Musings on Photography

Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day will fall on April 27 this year.

Learn about it here.

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See what people have done on Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day in previous years here.

Be there. Aloha.

At one point I owned a huge assortment of Canon lenses for their 35mm EOS slr system. I had a lot of fixed focal length lenses, but they all got traded in for a two lens lineup quite a while ago - the two lenses were the now dated 28-70mm f/2.8L and the 70-200mm f/2.8L. Those two zooms are big and heavy but weighed about the same as the complement of fixed focal length lenses I had.

Only one fixed focal length lens didn’t get traded in - the 100mm f/2.8 Macro. I’m not talking about the USM version, I’m talking about the old, creaky slow focusing version. When it focuses it makes a loud whining grinding noise, but I don’t care. It’s one of the sharpest lenses for a 35mm camera I’ve ever owned, but that’s not the reason it got kept. It got kept because it turned out that wide open (or nearly so) I felt like it gave near distance images a great ‘look’.

I’ve been doing a lot of close working distance, wide open photography these last few weeks. I try to get the camera out a couple of times a day, and just wander around doing something I think of as ’scales’. Mostly this seems to have been taking intimate semi-abstract photos of all the plants near my home waking up for spring. I’ve got the 24-105mm f/4.0L and the 70-200mm f/2.8L, as well as the older 28-70. But for this stuff, the lens that works best is that old, noisy 100mm macro.

I’ve come awfully close to trading it in, several times with the idea that I’d update to the newer USM version. But apparently the optical design has changed, and I worry that I’d trade away the feature that I care most about - that smooth transition from ‘in focus’ to ‘out of focus’ and the way things that are out of focus still read as ‘leaves’ or ‘branches’ even though they’re quite blurry.

I guess I will have to rearrange the bag I carry all the Canon gear in, to make room for my ancient 100mm f/2.8 Macro to ride along all the time. It’s fun to rediscover how much I like this lens all over again.

Ok, having now attempted some night photography, allow me to make two observations that seem obvious in retrospect:

• At night, it is dark. This makes it hard to see your camera and other gear.
• At night, it is colder. In the winter, especially when the sky is clear, this means it will be darn cold outside.

Now, these two observations, combined, led me to the inescapable conclusion that I might well want to set up the camera, set it all going, and then go inside where it’s warm and light, and leave the camera outside merrily doing its thing in the dark. The question then becomes “How do we arrange for the camera to stay busy while we are away?”

Enter the Canon TC-80N3, which Canon calls a Timer Remote Controller. It will happily instruct my EOS-5d to perform exposure gymnastics, including delay to the first exposure, intervals between exposure, hold the shutter open for long exposures (if the camera is set to ‘B’), and making a certain number of exposures. It’s cunningly designed, actually, to do all of these things at once.

So I can set the thing to make 99 exposures, each exposure 15 minutes long, with two minute delays between exposures, and start the first exposure in 30 seconds. Then I start it off, walk away, and hope the wind doesn’t blow my camera and tripod over. Or, perhaps, I go and set up the other camera. Whatever.

I got this thing last Friday, and although it’s pricey, I like the way it’s designed such that simple programming allows it to be so flexible. There’s a manual but once you get the general concept, you’re good to go, and you needn’t worry that you’re going to be trying to read the manual in the cold and dark using the little LED flashlight on your keyring. And, in fact, the LCD display has a backlight, so you can use it in the dark.

Other than the price, there’s only one flaw in the ointment, and here it is: when you’ve programmed the thing, you need to press the ’start/stop’ button to start the sequence. A naive photographer might think that that big round grey button with the slide lock is the ’start/stop’ button, but the naive photographer would be wrong, wrong, wrong. That big grey button with the sliding lock is actually an auxiliary shutter button, which lets you use the TC-80N3 as a simple cable release, much like its much cheaper brother the RS-80N3. The ’start/stop’ button is actually a little recessed button (see photo above, button between the ‘mode’ button and the backlight button).

And the odds of you being able to hit the ‘mode’ button, the ’start/stop’ button, and the backlight button while wearing gloves and in the dark are exactly zero. At this point, see the observations at the beginning of this post.

I don’t know why camera manufacturers insist on making gear that is really outstandingly good but suffers from A Fatal Flaw in real world use. But it really irritates me. I very much suspect that cameras would be much better designed if the designer of the gear was told (before designing anything) that they would be forced to use the gear to actually achieve the functionality goal in a real world situation under trying circumstances (e.g. cold stiff hands wearing gloves in the dark) and that if they failed to get it to work, they would be taken off and locked into a closet with 25,000 agitated, angry and hungry rabid weasels.

Ok, not so much higher nor stronger. Just faster.

I’m talking about the Lexar Professional UDMA Dual-Slot USB reader. I finally got one in my hands, and it’s much faster than the old Lexar USB CF reader I had. No, I haven’t done timings, but it’s clearly much faster even with the older 80x CF cards I’m using. It would probably be faster still with the newer, 300x UDMA cards that are now available. (Yes, I suppose I’ll buy some 300x cards.)

These new cards and the new UDMA readers are such a step forward in speed that if you are regularly filling up some of these big 4GB or 8GB cards, it’s worth the cost to upgrade. It turns it from a ’start up the copy, go away and read a book’ into ’start up the copy, make a cup of tea, and the copy is done before you sit down to drink.’ That’s not a big deal if you’re dealing with cards on a once a week basis but if you’re traveling or on a photo expedition and your days are already packed pretty tightly, it’s a huge benefit.

Why didn’t I get a firewire reader? Because I wanted one reader that would read both CF cards (which go in the EOS-5d) and SDHC cards (which go in the G9).

The photo above is the Mac Mini based fileserver described in this post. The square white thing under the disk drive to the right is a bit of styrofoam packing material I stuck under the disk drive because the vibrations of the disk drive were making the countertop resonate and filling the room with a loud hum. The big off-white thing to the left is a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) that can run the server for about fifty minutes from the battery. (I could probably have gotten by with a smaller UPS; it only has to keep the server alive for the 30 seconds before our backup generator kicks in. If the power is out for more than about 40 seconds it means the generator failed to start, so the server is actually configured to shut down gracefully after three minutes on battery.)

Several folks have asked what I do for offsite backups. Since I just ordered new gear to revise my offsite backup scheme and make it easier to keep up, I’ll detail the new scheme.

What I bought were two one terabyte Western Digital MyBook external disk drives. Western Digital offers a confusing array of Mybook models which vary in case color, shape of the status lights, and a minor change in case dimension, all of which are of little importance to me. They also differ in the format of the filesystem the disk ships with; I always reformat a disk before using it (after reading about disk drives shipping from factories pre-infected with viruses), so that part doesn’t matter to me either. And finally, the important variation - the variety of interfaces the external disk can support. Nearly every combination of USB 2.0, Firewire (aka IEEE 1394a), Firewire 800 (aka IEEE 1394b), and eSata is offered. In general I choose the disk model with the largest number of interface options, to preserve my choices into the future. This most recent purchase, though, I bought the MyBook Home Edition, which gives me USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and eSata, but not Firewire 800. That’s because a) the Mac Mini doesn’t have Firewire 800, and b) I was able to exploit a price break.

So here’s my basic plan:

1. To start, I copy everything onto one of these disk drives. I then give this disk to my friend Bryan, who generously stores it in his house.
2. Then, once a month or so, I take the disk I still have, copy everything onto it, and exchange it for the one at Bryan’s house. The new disk goes back to Bryan’s place, and the one that had been at Bryan’s comes home, to be used the next time around.

This way, if some calamity results in the loss of every copy of data stored on the redundant servers at my home, I can go, get the disk from Bryan, copy it off that (now very precious) disk, and I’m up and running without any data loss. What sort of calamity might cause me to lose everything? The two big risks are probably a fire (my home was threatened by a forest fire just a few days after we moved in), or a burglary where the burglars are very thorough and make off with ALL the disks that comprise my redundant system of servers and workstations.

You can reduce the risk even further, by having multiple offsite copies. You don’t need to add two disks for every offsite copy. If you want N offsite copies, you’re fine with N+1 disks; you stagger the replacement and so you only need one extra disk beyond the disks stored offsite.

Finally, the reason why I don’t have one disk for each offsite backup, and go and get the disk, write a fresh backup onto it, and then replace it offsite - that’s because I know that what will happen is I’ll retrieve the disk, then it will sit around for a while before I remember to write a fresh copy, and then more time will elapse before I remember to put it back at the offsite location. In the end, if I do this, the offsite disk is actually offsite a small fraction of the time - and thus doesn’t offer any increased protection.

I’ve looked into doing offsite backup on a offsite server, transferring the data via my internet connection. Since I pay for the bandwidth I use, this ends up being an expensive option for me.

A final note: in the past, my offsite backups were written by the FreeBSD server, and thus used the native filesystem for FreeBSD. This caused me some anxiety (I can’t read those disks on any other of my computers) and some moderate amount of hassle. In the future the offsite backups will be written by the Mac Mini, and will be in the Mac native filesystem (HFS+) so that I can just plug the disk into any Mac and get at the data. This is one more reason for shifting away from the FreeBSD server. And although in theory you can plug a USB disk into the ReadyNAS NV+ and write a backup to it, I’ve never been able to get that to work. Beyond the fact that I had the keyboard, mouse, and monitor, it’s another reason why the Mac Mini based server system isn’t headless - having a keyboard, screen, and mouse makes it easy to do things like write the offsite backups when needed.

I’ve mentioned my mass storage solution previously, in this post. In that post, I indicated that the Freebsd fileserver was aging, and that I’d bought an Infrant Readynas NV+, and filled it with 320GB disks in a RAID configuration, and it was providing a redundant file server.

Well, it turned out that that plan didn’t go quite as smoothly as I hoped. Infrant, the company that was selling the Readynas line, was bought up by Netgear. There have been a few reliability issues with the Readynas NV+, but the big problem hasn’t been reliability, it’s been performance. Performance from a machine using the ReadyNAS as a file server was slower than the Freebsd server. The difference in performance was enough that instead of doing what I’d planned, and making the Readynas the main fileserver, and having the Freebsd machine serve as a backup/hot spare to the Readynas, I ended up keeping the Freebsd machine as the frontline server, and the Readynas was kept in sync with the Freebsd machine to provide EXTRA redundancy and to serve as a hot spare should the Freebsd machine lose its cookies.

This was all fine, but the Freebsd machine has really gotten old. It’s built from commodity parts, assembled by me (and my friend Rob), and during 2007 I was becoming increasingly nervous about it. Performance was good - not good enough that I didn’t keep things on local disks on the various computers around the house, but good enough that it didn’t bother me too much. The big problem, really, was that keeping the ReadyNAS in sync with the Freebsd server was a pain, mostly because the ReadyNAS just doesn’t have enough cpu horsepower to make the synchronization tool I wanted to use (rsync) work well. Add to that the disturbing fact that it’s come to light that the Readynas is somewhat prone to power supply failures, and it was becoming increasingly clear that I needed some way out.

In essence, what I needed was:

• a solution with filesharing performance (using either the Windows CIFS protocol, or the Apple AFS protocol) as good as or better than the Freebsd server.
• Something quieter than both the Freebsd server (which sounds like a jet taking off) and the Readynas (which has developed an annoying buzz).
• Something that minimized the amount of software I had to stay current with
• Preferably something physically small
• Something that doesn’t consume much power, particularly when idle (which is most of the time)
• Something where, if something happens to it, I can pretty much go out, buy the hardware off the shelf, bring it home, plug it all together, and having it running quickly

Around the middle of 2007 when I switched to Macs, I was already leaning toward putting together something based on a Mac Mini and one of the Western Digital MyBook dual external disks in mirror mode. That setup provides networked redundant disk storage, just like the firebreathing Freebsd server, and the Readynas.

Not long ago, I reported that I’d bought the external disk. I played around with it some, found it satisfactory, and planned on buying the Mac Mini soon. Well, just after Christmas, I did just that. It took surprisingly little time to set it all up, and in less than an hour I had it running as a file server, with one big filesystem on the Western Digital external disk.

Performance wise, this setup beats the (constructed specifically as a high performance file server) Freebsd machine handily by a pretty significant margin - initial benchmarks have it between 1.25x and 8x as fast as the Freebsd machine depending on task. It’s so much faster than the Readynas that I haven’t even bothered to actually measure the difference. And rsyncing to the Freebsd server it’s very fast.

So my assessment now is that the Mac Mini setup hits every single one of my requirements: fast, quiet (nearly silent, in fact, except when the MyBook Pro fan runs), it runs Mac OS X just like all the other Macs in the house, it’s tiny, consumes little power, and I can drive to the Apple store and actually buy the Mac Mini and the external disk right off their shelf.

I’m just so impressed by the Mac Mini - such a great performer in such a small package at such a competitive price, and it seems very nicely made. (I bought the 1.83Ghz version with the 80GB disk drive and 1GB of memory, $600 plus tax) The whole thing is just so simple - no muss, no fuss.

So now, I’ll retire that old FreeBSD server. The Readynas will continue in it’s duty of being a backup to the Mac Mini fileserver and being a hot spare. If the Readynas fails, it will get replaced with another Mac Mini.

I’ve always liked Really Right Stuff products, starting way back when Brian Geyer ran the business. They’ve come up with some really innovative products over the years, and the product quality has always been first class.

So today, I got an email asking about about their ballheads, and to refresh my memory on one point I visited the RRS website.

While I was browsing, I noticed this clever product - a clamshell sort of case that dovetails with an Arca-Swiss style L-bracket to completely enclose your Canon PowerShot G7 or G9 camera.

Pretty slick. There’s more to it than just this - the case can double as a camera support. See the whole thing.

No, I haven’t held one in my hands (although I’m pretty tempted to order the combo, which costs $130.) But my prior experience with RRS products makes me pretty confident that they’ve done a really nice job.

Clever, huh?

[UPDATE: well, that didn't take long. I just ordered one. More on this item when it arrives!]

For years and years, I used a 4×5 camera almost exclusively. Now, a 4×5 image has an aspect ratio very close to 4:5 (it’s not quite exact because there’s a border around the 4×5 negative, and that changes it slightly). Now, it turns out that this makes it a good match to most common photo paper (such at 8×10). And somehow, in that ‘come to love the walls of our prison’ way, I got into this mindset that this 4:5 aspect ratio was, in fact, God’s Own Aspect Ratio. And, I’m ashamed to confess, I sometimes looked at the aspect ratio of a print for a clue to what format the photographer used. Snobbery, nothing more.

Then I bought the 5d, and started making prints from the exposures from that camera. And, of course, the EOS-5d has the usual full-frame 24mmx36mm thing going on - the aspect ratio is 2:3. At first, everything seemed wide, and it always felt like I had this extra space at the ends. It didn’t take long to adjust, though, perhaps because I’d been experimenting with a 1:2 aspect ratio with the 4×5, by cropping down the negative.

There probably isn’t one God’s True Aspect Ratio. The needs of the world’s photographers are many and diverse, and although one photographer will thrive with the 1:1 square aspect ratio of the old Hassy, another will thrive with the 6×17 panoramic ratio. That’s a good thing. We don’t have to all be the same.

And that’s why this is a petty complaint. In the relatively short time I’ve been using the EOS-5d, I’ve gotten really enchanted with the 2:3 ratio.

Naturally, my second favorite camera, the recently acquired Canon Powershot G9, has a 4:5 aspect ratio. It’s as if the Photo Gods have sent me a little camera that I like very much, but decided to tweak me just a bit.

On the bright side, this aspect ratio issue remains one of the few things about the camera that irks me. Yesterday I noticed that the camera has acquired several scratches (some in the paint, and one minor scritchy scratch in the corner of the display). This is actually good news - the camera has been riding around in the pocket of my coat, never far from hand. Some might call them scratches of use. I suppose that Fred Picker, bless his soul, would call them Noble Scars.

I’d just point out that if the most annoying day to day thing about the G9 is that I wish it had a 2:3 aspect ratio, then pocket sized compact digital cameras have come a mighty long way toward being real cameras instead of fancy electronic gizmos which can, in a pinch, be forced into making something which kind of resembles a photograph.

There are other problem with the G9, of course. Like every camera I’ve ever owned, I wish the lens was better - in particular I wish it had less distortion and nicer out of focus rendering. And I wish it didn’t suffer quite so much from noise at higher sensitivities. But the bottom line here is that although the G9 might make be inadequate in some ways, to me it feels like such a step up from all the other compact digital cameras I’ve owned that it’s a breath of fresh air.

Way back when I bought the Canon EOS-5d, I bought it as a ’scouting’ camera - what I wanted was a small, lightweight camera that I could carry around to various locations and make ‘visual notes’, so that I could be more productive with the big, heavy Linhof Technikardan 45s. But I bought the EOS-5d, and when I discovered what a great camera it is, and how good the results were, it transmogrified into my ‘main’ camera, and the 4×5 kit got ignominiously stuffed into the storage space under the studio stairs.

A similar thing seems to have happened with the little PowerShot G9. My relationship with this new camera arrival has been interesting to me - it was purchased, really, as a ‘vacation’ camera to take along on my trip to China. It served in that capacity very nicely. Based on my previous experience with cameras like this, I didn’t really expect it to ever get used for anything but a vacation camera, for tourist snaps.

But the big surprise is that I’ve found that the image quality is good enough that it’s turned into a ‘carry around in the coat pocket’ camera - one that I grab when I’m heading into town, or out on some errand. When I go for a walk, the little G9 gets tucked into the pocket and goes along. Sure, it could be a bit smaller. Sure, the photos could be less noisy. And it could weigh less, too - it weighs enough that I notice that it’s in my pocket.

But I’ve bought myriad little digital cameras specifically to fill the camera niche that the G9 is now filling - an Olympus C2000Z, way back when digital cameras were somewhat exotic. The C2000Z didn’t have very good image quality and I felt it was too bulky, and so was followed by a Minolta DImage X, a featherweight little camera that was incredibly small, incredibly light, but had the most flare prone optics ever assembled by man and had batteries that had to be charged every couple of exposures. And in turn, the inadequate Minolta was replaced by a barely remembered series of Canon Powershot A-series cameras, which were tantalizingly close to what I wanted but not quite there. And all the while, I kept remembering my beloved Contax T3 - a compact something more than point and shoot 35mm camera with a stellar lens, small enough to fit in pockets and light enough to take everywhere. Only the prospect of processing and scanning a continuous stream of TMY kept me from pressing the T3 back into service.

Rather to my surprise, the G9 seems to at last fit the bill. I wasn’t expecting it to - it’s not really smaller or lighter than the PowerShot A95 I have here on the work table. It’s not really all that light, truth be told. I’m not really sure what it is about the G9 that means it gets taken along so often, when the previous contenders didn’t. But in some difficult to understand and difficult to articulate way, it seems to have hit that sweet spot.

It might be that, for once, it’s a pocketable digital camera with controls that actually make sense - adjusting the aperture when in aperture priority mode, for instance, is done with a little control wheel on the back, just like with a ‘real’ camera. Press a button, and the same control wheel turns into the exposure compensation control. The autofocus system is not horribly bad, and now that I’ve got the two custom setting modes set to useful setups, I find that the camera is quickly turning into one of those “I don’t think about camera controls” cameras that seem to adjust themselves while you’re thinking.

There are flaws, yes. The viewfinder framing bears little resemblance to what the actual framing will be. The images are noisier than I’d like, and at high iso settings, Noise Ninja seems to turn the images into some sort of surreal plastic reminder of what the scene would have looked like if you’d been overdosed on recreational pharmaceuticals. The metering system seems to continually taunt me by picking an exposure that blows out highlights. But the thing records in raw mode, and the image stabilization seems to actually work. And that means that a lot of photographs are getting made that wouldn’t have gotten made before I bought the thing. Lots of photographic ideas are getting explored that until the arrival of the G9 got mental filed in the ‘Some day I should think some more about that’ part of my brain and thus lost forever.

And it turns out, it’s hard to argue with that. I’m left hoping that the G9 will continue to get put in the pocket when I head out the door, at least long enough to hold me over until its replacement appears on the market.

And if Canon are listening, I offer the following: More cameras like this one, please. A little smaller wouldn’t hurt. A little lighter would be nice. A little less image noise would make me happy. A move to the 2:3 aspect ratio would not break my heart. But on the whole, you seem to have hit it just about right, and you’d do well to keep moving in the same direction.

Two interesting things have arrived here at my house in the past few days:

• A 17″ x 50′ roll of Crane’s Museo Portfolio Rag. This is a heavyweight matte surface paper. The base is about the same color as Crane Museo Max, but the surface finish is much more like hot press watercolor. Not quite as smooth as Epson Ultrasmooth, but very close. It’s very slightly warmer than Ultrasmoooth - you can see the difference when they’re side by side but might have trouble seeing the difference if they were on opposite sides of the room. I’m hoping this will have all the properties (gamut, dmax, and feel) of Crane Museo Max but without the cold press watercolor finish which irks me slightly. I will be evaluating this paper over the next few weeks, assuming that my HP Z3100 woes get worked out (more on this in another post).
• A 2TB Western Digital MyBook Pro Edition II external disk. This is actually two 1TB disk drives in an external cabinet that provides FOUR interfaces: USB2.0, 1394a (aka Firewire 400), 1394b (aka Firewire 800), and eSata. The two disk drives can be configured in a variety of ways, including appearing as one big disk with 2TB capacity and in mirror mode as one redundant disk with 1TB capacity. My eventual plan is that this disk and a Mac Mini will replace my aging and ailing 1TB raid fileserver. It cost $640 from Newegg.com, and it represents what I think is a pretty inexpensive way to get redundant storage in a small cabinet. I’ve read reports that the unit is noisy, which might be a problem. More on this as I get a chance to play with it.