Shooting Art Workshop Notes

I was asked to do a workshop at Pratt to show some grad students how to photograph art for their portfolios and websites and such. So I’ve spent some time putting together notes for my presentation and figured I’d write it up as a post for those who missed it or as a refresher for those who attended.  I’m going to assume some photographic knowledge on how to use a camera and lights and that you how they work and such.

Preparation
First things first, you’ve got to get the art ready. Remove it from from any frame or at least remove the glass if the frame is part of the art.  Flatten any curled papers by sandwiching them between some books for a while or have them pinned down on the corners so you have a nice flat surface to shoot.  Some people use an easel to hold the art, or use binder clips attached to a wall in order to hold it vertically without having to pin through it.  I’ve also see artist’s tape attached to the back side of the corners of the art and tacks or more tape the other way used to attach it to a wall.  When it comes to 3D art or sculpture, make sure everything is clean and you have a good setting to shoot it in.  Don’t forget about the background.  You generally want a nice neutral color behind the work if possible.

Lighting
When it comes to lighting you may be surprised to find out that you don’t always need fancy lights. In fact, a nice even indirect Sunlight is a great source, nice and soft. In fact it’s what we’re going to try to mimic when we don’t have it available. For best results you’ll generally need quite a bit of light in order to use your camera at the lowest noise and highest sharpness settings.

Flat art and sculpture will generally require different lighting setups because in one you’re trying to minimize shadow and in the other you try to use it to your advantage. That said, even with flat art you may want to light the work more from one direction. Does the work require texture? It may have a surface you want reflected in the picture, things like canvas, finer papers, or the impasto technique in painting for instance.

Once you decide what you’re goal is you can setup some lights.  Basically two different options, continuous or flash. The advantage of continuous is that it’s WYSIWYG so you see what the light is going to look like in the picture, and they’re cheaper, however you need to take more care to get the color right and they don’t put out as much light as strobes so you’ll need longer shutter speeds all things being equal.  Flashes on the other hand put out nearly perfect light at whatever amount you need, though they’re a bit harder to use in practice. Either way you’re usually going to want to spread the light out to be softer, using umbrellas or softboxes or similar tools.

For most work, two lights is more than ideal, one on each side of the flat work to fill in each other’s shadows. As far as distance goes, because light falls off in an exponential fashion, you’ll get more even light across a larger area if you back the light up a bit. Though this property can be used to the opposite effect in sculpture by using closer up spots to highlight parts of the work. Don’t forget too that even if you have only two lights, you can mimic a third fill light by using a reflector.

So the place to start is two lights, both in front, one on either side for flat objects like papers, canvases, and such.  For 3D objects, try one up front right as your main or ‘key’ light and then a second around the other side and slightly behind to give the left side an edge and some dimensionality.  Move and shoot to taste.

Color
When it comes to getting the correct color in the photographs you must remember that all light is not equal. The main thing you need to worry about is color temperature.  Just like how you’ll notice that things look warmer and more orange with old school incandescent light bulbs, you need to tell the camera what kind of light you’re using so it can compensate. The three you’ll ever probably use are Daylight, Tungsten (fancy name for normal light bulbs) and Fluorescent. Almost all digital cameras allow you to manually set the white balance, called WB on some systems. If you shoot RAW files instead of Jpeg right out of the camera, you can effect the white balance in a computer in post-production.  This is arguably the more accurate method, but it doesn’t hurt to get it close in the camera just to see what you’re doing while shooting.

If you’re really anal about such things and color is important to you, make sure you’re on a good calibrated screen and also shoot a color chart or grey cards to give yourself a reference to work with. More on this later.

Camera
Don’t forget, you may not need to use a camera. If you’re work is small enough you can get arguably better results from a scanner.  You say your painting is 3’ wide?  Ok, well read on then.

Even though you may be doing all of this to go on a website at lower resolution, when in doubt work on bigger files.  You never know when you’re going to need a high-res copy to sell print reproductions or to give to the authorities when your painting gets stolen from the Uffizi

You can of course use just about any camera, but you we’ll use a dSLR. However in a punch I think you could even use an iphone if you had to.  You want to use longer lenses (more telephoto) when possible because it flattens perspective and allows you to move further away from the work so that the likelihood of reflections from the lights is less.  Prime lenses tend to be sharper across the frame than zooms, though both can be used.  Better lenses also have less geometrical distortions which you wouldn’t notice when taking a picture of your friend on the street, but become very obvious when you’re shooting a perfect rectangle and the sides look like they’re bulging out.

You’ll want to shoot straight on from the middle of the work to reduce key stoning.  I’ve also shot straight down depending on size of work. The floor makes a nice flat surface to shoot at.

Exposure
Ok, so you’re ready to actually take the pictures.  If you can, use a tripod if possible, that’ll make getting the shot straight on and longer exposures possible if you’re using continuous lights. Use the lowest possible ISO, 100 or 200 are great, that will make sure you have as little noise as possible in the images.

If you’re using continuous lights, set your camera to Aperture Priority (“Av”), that way it’ll take care of the shutter speed. Lenses are sharper in the corners if you stop down the lens, so if you have enough light, stop the camera down to it’s optimal aperture, usually somewhere between f/8-f/11, but try to make sure you’re at at least f/5.6 for best results.

If you’re using flashes, you’ll want to shoot in Manual Mode (“M”). Set the shutter speed to 1/160th of second, and stop the lens down to f/8.  Back in the day you would have used a light meter to set the power of your flashes, but now with digital you can just as easily take some test shots and adjust the level of your lights to taste.

Use the cameras Histogram to gauge exposure. Make sure you’re nothing is way off either end of the spectrum, though unless your piece is extremely contrasty, you should worry more about not clipping the highlights.

Post-production
Once you’ve gotten the shots you need you can use Photoshop or Lightroom to fix geometric and perspective issues. Crop, and use the grey card you shot earlier to set the back, white and grey points to get your color corrected. Often the images will require a bit of sharpening to look their best. Use small radius and don’t overdo it. If you’re sharpening in Photoshop, use the “Smart Sharpen“ filter instead of “Unsharpen Mask” for best results.

Wrap-up
Things can get crazy from here. How to deal with translucent objects and reflective pieces, oddball perspectives like shooting from above or below, stitching together multiple shots of a larger work that won’t fit into frame well. Those are all subjects bigger than I want to get into, but I’m sure the stuff above is enough to get your started.

Hard Drive Hard Choices

If you at all follow technology and haven’t been on vacation on a beach somewhere for the past 3 weeks you may have noticed that storage has gotten a lot more expensive. The 2TB WD Green drives which I use to store images have gone from around $79 to $129 to $149 in a matter of days. And no more free shipping. Not good news for those of us who use a lot of drive space.

The reason behind all of this is the flooding currently happening in Thailand. Apparently a very heavy monsoon season is pummeling them. This is obviously a terrible human tragedy, around 400 people have died at last count with millions displaced from their homes. The bad news in tech land is that a huge percentage of hard drives are put together in Thailand, and even worse news is that around 90% of some of the components like the main motors are made in Thailand, which means that even companies which manufacture their drives elsewhere are screwed.

Estimates I’ve heard recently indicate that it may take them a few quarters to get things back to where they were once the water recedes, and that there are only a couple of months worth of inventory in the pipeline. Put this together and it means we’re in for a bad winter if you need drive space.

The question is, what to do about it. I’ve got a couple of spare 2TB drives in my case which should give me more than enough bits to get through, but still makes me nervous. What happens if I have multiple failures or get inordinately busy? One possible option is to do a bit of hoarding now. They’re expensive for sure, but maybe the price will go up to $300 in a couple months and I can sell a couple of the drives I bought for $150 on ebay at net gain. Fantasy? I’m not sure. I’ve watched them double already on NewEgg and that’s before the real shortages occur, when things are just out of stock.

So if you see a good deal at Costco, you might want to pick up a few before it’s too late.

Think I’m crazy? Feel free to comment and let me know.

Vagabond Mini Battery Powered

If you’re out on a shoot in a situation with no access to a power outlet, you’ve got a handful of options to get you through. First I guess is to stick with available light, which I tend to do a lot, however you’re at the whim of the sun. Second is to use speedlights, which are surprisingly capable as people like David Hobby have shown with his Strobist zeitgeist. They do have limits on their power however which makes shooting them into a 4 foot octabox less practical. So what do you do if you need a big powerful light in the middle of nowhere? Well on really big shoots you could use a generator, but the cool way to do it is with battery powered studio strobes.

I’ve owned and used a Profoto AcuteB pack and head for a couple of years now. The light out of it is typical Profoto beautiful and smooth, and it’s simple well as relatively compact to boot. The problem is that I don’t use it very often and I think the lead acid battery is dying on me. Honestly, I get maybe 100 pops at half power (on a 600ws light) before it starts complaining by slowing down recycle times and beeping to tell me I’m going too fast.

Well last night I went to shoot a ukulele player I know up on a midtown roof at sunset. I needed to balance the light from the remaining sun on the buildings behind him with a big soft light source on Paul. Normally this would be a job for the Acute, but Dan came along with me and instead brought a 1600ws White Lightning head and his recently aquired Paul Buff Vagabond Mini battery. And I’ll get right to the point, this little thing blew me away.

I shot over 300 shots with the light around half power into a big octabox about 8ft away from the subject and the little thing didn’t even flinch. In fact when we were all done it was still somewhere between 50%-75% charged. And it’s only $240. Granted, you still need to buy a light to use it with, but even with that taken into account it’s still less than a third of what you’d pay for the Profoto which in my experience can’t hold a candle to the versatility of the Vagabond.

Is the light from the White Lightning strobe quite as nice as the Profoto head? Maybe not exactly as nice, but still pretty great, and the Vagabond has two outlets so you can plug in two lights to one battery where the AcuteB can only power one head. They even say you could use a power strip and go up to 4 lights which is just insane from something the size of a brick that weighs 3.5 pounds.

I’m honestly considering selling the Acute and buying one of these. It was really that great. The only downside I see is that you’re now carrying a battery pack and the monolight vs a pack and lightweight head. But that’s a bit of a 6 of one kind of thing. And your clients may not be quite as impressed as if it said Profoto or Broncolor on the side, but the results should make up for it and your wallet will thank you.

By the way, I have no affiliation with the Buff people, I just think this product is amazing. Though if they sent me one as a thank you, I might just keep it.

Research

A big part about connecting to your subject in portrait photography, or at the very least getting them to feel comfortable, is to know a bit about them. This helps both in the obvious case of conversation, but also in reading their mood and body language. I’m lucky in that I can talk to just about anybody (A gift of my father I think), but knowledge is definitely power. And the way to get that knowledge is through a little research. Now, I don’t do this for everyone I take pictures of, but often I’ll do it for editorial shoots especially when I’ll probably only have less than an hour of their time. Small talk about the weather is fine, but to me it often sounds like practiced banter and that doesn’t help the cause. Have something to say about what they’re interested in and you’ve got some power. Not only have you shown them that they’re not just another job, but you also get them really thinking about the questions rather than the artificial situation of sitting in front of a camera lens.

For example, this morning I was doing a little research on a subject I’m shooting later this afternoon. Author, college professor, ok I could get that information in the assignment email. But that’s going to get you conversation about how his books do on amazon and if this years crop of students is up to snuff. Fine and better than the weather, but just so. The magazine also sent me a draft of the article the portraits are running with. So that gave me a little bit about his new book and the trilogy it’s a part of, but it doesn’t tell me much about him as a person.

Next step is Google. Wikipedia entries, written interviews, etc are all great. Also check Google Images to see if there are other shots of the guy. That might give you some ideas on how to photograph him and at a more basic level whether or not he’s photogenic. Sometimes you get a tough subject and need to plan your lighting and equipment accordingly. I also find it handy to see if there’s any video of them online as well. Them giving a talk at a conference or getting interviewed for TV and such. Knowing how the person looks in motion and the tone of their voice can make meeting them for the first time less jarring because you know what to expect.

Finally comes a little research into their field. Knowing the guy is in finance is good, but knowing that he works in the international bond market is better. That way you can do a five minute read on the subject and not sound like an idiot when you ask him what he does. I once shot a guy who was an oil market analyst. He had been on Charlie Rose, so I watched that, and read a few bios and interviews, but then I did a little reading on recent volatility in the oil market and what was causing it. Read an article on recent discoveries in Kazakhstan and oil shale in Canada, and learned a bit about the concept of peak oil. So when I showed up the next day, Charley and I hit it off like crazy. I asked him interesting questions and he gave interesting answers. So not only did I make his experience more enjoyable and less artificial, but I got better pictures because he was comfortable AND I learned something to boot.

Some of you reading this must be thinking that I sound bat shit crazy, and that’s ok. I’m not looking for cookie cutter in my work, I want each experience to be unique and interesting. In fact, the pictures and the money are all well and good, but in some ways it’s the people whom I’ve met that have made taking portraits rewarding. If the cost of doing that well is an hour or so of browsing the web to do some slightly obsessive pre-shoot research? Well, I think I can live with that.

My thoughts on the Kindle Fire

Earlier in the week Amazon announced their new family of Kindle devices and even though they’re not available for a few weeks, I figured I’d write up my thoughts so that people can have a record to skewer me with if my predictions south.  For those of you who listen to my Circuitous Conversations podcast with Dan Gottesman, go check out the latest episode #57 where we do a half hour rundown.  For those of you who don’t podcast, here’s what I think.

The new e-ink readers look good.  I’ve got a Kindle 3 I really like, but the idea of an even smaller Kindle Touch device for $99?  You honestly can’t beat it.  There is also a new one with buttons for $79, but I’d say spend the extra $20 and get the Touch. Well worth the aggravation tax to not have to input text like a game code on Metroid back in 1988. One letter at a time. Some people are upset because the new Kindles come with the so-called “Special Offers” by default. Yes, these are ads, but they’re pretty unobtrusive. A small sliver on the main menu and they replace the ‘screen-saver’ pictures of old dead authors with ads for books or whatever? They’re not there when you’re reading or pretty much any time you’re using the device, so who cares? It’s $99 for a top of the line touch controlled e-reader and started at $399 just a few years ago. It’s almost an impulse buy at that price.  I’m also a WiFi guy on the Kindle. I know that the price of the 3G version includes lifetime internet for the device anywhere in the world, but if you’ve ever tried to check your email or browse the web on an e-ink screen, you’ll know that you’d be far better off using your phone. I’ll just fill mine up with books before I leave, thanks.

I think the Kindle Fire looks pretty damn awesome and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t think the iPad is from the grace of God. I’m of the opinion that 10″ is just too big to carry around, and that is the promise of a tablet to me.  Sitting around the house or reading in bed is great, but I can do that on my laptop and I don’t have to hold the screen up vertically the whole time. As a city dweller, the promise of a device with books, music, movies, magazines, etc on the subway is a grand one. And I know that my phone can do all of this, but I’m sorry, watching a movie on a 3.5″ screen is not something I do unless I have to. 3.5″ too small, 10″ too big,  7″ might be the Goldilocks ideal. Especially when you consider that the screen is 16:9 and not 4:3 like the iPad, which means that the actual size of widescreen movies won’t be that different between the two, you’ll just get more movie and less letterbox.

Dual core A9 processor, 8GB of internal storage, WiFi, Gorilla Glass, 8 hour battery. Yum. And as someone who likes Android and wants it to succeed, this is also a boon.  Though from what I understand, Amazon has actually branched it’s own versino off the Gingerbread codebase and put their own skin on top.  From what I’ve seen it looks great and is smooth and fast, unlike every skin I’ve ever seen for the OS. This also leads to the promise of adding apps from the Amazon marketplace.  The Google apps (Gmail, Maps, Navigation, etc) are nowhere to be found because it’s not a pure Google device, but I’d be willing to bet $100 that we’ll see custom ROMs and ways around that within weeks of launch.

Some people point to the size and lack of cameras and bluetooth support (for external keyboards and such) as evidence that this is a pure consumption device unlike the iPad which people use to create content. But I’m willing to bet that this is exactly how the vast majority of iPad owners use theirs. It’s for browsing the web, and reading facebook and email, and watching movies.  Sure there is a subset of people who actually write on the iPad or make music with it, but I have a feeling that’s what floats to the top of the publicity pile, not what actual users are doing. At least that’s been my experience.

Perhaps the best feature of all is the price. As the old adage says, Apple has content stores to sell the hardware where Amazon has the hardware to sell the content.  And this shows in the price.  $199. That’s less than half the price of an iPad.  I couldn’t justify a tablet at $500, I can at $200.

Isn’t it just a portal to Amazon’s content stores?  Sure it is, but really no more than the iPad, there’s just less subterfuge about it. They’ll admit it right on the surface. I guess we’ll know more once the devices get in reviewers hands, but if it’s anything close to how good it looks right now, then Amazon’s got a huge hit on their hands. I wouldn’t be surprised if they sold 8 or 10 million for Christmas.  Finally some competition for Apple.  They’ve had it too easy for far too long.

If you’re thinking about checking out the new Kindle anyway, do it through this links and you’ll support the work we do on this site.

Turning Points

I spent this weekend walking around Washington DC with my partner Heather and our British friends colloquially known as ‘The Brits’. A full 11 hours on Saturday where I led them through The Capitol, Air and Space Museum, National Archives, American History Museum, Washington Monument, WWII Memorial, Vietnam Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, MLK Memorial, FDR Memorial, and finally the Jefferson Memorial. That was just Saturday, we did another half day on Sunday, and we walked the whole way both days.

Small photographic opportunities came up and although I was carrying my Leica M4, I only ended up taking one picture with it. That’s right, one single frame. Pulling out a light meter and fiddling with aperture and focus settings and soon the moment is gone. Plus the hassle and cost of processing and the time spent scanning hung over me like a shoe that would eventually drop.

I could have brought my Canon 5D2, but a prime lens would be limiting and a zoom is just too big and heavy. I just don’t enjoy having a couple of pounds pulling on my neck all day long.

I did however take 30 or so photos. “With what?” you say? “With my iPhone”, I answer. Seriously. Is it a great camera? Nope, but it’s a decent one. Especially for an occasional shot to put on your facebook or send to my mother. The other great feature is that I carry it around with me all the time anyway, so in a sense I get something for nothing.

If you look at the 365.2011 posts from this weekend. The rainbow, the Capitol rotunda, and the grave at Arlington Cemetery were all taken with my phone. Would a good little compact like an S95 or an LX3 take better pictures? Of course, but I’ve never been able to justify a $400 purchase for the couple times a year I’d actually use it. I’ve tried small cameras over the years but they tend to sit in my closet unused. Plus, how big would I ever print one of these out anyway. Assuming enough light and good sharpness, I’m sure the 5MP of the iPhone would make a nice 8×10″ print anyway. In fact let me pause here and do a test.

Ok, I’m back. Printed an 8×10 of the Capitol picture and you know what? It looks pretty darn good. Not as good as it could have looked had I used my 5D or even a better compact, but it’s just fine for a travel snapshot. A extra small radius sharpening and I’d be perfectly happy. Remember that I’m a portrait photographer. So when I travel, taking pictures is not the goal. In other words I take pictures when I travel, I don’t travel to take pictures.

Also, I’m sure there are a bunch of other android phones and such with great cameras too, I’m not singling out Apple, though whatever camera module they chose is pretty great. Certainly a step up from the toy in the 3G. I wish they would put a simple exposure compensation slider in the camera app though. Maybe next time.

So what does this all mean. Well I guess it means that I’ve proven that I’m fine with snapshots from my phone. Something I honestly never thought I’d say. It also means that I’ll probably use my film cameras even less going forward. It was kind of like the moment when you realize that you’ve fallen out of love with someone. There’s really no way to forget that you’ve thought it. I’m heading out west in a couple weeks to see some national parks and will most likely bring my Canon, those places deserve it. However the next time I’m taking a trip to Disney World, I’ll most likely be leaving my cameras at home.

Inspirational Photo Books

Let’s face it, we all need a little inspiration sometimes. I don’t know about you, but I find that I’m much less self-judgmental when I’m looking at a famous photographer’s work in a nice big coffee table book rather than flipping through 600px files on a website. To that end I’ve put together a list of books that I own and will pull out when I’m in need of some love.

Cover images link to the relevant Amazon.com page for your surfing pleasure.

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Pointing Device Menagerie

For those of us not sold on the promise of touch computing, the method with which we move the cursor around the screen tends to be a very personal thing.

It all started with the mouse of course. Invented way back Douglas Engelbart at Stanford way back in the early 1960’s, but as really probably used first as we know it by the team at Xerox Parc who made it work using a ball and not direct rollers.  By the way, the mouse was so named because the first one had the wire coming out the back which made it look like an actual mouse with it’s tail coming out. And of course the Apple Mac (and Lisa before it) brought all this into the mainstream.

I think my first Windows computer with a serial mouse was probably in 1990 or so?  I had used an original Mac and some PCs with other windowing environments like GEM desktop (I think that’s what it was called), but Windows 3 was the first version I actually played with on my own machine. First it was two button, then the cheap mice they gave you with computers became 3 button, all of them connected to a 9 pin serial port (COM2/COM3 represent!) on the back of the computer.  The one everyone wanted to use was the two-button Microsoft mouse though. It was well built, fit your hand (assuming you were right-handed) and seemed to track smoother than the crappy ones. Which brings me to cleaning. Since these mice had a ball which rolled on the surface, all this gunk got rolled up into the mouse mechanism and much of it attached itself to the rollers inside.  These got nasty and you often had to open it up, pull the ball out, and clean them with some alcohol. At least that’s what the nerdy people did. I never liked mice however.  You had to have room on your desk to use them, they didn’t track reliably and I found that constantly using the same pointer finger to click gave me repetitive stress problems in my hand and arm.

This lasted up until college and I think until I met Keenan. Keenan was a webmaster at a big software company at the time and I’m pretty sure he’s the one that introduced me to the trackball. And not just any old trackball like ones with a ball the size of a golfball which you’re supposed to use with your thumb. Yuck, those are terrible.  No, I mean the big Kensington Expert Mouse. You’ve got 4 buttons, a big ass ball which apparently fit a standard size billiard ball if you were so inclined. You control the ball itself with your fingers, slowly rolling over it from the top, or flicking and catching it to zoom across the screen. Then your thumb was naturally sitting right on top of the normal left click mouse button. They weren’t cheap, I think $100 or so, but they were build like tanks and totally worth it ergonomically.  To my mind, they were ergonomic before it was a computer users buzzword. And the design is still a classic to my eye. My first begat a new one when USB came around, then a dead-end model which was wireless and had extra buttons up and a scroll wheel up top. The main problem with them was the same as with ball mice, the rollers got crudded up with dirt, requiring cleaning every few days if you were sensitive to such things. Finally about 5 years or so they released the latest revision which was optical and black, and added a scroll ring around the main ball. Almost perfect.  This has been my main input device on my desktop since it’s release.  The paint on the main button is getting a little worn away and you do occasionally have to pop the ball out and blow dust off the sensors, but it’s nothing like trying to keep physical contacts clean. Plus it’s quieter.

Before I got serious about photography, I used the trackball when retouching.  I had played with some cheap tablets from the late 90’s on, but it never felt quite right to me.  I was never a trained artist after all, so it’s not like I was yearning to hold a pen. That changed back in 2006 or so when I got a small 4×5″ Wacom tablet and forced myself to use it when in Photoshop. Once you’ve gotten used to the control of a pen, trying to do retouching with anything else is like drawing while wearing boxing gloves.  When I moved to a 24″ and then a 30″ screen, I upgraded to the Intuos3 6×11 widescreen tablet and have used that ever since. For the kind of work I do, the size and shape of the tablet is related to the size and shape of the screen. In the normal 1:1 mode I use, the tablet is mapped to the screen, so the upper left corner of the tablet is mapped to the upper left corner of the screen, etc. So moving around to a specific part of the screen becomes second nature. This is unlike a trackpad where you might have to push-push-push in one direction to get the cursor across the screen. Because of this 1:1 relationship, if you’ve got a 4×3 ratio screen you want a more square tablet and if you use a widescreen display like most of us do now, you’ll want a wide tablet, so that an inch in the vertical gives the same amount of movement on the screen as an inch in the horizontal. The one problem with doing this 1:1 stuff is that if you use multiple monitors, you’re kinda screwed.  This is actually one of the reasons I use a single big screen. Sure, you can make it so that it maps across two screens, but then moving the pen a half an inch to the right will move the cursor on the screen the same amount as moving the pen an inch up or down. And that kind of inconsistency is a deal breaker for me and totally defeats the purposes of the tablet in my opinion.

This brings us to trackpads, which is the reason that I originally started to write this post. Trackpads, especially the newer glass ones on the apple laptops, are great on a laptop.  They integrate into the design, they work smoothly, and they allow advanced gesture support. All perfect for the laptop.  I found myself using the four finger up and down expose gestures on my new 13″ Air so much that I started thinking about the Magic Trackpad for my desktop. That way I could unify the way I scroll pages, reduce wire clutter, and look cool to boot. As luck would have it, B&H had them for $10 less than the Apple store and I had a $50 gift card lying around since last Christmas, so I figured “why not?”  Well I’ll tell you why not. The Reality-Distortion-Field strikes again! I don’t like it on the desktop at all. Sure the gestures are all there, but I find moving the cursor around on such a big screen to be very inefficient and hard on my hands. On a laptop, you can rest your hand along the side of the trackpad and edge of the case and flick around with your pointer finger, but on the magic trackpad, it’s raised on the back edge to be more like the wireless keyboard (and to house the batteries) which means your wrist either has to over-extend upward if you want to rest it on the desk, or you have to levitate your hand above the trackpad the whole time. Thumbs down.  I think it’s great on a laptop, but it just feels silly on a desktop. Plus I think it’s a tad to big.  Maybe it’s a great option for the Apple TV or something, but it’s not going to replace my Expert Mouse.

I’m sure there are lots of people out there who may disagree with me on this one.  My friend Michael swears by his which is why I got one in the first place, but to me it’s just RSI waiting to happen.

Moving Old Outlook and Outlook Express Email Over to Gmail

I’ve had an email address since 2003 I guess, but I’ve only got the past 4 years or so of my main billwadman.com address up on the google apps server where I host it (I use and highly recommend Google apps standard edition. Now I don’t have to worry about my mail at all when I switch computers). Not that the stuff before my Gmail jump in 2007 was literary gold, but you never know what was in there. Letters from old friends or my dead father, reminders of events that you’ve forgotten about, picture attachments you thought were lost to the sands of time. Old email can be like nostalgia central. Well I was thinking about all of this last night while recording Circuitous Conversations with Dan and it got me thinking that I should take stock in my email archive situation. I didn’t expect for it to take me most of the day, but it did and here’s what I’ve figured out.

Outlook Express
I looked thorough all my old folders of stuff I’ve pulled forward through pc to pc over the years. Back in the late 90’s through 2002 I was using Outlook Express which came installed with Windows. It wasn’t the most powerful piece of software, but it was a lot smaller and faster than the full version of Outlook and I didn’t need calendaring features so it was just fine for me. Those backups were really just a copy of the proprietary .dbx data files as OE kept them. And while they’re not hurting anyone just sitting there, who knows how long I’ll be able to get software that can even read them since they don’t make Outlook Express anymore. I had to figure out a way to get these up onto the gmail servers. In the end I booted up the Win7 virtual machine I’ve got on the hackintosh and installed the most recent version of Windows Live Mail. There is an import function that you point toward your old OE data files and it sucks it in. Step one done.

Now to get it to Gmail. First add your Gmail as an IMAP account in Windows Live Mail. I then created a new folder (shows up in gmail as a label) called ‘OutlookExpress Import’. You can then drag and drop your imported emails over into that folder on the Gmail IMAP and it’ll start copying them up. It’s very slow, like 1 per second in my experience. Something to do with the gmail servers having to parse the data a bit I think.

Outlook
From 2002 until recently I was using Outlook in it’s various versions. So I had a folder with a bunch of archive .pst files in it which was a bit of a pain because I know there are duplicates all over the place within them. So I installed Outlook on the virtual machine and one-by-one imported the .pst files into a nice fresh empty Outlook datafile. Making sure I selected “don’t import duplicates” of course. This took a while. So my about 2GB of my old Outlook archives are  now in Outlook and somewhat organized.

There are a number of little utilities out there which will upload your Outlook data straight to Gmail. In fact, Google themselves make one which will do the work for you. I tried using it a couple of years ago to questionable effect. It kept stalling so I decided to take a different route this time. I wanted to get the data out of Outlook and into a form that was more friendly to other systems. So I installed Mozilla Thunderbird, the email sister app to the Firefox browser. Using it’s import system, I pulled all the email over from Outlook.  Now that all the mail is in Thunderbird, it means I’m cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux) , so I pulled all those files over to the Mac and imported them into Mail.app.  I’m not a huge fan of the Apple mail program, but I felt like it was a good safe place to make the move to Gmail.

I reckon I could have just added Gmail as an IMAP account to Outlook and done the same thing I did the first time, but I didn’t want to be in the Windows virtual machine any longer than necessary and there was a lot more mail in the Outlook dataset. I could do the same IMAP trick from Mail.app I guess, but I decided to give the latest Google uploader a shot.  Windows version here, and Mac version over here.  They’re similar in what they do, but somewhat platform specific as to what mail program data files they know how to deal with.  And I have to admit, the new version for the Mac is working pretty great so far.  I opened it up and it found all the mail in Mail.app and let me specify which of the folders I wanted to send, as well as hot to label the stuff on it’s way up.  It also seems to be quite a bit faster than the IMAP route.  It’s only about 20% done at the moment so I’ll update this later if I have any trouble, but so far so good.

Wrap Up
So if I had to start from the beginning again I think I’d do things a little bit differently. I probably would have imported the Outlook Express mail straight into Outlook, then pulled in all the archive .pst files. So everything was all in one place. Then spend some time culling the stuff that I know I don’t need from client projects 12 years ago, and perhaps consolidating the folder structure a little bit to tidy things up. Finally I would have either used the Windows version of the Google Uploader and just called it a day.

That said, the alternative of pushing it all through Thunderbird to make it more platform agnostic is not a bad way to go considering then you could zip all those files up and keep them as a standardized backup.  Knowing that they’ll be readable for a long time to come since it is open source and uses a variation on the UNIX’y mbox mail file standard. It all depends on how anal you are about such things. But if I’ve learned anything in this process it’s that being a little crazy about organizing things now could save you a lot of time in the future, and perhaps determine if you can even read it at all.

Why Street Photography Isn’t for Me

Some photographers just love going out on the street with their camera. Living in the world, shooting the world, going on photowalks with other photographers where they all walk around together and shoot the world. In the process of shooting every day so far this year there have been days where I didn’t have a shoot, or an idea, or I had a shoot for a client but couldn’t use the pictures for my blog etc. Days where I had to go out for a walk with the camera slung by my side. I’ve come to realize that I don’t really like doing it very much.

Granted, there are a smattering of random street pictures from the first half of the year which I’m really happy with, but most of them were pure happenstance. Literally something I tripped over, or a split second where I saw something and was able to get my camera up in time. I understand that this is the point and that some people feed off of that idea that they may come home empty-handed or perhaps having bagged the proverbial big whale. But that excitement stresses me out. It removes all sense of control from me. I understand that I have to notice whatever I’m going shoot and be good enough technically to get the shot, but still it feels more like gamble than a skill. I want something more deliberate. I’m most definitely not a hunter, especially with portraits.

There have been plenty of times in my life where I’ve walked up to someone cold and asked if I can take their portrait. Not a lot, but I’ve shot so many people that even though the ratio is low the number is high. And I’m a friendly guy so they tend to say yes, but if you’re in this situation the person is usually going to give you a minute or two. Which is fine for a couple of snaps, but no time to really dig deeper and get something special. I want it to be a partnership not a competition. Which is another thing, I don’t like taking people’s pictures without their permission. I try to be non-confrontational and I’m not a voyeur. I’ve done it a handful of times but I always felt like I was doing something wrong while doing it. Even with the tilted shot of an old man from a couple of days ago that a lot of people seemed to like as an example, that was taken from the hip because I didn’t want the guy to yell at me for taking it.

I had a chat with my friend Jeffrey over at Faded & Blurred the other day and I was talking about this subject and he mentioned a quote, I think he said it was Avedon. Something like, “I don’t want to wait for things to happen, I want to make them happen” Which gets somewhere closer to how I feel.

Also, from a technical perspective, I don’t think that dSLRs are good street cameras. Too big overall, too noticeable. I’ll put my hat in with the people that say this is where a rangefinder really shines. Smaller, less obvious, quieter shutter. Overall far more discrete. The iPhone4 actually does a decent job for photos of still objects in good light, I’ve found myself using that more than I thought I would, and with good results.

So, is there photographic gold in them there streets? Yes there surely is and I’m sure there will be times when I go for a walk with my camera with me. But most of the time I’m going to leave it to other photographers to find. You can’t do everything well, sometimes you’ve got to pick your battles. I’m sure there are plenty of landscape photographers out there who would think of nothing to sit and wait for 2 hours for the light to change in their favor, but who would go into a cold sweat with the very thought of spending 2 hours taking portraits one-on-one with another human being. And I’m glad they’re out there, because when it comes to landscapes if the light’s not right when I get out of the car I just shrug and drive to the park lodge to buy the postcard.