Ancient Australian Boab - Adansonia gregorii

The important technology trends, we are told, are happening INSIDE the camera body in terms of noise reduction and bigger LCDs. The market is also giving us high-quality digital lenses, better and better monitors, and printers with vastly improved archival inks.

Megapixels

However, there still is that ole’ Bigger is Better race going on around us. Don’t kid yourself – Americans in general think bigger is always better – and even the term, megapixels, was conceived of in exactly that vein. We live in a world where size counts.

But you have surely noticed by now that these mega-increasing megapixels take up valuable real estate on your hard drive. I know; I have eight external hard drives growing like Ivy out of my G5 Macintosh HD, affording me a total of 400 gigabytes. I often shoot mega-events for universities and institutes of various kinds and each of these events average eight gigabytes of famous speakers, eloquently catered dinners, hallowed architecture, and ugly but extremely rich donors.

I used to do these same kinds of events using my film-based F5. All I had to do then was turn over the film in neat archival sheets and voila! I was paid. And my Mac back then counted its hard drive space in megabytes, not gigabytes.

Now I have to shoot, bridge, color balance, convert NEFS, photoshop and print contact sheets -- and then burn it all to CD before I get paid!

So don’t take to-ooooo deep a breath. The pace is still frenetic; it is just not quite so frenetic (maybe).

Toys

A friend emailed me the other day. He got to play with a new toy, he said -- a dual mode FF and APS D2X style camera body mounted on a 500mm f/4G AF-S VR lens. He took three pictures from the roof of a building on Pennsylvania Avenue of the Capitol dome. The images were printed using an Epson 9800 printer at 40x60 inches. You could count the mortise joints in the masonry (and this was from nearly three miles away!)

This is definitely cool stuff and I count myself a techie from way back. But I also know that these technological innovations will always outstrip my existing gear; that is the nature of the beast in this era of digital photography. We can drool as we page through the likes of Outdoor Photographer and PC Photo and Rangefinder, etc., but we need to keep things in perspective.

Our brand new digital system is outdated by the time our credit card is swiped.

I just switched hats now, having set aside my digital hat for my psychologist hat, and I have this to say to you:

Shoot to your hearts content – that is what photography is all about after all – and don’t fret over keeping up with the Jones. An artist can work his or her magic no matter what camera is in their hand.

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An ad in PC Photo caught my eye (which is exactly what it is supposed to do, right?). On page 21 or so in the November issue there is an ad for SanDisk ULTRA II 8.0 GB media cards. The five pictured types of ULTRAS take up about 1/8 of the page – while the rest of the ad depicts a man at the prime of his career wearing zip-able pants-to-shorts trousers, military-style short hair, a Canon over one shoulder, and a second Canon sporting a 300mm prime lens balanced on a raised knee.

Of course, the body/lens combo is being held about 6 inches from the shooter’s crotch although surely the ad did not mean to (cough) suggest anything phallic here.

Aboriginal cave art in Queensland, AU

Compact Flash Card Sizes

I do not recommend those 8.0 GB media cards. I know, I know, they are all the rage these days. And they fit well with the Bigger is Better mentality for sure. But if you lose that card or drop it off the edge of the Earth – then you are going to have a veritable heart attack over 8 fat gigs of lost images. And don’t say I didn’t tell you!

These cards are NOT infallible. Lucky for us we have Photorescue from http://www.datarescue.com, which can save us from disastrous outcomes some of the time, but not all of the time. I have actually sent several compact flash cards back for their lack of reliability; the last thing I want to have to tell a photo client is “I didn’t get the shot.”

A 650 Meg card holds exactly enough for a standard CD-ROM. A 1 GIG card requires splitting your image files onto two different CD-ROMS in such a way that valuable space on the CD-ROM goes unused. Do the math. What CD-antics do you have to go through with the various cards?

I personally do not use DVD media for archiving image files, mainly because the market has not yet seriously addressed their archival capabilities. For your most treasured images, go for GOLD media.

Which file formats?

Finally, a common question has to do with what formats to use when saving files. For what it’s worth, this is how I do it. Once I have determined in BRIDGE what files I want to keep or work with, I immediately archive the selected raw files to CD. I also save a second backup copy to one of my external hard drives. I do not convert these files at this point, I merely archive them.

Then I use the following system to dictate which formats I save converted files to. If I convert the raw file and work on it but do not print it or send it on to an agent or client, then I save that file as a Photoshop (.psd) file without sharpening it. I save sharpening for the final step in the workflow. So when I see a .psd file in my archives I automatically know that it has been converted but not sharpened.

When I work on a file to the point of sharpening it, then I save that sharpened version of the file as a TIFF (.tif).

So when I open my archives and see .tif files then I automatically know that they are sharpened files ready for delivery or printing.

Many of my photo clients prefer JPEGS and I do give them sharpened JPEGS. The files that I am referring to in the above paragraphs are my archival files, not client files. The above system helps me keep tabs on what has been sharpened or not once they have been converted from raw. Perhaps the day will come when PS CS2 will allow me to tag a file as sharpened without having to go through all of these file format gyrations.

Until then, happy tiffing!