Open Mike: Woodwork, Etc.

A.
It only snowed here Saturday overnight, and just a little, but they got 77 inches (that's not a typo) in Orchard Park, where the Bills play, in the Southtowns of "Nickel City." That's 86 miles from me as the crow flies. They say the only plane that left Buffalo Niagara International Airport on Friday was the one carrying the Bills to Detroit, where their game this weekend got relocated to. Ironically, climate change was implicated in the snowfall; conditions are ripe for lake effect snow because Lake Erie is unusually warm after our uncommonly warm October. I went out photographing on yesterday, my day off, but it's a funny thing—when it's 23°F (–5°C) and windy, suddenly there aren't any good photographs more than 30 paces from the car. I don't know where they all go, but there aren't any. 'S true.

B.

Just as a matter of aesthetic preference, do you like woodwork in houses? Just out of curiosity.

C.
Do you do this? I like to keep the same card in the camera across two, three, or even four stints or spells of photographing. That way, not only am I less attached in my mind to my hopes for any one day's shooting, but I have more to look at, and hence, more chances to find a few good ones. When I go out once, come back, can't resist downloading the card, and find I got nothing, it's discouraging. In those situations, I'll sometimes work on pictures I know in the back of my mind aren't really that good. Clinging to my false hopes. Wanting to have gotten something. When you review your work, it's better to be in a realistic frame of mind; and that's easier when you actually got a few.

Mike

The best card ($45 each)

Featured Comments:

Adam Isler: "I generally keep the card in my camera all week and shoot at least something almost every day, but have an extended shoot only once or twice a week. Then at the weekend I download the images from the chip to Lightroom, automatically organized into date folders, and work on Lightroom's 'most recent import.'"

Dogman: "I wanna see it now! I download immediately and give everything a look in Lightroom. If I like anything I immediately do whatever fiddling around I deem necessary, and delete the losers. The card goes back in the camera, is formatted again and is ready to go next time. SanDisks are the cards I use. I've yet to lose a photo due to card failure. My losses are due to photographer failure."

Grant: "The Buffalo storm is nothing new. The Queen city is pounded by big storms every few years. I recall storms in 2000, 2001 and 2006, that had the border with Canada closed numerous times. Toronto has sent snow clearing vehicles to Buffalo more than once. The nice folks in Buffalo have helped out Toronto a few times too.

"I lived for many years in a 1920s house with a staircase very similar to the one in the photo. There was a stained glass window at the stair landing. I liked it, except that it had a dark stain, which I guess was the style at the time. I would have refinished it to something lighter, but for the fact that all the woodwork in the house was in the same dark stain. Far more effort was required than what I wanted to do.

"A number of years ago I started using 64 GB cards. I have multiple cameras and I still shoot like I only have 36 exposures on the card. This allows me to go a long time without a care in the world. My blasé attitude has only caught up with me once. I recently got to a really nice location, carefully composed my shot, squeezed the shutter and got a message 'No memory card.' That's when I remembered that it was still in the card reader at home. Being a photographer with many years experience, I had a backup plan, a long walk back to the van to get the other camera.

"How ironic that when I got home and sat down to that day's installment of TOP, the lead story was about a photographer in the Finger Lakes who had had the same experience. Great minds think alike?"

Mike replies: I've now got one of these (it's light), with two spare cards in it, in the side pocket of the camera bag.  :-)  The pocket on the other side contains a spare battery.

Kent Wiley: "It's been nearly 20 years since the most recent of these photos was taken, but you might say I appreciate woodwork in homes, since I did most of the wood trim in these views. I had some help certainly, and wonder what these dwellings look like now. At the time, my carpentry skills were certainly better developed than my photography skills."

Mike replies: Wow, that's impressive! You are a master.

Kristine Hinrichs: "I shoot every day and download the files (11+ year 'Project 365'). Even after eleven years, I feel like it’s Christmas morning waiting to see what the images look like. I am so often surprised by the gift of an image that found me. Often enough I’m disappointed as well but I know there’s always tomorrow."

Mike replies: You packed a great deal of wisdom and truth about what it's like to be a photographer into very few words in that comment. Thanks for that.

scott kirkpatrick: "It has been attributed to Brett Weston and was apparently a family observation that the weight of a large field camera had the same effect on pictures that you see with sub-zero temperatures: They either come close to the car out of curiosity or run away."

Comments

[Mike Ferron]

Handsome stairway that is. Yes crazy weather around. All that snow up near you and after a very hot, disturbingly dry summer here in Austin we should be living the good life here as the rains returned and the temps cooled except they cooled too much! Highs this time of year should be near 70 and yesterday’s high was 38. The rest of November is projected to be cooler than normal was well. I moved south for a reason and chillly temps are not one of them!

[Albert Smith]

I shoot yearly events in my area that have very regular schedules. What I do is keep the cards filed away and the insert that same card in my camera for the next shoot. For example, at the Daytona speedway every year on Thanksgiving weekend they have an event where they fill the infield with literally thousands of the most perfectly maintained classic cars, just beautiful specimens. I put the same card in my camera year after year for this event. I shoot jpegs (thanks, Fujifilm!) and can now put on an impressive slide show on my large TV. I have several categories of this type of cumulative card use, and after buying film for decades I have no problem not formatting the cards to reuse.

[James Bullard]

A. It is true that colder temperatures mean fewer photos although my definition of 'cold' is different now than it will be in late January.

B. Woodwork? I assume you mean varnished rather than painted. The answer is, it depends on the style of the house. It suits art deco.

C. I download my photos to LR and reformat after almost every photo session. I don't keep photos on the card (I have one card per camera). It is partly a matter of archiving since I use both a harddrive and a NAS that is automatically backed up to another location. If I only had them on the card and anything happened to the card, they'd be lost.

[Keith Cartmell]

A.
That's crazy snow. We've had two big dumps this year, maybe not quite a foot each, here in Calgary. Maybe the photos here are a hardier breed, because there's lots of them around all over the place at -5C. At -40C, (or F) I admit, not so many. Maybe they hibernate.
B.
Depends. Some is nice. Too dark is depressing.
C.
SD card workflow. After an event or a big photo session, I'll take the card out and edit photos. Sometimes an event might be spread over several cards and I'm careful to edit in the order taken. Then the card goes back in the carrier and I'll clean off the oldest card and start using that. But day to day photography, like around the house or short walks, those SD cards might live in the camera for several days without processing. I rotate through about 18 SD cards (various sizes, various speeds), and as soon as one gives me a problem I'll get the photos off it, and throw it away. As a general rule, I don't like to edit too many photos at once. I start getting sloppy, applying the same edits (the Lightroom previous button) to photos that are part of a sequence in the same light.

[robert e]

I'll even use the same card across different cameras. Aside from quantity/quality issues, I feel that I'm a better editor if I have some distance from my thoughts and emotions of the moment (they were important enough to remember, I'll remember them) and a different session with with different tools is a quick way to gain such distance.

I like woodwork in houses, but it depends on the house, and the woodwork. I do not like seeing thoughtlessly painted-over woodwork--that just makes me want to start scraping.

It was this blog that informed me that climate change experts predicted longer springs and autumns for our part of the world. Now it reminds me that change is change and everything is connected, and a pleasantly long and balmy autumn can have devastating consequences.

[Dave]

C. I never take my cards out of the camera bodies - I offload images via USB and never worry about if there is a card in the camera for the next shoot... I also tend to offload and process the same day...

[William Lewis]

I buy these: SanDisk 16GB Class 4 SDHC Flash Memory Card - 2 Pack SDSDB2L-016G-B35 Retail Package for ~$14 ( https://amzn.to/3GABUI3 )

I keep one in whichever camera I am using, download to the computer after every photography session, and, once the photos are on my computer, I reformat the card again in whichever camera I'm using it in. The other one is kept in the camera bag for when (not if, when) the current one dies. Then I use the spare and buy two more. Rinse, repeat ;-)

My other favorite storage media is Ilford XP2 in 120 format, but that's another story! :LOL:

[darlene]

A. The area around the Great Lakes can get crazy snow! After my mom remarried, she lived in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I remember how happy she was when she told me of the beautiful T-Bird my stepdad gifted her. The next time I visited, it was winter, and all I saw was a huge pile of snow in the driveway and walls of snow up to the roof of the house. Shortly after that, I went ice fishing with my stepdad. I felt bad when the fish I caught flopped a few times on the frozen lake and then became frozen stiff. I told my stepdad I would rather go home and look for the T-Bird. He said I might like smelt-dipping more.

B. My dream house is a log cabin in the woods.

C. After I shoot, my card is uploaded. If nothing pleases me at first glance, I get to work.

[Rusty]

Check the price on that best card with SAVINGS of $45 ea.

[The price is for three of them! So, $45 each. Not too bad.

It really depends on whether your camera can benefit from UHS-II cards. These are UHS-II cards. If you have a camera that uses UHS-I cards, then you can save more money by buying the same card but for UHS-I:

https://tinyurl.com/3x6ccwk5

--Mike]

[DavidB]

A. One of my favorite winter photos was taken at a temperature of -15°F (-26°C) but there was no wind and it was only a few steps from the front door of my work place. We threw boiling water into the air -- doesn't everyone do this when it's cold? -- and photographed the result. We repeated it several times because we were easily amused.

This was in northern Arizona -- not to be confused with the deserts of central and southern Arizona.

https://www.dblanchard.net/blog/2013/01/science-experiments-with-boiling-water-on-a-cold-day/

[Mike Marcus]

Yes, love seeing the wood grain in houses and in furniture too. I grew up with lots of wood grain and I love to take photos in the woods and on mountainsides.

Whenever I get home with the camera I tend to download the photos into LRc, maybe just to remind me of what I saw. You know, as a vintage-aged guy, I sometimes need reminding. :-)

When I travel, I most often download every day's travel photos into LRc on my laptop to have a backup during travel, while I also keep all photos from the trip on the card in the camera. There they stay until I can export all of the trip's laptop photos from LRc onto my desktop and have these also backed up to an external drive or two. So far, no card failures or photos lost with this approach.

[Patrick Dodds]

That wood looks mighty orange... maybe some occasional calibration might not be a bad thing after all ;)
A quick (!) follow up question to your earlier printing / colourspace post: if the person who took the photo of the stairway calibrated their monitor, posted the photo, then after perhaps several iterations (re-postings of tweaked pictures) got it to look how they wanted, and then I calibrated my monitor and stumbled upon their stairs, would the stairway look exactly the same to both of us? Or would we both have to print out the image to get the same look?

[It would probably look pretty close. There are always variables. --Mike]

[Stan B.]

I download immediately, if I think I have something worthwhile. The problem is, I sometimes tend to edit and release in the initial excitement. The next day, I see obvious areas that I missed or need more attention- sender's remorse. Sometimes that process can last days, weeks... years.

[Joe]

You don't review your shots for a few days? Mike! That was your opportunity to remind everyone how Winogrand worked.

[Frank Field]

Absolutely love the warmth that woodwork brings to a home’s interior. From what’s visible in this image, it looks like the woodwork was originally much darker and has been bleached to this much more pleasing, warmer stain that brings out the wood’s grain rather than hiding it as a dark stain does.

[Marshall Smith]

I've always liked woodwork, in my younger days I worked in a cabinet shop that did a lot of this stuff; fancy wainscots, bookcases, etc. Most of it was for rich East KY coal millionaires, before coal went bust around here.
A meme came up on my FB recently that made me laugh, having a daughter who was obsessed with horses, and had a big collection of the Breyer models. Almost as bad as how some people collect cameras! She got a kick out of this meme:

https://www.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/k1zf2o/the_client_always_knows_best/

I've also burned myself with the "no card in camera" mistake and now one of the first setup menu items for me is to disable the option to shoot without a card!

[Moose]

It appears that, once again, I'm odd man out.

We recently returned from six weeks in NYC, Boston area and Maine. I came back with 2600+ frames on the E-M1 II and 5600+ on the OM-1.* Using 128 GB cards, I never had to go to a second card. One 90% full, the other 56%.

With 64 GB cards in the second slot in both bodies, I never had to worry about running out of space.

This was wonderfully freeing. I've got a lot of 32 GB cards from years ago, 64 GB, from more recently,
and I say juggling them on long, photographically rich trips was a pain.

Being a belt and two pair of suspenders guy, I download any big day's files that night onto my portable, then copy to a portable HD, which is kept separately from cameras and computer. There are three copies of every file.

The only photos I've ever lost were on a card I somehow lost n the field, before downloading. I remember putting it in a zipper pocket, so it's probably not buried in mud out in the boonies of Bhutan. Swept up by a cleaner in the hotel in Trashigang?

That's not going to happen again, with larger cards and two slot bodies.

* Not that many photos. Focus bracketing and hand held HR use multiple files for one shot and Oly's ProCapture racks up lots of frames for a keeper or two. Fortunately, bit buckets never fill up.

— addendum to my last, about calibration. I do carry a WhiBal card in my wallet. A lot of strange lighting out there. \;~)>

[Moose]

Why is that Sandisk card the best?

Lexar eq., with identical specs is $8 cheaper. I've used lots of Sony, Sandisk, Lexar and Delkin cards. I may have had one, secondary brand fail ages ago, in the days of 4 or 8 GB cards? Nothing since.

I've been using mostly Lexars for the last few years, and they've been perfect.

"These are UHS-II cards. If you have a camera that uses UHS-I cards, then you can save more money by buying the same card but for UHS-I"

Well, maybe, assuming one doesn't find that the next body supports UHS-II, and does things that work better with faster cards.

Also, for folks like me, who download most every night of a day with photos, a II card in a fast reader takes ages less time to download.

[Speed]

Download ASAP. If others are dependent on the images, even sooner.

Once downloaded they are automatically backed up offsite. One or two fewer things to go wrong.

[John Shriver]

B. Love woodwork in houses, stained and finished, not painted. Only four rooms in my house have stained woodwork with shellac finish, although the kitchen was that way originally as well. But almost every door is stained/shellacked on the interior, except for the back door and the coat closet. Something like 25 out of 27 doors...

[Kenneth G Voigt]

B: I had a realization a few years ago. I feel most relaxed, most stress-free, most "at home" in a house with a lot of natural wood; most of all in a log home.

[Thomas Mc Cann]

its not the card snafu that catches me, I have twin slots. its when I go out without a spare battery

[Robert Roaldi]

Some wood accents are good, wood panelling on walls is too dark.

I leave the card in camera and download via USB, it's fast enough. I do initial culls but don't process till later, sometimes days, sometimes weeks, with additional culls along the way. Sometimes, I try to save losers, but only as an exercise in post-processing because I tend to forget all that is available in the software and working on photos that don't make it is a good way to refresh my memory about all the tools.

I don't shoot for a living so I rarely take so many photos that I need to worry about extra cards, but I always have some jic.

[Tom Duffy]

Years ago, following a major snowstorm in the Buffalo area, there was a cartoon on the editorial page of our newspaper. It pictured a large Air Force plane with the caption, “Meanwhile in upstate New York, the search for Buffalo continues.”
The nicest woodwork that I remember was in the interior of the Fordham University in the Bronx. The library was used for some shots in the film “The Exorcist”.

[robert e]

Re Moose's comments:

Obviously, you can buy the same type of card from another brand, out of preference or to save a few bucks. As Mike says, you can also buy a cheaper, lower-spec card if your camera can't take advantage of the higher speed (or, I'd add, if you'd rather (or must) give up some speed to save money). On the other hand, as Moose points out, you may want a faster card than your camera needs because your card reader is capable of taking advantage of it, for the sake of faster downloads.

On using higher-capacity cards: Flash memory wears out, eventually. I believe manufacturers recommend replacing them after 5-10 years, depending on how hard you use them. Cards do wear-leveling, i.e. they try to spread out the wear evenly across the whole capacity of the card. Given that, I wonder if buying larger cards than one needs might buy a bit of extra reliability? (Maybe that's futile, though, if mechanical stress from handling is an issue.)

[Mark Sampson]

Born and raised in nearby Rochester, I know lake-effect snow. Too well! But that recent one must set a record, even for Buffalo.

I like that woodwork; for a moment I thought it was the house of some good friends. But that photograph is seriously over-lit.

Since I come from large-format film, I shoot carefully, and delete in-camera before uploading. it's just my way.

[Dave]

Mike; Lotsa food for some good comments!

Living around the Akron, Ohio area, we're well familiar with lake effect snow. Luckily, we're far enough south that we don't generally get too much snow. Close enough to Lake Erie to enjoy the larger beaches during the summertime, though.

Real wood features (and furniture) do make a home "home-ier". How was such woodwork fairly common 50 to 70 years ago, without increasing the cost of the home two to three times? After wood veneers became the rage, real woodwork became a luxury, it seems. Even TV sets had the warmth of wood cabinets, rather than bland plastic.

My camera takes UHS-I cards, so I'm lucky with the lower cost of the cards, but unlucky in the slower write speeds. I don't shoot sports, so the slower speed doesn't matter. I'm not sure how fast the computer's card interface is. (It finishes copying when it's done. No sense in staring at the computer while it works.) My camera has two card slots, so they're filled with 64GB cards and I have two spare cards in the camera bag and in the battery grip. (Pentax thinks of everything.) I copy the photos to the directory matching the year, then separate the Jpegs from the RAW photos and store them in a "Jpegs" folder. The folders have a month and day code in the name, but I won't have a duplicate as long as I use a different year folder for that year's sets of "month and day" folders. (I hope that makes sense. It looks like a real butcher job to me.)

If I neglect to back up the files, it's a bit of a pain to keep everything straight because of the way the folders are named. I've been known to re-copy everything in that year's folder and overwrite the files on the backup, then go do something else while it runs. :>)