery powered LED light which I diffused through a stack of tissue paper, set the camera up on a tripod with a 100mm macro lens and pointed it straight down toward the film The results are very impressive. Now these are not the sharpest film shots ever, but they give you some idea of the quality you can get out. MUCH better than I’ve ever gotten from my flatbed and using gear I’ve already got.

I tried some color film as well with less than ideal results. The color temp and spectrum of the LED just wasn’t up to the task. Color negative film is REALLY hard to get the color right when scanning, in my opinion. The only time I’ve ever gotten great results was when I rented time on an Imacon with custom profiles for each film type.

TIP: Use live view and 10x magnification to get the focus right. Also stop down on the lens a bit to get to the sweet spot and handle any slight depth of field softness.

Here’s a 100% blow-up of the above:

So I gave in an bought myself a Pelican model 1510 rolling case for my camera and such. Everything I’d need for a typical editorial portrait shoot.  Packed in there I’ve got:

Canon 5D Mark III Body
28mm/1.8
35mm/1.4L
40mm/2.8
50mm/1.2L
50mm/1.4
85mm/1.2L
Canon 580 EX Speedlight
Nikon SB-80 Speedlight
2 Pocketwizards
2 Manfroto 6′ mini light stands

and I think I can fit two 36″ Softlighters diagonally across the top before I close it, or at least the umbrella parts. This is my first attempt, I’ll get more refined in time. I won’t need to carry all those lenses all the time of course. I just wanted to see how much I could fit.

It’s not light though. Weighs in at just over 30lbs all in. Not bad considering the shear number of options it gives me and it’s very compact size. Let’s just say that I’m glad it’s got wheels.

Speaking of wheels, I’m considering replacing them with softer/quieter rollerblade wheels like this guy did:

UPDATE: I did in fact find replacement wheels on eBay. Here’s a link for as long as it exists. Just look up 60mm x 20mm luggage wheels. I got mine from a place in Hong Kong. $15-20 with shipping and they installed fine and are much quieter.

If you’re going to buy one, do so from this amazon link and I’ll get a few cents to support the site:

So I’m going to change this. I’m going to start reaching out to the madhouse of talented people in my life in an attempt to make something new which is more than the sum of our skill. To make things I just could not do on my own. The mental hurdles are likely to be even worse than the physical ones, but that’s ok because if you’re not scared, you’re not growing.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m writing a post about this, except to make a public declaration of my intentions so that perhaps you all can hold me to it. Been taxiing for far too long.

So, to all the fashion designers, set designers, make-up artist, illustrator, animator, and other friends of mine. Let’s talk.

“Ice Cream Cait” was done in one shot with the camera on a tripod, which made everything pretty easy. In fact, technically, I’m pretty happy with that one. It looked how I wanted it to look. Creamy bokeh (85/1.2 will do that, even at f/3.2) and great actress. The main mistake I made in that one, was the fact that I used an auto-exposure mode, which caused the camera to stop down once Everett comes in at the end to steal the ice cream, which darkened the image. I guess I could have fixed that in post, but again, it’s not about them being perfect at this point, it’s about shipping. I ended up using some Creative Commons music for that first video, which worked out perfect as a ‘porn soundtrack’

On the second film ‘Spring Fling’ I became more ambitious and decided to do one that required editing and a shot list (though it was made up in my head as I went along). This time I ended up having three problems:
1)  I did the same thing with autoexposure and have learned my lesson; Manual mode from here on in.

2) Most noticably, I need a stabilizer. The shots where I’m walking behind the actors are way too shaky. I knew this one going in and the uneven slate sidewalk didn’t help. I shouldn’t have handheld. Even if I had put the camera on a tripod and carried that it would have been a lot better. I’ve also figured out a way to use my little tripod as a make-shift stabilizer which works but requires a few feet to the left because 2 of the legs are extended as counterweight. I don’t really want to pay a few hundred bucks for a commercial one at this point, but I’m probably going to try to build one of Johnny Lee’s $14 Poor Man’s Stabilizers. Even if only for fun.

3) White Balance and overall color are tricky. I’m not shooting RAW with the Magic Lantern hack yet (maybe someday Claude) but when you’re moving in and out of shadows and sun the camera is shifting white balance back and forth which can make matching clips tough. I have generally been able to ignore this when shooting stills by just dealing with it in post, but it becomes cumbersome to color correct each shot in a sequence. Probably better to set it to Daylight outside and work all the clips from there. I should also switch my picture mode to something a lot flatter and low contrast so I can grade the look of the image later.

—–

I have not tried anything with dialog yet. That will involve little zoom recorders and lav mics or a shotgun. All stuff I’ll get to in due course, but I wanted to get some of the visual stuff under my belt first.

The other thing I’ve learned is that video is REALLY time consuming. Both in editing and in rendering. I’ve got a really fast top-of-the-line i7 desktop with 32GB of RAM and it still takes 5-10 minutes to render out my 1-2 minute films to h.264 at 1080p. Crazy. I’m sure there’s more to come in the ‘beginner mistakes by Bill’ series, but that’s the point right? That’s how we learn.

As one would expect, there has been some outcry on the interwebs because of this policy change. I completely understand the change from Adobe’s point of view. Not only will it make their software more difficult to pirate, but it will also smooth out their revenue stream so they don’t get big bumps when a new version comes down, instead they get a little all the time. It also ensures that all the paying customers (and shouldn’t that be all of them in their mind?) have the latest and greatest version running. The end of compatibility problems. Just like Apple with the iPad, there is no Photoshop CS7, there is only Photoshop CC and you’ll have the latest.

Unless you are a student, or acted like you were one, Adobe software has always been expensive, the top end ‘Master Collection’ costs over two grand. So is $600 a year to get access to all of it really that much worse? For professionals who are buying the software every year anyway, then no. In many ways is makes it easier. Much like buying your apps on the Mac App store makes it easier to reinstall your software on a new machine. For them $600 to have access to all those apps is the cost of doing business, already baked in. I pay about $150 for each annual version of Lightroom alone (now included in the Creative Cloud). I could argue that I certainly use Photoshop and a few of the other apps enough to justify $1.65 a day. I spend more than that on egg sandwiches. And the apps are still best of breed and remain up to date. As a bonus, Adobe is trying to smooth over their customers by offering the first year for $29/mo for current Creative Suite users. There is also a $20/mo for students and teachers.

The real people who are going to lose our are the hobbyists. The serious amateur photographer who likes to buy Photoshop for $600 and then use it for 6 years on their G5 tower. Or the gal who uses only Photoshop. Now they’ll have to pony up and pay the $20/mo for the single app (you can buy them one at a time if you only use one or two). So $240 per year for Photoshop, which is more than the $199 every 18 months that current upgrades cost.

Personally as someone who has been around computers for 30 years, I don’t like the idea of software as a service. There’s something unsettling about it. I like buying a piece of software and knowing that I can install it and use it for years without paying the company another cent. It’s ‘mine’ even though I know it’s only a license.

I’ll admit that when I first read the news I had that ‘ut oh’ sinking feeling. However it’s a brave new world and I don’t think any amount of grumbling and shaking of fists is going to turn back the hands of time. Maybe I can use my current status as an SVA Thesis Advisor to sign up for the discount…

Think about it, once you get home with the pictures you’ve taken, you copy them over to your computer and then start making decisions. Exposure, contrast, color, you know, all the important stuff that determines what your images will look like in their final form. Unfortunately, most people view their monitor as an afterthought even though they’ll spend far more time with their photographs in front of their computer than they did with a camera in their hand. It’s the modern day darkroom and should be treated with the same commiserate reverence. So where do we start?

Modern day monitors are LCD

Let’s get a few things straight. Nowadays everyone is using LCD monitors. I’m sure if you go searching around the internet you’ll find some article written in 2002 by some guy in a basement who refuses to give up his Sony Artisan CRT (in fact here’s one now), but that time has come to a close. Even within the field of LCDs, there are a number of factors to consider.

Size

The first thing people notice about a monitor is its size and resolution. If you’re serious about photography, don’t bother with anything under 24″ (or maybe 22″ if it’s that fancy Eizo 221) at 1920×1080 resolution. Personally, I find even that size cramped and would recommend a 27″ at 2560×1400 or a 30″ at 2560×1600. More pixels means that you get to see more of your images in your library or more of the image you’re currently working on in Photoshop. Plus, who doesn’t want more room for palettes. Some people are fans of dual monitor setup, with either their library grid or palettes on the second screen, but I find the break between the two distracting. I’d much rather have a single larger display than two smaller ones, but that is a matter of personal preference.

Panel Type

Unfortunately for you, not all monitors of the same size and resolution are created equal. There are two main types of LCD, TN (Twisted Nematic) and IPS (In-Plane Switching). They’re two different technologies to control the color of the pixels in the display. I won’t go into the guts of the differences here (that’s what wikipedia is for). What you need to take away are these two basic rules: TN = bad for photography, IPS = good for photography.

Now there are certainly exceptions to this, but as this is a primer and not a book, just trust me on this. IPS displays are far less washed out when you’re looking at the screen from an angle, they also tend to be more true and accurate when it comes to color reproduction. They also tend to use IPS panels in displays with better backlighting and fancy calibration tools. So if you’re serious about this stuff, invest in an a good IPS display. IPS panels also tend to have much larger color gamut (that is, they can display a larger range of colors). Some even come close to covering the whole AdobeRGB color space, which is pretty huge.

This is probably a good time to point out that almost all laptop screens up until recently were TN panels. Both because they were cheaper and because they don’t require as bright or power hungry backlight. Exceptions to this are the new Apple Retina Macbook Pros, the Thinkpad x220, and a few Acer models that I’ve seen. This is all to say that if you’ve only ever edited your pictures on a 4 year old white Macbook with an unprofiled screen, then you really have no idea what your pictures actually look like. Imagine trying to color correct while wearing rose-colored sunglasses.  Speaking of calibration…

Calibration and Profiling

Whatever monitor you end up getting, it will likely not be very accurate out of the box. At the very least get yourself one of those puck kits like a Color Munki or i1 Display Pro. Here’s how they work: The software displays a series of color patches on the screen while the colorimeter or ‘puck’ sits on the screen and measures the color.  Since the computer now knows both what color was supposed to display and what color DID display, it can create a curve to compensate for the error. It creates what’s called an ICC profile which is just a file that the operating system uses to translate and ensure that what the computer is asking for gets shown on the screen accurately.  This is the bare minimum when it comes to color accuracy.

The next step up are monitors with what are called Internal LUTs which stands for Look Up Tables. Basically it does a similar translation as the ICC profiles, but it does it in the monitor itself at a much higher degree of accuracy and independent of the computer it’s connected to. All of this is a good thing. Monitors with internal LUTs tend to be much more expensive, heavy, and geared toward pros, but man are they worth it if you can afford it.

The Future

Part of the problem with buying an expensive monitor is the worry that what you buy will be obsolete within a year or two.  Good LCDs have been consistant for the past few years, the latest models just minor upgrades from the previous, but there are some things on the horizon.  Top level screens still tend to use CFL backlights, that is, old-school florescent bulbs. Many cheaper screens now use LED backlights which tend to be more consistant over their life-time, use a lot less power, lead to thinner screens, and turn on almost instantaneously as there is no warm up period. For some reason however the high-end screens still use CFL. I’m sure there’s a good technical reason relating to color gamut, but keep an eye out for that.

Update 1/7/14: A number of high-end screens have started to be released with LED backlights. The new NEC PA302W for instance has a tricolor LED backlight system which still allows for wide color gamut.

Another thing that’s coming down the line is 10bit per channel color. More bits means less dithering between colors in gradients and such. Some screens can do this today via displayport, but only a few high-end workstation video cards will output 10bit, and as far as I have found in my research, only on Windows at the moment. Personally I’d love to have it, but I’m not going to spend $1000 on a workstation graphics card that’s slower than a $200 gaming card just to get it. They should really enable 10bit color channels on all video cards at this point.

Then there is resolution. 30″ displays have been at 2560×1600 since the Apple 30″ Cinema Display came out in 2004. With all this High-DPI ‘retina’ screen talk on mobile and laptop devices, it’s only a matter of time until desktop screens fly up to higher resolution. 4096px or 4k most likely. Whether this will happen in the next year or two is anyone’s guess. I have heard that making panels at 30″ with that many pixels is still really difficult. The manufacturers are getting very low yields (the percentage of screens that are defect free) at the moment. But again, only a matter of time.

Update 1/7/14: Hallelujah! The 4K revolution has begun! A couple of months after I originally wrote this post, Asus came out with a 32″ LED backlit display with a 3840 x 2160 resolution. It cost $3500 and the color accuracy wasn’t great, but it was a first step. Then in last December, Dell started shipping it’s own 32″ 4K for $3500 as well as a 24″ version for $1300. Both were part of Dell’s PremierColor line which means they come calibrated from the factory to have a Delta-E of less than 2. Pretty good straight out of the box. I bought one of these 24 Dell UP2414Q displays and have used it to replace my aging NEC 3090, though not without some trouble. Getting this may pixels from your computer to the display is still a little bit of a black art and not for the faintest of hearts. I’m sure all the kinks will be out in the next few months. In the meantime this is on the cutting edge, so be prepared to cut yourself.

Advice

So let’s say that you’ve been listening all this time and are interesting in upping your game. Here are a few recommendations. One thing to keep in mind is that while there are screens from 50 different manufacturers, the actual panels inside them are only made by a handful of companies. LG and Samsung alone hold over half of the total LCD panel marketshare. The differences between manufacturers and models are in the backlight systems, input circuitry, etc. Imagine the same engine in a VW Jetta and an Audi A4 Quattro. Same motor, very different car.

If you have a decent screen and can’t spend any money at all, but find that the prints coming out of your printer are way too dark, then your screen’s brightness is too high. Pull that brightness down and you’ll be more accurate, save yourself some money on electricity, and save your eyesight.

If you’ve got a decent screen and are not getting great results out of the box, buy yourself a colorimeter kit and profile that puppy up. This is bare minimum if you’re serious about seeing your images as they actually are. I’m personally a fan of the xRite products like these:

Xrite i1Display Pro

ColorMunki Display

If you’re coming from nothing and want to spend less than $1000, get yourself a quality IPS screen and a decent profile system. A lot of people really like the Dell Ultrasharp series of monitors. The main problem with Dell monitors seems to be that they’re WAY too bright when they come from the factory, but once you pull the brightness down they tune right up. These links are from Amazon, but keep an eye out for big sales at Dell.com. Be sure to profile with a colorimeter like the the ones listed above.

24″ Dell Ultrasharp U2412

27″ Dell Ultrasharp U2713

Some Cupertino diehards are going to demand an Apple Display. That’s too bad, because while they’re very pretty, they’re overpriced for the performance they deliver. Same panel as the Dell above for almost twice the cost, and that’s before Dell’s frequent sales. Also, many people dislike glossy displays. While blacks can tend to look more black and things are arguably a bit sharper, reflections can be a really serious problem and make it difficult at times to judge what’s really there on the screen. Again, be sure to profile with a colorimeter like the the ones listed above.

27″ Apple Thunderbolt Display

If you’re really serious and want to buy the monitor that’ll last you for years there are really only two choices. NEC or Eizo. Eizo are more expensive and cooler looking, but quality for quality they’re both in the same ballpark. These three monitors include their own calibration systems.

24″ NEC PA241w Spectraview

27″ NEC PA271 Spectraview

30″ NEC PA302w Spectraview

27″ Eizo ColorEdge CG276

And if you want to play with fire, you could try one of the new generation of 4K displays. Remember that you’ll need a graphics adapter with DisplayPort 1.2 and it software support is still a bit spotty. For instance, Mac OS 10.9.1 doesn’t yet allow for MST mode which gives you 60Hz refresh rate at it’s highest resolution, and you need to run a terminal command to enable HiDPI mode. Again, be warned, but the images and text do look just lovely.

Dell UltraSharp 24 Ultra HD Monitor UP2414Q

Dell UltraSharp 31.5 Ultra HD Monitor UP3214Q

Conclusion

Now some people will say, “What? You must be out of your damn mind if you think I’m going to spend $1000+ on my monitor!” Well that’s just fine, but think about how much you’ve spent on your camera? How about lenses? Or your computer? My $2000 30″ NEC that I bought 5 years ago saw the coming and going of 4 camera bodies which cost about $12,000. Think of it as an investment in a great pair of glasses that let you read accurately and without strain. I’ve never heard of someone having buyers remorse after upgrading their screen.

With the CamRanger, you can remotely control your Canon or Nikon DSLR as if it were in your hands. At its heart, it’s a mobile wifi hotspot with custom firmware, but it’s that firmware which makes all kinds of exciting things possible. Once you’ve got the free sister app installed on your iOS device, you can fire the shutter, change settings like shutter speed/aperture/iso/mode/etc., all from a great distance away from your camera. Not only that, but you can use live view to see what the camera sees and even tap on the live view image to focus, just like it was the camera on your phone!

What’s happening here is that the pack of cards-sized CanRanger box plugs into your camera via USB. You then connect your iOS device to the CamRanger’s own WiFi Network. The network is protected by a password printed on the back of the unit. Personally, I think it could do without this feature,  or just use the password ‘camranger’ or something. I can’t imagine too many situations where people are going to be trying to hack into your camera, but maybe I’m too trusting. Once the network is set up, just open the app on your phone and it takes control of the camera. In the past I’ve used both the Canon software and Lightroom to tether my camera, and I’ve always had a hard time getting it connected without locking up (both my 5D2, 5D3, and 1Ds3). It typically takes a few tries. I’ve had none of these problems with the CamRanger. Somehow it’s a more solid connection than Canon’s own software.

So why would you want this? Well, I can think of a few scenarios. You can use it in a ‘client’ mode, so that as you snap away on your camera the pictures you take show up on the screen for immediate client review (personally my nightmare situation, but I know people who do it). If you are a landscape photographer, you could control the camera from the superior screen of your retina iPad to compose the shot, zoom in and check focus, and review. Personally, it doesn’t do much for me as a one-on-one portrait photographer, but it was VERY handy when I recently shot a bunch of my friends making snow angels in Prospect Park. I had the camera at the end of an extended tripod, cantilevered over the subjects with a wide-angle lens. Using the CamRanger (taped the the legs of the tripod), I was able to compose and shoot using live view from my iPhone. It worked perfectly and I’ll have to admit, it was pretty cool. Additionally, the software shows you a live histogram, has a built-in intervalometer, and will even program HDR image sequences when the camera is in Manual mode. The CamRanger does everything you could expect of it and does it well.

That’s a lot of ‘pros’, so what about the ‘cons’? I can only think of a few. First,  it has its own battery, so that is yet another thing to remember to charge. I know this is somewhat unfair because the thing has to power itself, but it did cross my mind. I never had the battery run out while I was using it, and my guess is that it lasts awhile, hours at least. Second, and more importantly is that there’s nowhere to put it when it’s connected. You’ve got this little box pig-tailed off your camera.  I would suggest  that they create a hotshoe mount for it, but then how would you trigger strobes? You might be able to figure out a way to mount it on the tripod socket, but sitting your camera down on top of an expensive plastic box doesn’t sound like a good idea. So that’s another problem. Next, there is the subject of cost: $299. Not crazy expensive, and if it fills a need you have, it’s downright reasonable. That said, it’s not at the price point where you’d buy it to have around just in case you need it. Lastly, the app, while fairly responsive and easy to understand, could benefit from a makeover by a talented designer. Right now it looks like it was designed by engineers (no offense to engineers), which is fine by me, but generally folks like slick-looking things.

So to wrap up, the CamRanger is a wonderful little piece of tech. While it isn’t cheap, it delivers as promised with little hassle once you get your head wrapped around how to get all the pieces talking to each other. For those of you out there who need to remote control your camera, I highly suggest you consider adding this to your kit.

Note: Dave at CamRanger was nice enough to send me a loaner unit to review.

The 20D is an 8MP cropped sensor camera which spits out a file of 2336×3504 pixels. Approximately the same number of pixels as my current iPhone 5 camera does. And there is a tendency for people to equate the two. Megapixels are megapixels? Right?

Wrong. Megapixels are not megapixels. I once printed out a photograph from my iPhone 4. It was a shot of the inside of the Capitol dome in Washington. The camera had everything going for it. The light was adequate, I held steady. It’s as nice of a file as I’ve seen from a phone. And it printed a nice 8×10″ print. Not an AMAZING print, but something you could certainly frame and put on your wall as long as you didn’t look at it from a couple inches away. Because at that distance, as it does at 100% on screen, it shows it flaws. It’s got that ‘digital’ look of early digital cameras. And the whole thing has the slightly smeary glaze of overzealous noise reduction, and details aren’t really that sharp anyhow. And why would we expect them to be? Physics is physics. A lens and sensor the size of a pencil eraser is not going to resolve as well as one 10 times the size. Megapixels may not be megapixels, but photons ARE photons. Computing power can pick up some of the slack, but at the end of the day, size does matter.

How much it matters is up to you. One could say that the 24x36mm full frame sensor in my 5D is not big enough. That the same amount of pixels in a medium format camera would resolve more. They might be right. In fact that are right, but since medium format cameras tend to use CCD sensors and no AA filters gives it something of an apples to oranges comparison. Huge sensors make beautiful images, but at a monetary and handling cost that I’m not prepared to pay except in specific circumstances.

This is all to say that had I taken the photograph above on my iPhone, there’s no way in hell it would look that good as a 13×19″ print. 8MP or not.

Oh and one more thing, The 17mm lens I was using with the cropped sensor gives almost exactly the same field-of-view as my trusty 28mm prime does on my full frame body. Apparently I liked that look even back then.

I shot the photograph above about 2 years ago at the beginning of 2011 in the diner up the street from me. It feature the actual proprietor Nick, hitting on a a beautiful woman in a red dress played by my lovely partner Heather. And of course, my friend Claude looks on in disgust from the other end of the counter. I had been meaning to bring Nick a print to put on the wall ever since I shot the picture, but it just kept getting pushed down my to-do list. So I finally printed out an 13×19″ print on my favorite Red River Ultra Pro Satin paper and then promptly let the whole thing go back to the back burner again for a week when I realized that I’d have to order a frame. However, I just remembered that I already HAD a frame I could use.

A few months ago when we were doing some promotional work together for the podcast, Frame Destination sent me an sample of what they could and I had it in my closet waiting to decide on a print that was worthy of it’s loveliness. So I said, ‘screw it’ and decided to use the frame for the diner print I was giving to Nick.

Frame Destination will custom cut frames of almost any size from very high-quality materials. Basically it’s the same or better quality than you’d get at your professional local framer, but for a fraction of the cost. Really top-notch product. I’ve used them to frame my Drabbles show at SoHo Photo a few years ago, and it saved me a bundle. The catch is that you’ve got to mount the print in the frame yourself. Static electricity and dust can be a real nightmare at times, but nothing a reader of this site can’t handle. It was also the first time I had used the non-glare plexi instead of glass it I have to admit that it looks beautiful.

For those who are wondering, here’s the parts list for the above frame:
Nielsen Profile 97 – Matte Black 21 (Anodized) – 18×24
Plexiglas® Non-Glare Acrylic 1/10” – 18×24
Alpharag 8-Ply – White 8660 – 13×19(18×24)
Foamboard Acid Free Artcare 3/16 inch – 18×24

So take this a reminder to print, mount, and hang some of your work so other people can enjoy it for years. If you decide to place and order with Frame Destination, try using the coupon code OTP at checkout and I think you might still get a few bucks off… It’s certainly worth a try.

Early last year I built a new and very fast machine based on the top-of-the-line Intel 3770K CPU, 32GB of RAM, 240GB Intel 520 SSD and the rest of it. State of the art and very fast. The only part of the machine that I kept from my old box was the Radeon 5770 video card. At the time running Snow Leopard and Lion this card worked just fine. Especially for what I need it to do. Mostly 2D work in Lightroom and Photoshop. And it should work well since it’s the the stock card (STILL!) in the Apple Mac Pro.

For some reason though, the combination of my new computer, old GPU, Mountain Lion, and Adobe CS6 Suite just doesn’t work all that well. If I leave on all of the GPU acceleration in the Performance tab of the PhotoShop Preferences, I get weird effects. The mouse lags a little bit behind my Wacom tablet cursor for example. And using things like a fairly small healing brush lock-up the computer for a quarter second with each stroke. Little weird things like that. Certainly not the kind of stuff that should be happening with a computer at this level.

I found that if I turned the acceleration down to ‘Basic’ that performance got smoother, but then I was losing some of the functionality inherent with Adobe’s inclusion of GPU acceleration in the first place. Needless to say, a little frustrating. After a bunch of setting changes and reboots, I’ve narrowed the problem down to the 5770 card. Not sure exactly what the problem is, but I’m not going to spend any more time fighting it. Time to move on.

So I started doing a little research into possible options. Apparently Apple as moved to Nvidia GPUs in their latest generation of machines, which is great because then there are native drivers for almost all of the latest 6xx series of cards. The move to Nvidia also means that I’d be able to enable CUDA acceleration in Premiere CS6 as well. Which apparently has drastic speed benefits in render times and such. TonyMac even has a list of natively compatible cards here on his site.

The problem is price. The card I had been looking at for the last month was the GTX 660ti. It’s basically the GTX 670 with one of the cores turned off. 88% of the performance for 75% of the price of the 670. The problem is that it’s still $300, and that’s a LITTLE too much for me to spend on a video card. Especially since I do little video editing and zero 3D gaming.

So I spent a few minutes this morning doing some extra research and found this page on Puget System’s site. Now Puget builds custom Windows workstations for higher-end clients and I trust their opinions. Basically they ran some Photoshop benchmarks with a bunch of modern GPUs and the results came out that the far cheaper GTX 650 gives me almost all of the performance of the high-end cards for what I use it for. And for only $120. SOLD.

The thing is that Puget was running the benchmarks in Windows and I’ll be using it in Mac OS, but I think that the underlying OpenGL code in the Adobe products is likely very similar, so I’m hoping that I just made out like a bandit. By the way, I ended up ordering the Gigabyte brand version of the 650 with 1GB of RAM from NewEgg. I love me some NewEgg and I get free shipping from right across the river in NJ with no sales tax.

It should be here on Monday at which point I’ll take the afternoon to do my planned reinstall of the OS and apps with the new card. Will let you all know how it goes.