The Online Photographer

Funny...Or Something

This is kind of funny, but for some reason nobody pays any attention to the "Recommended This Week" product link on the right-hand side of the page. In the dozen or so weeks I've been putting them up, I think maybe twenty people have actually ordered one of the books. (Granted, the link goes to Amazon U.S., and many of our readers are in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia. But still.)

In a recent comment, Ken T. even wrote:

That Katrin Eismann book is, in my opinion, the finest book of its kind (on 'digital darkroom' techniques) I've ever seen. It's a relatively timeless work that I highly recommend. Katrin is an excellent educator.

While I'm recommending such books I have to also highly recommend Leslie Alsheimer's Black and White in Photoshop CS3 and Photoshop Lightroom (Focal Press). (Mike, please provide the TOP amazon link for this book if possible.) It's superb, too.

At the time, I'd just taken down the product link for Leslie Alsheimer's book from the "Recommended This Week" slot, where it had been for six days.

Actually, that one didn't do too badly—five people ordered one.

It's especially invisible when you can't even see what the book's about. This week's title, for instance—American Horizons—is about the work of Art Sinsabaugh, subject of the recent PBS documentary that many of you might have seen (I missed it the first time it was on, although I'm scouring the listings for a rerun. Naturally I've known Art Sinsabaugh's work for years—decades, actually).

Anyway, I should probably just delete that little feature. Or else call attention to them in posts like this one. I dunno. Anyway, check it out once in a while, if you remember.

-                   Your friendly quasi-local virtual bookstore proprietor,

-                                                                                             —Mike

NOTE: Amazon is "temporarily out of stock" of American Horizons, as of 9 p.m.

UPDATE by Ken Tanaka: For those planning a visit to Monterey, California (or looking for a good excuse to take a trip to this wonderful area) "American Horizons" is making its final showing at the Monterey Museum of Art until September 7th. It's absolutely worth seeing. This is very genuine photography mostly captured with a big ol' banquet camera, free of steroids, artificial sweeteners or preservatives, created by a goggles-on, certifiable OCD-suffering, chain-smoking photomaniac. (No, the Museum isn't compensating me for promotion.)

The Storage Dilemma

I've always welcomed comments on this site, and sometimes the comments, collectively, are better than the original post, but I seldom simply toss up a subject and open the floor to other speakers, depending on commenters to provide the information and interest. But I think I'll try that now. The occasion is a question from an "old pro," Scott S., that I can't answer:

I read your site regularly and enjoy it immensely. I have been a pro for 25 years, working mostly for non-profits.

I am faced with a storage issue. I have strung together pairs of hard drives (6 sets totaling about 7 TB to date) that serve well for short-term storage. What do most people do for a long-term solution? I have heard so many options, I am just confused. Do you know a site or link that may help?

What about this? What does the future of archiving look like for digital images? The archiving of prints, slides, negatives, and other traditional media, a sub-specialty of paper conservation, has a well-established science and standardized practices. But what can you do now, or what do we need to achieve in the near future, for long-term, permanent archiving of our digital media?

Does anyone know what actual archiving institutions are doing? Is anyone aware of the state of standard practices among conservators?

______________________

Mike

Featured Comment by Craig Norris: "This subject has been actively on my agenda for the past ten years, ever since it became my responsibility to work on the problem for TV stations (my other career outside photography). Video production typically consumes up to 70 gigabytes for every hour of high definition video that is recorded in some form of compressed file. Even with low-end video formats like HDV, using much deeper degrees of compression, it still requires something in the order of 11GB for each hour of recorded material.

"In still photography the size of our problem is some order of magnitudes smaller in terms of absolute data storage consumed, but the requirement to faithfully preserve the data indefinitely is no less important and no less difficult.

"To get straight to the question posed by Scott, I can pass on the fact that TV stations today are already using or looking to use LTO data tapes as the main digital bulk storage medium. The current version called LTO-4 has a native capacity of 800GB per tape cartridge.

"Linear data tape cartridges aren't good for day-to-day random access, so the common practice is to keep the active material on RAID hard disk arrays, and to back it up regularly to LTO-4 tape, which is usually housed in robotic auto-changing libraries containing hundreds or even thousands of tape cartridges. Next year will see the introduction of LTO-5 tape, with double the capacity of LTO-4.

"The above-mentioned solution being adopted by TV stations isn't economically viable for the average photographer, except for the fact that a standalone LTO-4 tape drive can be used to back-up the multi-terabyte hard disk storage attached to one's workstation.

"According to my latest research on behalf of TV stations, and in the quest to solve my own data storage problem at my studio, blu-ray disc is emerging as a practical data storage medium. With the new dual-layer version offering 50GB of capacity per disc, and an estimated data shelf life in the order of twenty years, blu-ray disc is likely to be the next data archival medium that I implement for my digital photo archives.

"Supporting my comments above is the observation I made a few days ago when I was hired to photograph the NBC Universal Olympics facilities in Beijing. I saw NBC recording a very large proportion of the Games broadcast on Sony's XDCAM HD format discs, a close cousin of the Blu-ray data disc."

Featured Comment by Stephen Barnes: "Information Management is my day job, and the one thing I'll say is that it's just as confusing for the professional archivists as it is for the photographers.

"I've worked with the National Archives for Scotland, Public Records Office for Northern Ireland, and The National Archives in England, and none of them have any consistent method or approach.

"The first problem is archive longevity. Any images we needed to send to them were put onto MAM-E [MAM-A in America] Gold DVD disks which have an estimated 200 year retention period. I personally use Kodak Professional Archival DVDs. All images are then copied onto a SAN which retains multiple copies of each file on-line. Finally, this SAN is backed up to tape. We therefore have three different technologies on which images are retained.

"If a technology looks like it is going to be superceded, we transfer all data to the new medium as soon as possible, to make sure we have the ability to read the data. Old technologies (eg. floppy disks, even VHS!) are archived along with a number of working devices. (There's no point in archiving something if you don't know if you'll have a device in the future!)

"The same is true for formats. While it doesn't look like JPG/TIFF are going to go away we would convert to alternative formats (PNG, PDF, DNG etc) to minimise risk.

"What this all means is that for sensitive and historically important information we have up to four copies of the same data on each of three media. That's 12 copies of our images.

"But the professional archivists have a preferred media for long term preservation—silver halide prints."

Featured Comment by David A. Goldfarb: "If one wants to preserve images for the ages and not rely on data transfer, I agree that the solution is to make the best archival prints one can make and store them according to the accepted archival practices for paper media. An important principle of archiving is that a long-term archive should be 'human readable' if possible.

"I met a historian once who had responsibility for the archive of an important figure in U.S. foreign policy. He had an office full of 8" floppies, the original computer used to produce them, and a huge IBM printer the size of a coffee table that could print files from this computer. Sometimes that's what it takes to preserve something worth preserving in digital form. I suspect by now, if he hasn't migrated the data digitally, he's probably printed it all, and scanned and/or microfilmed it."

Featured Comment by Charlie H: "Personally, I am all about the photo-album. Last night we pulled out a few clunker sized albums of my wife's trip to China twenty years ago. Pics looked great, the kids were all over it. We haven't so much as lifted a finger preserving this archive. Barring a fire, they should be around for a good while and that's enough for me. Long live the photo album."

Mike replies: Charlie, you stole my thunder. I'm writing a column now making the case for the lowly album as a surprisingly good alternative for some people and some purposes. It's interesting to say the least. And it feeds into what Gordon says below, too.

Featured Comment by Gordon Lewis: "I don't mean this to sound gloomy, but if you look at the history of the world as we know it, nothing lasts forever, at least not in its original form. The best we can hope for is that our work outlasts us. Once we're gone and it's in someone else's hands, who knows? They may value it and want to preserve it; then again, they may not—and this assumes they know where it is and want to go to the trouble of examining it.

"A previous poster mentioned that there are short-term and long-term dimensions to storage. I would add that there are commercial and non-commercial dimensions as well. You can't sell what you can't find or can't read, so there's a strong financial imperative to preserving your work. Family and personal photos, though non-commercial in intent, could be invaluable to the owner, yet it's amazing how little time, money and effort the average person puts into preserving them.

"For my own part, I've decided that instead of simply preserving the photos I've taken of family and friends, I'm going to print them and distribute them as albums; to spread the wealth, so to speak. It's possible they'll last longer or at least be better appreciated if they're distributed rather than hoarded.

"I'm not lecturing anyone else, mind you; just sharing a few reflections. The way I'd summarize my feeling is this: Save your work as best you can, but also remember who you're saving it for and make them a part of the process; otherwise, your preservation efforts may end when you do."

Happy Henri's Birthday

Today is the centennial of Henri Cartier-Bresson's birth. The great Frenchman. I think I'll celebrate by taking down my copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson Photographer, putting on some Bill Evans in the other room, and paging through the book at great leisure, lingering on every picture and letting my mind wander. If I drank I would add a glass of wine!

___________________

Mike

(P.S. Before I went to look for it just now I have to admit I had no idea that this book was still in print. Learn something new every day!)

Pentax 35mm DA Macro...Tokina Variant?

Tokina and Pentax have collaborated on several lenses, apparently with Tokina taking the lead on several of the projects. And there is a Tokina 35mm ƒ/2.8 Macro lens—the AT-X M35 Pro DX Macro—for Canon and Nikon only (what that means is, no Pentax) with the same specification as the Pentax 35mm DA Macro.

As you can see, the published block diagrams for the two are very similar:

(Pentax above, Tokina below)

...And although the diagrams aren't identical (there are subtle differences in several places, especially in the cemented 3-4 doublet) the similarities certainly indicate some sort of sharing of ideas at some stage. People tend to assume similar designs are "identical" if they're close, and this can be a mistake—a cross-section only shows partial information, and very subtle differences can be quite significant. The above looks like more than coincidence, however.

I received a strongly-worded message from my contacts at Pentax yesterday stating in no uncertain terms that the 35mm DA Macro is purely Pentax's design and manufacture, from concept to market—that is, the project was 100% Pentax.

The Tokina lens certainly looks different!

Despite the disavowals of any direct connection in this case, the cross-sections are close enough that if I shot Canon or Nikon and wanted a very high-quality normal fixed macro, I'd put the Tokina very high on my short list to try. It may not be the same lens, probably more like a cousin than a twin, but hey, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck....

___________________

Mike

Exp. 1991

Reader Tyler Monson saw this bin of expired Kodachrome in a thrift store today. Had to take a snap of it—with his digital camera, of course.

______________________

Mike (Thanks to Tyler)

P.S. If anybody writes a comment that contains the words "who cares," I ain't gonna publish it. To know Kodachrome was to love the stuff!

Stuff We Can Buy

On photography websites we're forever going on about what we can't buy— "wishful thinking" cameras, future technologies, rumors of coming products, capabilities we need but don't have. Think about it. Every now and then it's probably healthy to reflect on what we can buy, and to remember how recently we couldn't. Things have gotten much better for us in a relatively short time, after all.

Got any other good examples? Here are a few that came to my mind (I could add some more, but I'm tired):

Kingston 32GB SDHC flash memory—Remember when the first 1GB IBM Microdrive came out? And that it was a miniaturized hard drive the size of a CF card (i.e., roughly three times the size of this) and cost "only" $500? And how amazing that seemed at the time?

Canon Rebel XS and EF-S 18–55mm IS lens—Remember back in 2003 when the Digital Rebel, the first true "Volkskamera," came out? With "crippled" firmware and a whopping six megapixels, lapping the then-still-recent D30? And how, if you bought it without a lens, it actually cost less than a thousand dollars (for the first time ever)? And how people back then snarfed 'em up by the bushel if not the boatload?

Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3—Well, okay, you can't quite buy this yet. But do you remember when "one megapixel" was an awesome concept, and blew away your friend's 320,000-pixel "digital-electronic camera"?

Leica M8—Remember when everybody was fervently hoping against hope that one day this would exist?

Canon EF 400mm ƒ/2.8L IS USM lens—Remember Canon's very first IS lens, for its film cameras (it's still available), and how you passed it around to all your friends so they could could see, and how you marveled over just how in the world they did that?

Nikon AF-S Nikkor 24–70mm ƒ/2.8G ED—Remember when zooms just weren't as good as primes?

Leica 35mm Summicron-M ASPH—Remember when Leica had only one highly skilled craftsman who could make aspheric elements? And how the value of every $5,500 35mm Summilux Aspherical Type 1, with its hand-ground and -polished aspheric element, went up immediately after it left the manufacturer?

Gitzo Series 0 Mountaineer Carbon Fiber Tripod—Remember when lightweight tripods had legs made of aluminum tubing?

Flashpoint F-1128—Remember when carbon-fiber tripods were expensive?

Remember when everybody, but everybody, wore one of these when they were working? (Oops, sorry, delete that—they still do.)

The Creative Digital Darkroom by Katrin Eismann and Seán Duggan—Remember when a "darkroom" really was a dark room?

Mac Mini—Remember how much you paid for your first Macintosh? (For me it was $2,500 for a machine with half a MB of memory.)

Epson Stylus Photo 1400—Remember when Epson was a new name on the scene that only a few people had heard of, and its Stylus Photo started making people realize that maybe inkjet was a viable medium for printing photographs after all? But you couldn't print on glossy paper and the ink dyes started fading after only a few years?

Canon iPF 5100 17"-wide, 12-ink pigment printer—Remember when the Epson 2000p came out—the very first consumer pigment inkjet printer? And how it was "wide-format" at 13" and "photo quality" because it had six inks instead of four? And remember that nasty metamerism?

Remember the first time you ever clicked on the address bar of a web browser, and how amazing it was that all that information came up so fast? Even if you'd now think it was pretty slow? And now you come here to The Online Photographer nearly every day, and don't think anything of it at all.

________________________

Mike

Featured Comment from Jon Bloom: "1 TB hard drives. The first hard drive I ever owned was a whopping 10 MB in size—a bit too small to hold one RAW image from a modern camera."

Mike replies: Good one, Jon. (Hope you don't mind the link I chose.) My brother and I frequently remember one of his "big" early purchases—a 20MB  external hard drive about the size of a volume of an encyclopedia that cost $800.

Featured Comment by David A. Goldfarb: "Remember the technological marvel that greats like Richard Avedon used to make timeless images? You can still buy it—."

Featured Comment by Tom: "A comment on the original Digital Rebel. It was crippled, but a hard-working Russian hacker who went by the name Wasia hacked the firmware. All of a sudden I had FEC on my dReb. I was so elated that I posted it on my web site. My web traffic at that time was almost entirely my mother. But my one post mentioning that hacked firmware went over 5 digits worth of views. So my top 5 posts by views were like 3 views, 3 views, 4 views, 10 views (<—a cat photo) and 25,000 views. For that many people to be interested in loading some unknown Russian's hacked firmware on to their $1000 dReb is a pretty good indication of just how well it sold."

Two Updates

Update 1: "Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the F.S.A./O.W.I. Photographers" on PBS last night. I thought the hour-long show was good, if necessarily superficial, serving as a primer on the FSA Photography Unit rather than an in-depth exploration of it. It's a decent introduction, though. It had some nice interviews, especially with Gordon Parks (who was hard to understand in places), Louise Rosskam, and F. Jack Hurley, whose book Portrait of a Decade is one of the best ones written about the FSA. The music was a bit heavy, like too much cologne; and, as is all too common with photography documentaries, the pictures were shortchanged: they showed a decent number (again in the context of a short overview of a show), but the camera work inexplicably cropped in on most if not all of the pictures, even when it obviously weakened them to do so, and the tonal properties sucked—even granted that video is never the best way to see photographs, still, it looked like a lot of the pictures were shot straight from middling-quality book illustrations.

The biggest strength of the show—its focus on the political and bureaucratic aspects of the unit—was also its biggest weakness, as it cast those issues too much in terms of today's politics. The implicit "socialism vs. capitalism" theme of the documentary is really incidental to the photographic story. The filmmakers could just as easily have cast Stryker's battles as bureaucratic rather than ideological ones, and concentrated more on his relationships with his photographers.

Still, entertaining to watch, and recommended, albeit not urgently.

(As a side-note, Portrait of a Decade could usefully be re-issued by some upstanding publisher—its reproductions were of barely adequate quality even in 1972, and the meat of the scholarly text remains excellent.)

Update 2: I promised a few days ago I'd look for my Duane Michals book, and I found it covered with dust (gak!) on a bottom shelf. It is The Essential Duane Michals, by Marco Livingston, Bulfinch 1997. After perusing it a couple of times I think it lives up to its title. It covers Michals' entire career, even including a decent indication of his magazine work. The bookmaking and reproductions are first-rate. It includes some of Michals' writing, and the commentary seems good. The design is especially good, flexible and dynamic yet never shortchanging the pictures. There are a few double-trucks but none really ruinous.

Moreover, all the big hits (well, that come to my mind, anyway) are here: Chance Meeting, Things Are Queer, I Build a Pyramid, The Illuminated Man, The Spirit Leaves the Body, a decent selection of portraits including the one of Joseph Cornell, and of course This Photograph is My Proof. Even Michals' cover for the Police album Synchronicity. The incidental homoeroticism that has seemed to increasingly preoccupy Michals the artist in his later years (I can't escape the sense that he just likes having his models around, although that sounds snarky) is present in about the right proportion, meaning, not overpoweringly.

Very naturally, I like to have more books by the photographers who are most important to me. I have many titles by people like Kertész, Cartier-Bresson, Koudelka, Friedlander, and Levitt. But I like to have good overviews of major figures too, and sometimes these can be harder to find, since a single book needs to stand in for a whole career. The Essential Duane Michals does a good job of doing this, better than most, and is an easy recommendation as a first or only title by this photographer.

Mine's been dusted good as new, and more carefully shelved.

_______________________

Mike

Daddy and the New Hat

No special reason for this, I just thought I'd give my little brother a surprise when he opens my blog this morning. Taken with the K20D and 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro.

______________________

Mike

Just Published! Pentax 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro Limited Review

Carl Weese and I have co-written a review of the new Pentax 35mm ƒ/2.8 DA Macro Limited lens that has just been published over at Photo.net.

If you'd actually like to buy this lovely device, please link from here so we can rake in the profits. I'll go mad I'll be so awash in money. I'll buy a sailboat. O what heaven the sea....

Er, sorry. Got carried away there for a moment. Still, I'll be very pleased on the off chance that somebody buys one as the result of the article. Here are the links:

Pentax 35mm DA Macro Limited at Amazon.com

Pentax 35mm DA Macro Limited at B&H Photo

Pentax 35mm DA Macro Limited at Adorama

Hope you enjoy the article.

_____________________

Mike

ADDENDUM: I don't want to be guilty of too much soft-pedaling here. Cross my heart I'm not saying this to try to push lenses. But to be fair and accurate, I should say straight out that if you own a Pentax K10D or K20D and don't buy this lens sooner or later, you're depriving yourself. No one who shoots Pentax digital in any serious way would ever regret buying this lens. It really is a treat. I'd recommend it even if you don't normally care for primes, even if you seldom shoot macro, and even if the focal length and speed aren't quite an exact fit. Its virtues go way beyond extreme sharpness. It will be the best lens you own, the best match for your very best technique, and, soon enough, your best results with it will make you forget what it once cost. If you're in the system, you need it. Even if you don't need it you need it. Very highly recommended.  —MJ

Featured Comment by Mark E: "Mike, My Pentax FA 31 F1.8 Ltd is pretty freakin' sharp, too. It is, of course, huge compared to the smaller DA* lenses. Any opinion regarding its sharpness compared to the DA 35 Ltd?"

Carl replies: Mark, the 31mm is a fine lens and is an excellent performer on the Pentax K10/20D, especially considering it was originally designed for film, not digital capture. Lens performance encompasses a lot more than just sharpness (as Mike and I go on at length about in the article). Overall performance of the 31mm is excellent, while overall performance of the 35mm Macro on a K20D is literally in a league of its own.

Mike adds: My experience with the 31mm is limited (er, sorry), having used it for only a short time when I was a guest speaker at Grandfather Mountain. But I'd add to what Carl says that it is not quite an even-up comparison: the 31mm is wider (by 4mm), faster (by slightly more than a stop), and covers more (full-frame as opposed to reduced sensor size). All these factors make it subtly more difficult to design for top performance (and more useful as an all-around lens). As with the Zeiss I mentioned in the review, the 31mm is a very fine lens I'd probably have no trouble living with, but it's like a NASCAR car against an Indy racer—head to head there's no doubt which would come out on top.

Watch Alert—PBS Show About FSA Tonight

I'm usually a little leery about recommending PBS TV shows about photography and photographers, since I have no reliable way of determining which shows are new and which are reruns. Usually, if I recommend something, ten people will write and tell me they saw it two years ago. (For instance, there's a show airing in my market about Art Sinsabaugh that I really want to see [or did I miss that already?]. Is that one new or old? Don't know.)

But I think "Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the F.S.A./O.W.I. Photographers," airing tonight on PBS, is a new one. I haven't seen it, but whether you're already familiar with the FSA (I'm very familiar with it, having leafed through the entire collection in Washington, D.C., a project which took me many visits over several weeks) or not, I recommend setting aside the time to watch the program. What with the inherent interest of the subject and the general excellence of PBS documentaries, I don't see how you could lose. I'll be watching, for sure.

Check your local listings.

_______________________

Mike

P.S. And incidentally, the best book about the FSA, long out of print and quite rare, is a thing called A Vision Shared by Hank O'Neal, still available on the used market for surprisingly little money. A gorgeous book and well worth having (and thanks again to Andy Moursund, who sold me my copy).

Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Great stuff; I'll be watching for sure. There's a fascinating new book on Dorothea Lange (Daring to Look by Anne Whiston Spirn) that includes images familiar and less so, as well as long selections from Lange's field notes. The notes document what she was thinking and explicitly describe what she was trying to get into her photographs. I might have a review coming on this one."

Featured Comment by Jason: "May I also recommend Bound for Glory: America in Color."

Featured Comment by Tyler Monson: "Take a look at Dust Bowl Descent by Bill Ganzel (U. of Nebr. Press, 1984). The author tracked down people and locations made memorable in FSA photographs, told a little of what had happened to them, and made some excellent photographs as they are now. The Amazon listing for this book has a nice description in the customer review section."

Open Mike (OT): Beijing Zowie

Sometimes I think I just see things backwards from the way most other people see them. I've been trying to get into the hubbub over Michael Phelps, with less than perfect success; my basic take is, the guy's a freak and swims better than anyone else, so he wins whenever he races. Why that makes his contests more interesting to most people rather than less so is something of a mystery to me.

I admit I don't understand swimming. Despite truly endless rounds of serial torture that lasted throughout my childhood—my parents called them "swimming lessons," and persisted with them interminably, cheerfully ignoring the obvious evidence of ineducability that was right in front of their eyes from the start—if you threw a bucketfull of water at my head you could come close to killing me. I used to say that I'd drown in the shower if I didn't pay attention. So maybe it's not Michael Phelps who's freakish, in my view—maybe it's just that swimming is.

Who knows why people find certain kinds of contests boring and others thrilling...?

READ ON: See "Usain Bolt's Olympics" at the link

____________________

Mike

PLEASE NOTE: I appear to have made a presentation error, for which I apologize. The two paragraphs and one sentence above are merely the beginning of a longer essay that continues at the link, put here as a "teaser" so readers can get an idea whether they'd like to continue reading or not. I'm convinced that some people are leaving comments without reading the whole essay. Before leaving an inflamed or wounded or angry comment, please read the whole essay. It is not intended to be synopsized unto perfection within the above excerpt.

I am closing the comments below, but they remain open under the entire essay, which, again, you will find at the link. Thank you.

Colors

Here's another "keeper" from the fishing trip just past. Essentially the same scene as the panoramic below, but at the other end of a day. I don't know about this one. All those...colors just fluster me. I just can't quite get used to photographing all those colors. There are at least half a dozen distinct colors just in the water.

In case anyone's heard me say that I'm really not a landscape (seascape? Lakescape?) photographer, I should mention that both of these are really just personal snapshots. I've been going to this place all my life, and the line of that opposing shore is as familiar to me as my own name.

_________________________

Mike

'Micro Four Thirds' Abbreviation

Not that either company cares what I think, but I'll just say again I think it's very shortsighted (if not downright foolish) of Olympus and Panasonic not to have designated a preemptive official abbreviation for "Micro Four Thirds" right from the get-go. After having read our readers' many thoughtful suggestions, I'm going to go with "m4/3" on this site.

As regular readers might remember, I tried to establish "mm-e" among various photography webmasters as a common abbreviation for "35mm equivalent." I got several long replies explaining why 35mm-equivalent focal lengths was not a valid concept and why they weren't going to go along, in several cases from individuals who then went right ahead using the concept on their websites, but continuing to write it out in long, ponderous English.

Years before that, I tried to peg "digital photography" as the ugly bastard term it is, and to suggest that "photography" should be reserved for traditional optical/chemical photography (with its "straight" products being called photographs) and that digital-electronic methods should be called "digital imaging" (and its products "digital images"). Anyone who reads about photography today knows how far that duck flew. So I've given up trying to influence the standardizing of photographic terminology. I'll write "Micro Four Thirds" as "m4/3" at least until the rough consensus of conventional usage overrules me, at which point I'll switch over and do whatever everybody else is doing.

_____________________

Mike

G9 History?

Several large retailers are listing the Canon G9 as "out of stock" and at least one prospective buyer we know has been told that the camera has been "discontinued" and is NLA (no longer available). If this is true and not just a temporary supply disruption (which, n.b., it could be), then it portends a G9 replacement at Photokina.

In other rumors, specs for two alleged Olympus M4/3 (Micro Four-Thirds) cameras have appeared on the Chasseurs d'Images forums in France.

I'm getting psyched about Photokina. Still, please take both these rumors with an appropriate chunk of salt.

_____________________

Mike  (Thanks to Scott Parsons and Dwight Jones)

P.S. Photokina is the World's largest photo trade show, held every two years at Koelnmesse in Koeln or Köln (in English, Cologne), Germany. This year it takes place from September 23rd through the 28th.

Featured Comment by Gordon Buck: "Canon offers a Software Development Kit (SDK)to certified developers for their Powershot cameras, including the G series. In April, Canon notified those developers that the next SDK would be the last one. In the same notice, Canon said that new G and S models would be available in the fall. The notice is vague enough that there is some uncertainty as to whether the SDK program is ending or whether the Powershot series is coming to an end. The SDK notice, plus a notice last year about Canon's new CMOS factory for small sensors, has many people very excited about the new 'G10' which will probably be announced in a few weeks."

Camera Dreams

Do you ever dream about photography? I have to confess I sometimes dream about shooting. Last night I dreamed I had a camera that shot both digital and film. After shooting a lot of digital, I switched to film, and suddenly the light got magical and there were lots of mysteriously cool people about, and I got a lot of promising shots. Then I had to rewind the film using a fiddly plastic control wheel as on a DSLR, which took a long time, and then when I opened the back—no film inside. I woke up thinking I blew it again.

Whew—you don't have to be Sigmund Freud to deconstruct that one!

_____________________

Mike

Random Excellence: Miroslav Tichý

The subject of Miroslav Tichý is so large and replete with ramifications that I almost don't know where to begin; I'm beset by the feeling that he's a transcendent primitive, photography's William Blake.

The artist’s tireless capturing of his immediate environment seems like an attempt to get a grip on a reality from which he has withdrawn and that is now rejecting him in return. In allusion to Plato’s cave allegory, he regards the world as mere reflection and himself as its only conscious observer. (M1M)

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Miroslav Tichý with two of his homemade cameras

Should the path fascinate, here's a start:

M1M

Geoff Dyer at The Guardian

Texts at tichyocean.ch

Exhibition 1

Book

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Mike (Thanks to Kathleen and others)

Photographer Kicker Coda

A faithful reader from Colorado writes to tell T.O.P. that "Douglas Bruce, unrepentant photographer kicker, failed to win his party's endorsement in Tuesday's primary election, and will not be the Republican candidate for the seat he currently occupies in the Colorado State House of Representatives."

Just as well—we photographers get kicked around enough as it is.

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Mike  (Thanks to R.W. Bloomer)

It Really Is That Simple

George Krause, Don Donaghy, 1991

Mark Power over at The Salt Mine has posted a thoughtful eulogy for the late Don Donaghy, with a number of rare pictures and a few good links.

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Mike

Migration Route

By Ctein

About a month back Hitachi released a 320 GB 7200 RPM laptop drive. The new drive offered me 60% more space (the difference between having a mostly-full hard drive and a half-full drive) plus modestly better throughput and lower power consumption. What's not to like?

Well, the migration path! Here it is:

1. Run my normal incremental backup of the 200GB drive to my external back-up hard drive using Retrospect Express. I like it 'cause it does a real file-by-file verification.

(Now the laptop has to go completely off-line or I'll lose data coherency.)

2. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the 200 GB drive to my external drive. Belt and suspenders, because from this point I'm working without a net.

3. Boot up from the external drive. (Y'all make your external backup drive bootable, right?) Secure-erase and reformat the 200 GB drive, because I'm going to sell it.

4. Open up the Macbook Pro, swap in the new 320 GB drive, and close up the box.

5. Boot up from the external drive and partition and format the 320 GB drive.

6. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the former contents of the 200 GB drive to the 320 GB drive.

7. If all has gone well, the 320 GB drive boots like it's supposed to, and I can bring the laptop back online.

It's time consuming and a little nerve-racking.

Just about the time I was getting ready to order the 320 GB drive, Other World Computing offered me a Newer Tech Universal Drive Adapter. The $30 UDA connects any standard or laptop sized IDE/ATA/SATA bare-bones drive to a USB2 port. The Universal Drive Adapter includes a power supply and all the data and power connectors needed to operate an internal hard drive externally.

Left: Here's the Universal Drive Adapter, aglow with power and data. There's nothing fancy about it, but there doesn't have to be to do the job.

Other World Computing also sent me a couple of their $10 ProtectaDrive silicone rubber sleeves, designed to protect a bare-bones drive from shock, electricity, and static discharge. Nice!

Suddenly, life was a lot simpler. I took my machine off-line, hooked up the new 320 GB drive via the UDA, rebooted from my external drive and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the 200 GB drive directly to the 320 GB drive.

This is the setup I used to migrate the contents of my laptop's internal drive to the new drive. On the left is the power supply for the bare-bones 320 GB drive, next to it the drive in a ProtectaDrive sleeve, and connecting that to the Macbook Pro's USB2 port is the Universal Drive Adapter. On the right is my bootable backup drive, plugged into the laptop's FireWire 800 port.

I set the 320 GB drive to be the new startup disk, leaving it attached to the UDA (Intel Macs can boot off of USB drives). Rebooting the system confirmed that the 320 GB drive was operational and bootable. Then I opened up the machine and swapped hard drives, closed everything up, and brought the system back online.

It's a lot less complicated than the old scheme. Plus, I can hang onto my 200 GB drive with data intact for long enough to be sure that the new drive is happy. Once I'm confident of the new drive's reliability, I'll hook up the 200 GB drive with the UDA, scrub it, and sell it.

Overnight scrub
The Universal Drive Adapter worked perfectly. Of course, it only works at USB speeds and on most computers those are pretty bad; on this Macbook Pro it's a paltry 18 MB/sec, which means it takes several hours to migrate all the data. Overnight's a good time. It'll take a very long time to do a secure scrub of the old drive, but it won't take my attention or require shutting down the system.

Two design issues:

• The short SATA cable included has the wrong connector orientation on one end, so you have to put a half twist in that very stiff cable to have both the drive and the UDA right side up.

• The plugs on the SATA power and data connectors are about half a millimeter too wide; you can't fit them onto the closely spaced connectors on the hard drive without forcing things a lot more than I'm comfortable with. Fortunately the connector housings are soft plastic and a minute's work with a hobby knife trimmed the width enough so they fit on with no trouble. Hopefully Other World Computing will see fit to redesign the SATA cables in the next product run to eliminate both of these problems.

All in all, a cost/time-effective solution to migrating data from one drive to another. Hurrah, OWC!

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Ctein

Great Printer Deal...If

Adorama is currently offering a super deal on the Epson R1900 13" (wide carriage) pigment ink printer. Normally hovering around the $500 mark, for a limited time you can get one for just $350.

Who is this printer for? The R1900 is well built and easy to use and produces outstanding results with its built-in profiles, but has small ink cartridges and doesn't do particularly well with B&W. So this is a good choice for a photographer who wants the luxury of being able to print large with high image quality on occasion, doesn't want to sink a lot of money into photo printing, prints exclusively or overwhelmingly in color, and only makes a few prints a week (or fewer). If that describes you, check it out.

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Mike