Bill Wadman BTS – Sideshow TV Pitch from Bill Wadman on Vimeo.

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.

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.

I had been limping along with a 5 year old NEC 3090 as it started to fail over the past few months, but didn’t want to replace it with another low DPI screen when I knew the 4k stuff was coming right around the corner. Then a few weeks ago Dell announced a 24″ UltraHD (3840 x 2160 pixels) display in their UltraSharp PremierColor series, the so-called 2414Q. I watched and waited for it to be available on Dell.com. Every morning waiting for the button to go from “Contact Dell” to “Buy Now” and it finally did a couple of weeks ago.  After some delays in shipment my screen finally arrived this morning and I thought I’d write a little post on my experiences. This will be updated as I fiddle some more, so be patient.

First Encounter
I plugged the screen into my very fast i7 Ivy Bridge Hackintosh with a GTX 760 GPU and I got full resolution on the first try. The problem is that it’s stuck at 30Hz refresh rate. Now the GPU has Displayport 1.2 and in Windows 8.1 people have been running similar screens at 60Hz. Apparently the Nvidia driver built into Mavericks (there is no Nvidia web driver for Mavericks yet, or ever) does not support what’s called MST or Multi-Stream Transport. Basically the way screens these hi-res screens work is that you send two screens worth of data (that’s the Multi-Stream part) over the same cable and the screen just displays them next to each other on the same panel. No MST in the driver means I’m stuck at 30Hz.  I’ve heard that the latest Nvidia Web Drivers for Mountain Lion has MST support, so I’m currently cloning my last 10.8 installation over onto an extra drive to see if I can get it working over there. Sometimes when you’re on the bleeding edge, you get cut.

The other issue I’m having is that the built-in resolution scaling is not working. So my screen is actually running at the full 3840×2160, which on a 24″ monitor is pretty tiny. Not completely unusable for messing about testing, but not the kind of thing you’d want to stare at all day long. So once I get the refresh rate problem nicked, I’ll figure out how to get it to show screen real estate something closer to 2560×1440 only with a whole lot more pixels to smooth things out.

That said, my initial playing around with images in Lightroom has made me feel similar to how I felt when I first upgraded to a color calibrated screen.  All the little flaws in sharpness that you really didn’t notice before because you were going between a low-res overview and 100% are now glaringly obvious, much like they are when you look at a print. It’s pretty amazing. 180ppi on a desktop screen. Yum.

Round Two
My next move was to install 10.8.5  on an extra drive to see if the passing comment I read on an online forum was true. The idea was that the web drivers that Nvidia themselves released for Mountain Lion allowed for the illusive MST mode. No dice. Unfortunately I had the same results as in Mavericks. Looks like I may have to want for a driver update or some coding genius to come along and help me out.

HiDPI Mode (Kinda!)
Ok, so I’ve made some progress. I’ve got the screen running like a pixel doubled 1080p screen. So it’s showing the screen real estate of 1920×1080 while being really really smooth and sharp. To do this I had to enable HiDPI mode in Mavericks using this terminal command:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver.plist DisplayResolutionEnabled -bool true

Once I did that, 1920×1080 (HiDPI) showed up under the ‘Scaled’ section in the display preferences. The problem was that every time I tried enable it, the system would automatically select a refresh rate of 30.3Hz which made the Dell monitor just barf and show me a black screen. To get past this hurdle I switched back to ‘Best for Display’ and then selected ‘Scaled’ again while holding down the Option key. That allowed me to choose 30Hz AND 1920×1080 (HiDPI), and Voila! Retina style beauty.  The next step is for it to give me a little bit more room to breathe. What I’d love is the real estate of 2560×1440 while using the pixels to smooth things out.

I still have the problem of 30Hz vs 60Hz refresh rate, but that may have to wait for a driver update that may or may not come. That said, we’re back in the “Ok, I’m going to keep this thing” camp. I don’t think it’s going back.  Also apparently there is a bug in Chrome that makes it completely slow on HiDPI external monitors. So I’m temporarily using Safari for the time being.

More to come as I continue my troubleshooting…

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.

As you can see it ended up a bit differently than I had originally planned (as things like this usually do). First, I gave up on the caving idea, no exciting enough, plus I couldn’t get my hands on the equipment I’d need to make it believable anyhow. That’s when I came up with the idea of them running from the imagined jaws of a cthulhu-like monster from beneath the ground.

The first thing I had to do was move the pipes and gravel pile to a more desolate location, so I co-opted a landscape I took on the salt flats at the bottom of Death Valley at dawn. Much better. Cisco and Eran showed up and we shot about 30 pictures of them if various forms of the pose with Cisco standing on the edge of a table (with my friend Guillaume serving as a counterweight. As you can see I had a soft light from below blasting them to match the light from the pipe, plus one behind to rim light Cisco a little bit. There was also another strobe next to the camera bouncing off the wall to give some overall illumination to the shadows that the other two lights caused.

Compositing the two together was the hard part, along with the random science photos of tentacles. That stuff took a couple of hours. Cleaning up the masks on each element, playing with curves to try to get the contrast and brightness to match between layers.

I posted a version on facebook and G+ last night at around this point. I knew normally I’d spend another hour or two playing with it to really polish things up, but I was tired so I went to sleep. This morning however I added the final touches. Smoke coming up from the pipes, a minor lens flare or two, a lightning bolt, plus a whole lot more 1 or 2 pixel clean-ups.

Is the end result believable? Well it is a giant underground octopus attacking my friends in the middle of Death Valley so let’s be reasonable about the answer to that question. That said, I think it’s successful and silly, and a lot of fun. It ended up very different than I originally intended, but also much better. Not bad for a weekend project.

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:

“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.

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.

Recently, they released a new paper called San Gabriel Semigloss Fiber. Just from the name I knew it would be interesting, because fiber papers were always under the purview of the darkroom. Traditional fiber paper is an old technology. Basically, a heavy paper with a natural mineral coating (as opposed to a plastic one), though it tends to be little harder to work with. It’s more fragile and picks up dirt easily. It also tends to curl like the dickens when wet. However, it is very archival. High-end darkroom prints, especially black and white, are typically made on fiber-based papers. I typically use more heavily-coated luster papers because I like the saturation of colors and the depth of the blacks that normal matte papers can’t match, but those coated papers don’t ‘feel’ like a traditional darkroom print.

So when I saw that RR announced this San Gabriel stuff, I wrote our friend Drew and asked him to send me a small box to try out. He kindly agreed, and after much anticipation, my paper finally arrived in storm-tossed NYC a couple of days ago.

It’s a thick and somewhat heavy paper, acid-free with no optical brighteners and coated with bartya; just like the old school papers were. It  basically looks like a dark room paper without the photosensitive coating, which is just delightful.

Since I’m most interested in using the paper for B&W printing, I pulled out a photograph I took a couple of years ago of the ancient bristle cone pines in the Methuselah Grove (Inyo National Forest, CA).

Finally, a backlit shot to show reflectivity. As you can see it has a little glare, but that’s because it’s coated and not a raw paper. I will say that in person the quality of  reflection is really nice and organic if that makes any sense at all. Sort of a waxy sheen.

I’m going to do some more tests, but so far this looks to be my new fine art paper of choice. Well done guys. Be sure to go over to RedRiverPaper.com and get a sample pack or a box to try out. Use the coupon code OTP and you’ll get 10% off your order.

About a year ago I wrote a post for the cover of the first book in this series entitled “Tab Bennett and the Inbetween”. That cover was a serious composite too, and because I never did get around to writing it up for the blog I thought I’d take the time to let you all behind the curtain for the making of the second one.

I should point out that Underneath, Princess of Twilight & Dawn will be out in the Amazon Kindle book store on December 30. I’ll be sure to update the post and let people know where they can get it.

The author Jes Young and I sat down and talked through some ideas for the second book. Just to get you up to speed in case you haven’t read the first book (which you should, here’s the ebook on amazon), the main character Tab was a young woman whose sister had died and is just learning the truth about who she was, which happened to be an elf princess with a destiny. On the first cover we visualized a scene out of the book where she’s walking from her house toward toward an apparition in the woods at twilight, and starlings are flying around over her head.

For the second, somewhat darker book (think The Empire Strikes Back), Tab is journeying down into an underworld to confront her evil father. We thought that a downward spiral staircase would be a great visual since it is a significant part of the story line. Tab would be dressed a big sexier, be a bit more badass, and be holding a bladed weapon of some kind. I liked the idea of making her pose similar to the first cover, with Tab walking down the steps, but looking back over her shoulder for danger. It would bring some continuity to the series.

The first challenge for this project was to find a spiral staircase.  It’s a surprisingly difficult thing to do. But Jes (or course) has a friend who happens to own a castle, Osborn Castle at Cat Rock up on the Hudson to be specific. So in the fall,  I took the train up with camera to shoot scenes and elements which I could later mix together for a background plate on which to build the composite. I’d like to take this moment to say that this place is BEAUTIFUL and a special thanks goes out to Fred for being so gracious and letting us use his property.. So if you’re fancy and looking for a place to have your wedding or similar gala party, then Cat Rock should be on your short list. Fred was kind enough to give us a tour of the grounds and the house. When we mentioned staircases, we were told there was one off limits to the public up on the third floor. As it happened, it turned out to be perfect for what we needed. I set up my tripod at the top and took this picture. It’s severely wide-angled (28mm) and I know that the perspective is going to be exaggerated,  but I’m ok with that because it will just add to the intensity of the final result.

Pretty boring right?  Too bright, cheery, and far too clean for what we needed. That’s ok, I can deal with that in post. The important part is to capture the crazy meandering stairs.
What I needed was a way to grunge it up a bit. Sometimes, taking pictures of uninteresting things can be a real lifesaver, case in point: I had a picture in my library of an old plaster wall whose paint was cracking and flaking off. It looks like this.

I used this detail stretched across the original stair shot in overlay blending mode, which made the two appear to merge into one foreboding stairway into the unknown. Here’s what that looked like.

Simple, right? Well it kind of is. It may not be perfect, but because we’re going to do so much more to this composite before we’re finished, it’s ok for the moment. The next step is to make scene darker and creepier, and make the lighting far more blue than the original shot. In addition, I wanted to sculpt the light a bit to give the impression of a final window with dusk or moonlight coming in from left to right.Jes had also requested that we bring in the birds from the cover of book one, so I added that detail in. That leaves us with this:

Notice that there are some lighter areas in the middle, that’s where I am planning to add the model. Thenext step was to get my friend Mary to model as Tab. I pulled out some blue paper to make it easier to mask her out, set up a couple lights (one for fill and another to mimic the light coming in the window), and set up a box to act as the step for Mary to stand on so that her feet and positioning matched as much as possible.

You can see that I didn’t have a sword for Mary to hold. I couldn’t get it in time, so we had to make due with a small umbrella as mock sword hilt. I was happy with her expression and the angle of her body, but we added some later shots which had much more dynamic hair, so that it would look like she was whipping her head around because she heard something behind her. So-(delete) I looked through the shots and composited the hair from a later shot onto this one. Here’s a crop of the hair shot.

Now it was time to bring Mary into the background. I actually-delete had pretty-delete decent luck using a mask and the built-in refine edges commands in CS6, which surprised me because they have rarely worked for me in the past. So-delete Here’s Mary against the plate, with and without the shadows. Look around her feet on the shot on the left and you’ll see how pasted in it looks. Matching shadows and light are the key to making shots like this work.

The next challenge of course, was the issue of the sword. I had a prop sword which I shot and masked out and placed into the scene, but it didn’t quite jibe. Rather it was fine, but it didn’t have enough pizazz or magic or something. So I gave it a bit of a glow and a little specular/spectrum?? highlight to bring more attention to it. Here’s the before/after:

Much better. The only thing left to do was to add a bit of vignetting to make Mary stand out and make the whole shot look more claustrophobic. I also added the grunge border I used on book one; yet another element of consistency between the two to give them continuity. Oh and last but not least istype/font, again I used the same style I developed for the first book.  So, without further ado, the final cover for Underneath by Jes Young looks like this:

I joked at the beginning of this week’s On Taking Pictures podcast that tripods are for wussies. Obviously I was joking, mostly. To be honest I don’t use a tripod very often. I’ve got a old big aluminum Gitzo that I bought used a few years ago. It’s big and fairly heavy, but that doesn’t really matter because it never really leaves home. Almost exclusively it’s supporting my Cambo 4×5 camera if it’s out of the closet at all.  I’m glad I have it, but with smaller cameras I’m more of a handheld, ‘move around with it to my eye’ kind of shooter.

I know there are a lot of people that swear by tripods, people like my friend Gary Yost who called me out on my wussies comment from the show. He uses tripods to great effect when shooting time-lapse and long-exposure kind of work, and I would imagine for that kind of thing a solid tripod would be an absolute requirement.

A few weeks ago while on a job I borrowed a nice tripod off of another photographer. Carbon Manfrotto legs and a Really Right Stuff ball head. It was a beautiful setup as such stuff goes. That head was one of the nicer machined objects I’ve ever seen. But have you guys gone and looked at how much gear like this costs?  The RRS ball head alone is $400. Worth is based on the craftsmanship to be sure, but I can’t afford to spend $700-800 on a tripod that I rarely use. I want to play, but I don’t want to pay, that much.

Back in 2004 I went on a trip with my father out west for 15 days. We drove over 4000 miles in a white Impalla rental, through 12 states and 10 National Parks. It was a marathon and I knew I wanted to get a tripod for the trip. So I went and bought a nice Manfrotto pistol grip ball head and a cheap set of aluminum legs by Slik. It was a crazy mismatch of gear as the legs were not and are not up to the challenge. They were light and cheap, I think I spent $90 on them, but they’re shaky and flex in a way that’s undesirable for a tripod. So now Heather and I are taking a trip out to California in a few weeks and I had been thinking that I wanted something a bit more solid, but also light, so that I could quickly set it up on a trail and take a self-portrait of the two of us. Some nice night shots of the stars when visible would be fun as well. My attempt in Utah last year with the camera propped on the back hood of the car wasn’t really up to snuff.

So I went shopping for carbon fiber tripods that are well built and relatively inexpensive because again, I don’t know how much I’ll actually use the thing outside travelling.  A search on B&H came up with something odd. Apparently a few years ago, Polaroid of all people had someone OEM them a carbon trip and ball head. The price had come down since their downfall and the latest price was $150 for the 65″ version. That’s a crazy good deal if it’s any good.  Reviews on Amazon.com were very favorable and so I took a ride into town to the B&H Superstore and had them get me one from the bowels of wherever they call them up from. It was nice, and felt solid for the price, but for some reason I couldn’t pull the trigger.

Fast forward a few weeks and the trip is quickly approaching, so I took another look on Amazon and one of their ‘market’ sellers had 6 of the Polaroid tripods for $89. Only catch was that it was a 57″ version that I didn’t know existed. The height was enough for me and the price was right so I pounced on the deal. UPS delivered it a couple days ago and low and behold it was the 65″ version I had looked at in the store. Apparently the seller had a typo in their description.

So far I’m very happy with the purchase.  It’s light, stiff, and comes with a ball head which I think might be enough for the trip, though I’d consider upgrading to something a bit more solid in the future. Though the camera plate that came with it requires a screwdriver, the plate itself is a knock-off of the Manfrotto quick-release plates I’ve been using for years.  The legs have a very Gitzo-esque look to them as well. It’s a knock-off for sure, but a knock-off is fine for me. The only downside that I’ve found so far is that the leg extender clips are plastic and therefore might not last forever, but for $90 with shipping I can hardly complain. Crazy good deal.  Now I can say goodbye to those old Slik legs.

And he was right, you know. I came home and over the next couple of days I made an 11×14″ print of each of the images and they sit in a box on my shelf as we speak. They’re a physical product of the hundreds of hours of work I put into them. They’re the end result.

Printing at home can be a lot of fun too, but there are numerous decisions along the line which can effect the final product. For the sake of this essay I’m assuming you’ve got yourself access to a nice pigment ink printer so that your prints will have a longevity measured in decades or centuries as opposed to weeks and months. I’m currently using an Epson R3000. It goes up to 13″ wide which is plenty for me and uses larger ink cartridges than the R2880.

The biggest question is what paper you’re going to use. Here are my thoughts.

SURFACES

Glossy
Glossy paper is very modern and in many ways best represents the true photograph. It’s got deep blacks ( and fully saturated colors. The problem is that it’s quite reflective and can sometimes be like looking at an iPad on the beach. I personally don’t use it much. Too shiny for my taste and somehow doesn’t have any character. It’s too clean.

Semi-Gloss
Also known as satin, pearl or luster; semi-gloss papers are coated like glossy papers are, but the surface isn’t smooth. Instead then typically have a textured, almost sandblasted finish which reduces the biggest problems of glossy. Imagine your average textured photo print from the 1970’s. That probably had a satin finish. This is my preferred paper, not only does it have a D-max almost as high as glossy so that blacks and colors pop, the finish also drastically lessens the reflective problem. Best of both worlds.

Matte
Matte papers are uncoated with a smooth finish. Think of them as a think piece of regular paper. A lot of people including my friend Jeffery love matte papers when printing black&white pictures. He says is reminds him of uncoated fiber papers from his darkroom days. I can see that, but when I print the same image on matte and satin and put the two next to each other, I almost always choose the satin. Blacks and color saturation on the uncoated papers are just to subdued to me. It’s like someone turned down the vibrance and pulled up the black level to 25.

‘Fine-Art’
I’ll admit, I don’t get so-called ‘fine-art’ papers. Typically they’re a more more rough, made from cotton rag, and often slightly tinted matte paper with more natural textures. I don’t like the idea that my paper is purposefully changing the image I’m printing on it. If I wanted texture I’ll do it in photoshop. Perhaps the argument is that buyers look at ‘fine-art’ paper and it looks more hand made or unique and therefore worth more money. I’m not sure, but it always looks hokey to me. Like it’s trying too hard.

WEIGHT

A paper’s weight typically denotes it’s thickness and in America is expressed in pounds. For example 68lb stock. Interestingly enough, this is derived from the weight of a ream (500 sheets) of uncut stock used during the manufacturing process.

How thick you like your paper is subjective, but I tend towards the middle. Too light and they’re easy to bend and crease, too tight and they’re hard to roll for shipment and flatten out afterwords. Medium thickness also works well in portfolio pages or stacks of prints for people to flip through.

LONGEVITY

Over the years, people have looked for ways to make paper a brighter color of white. So ‘white’ that they often have a blue tint to them. They do this by adding optical brighteners to the papers. It’s the same stuff they put in laundry detergents to make your clothes colors pop. For longevity sake you should try to use the less brightened paper as a general rule of thumb.

You should also look for acid-free papers if you’re anal about how long your images will be around. This usually limits you to matte and fine-art stock. A good matte paper and pigment inks and your prints will out last you by a long margin.

RECOMENDATIONS

Personally, 90% of the time I print with Red River Ultra Pro Satin. It’s got a great surface and D-max without the too many brighteners which make my eyes hurt. This is what I use to print images I sell. When I do print matte I go for their Polar Matte.

In the spirit of full disclosure, Red River Paper is a sponsor of the On Taking Pictures podcast but I’ve been using their products for years before any of that happened. They sell great paper and great prices. In fact, go to http://redriverpaper.com/otp and you’ll get a great deal on a sample pack and 10% off when you decide to order.

Now go take some images and make some prints that you can pass down to your children’s children.

Of course you could just plug the camera into the computer with the typically included USB cable, but traditionally that has been the less popular solution. Partly because often you’re using the camera with another card while the first card is being downloaded to the computer, but mostly because the USB interfaces on cameras (at least the Canon dSLRs I’ve used) have been pretty dreadfully slow. Even though they’ve been listed as USB2 for a number of years, you’re lucky if you get 8-10MB/s out of them.  This is just unacceptable when we’re talking about 16GB cards full of 500 images. Let’s face it, we don’t have all day. I’ve heard that the new Nikon D800 does USB3, but I haven’t found out if it’s any good. The growth of ethernet at the top end is also interesting, hopefully it’ll trickle down on the next revision.

And so, like many of you I’m sure, I’ve collected and shifted around from card reader to card reader over the years. My first serious reader was the Omniflash UNO! (lower left), I know it looks crappy, and it is in many ways, but for a while it was one of the only Ultra-DMA card readers available for anything approaching a reasonable price. The UDMA part means that it was reading pretty close to the maximum speed of USB2 around 30MB/s with the fastest cards. However the best part about these is that they were crazy cheap. And by cheap I mean like $6 each. So cheap that I used to buy them in multiples so I had spares when I broke them and could keep one in every bag. They were great.

However I ran out of good ones one day and didn’t have time to wait for a shipment from China, so in the meantime I went and picked up a new one at Calumet. In fact it’s their name branded PocketPro CF which I’ve been using for the past year or so and honestly it’s been trouble free. However it was over $20 and didn’t do anything the cheap ones didn’t do except last a bit long I guess.

With the purchase of my 5D Mark III and a really great sale at Best Buy one weekend, I switched from the 8GB SanDisk Extreme III CF cards I was using over to a couple 16GB SanDisk Extreme SD cards which top out at 45MB/s. Faster than USB2 can possibly go, and since I had built my nice new Hackintosh with USB3 built in I wanted to give it a go. So I picked up this cheap little IOGear USB3 SD card reader from Newegg. It looks like a USB flash drive to me, and it essentially is, only with a slot on the side that you pop a card into. It’s a little flimsy and I don’t really like the way the card sticks out of the side of it.  And for some strange reason, it wouldn’t let me write to the cards from my computer saying they were read-only. In fact, every card I tried said it was read-only. None of them had the write-protect switch flipped (though I tried them in all positions including the middle which some people online suggested), but still nothing.  I’ve got the reader built into the Macbook Air for travel situations so I’m not sure this thing will see much use going forward, but we’ll see.

So finally today I got delivered what I hope will be my one main reader for the foreseeable future. It’s a Kingston FCR-HS3 and as you can see in the picture above (upper right), it’s got a hole for just about everything, it’s USB3, and it just heavy enough so that I can have it towards the back edge of my desk under the monitor and it’ll stay out of the way without falling off. I did a little BlackMagic speed test and it read and wrote the SD cards at 42MB/s or better which is about what they’re rated at.  Looks like this will be the best of all worlds. I think the only thing I have a problem with at the moment is that the logo has a glaringly bright LED underneath which flashes during disk operations.  I’ll probably just cover over most of it with some gaffers tape. That should do the trick.

Last time we spoke a few weeks ago I had my new Hackintosh up and running, but only barely. The hardware was fine, but since Apple didn’t yet support the new chips and features it was a pale shell of the machine it wanted to be. Hacked kernel, no USB3, no power management. Basically, not quite ready for prime time.

Well on Monday, Apple announced their first Ivy Bridge based Macs in the form of the updated portable line. Theoretically, this included all the files the hackintosh community needed to finally get things working for me, but you couldn’t just grab the files off the drive of the new machines, apparently it doesn’t quite work that way. However at about midnight on Monday, Apple released a big 1GB update file for the new Macbook Pro Retina, which included new versions of all the necessary files.  You couldn’t just install the update, but people in the forums started pulling things like the new Mach Kernel and power management out and trying to install them to see what happened.

So I decided to throw caution to the wind and did some manual shenanigans to install Lion 10.7.4 with the latest Ivy supporting kernel and some other stuff and it worked well enough that I was about to write a little post giving my step-by-step process, gloating a little, and then recommending that you wait until the TonyMac guys get the final solutions out. Great plan, however while I’m writing, they did just that.

BridgeHelper 5 was just released and gives full ivy bridge support, with power management and USB3.  I plugged in my new USB3 drive dock and an ssd just to check and was getting 230MB/s reads (which is about the limit of the old Intel G2 drive I was using to test).

And perhaps best of all, the new machine sleeps and wakes up like baby, but without all the crying.  Seriously, it’s nuts fast.  Even booting from the Apple logo to login is about 5 seconds. I’m currently overclocking it to about 4GHz, but I’m going to shoot for a bit more as time goes by and I feel more comfortable with it.

The only little problem I’ve got at the moment is that one of my case fans is running at full speed though I’ve asked the EFI to slow it down.  I’ve got to look into that, but really, can I complain? Finally got my Ivy Hack up and running.  Moved my data drives over a few minutes ago. Let’s see how it feels in daily use.  More as I explore but follow me on twitter if you want to keep up, I’ll post and forward more there for little things.

Refreshed Airs and MacBook Pros
I’ll admit, I was worried early on in the show. The updates to all of the current laptop models (minus the 17″ MBP which seems to have been 86ed) was underwhelming.  Sure, they upgraded the CPUs to Ivy Bridge, which also gave them better GPU and USB3 for free as part of the package. The price on the 13″ Air came down a bit and you can get them with 8GB of RAM which is nice. Same story with the revised MBPs; Ivy Bridge, USB3, faster video card. All were ripe for update, so not a surprise in the joint.  If this is all they had to show, that would be a problem.

MacBook Pro with Retina Display
Apple luckily had a trick up their sleeve with the ‘new’ Macbook Pro with Retina Display.  There were rumors of a high-dpi macbook. In fact some of the rumors had them across the whole portable line, but apparently Apple is going to take this transition more slowly than some people would have liked.

15″ 2880×1800 screen is the big draw. That’s really high-res. Higher-res in fact than the 30″ NEC I use for my work. Big upgrade, huge. Apparently the screen is crazy thin as well. Overall thickness of the whole laptop is between the old Pros and the Air; so thin in fact that they had to replace the Magsafe connector with the new Magsafe 2 connector. Yes, I know there’s a $10 adapter, but come on, they couldn’t have had the thing be a couple millimeters taller and kept the single standard? YOUR standard? Whatever. That’s Apple being Apple.

2 Thunderbolts but no Ethernet or Firewire. A Pro laptop without an Ethernet port? Oh you can buy a dongle for $30. Great, how about you throw that in the box for free since I’m spending at least $2200 on this thing. Speaking of the price, it’s great as long as you stick with the low-end configuration. However, the second you move up to the faster CPU, which almost everyone who’s in the market for a machine like this is going to do, you’re looking at $2800.

So $2800 isn’t so bad, right? Well, I haven’t spent that much on a laptop since my original Titanium Powerbook, but we’ll put that aside. Apparently, one thing they don’t tell you is that the RAM is soldered onto the motherboard like on the Airs, so it’s not upgradeable. So make sure you get all the memory you need when you buy it. That upgrade is another $200. So now we’re at 3 grand before tax. And don’t forget AppleCare, because otherwise you get the whopping 1 year warranty on that non-upgradeable ‘Pro’ machine you just bought. If you go all in with CPU, RAM, SSD, and AppleCare you’re looking at $4100 pre tax. That’s a lot of bank.

Is it a nice machine? I’m sure it is great, it better be for that kind of coin. And it’s certainly got that screen which no one else at the moment can touch. I should really hold my tongue because I’m not a big fan of laptops overall. I think they’re fine, I’m writing this on a 13″ Air right now, but only because I tend to write better on the couch. For real work, I need a bunch of storage and a bigger screen than 15″, even if those 15 inches are a glorious pixel-packed masterpiece. I’ll admit that when I first heard the specs and saw the pictures I had a little tinge of lust, but then I looked at the pictures The Verge had put up and realized that it’s still just a laptop. Without a big expensive Thunderbolt array and maxed-out specs, it’s not enough to be my only machine, and it’s just a little too big for me to carry without grumbling.

For a photographer who is editing on the road all the time, I think it would be a great solution IF you’re willing to spend that kind of money. For me, it’s not worth it. I know of a couple of wedding shooters who have already placed their orders. Personally, I’m going to stick with my desktop, 32GB of RAM, 8TB of storage, and a big screen. Even if it’s not 221dpi, it’s fine for now.

Updated Mac Pro
Speaking of desktops, they silently updated the Mac Pro as well, though “update” is the extremely kind way of putting it. Basically, they bumped the bottom rung CPU up a notch and rejiggered some of the prices for the dual socket models. No SandyBridge-E Xeon, no USB 3, no Thunderbolt, and still a two year-old 5770 GPU. Honestly, you might as well not have updated it at all. Calling this machine the Mac Pro in 2012 is just embarrassing.

The high-dpi screen on the new laptop also makes the current Cinema Displays look pretty silly at 2560×1440. I’d expect an update to that, too.

Odds and Ends
What’s left? Well, there’s a new Airport Express for $99 which is now dual-band and looks like a white Apple TV. Speaking of which, we heard nothing about the Apple TV- whether the fabled display, an updated box, or an App Store. New iPad case which also covers the back of the device. This one is actually somewhat interesting to me, I’ve looked for a case for my iPad 3, but holding the smart cover on with magnets seemed far too flimsy.

Overall I give it an ‘eh’. Or rather, I gave it a ‘WOW look at that laptop!’ and then I came back to reality before they showed the price, you know, while they were showing the video of Jony Ive pontificating about how ‘nothing ever conceived in the minds of man has ever been this amazing’. Keep using that line, Sir Ive.

So here’s the original exported straight from Lightroom:

Then here’s the version Geoff sent me. High-contrast, high saturation, and very ‘fashion’ to my eye:

And finally, what I would have done with it if it were my picture. Not as drastic, closer to the original, but still trying to pull something more out of the RAW data by highlighting Mary a bit. In comparison, mine looks really boring and conservative.

I’m sure if we gave it to 10 photographers we’d get 10 varying versions of the image.  Just goes to show how much post-processing is part of the process.  We may have gotten rid of the chemicals, but you’re still not done when you press the shutter release.