Roger Ebert, in a recent post, You can draw, and probably better than I can.
What you draw is an invaluable and unique representation of how you saw at that moment in that place according to your abilities. That’s all we want. We already know what a dog really looks like.
So I dug out a pencil and sketchbook at started up again.
I’m pretty bad, but at least I’m doing it. And soon I’ll have a picture of Jessica that no one else in the world could make.
My mom is going to have a conniption when she sees what I’ve just done to my living room. She has very specific ideas about what a living room should be. There should be a television (large as will reasonably fit) with accompanying entertainment center in a prominent position. A sofa with either a love seat or side chair organized around a nice coffee table would be good. Put a big mirror on one wall and scatter enough knick knacks about so that nothing looks “empty.”
That’s not what I’ve done.
For starters, there’s no longer a television. That’s right, I’m now officially one of those people. In its place I put my turntable. The reduction in cabling is astonishing.
At the other end of the room I added a simple writing desk and chair. Again, almost no cables.
I’d prefer a nicer chair and some sort of interesting lamp, but this’ll work. Who knows, I may hate the whole idea in a week, but for now I have nice, minimal place to write or draw and listen to music. And now there’s no chance I’ll “accidentally” just sit and watch T.V. all night.
And for reading, there’s the recliner. I think I’m all set.
Who knows, maybe my mom will grow to like it. Eventually.
Keep on a-rockin’ me baby.
NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 released, on the Mac App Store:
NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 is a new free version of NetNewsWire for Macintosh, available now on the Mac App Store.
I’ve been a loyal user of NetNewsWire for a very long time. Only recently have RSS readers like Reeder and NewsRack lured me away from NNW. My heart lifted when I saw that NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 was available in the App Store, but then sank again when I saw that it doesn’t sync with Google Reader. I use 3 different Macs and syncing is critical.
Then I remembered Dropbox.
I moved ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire Lite/ into ~/Dropbox and symlinked it instead. Something like…
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Sync/NetNewsWire\ Lite/ \
~/Library/Application\ Support/NetNewsWire\ Lite
There, synced. And it’s nice.
I’ve never listened to Helmet outside of occasionally hearing one of their songs on the radio. This is not my favorite.
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Tinderbox. I’m always finding some new trick or useful feature. Today, I discovered “$NameStrike.”
Crossing out words on paper is not only satisfying, it serves a purpose. For me, it means “I’m done with this” or sometimes “This is no longer valid.” Not long ago, Eastgate added a Strikethrough format to note text. That may seem trivial, but I use it all the time. It may not be as enjoyable as the pen and paper version, but still.
What I didn’t know is that I could also strike out a note’s name in map views. I manage projects using Tinderbox and discovering the $NameStrike attribute was immediately useful. As an example, here is what a new project map looks like…
See those notes in the Tasks area? Those are based on the built-in “Task” prototype. However, the built-in prototype doesn’t do anything fancy with the text, so I added the following Rule:
if($Checked==true){$NameStrike=true}else{$NameStrike=false}
Like so…
This Rule then applies to every note that is based on the Task prototype. If the “$Checked” attribute of a note is true (checked), the note’s name in the map is displayed nicely crossed out. Now all of my completed tasks instantly and automatically look completed. And I’m happy.
I just don’t get on well with color film photography. Getting color right is hard. There are so many pieces to getting a good color image that I’m considering giving up on it altogether.
The first and most enjoyable color film over the past 70 years has been Kodachrome. Transparency film in general is fun and vivid and interesting, but only Kodachrome looks like Kodachrome. And now it’s gone. Same for Polaroid. Same for my long favorite Kodak Portra NC. And so on. With the fun emulsions disappearing, so is my interest in color film photography
Minilabs are disappearing faster than film stocks. The quality of the few that remain is so hit and miss that it’s generally better to ship color film off to a pro lab. Pro labs like Dwayne’s or North Coast or any number of others do a great, consistent job. The problem is cost and timing. If I wanted to see my photos right this second I’d shoot digital, but waiting 10 days or more is not something I enjoy. Figure in the cost of shipping and it gets expensive pretty quickly. If I were more patient and cost was no object, I’d ship everything to a pro lab and have them do high resolution scans for me. Processing black and white film at home is so easy I can’t figure why more people don’t do it. To be fair, color processing doesn’t look terribly difficult, but I haven’t been motivated enough to try it.
Speaking of scanning. Scanning sucks generally, but scanning color film sucks hardest. None of the software is anything but horrible to use. This makes getting consistently decent scans impossible. I’m sure others have figured it out, but I’m never happy with my results. Between iT8 targets, color profiles, and horrible software, I’ll take a pass. Scanning black and white negatives is more a matter of watching shadows and highlights. That I can usually manage.
Inkjet printers are damn good these days. Getting good color out of them is still too hard. I don’t want to spend time calibrating monitors or finding custom RIPs or buying ridiculously over-priced inks. Even if I get it right, it’s still a computer-generated image on inkjet paper. I’m old-fashioned and a real wet print made with light and chemicals, by hand, is much more interesting. Color printing in the darkroom isn’t worth the trouble to me.
Aside from the above, I rarely find that color adds much to most images. Unless the image is about color, I say leave it out.
Photos from digital cameras contain all sorts of interesting information embedded directly in the files. Information such as camera used, aperture, shutter speed, etc. are all kept in the file’s EXIF fields.
We film shooters aren’t so lucky. The only useful information in a scanned image is the date it was created and maybe the scanner used. Not that useful. When shooting film, I don’t bother recording lens or exposure information so that data is unavailable. One thing I do keep track of is which camera I was using at the time. It would be nice if this could be kept as part of each scanned image. I could of course use IPTC keywords instead, and that works, but sites like Flickr handle the EXIF info differently.
EXIF data isn’t really meant to be edited, but there are tools available that will force the issue. I use ExifTool. From the site…
ExifTool is a platform-independent Perl library plus a command-line application for reading, writing and editing meta information in a wide variety of files.
ExifTool can do approximately 42,470 different things, but I only need one: Embed the camera Make and Model into the file. Here’s how I use ExifTool to do that.
In a terminal window, cd into a directory containing images to modify. Then type…
$ exiftool '-Make=Hasselblad' '-Model=500C/M' -overwrite_original .
That’s it. Note that the dot at the end of that command means it will process every file in the current directory and it overwrites the original file with the modified version. Be careful!
When I subsequently upload the files to Flickr, it’s easy to tell which camera was used, because it’s shown in the same place as files from all the cool digital kids.
I keep a text file handy with variations of the above for each of my cameras so I can quickly copy and paste the command.
A great benefit of digital photography is that the original files can easily be duplicated and are therefore safe from catastrophe. That’s the claim, and for the most part it’s true. The flaw is that if digital files are not managed well, they’re quite fragile. In many tedious film vs. digital debates, film nuts claim that a negative will never be destroyed by a failed hard drive and the digital zealots claim they can make as many copies as they want, so there!
Both groups are wrong, or at least overly optimistic. Film negatives die in fires and and digital files are frequently left to die on fragile drives. I’m mostly in the film camp. Prints and negatives in a shoe box will be viewable indefinitely with no further interaction or requirements other than the box and some light. Many digital files are going to be lost because they’re not backed up or the computer is thrown away or otherwise lost. Digital files don’t survive inaction. It’s the inaction part that puts your photos at risk.
I shoot primarily on film, so I should have original negatives of all my photos for a very long time. Just put them in a binder and I’m done. I also scan every frame so I have an easily shareable digital copy. Film storage is easy and pretty foolproof. Digital file storage on the other hand only appears foolproof, so here’s what this fool does.
Film scans and digital photos are ingested simultaneously to my primary (internal) drive and an attached Drobo. Then, everything is copied nightly using Chronosync to an external drive. A second external drive serves as a Time Machine backup. This means each and every photo is in at least 4 places at all times…
You’d think I’d be covered with the above process, but it neglects to take into account the natural disaster problem. Everything above is contained in a single room. I have a fire and Poof! it’s all gone. That’s why every 6 months I make a complete backup of everything on yet another hard drive and move it offsite. I’ve only been doing this for a year, but the plan is to rotate drives so that I have a complete archive on drives in two offsite locations. It would be tragic if my house burned down and I then found that my single offsite backup was faulty. In the photo above, you can see a docked drive being filled with my photo libraries as I write this. The dock has eSata and USB interfaces. I just have to make sure to remember to copy everything forward before either of those formats are phased out.
I’m a little old-fashoned. I don’t trust the cloud. As part of a backup strategy it’s great, but not as the only method. Besides, it’s horribly slow. I upload most “keeper” shots to galleries out at Zenfolio but this is more for sharing than for backup. Many folks swear by cloud storage, and it’s certainly better than nothing.
So, what’s your backup plan? You’ve got one, right? If not, get one.
It’s been interesting
