What do you do with your old photos?

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Philosophy

This question comes up a lot and with my recent backup array issue, it came up again.  In most cases your older photos aren’t the most spectacular photos you ever produced.  I dare say 90-95% of them you could easily label as garbage… but they are your garbage.  A couple of months ago some of Ansel Adams’ early negatives were found at a garage sale and have been reported to be worth over 200 million.  I doubt that’s truly the case since a lot of Ansel’s magic was in the darkroom creating the print.  It’s his early work, and wasn’t worth anything to him while he was alive, but it’s worth something to someone else now.  The same holds true for your photos, they will be worth something to someone in the future.

I know how devastating it is to lose a lot of photos, with a previous girlfriend going psycho on me and selling my camera equipment and burning all my photos and negatives.  So I have little to show from my film days.  This has made me paranoid in the digital age so I have backups of backups.

A little perspective

As a casual photographer in the earlier years of digital.  My Olympus cameras D360 and D40 spanned 7 years of usage.  In that time I produced 12,488 photos for a whopping total of 11GB worth of space with those cameras.  I had gotten a DSLR a while before they were retired, but I still used them for family and fun photos since they were convenient. Now, when I do a day of shooting I often produce 12-20GB of images.  Yes it’s much fewer files that are much larger, but if you look at it from an image mass point of view, 11GB is not a lot.

Organization

A long time ago I decided to store all my photos by date.  So today’s folder would be 20100902.  I do have several folders I put these in, so any work for my business goes in it’s own folder, artistic photography, family, and specialty projects all have their own top level folders so I can easily find them without the need for an image management program. I’ll also append a name or description of the folder so it’s not just a date but a date and a name.  This way if the new image manipulation killer app comes out tomorrow, I can easily add my library with little fear.

I know it’s now time for me to embarrass myself.  Since I posted my first digital photo, I’ll post a photo from my last day of shooting with my Olympus D40.   It happened to be at the circus.

Whatever happened to those cameras?  My Son and daughter got ahold of them and continued to use them for about 2 more years before they go so inoperable the became the subject of “I wonder what’s inside of one of these things” dismantling experiments.  Now my 4-year-old son uses my first DSLR.

Bottom line

There’s no real reason not to keep old photos.  I dare say in a couple of years you’ll be able to easily carry around your entire photo library, much like I can easily carry around my 7 years of using those two Olympus point and shot camera photos on 16GB flash drive with room to spare.

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Lens Correction and Manhattan Skyline

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Processing

Since I got the request to do my same lens correction test for a panorama, but with a cityscape, I asked Mark Schaffer of Knowsphotos if he had a few RAW files I could process.  He’s a far more traveled and accomplished landscape photographer.  You should check out his site, he posts images rather regularly.  The only thing is he uses a Nikon, but I won’t hold that against him.   ;-)   Just to be clear the original RAW files are his, and I processed them (including color correction) the same way I would have for any panorama.  So this is about as close to an equal comparison as the skyline pano I performed the same test on last week.

Yes, I know I didn’t crop the image.  I just want you to see what comes out of the pano stitching.

From this size you cant really see much difference.  And even putting the photos on top of each other at 100% shows that they are very close even along the edges.  Below is a small section of the pano at 100% where the images are in a difference mode so you can see the… differences.

As you can see there is not a lot of difference between the two images.  So one can conclude that with this lens, lens correction will not make a large difference when stitching panoramas.  I would hazard to guess that this would be true of 99% of  you panoramas, because the way the panoramas are stitched, the least distorted area of your lens is used for the bulk of the stitched image.  If you have any distortion, it’s generally along the edges of the picture, and you normally crop that out anyway.

So now you know and can spend some time at Knowsphotos to see some of Marks Landscape and Architectural photography.

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And How about HDRtist?

Posted by Philip in Follow-up

If you don’t know if HDR is for you and want to try your hand (or photography) at it, you have the option of of your choice of various 30 day trials for plugins and software.  But if you are like me, sometimes you get distracted and those trials run out or you may not have the time to really vest yourself into a new technology.  So a free program for HDR photography like HDRtist by Ohanaware may be what you are looking for.  It’s simple… really simple.  Drop the photos on the app and you have a single strength slider to control the look.  It appears that it’s more than just exposure blending, so you can make your HDR anywhere from bland to really punchy.  But if you want something funky, you’ll have to blend images from different scenes.

Here’s where you come in: Give HDRtist a try and tell me what you think.  I’m not affiliated with them in any way, just curious if you think a single slider bar is enough, even for freeware.

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And how about HDR Expose

Posted by Philip in Follow-up

I got a comment about another HDR application by Unified Color entitled HDR Expose.  And after only testing it on one set of images, I must say I don’t like it yet.  It took it nearly 20 minutes to  merge the 3 RAW images when both Photomatix and CS5 only took a couple of minutes on the same machine.  I know that one data point isn’t a good reason to completely denounce them.  So I’m not.  The proof is in the image.  After all if the image is that much better, then the extra processing time is worth it.  But I found the image to be noisy.  Fortunately they have their own noise reduction algorithm which seems to work rather well.

So after my one image test I can say there’s nothing really endearing me to HDR Expose yet.  But I’m going to have to test it on a lot more images.  It could be my computer got hit by a stray cosmic ray and caused it to process really slow.  And my ignorance of their interface is also a problem.  I’m going to give it a fair shake over the month and see if it performs better than I originally tested.  Below is the same image processed through HDR Expose.

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Split Printing

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Processing

Print big on a budget.

My photography tip this week was to print big.  Printing big allows you to really show off the detail of your work and nothing says wow like a large photo.  But what if you don’t have a large format printer and don’t have the funds for doing big prints? This is a great way to printing large sample images with out the large print cost.  Split the image up and piece it back together.  I’m not suggesting that you try to line up the edges of sections of the photo, but if you take the image above and add a design element like below you can easily line up some white areas of your image.  There’s nothing to match up other than corners.

In this example, the upper right corner could be the largest print one could make on their letter sized printer.  You don’t have to have the breaks being as wide as shown here. But make the spacing wide enough so it looks like you meant it. As an added tip, you can take a section and add a different photo to make it be more than a inexpensive way of doing a large print.  It becomes a signature print.  The possibilities aren’t endless, but pretty close.

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Cleaning tips

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Philosophy

I started to get some questions about what products to use to clean various parts of your camera.  I’ll break it down as simply as possible.

Outside of the camera – I use lens cleaner.  Just about any of them will be good.  They don’t leave any sort of film.

Lens – Lens cleaner most of the time.  The most important thing is to use a lint free cloth, but in a pinch a puff of hot breath will do juste fine for the outer lens.

Inside of  the camera – The most I do is use a blower to knock out any lose dust and debris.  No brushes or cleaners.  Don’t want to remove any oils that could be important to the operation of your camera.

The sensor – Use something like a sensor brush if it looks like you have more dest on the sensor.  This is a dry method and will handle 95% of your spots. Otherwise you’ll have to get the special swabs and liquids.  Go to http://www.visibledust.com/ for products and instructions based on your camera/sensor size.

Finally, send your camera body in for a cleaning on a regular basis.  Probably every 50,000-100,000 photos.  If you change lenses often you may have to do it more often.  For most professional photographers, that’s once a year.  For casual photographers, that can be once every three years.

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