Black and White Photography Blog

As mentioned, the drive from OWC comes with NovaBackup for the PC and Mac.  There are also a ton of other programs for the Mac, but not for the PC.   Now, to the point.  Compared to Retrospect (OEM) the version you get for free with many external drives – NovaBackup is a million times better (uhm, okay hyperbole) but it is a real backup / restore system with tons of options, logs, jobs, schedules, and pretty much anything that I’ve ever seen in a backup system.

The auto.inf file on the DVD did nothing but spin the disk, so I copied the folder to the PC and launched and installed it from there without a problem (typical PC glitches).

I’m not here to write a review of the program since I’m sure you can dig that up somewhere else; plus I just installed it and I really do hate when people write these glowing reviews after using a program or piece of hardware for five minutes.  But at first glance (10 minutes, and setting up a few jobs and running them) – it is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

When the program starts, it does (which can be turned off) ask if you want to check for newer versions and of course there is a newer version ($24) but for now I’ll just see how I make out with this version – which if you think I have any idea what version it is you have another thought coming.  I’m sure that somewhere there’s something to press to tell me the version and it does flash by on the splash screen, but I’m sure this began life as a mac program as there is no file / about menu item.  Plus there are one or two odd interface things that might make sense on a mac but seem useless on the PC and aren’t worth going into.

Long story short, just uninstalled Retrospect, and am in the process of creating various jobs which is what I wanted to do, that run at different times, and have different attributes, i.e. one job may run as an incremental and I may have another job that is full… It doesn’t matter right now if you don’t know what this stuff means – it just means that you get the choices you should have in a backup program.

I haven’t tried restore yet (which is the really important thing) but will in a bit.  If you don’t hear from me again about this, it means everything went as expected.

First off, thanks to Craig who sent two raw files from the 5DII, one at 800, one at 1600, both excellent photographs in terms of dynamic range in a real-life test.  Although I don’t have the time right now to show the crops.  I viewed his 800 file and my own 40D 800 file (night shot) side by side in Lightroom.  Now I’m not talking about the amount of pixels – that’s for someone else to talk about.  But in terms of overall noise at 800 – the 40D had less (or if not less, more pleasant rendition).  The image that I picked to compare was just a run-of-the-mill night shot at 800 with as always all NR off.  Hmmm… so that flies in the face of just about everything I’ve ever heard.

Now, at 1600 ASA, it’s true that the 40D had more noise in these dark and midtone flat areas, but there were no artifacts.  There were artifacts in the 5D II 1600 shot. And although there was less noise in the 5D shot – it had a look that was less pleasing than what I got with the 40D @ 1600.  Go figure.

Alright – so then I went to dpreview and downloaded two RAW 7D files.  I had to upgrade Lightroom to 2.6 to read the raw 7D files.  The upgrade went fine and I looked at two 1600 ASA RAW files they had for download.  I thought they were both great.  (Okay, subjective).  Definitely less noise than my 40D and completely usable at 1600.

Now at the same time – two projects came along where the client wants large blowups – one at 40 x 60 inches, and one at 35x 50 inches.  Basically, I’ve decided to go for the 7D.  Between the two project they’ll pay for more than half the 7D cost.  And that’s about all I can say about that right now.  True, it doesn’t make sense, unless it has to do with how the Lightroom RAW convertor works – and might be completely different with various raw convertors – but whatever – close enough so that I will continue down the 7D line.  There are other benefits to the 7D in terms of focus etc. but for now I won’t mention them (uhm, I just did).

Next up.  The OWC Mercury Elite AL Pro drive arrived this afternoon.  It comes formatted for the mac.  The instructions for initializing the disk for the PC may be correct for some MS OS, but didn’t quite work for XP Pro.  Not a big deal since I know my way around initializing and formating disks.  It’s a very cute looking, smallish drive (Seagate Baracuda inside) with two firewire and one USB 2.0 socket; and it’s still formatting (I’m doing the long format).

You know – I can’t really answer any questions about it for a year or so.  All my external drives have been fine for the first year.  It is definitely quiet; and there seems to be good air flow; but time will tell.

And that, my friends – is enough info for one post.  Of course you can write about the fact that the full frame has more pixels, or that the pixels are bigger, or whatever – and I realize that but I go by what I see and the 7D stuff at 1600 convinced me.  I’m also, as I said, biased in that I’m not in the mood to get rid of my 30mm f1.4, and maybe you just get used to the look of a certain line of cameras – although when I looked at the RAW files of the 50D I was underwhelmed.

I just finished importing all my Lightroom catalogs (six) into one nice big one.  There were a couple of glitches along the way.  On two imports it got stuck during the import phase where it says, “Checking for Duplicates.”  I found that by canceling the import, closing and relaunching Lightroom, it then skipped that step and the catalog import continued properly.  (I am leaving the original files where they were and just importing the catalog info).

When I imported my “negatives” catalog Lightroom sort of crashed and said it would check itself the next time it started, which it did (integrity check).  Took, I don’t know, maybe a half-hour to check the catalog.  I’m running a backup of the thing now – just to make sure I have a good backup.  If it takes as long as it did when doing the integrity check, we’re talking about at least a half hour (right now the backup is on the same drive as the original catalog – just for the sake of speed).  I’ll change that later.

The OWC drive should arrive within the next hour or two.  I’ll do some reorganization once I get it.

When I began to look at the new super catalog it seemed as if there were files I hadn’t noticed before; which is likely since you miss stuff when you skipping around between six catalogs.  So this was a good move.  As far as speed goes, i.e just searching or scrolling etc. – seems absolutely fine.  So yeah – this was something worth doing.

* * *

5d II

In a recent comment, Craig says,

Hi Dave,

I do what you do (i.e. sell black and white prints), and have used several 5D Mk II’s for about a year (I got one of the first in the UK).It is absolutely brilliant. The ISO improvement is good – but to be honest, I wouldn’t print anything larger than 22×17″ at 640 ISO. Being realistic, 800 is just too noisy.

If you need any real life sample files, let me know. Cheers – Craig”

Now that is a surprising statement since I regularly shoot at ASA 800 with the 40D, and I know I’ve done prints that are larger than 17 x 22 inches from those files.  I think I’m going to have to ask an 800 and 1600 file that hasn’t undergone any processing, i.e. maybe a png from the crw file, as opposed to a jpg.  Because that just doesn’t seem right.  Could be my eyes are going, or I’m not as sensitive about noise.

Craig – maybe you can email me (or respond to this) with more info (shooting raw, noise reduction settings if any, what printer etc.

One of my most popular prints, The Ice Skating Rink, was shot with the Rebel XT, on a tripod, at 200 ASA, run through Noise Ninja, and  PhotoZoom (I don’t remember the interpolation settings) and that lowly Rebel file is  regularly printed with the long side at 29 inches.  I’d have to look, but I could swear I’ve even gone larger than that with it.

Now it is definitely not perfect at that size, edges are too smooth, and some out-of-focus parts of the image are sort of melting into each other  – but if it is going over 29 inches I  add a touch of grain toto cover these defects and it turns out fine.

Anyway – comparing 800 and 1600 and maybe higher 5dII images with the 7D and the 40D — I have to compensate for the fact that they all have a different amount of pixels – but I need to get an idea of the noise quality at the high end compared to my trusty 40D.  It seems to be a very subjective area of inquiry.  One person says they see a tremendous difference, the next person (all experienced photographers) doesn’t think the noise / ISO stuff is so hot after all.

I’m not so sure I can really tell; though I’ll have to go back to dpreview and go through the pixel peeping exercise again.

There did seem to be a big consensus that the 50D was a dud in terms of noise at higher ISOs.  And there is an overwhelming number of opinions about the 5DII having very little noise at higher ISOs.  Anyway – just something to look into for myself I guess.

Looking through all these 50,000 plus images in chronological order, I can say for sure that blown highlights was a big problem in the beginning that was solved with the 40d, and that I made a gigantic mistake when I started by shooting jpg rather than raw.  That was for a few months, and I have some shots from that period where subject-wise they’re very good but there are blown-out highlights that are just impossible to fix without going into Photoshop and doing cloning work.

Although the Skating Rink shot was done raw, I still had to do some cloning work to remove some of the flare from those lights.  I didn’t remove it all, to keep it natural looking, but believe me – I added a building or two so I could lessen the prominence of that flare.  In fact, it took me three years before I offered the shot for sale, and tried all sorts of things to clean it up before I came up with the idea of adding extensions to the buildings on the right.

Anyway – orders continue to come in, and now that everything is in one catalog, it should make life easier for me.

* * *

One other interesting development.  Although I’ve never been comfortable using color with prints, I do like it when I’m creating cards, mugs etc.  So in that way, another unexpected world opens up.  Well, I never claimed to be completely sane.

Store – East Harlem, 2004

Tearing Down Shea Stadium Mug by ansel51
large coffee mug online at zazzle.com

I really enjoyed making this one. It’s got the date that ground was first broken on one side (October 28, 1961) and the date that I took the shot of Shea coming down on the other side of the mug (1/27/2009) and it’s all set against a large dusty shot where you can just make out the crane and the baseball player logo. Now whether a Mets fan would want to drink their coffee from such a mug – that’s another story. But I’m going to give a set of them to my sister (big Mets fan) for her birthday.

It does bring back memories – not so much of the stadium but of my Uncle Hy W. who first took me to Shea, and how we sat way up high and felt like the planes were going to knock us out of our seats.  He died a pretty long time ago, but was such a fun guy to have as an uncle.  The main reason was that whereas we were always scrimping and saving in my household, he had more money, and seemed to really enjoy cooking breakfast for me.  Rather than having to cut frozen pieces of cheap bacon in half – as we did in my house – you would come down to breakfast and there would be as much fresh bacon – not cut in half – as you could eat.  The tomatoes were redder.  The bread was fresher.  You didn’t see anything that said “A&P” on it.

Sometimes he would brew fresh coffee (maybe I was eight years old at the time) and mix it with half-and-half and let us have some.  Instead of margarine there was butter.  He liked, and could appreciate the good things in life.  He introduced me to Radio City Music Hall.  Took me to Italian restaurants where the menus were in Italian and each pizza was made to order.  When I would tell my dad about the great things we had had to eat – he would say, well what’s the big deal – anyone can do that if they have money.  Maybe he felt bad hearing me rave about the delicious food I could get at Uncle Hy’s.

One day, when I was about fifteen, he drove about an hour out of the city, to what was for me upstate New York – just to bring me to a place which he proclaimed made the best pizza – called of all things – The Dugout.

It was a sort of pizza that was very light, with a thin crust, and was sort of like White Castle in that you could sit there and eat an entire pie by yourself.  I think he had some health issues at the time, and couldn’t gorge himself any longer – and he told me that he brought me along just so that he could enjoy watching me wolf down a pie.

I had two uncles named Hy – so in case anyone in the family is reading this – I’m writing about Hy W.   He died a tragic death at an early age – but left me with very satisfying memories.  Whenever I think about baseball, I think of him.  Oh – and just as an aside – he was a tremendous ballplayer.   In fact, both of my uncles were great baseball players.  My other uncle – Hy B.  had a tryout with the Cleveland Indians, and could have started in their farm system, but his parents didn’t want him to leave home.  It may have been due to the depression.  I’m not sure.    I was very close with Hy B. also.

Well, I’m sure that’s enough rambling based on a mug.

I’ve had a good couple of months financially, and have hit the point where I can afford the upgrading from the 40D to the 7D, but not quite enough money for the 5D II.  Main purposes for upgrading, in this order are a) higher usable ISOs and b) more pixels.

Given that I’m hardly shooting much these days, should I just hang in there until I can afford the 5d II ?  That’s my inclination.  If I do upgrade to the 5D II (and I’ve been looking at prices for both cameras – new – on eBay) I’ll also need to pick up a fast 35mm lens to replace the 30mm f1.4 Sigma.  In other words the 50mm that I have is not going to be wide enough for my style on the 5D and I’ll need a 35mm f1.4 although I could get by (esp. given the faster speeds of the 5D II with the 35mm f2.0 which is a good lens and MUCH cheaper than the f1.4).

In addition I have the 20mm f2.8 and the 100-270 zoom with IS which is an excellent lens.  Not the real expensive one.  But very good.

I think the real question is whether the usable ISO speeds on the 5d II are really that much better than what the 7D offers.  I have downloaded files from both cameras, and in the pixel-peeping mode I can see a difference between the two cameras at 1600 and definitely at 3200.  On the other hand, I haven’t done the real work yet and made prints from them, of cropped pieces from the large files.  I think that’s really what I should do next.  Convert them to b&w the way I usually do (from raw files if I can get them) and see for myself if there’s a visible distance at a normal viewing distance… yes… thinking outloud in this post, I think that’s what I’ll do to decide.

I hate the idea of giving up the 30mm f1.4 which has been so good to me wide open.

In other news: the Zazzle stuff has really been a great boon to me as people have bought prints after seeing the calendars.  And I’ve begun to use the free Fedex triangle tubes for rolling up unmatted prints of 12 x 18 and larger.  They work very well and I’ve saved money and storage by not having to use the Kraft tubes.

I thought this would make a good card.  The amount of rules and regulations in the city do get on my nerves.  The other day I was talking with my friend who runs a bodega.  The city sent him incredibly ugly cigarette posters which had to be installed near the register (if you sell cigarettes).  He complained for a half hour about how this would turn people’s stomachs and that he would lose business by putting them up – so he decided to stop selling cigarettes instead.

Basically though – the parking regulations are simply set up as an additional and very lucrative tax.  Frankly, I believe I have every  right to do dumb stuff so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else.  Simple enough, but for some reason the people that get into power always feel they need to protect me from myself (which hasn’t really worked so far).

No Anything by ansel51
Design customized tshirts on zazzle.com

I ended up removing my Zazzle posters.  Customers found it confusing in terms of what to buy.  For example they want to know whether what I’m offering in my store are posters or not.  And whether the Zazzle posters are any good.  The odd thing is that my prints do not use a chemical process, they are inkjets and the posters at Zazzle are using photographic chemicals.  At least on some media.  Anyway, I wasn’t selling any posters, and the best selling items have been mugs, calendars, and cards.  So I think it best not to offer the Zazzle posters and to keep the Zazzle stuff for the calendars, mugs and other non print things.

The other thing is that I just didn’t like the idea of having posters go out without my being able to check them first whereas all the product type stuff has turned out well.  I have a much more perfectionist attitude towards the posters.

Near Grand Central, 2009

If you know the city well, you probably can say exactly where this was shot.

* * * UPDATE * * *

I have taken Elliot’s advice on this one and bought the following:

1.5TB (1500GB) OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro High Performance 7200RPM FireWire 400+USB2 Solution with 32MB Data Buffer and featuring the Oxford 934 Chipset. FW400 & USB2 Cables, Prosoft Data Backup, Intech HD SpeedTools, and 3 Year OWC Solution Warranty.

If all goes well, I will pick up one more in a few months, and hopefully that will keep me for a few years.  I’m also curious about the backup software they include because I’ve never thought much of EMC retrospect.  I can go into the various things I don’t like about it, but there’s been enough complaining in this post to last for a while.  I can only say that at least on paper (screen) these look like good products.  If it blows up then maybe there are ghosts in the house.

There were just too many conflicting reports on Seagate drives.

Whoever said that delayed write was drive specific – was right.  Drives have been copying from one WD drive to the other for two days and nights without any issues.  (Still going… but this should be done in a few hours and then all files are backed up.  Will be doing reorganization once the new drive arrives.  My own conclusion about the external drives (not the ones in good enclosures) is that they simply aren’t cooled properly compared to the drives in the machines.

* * * END OF UPDATE * * *

My LaCie 1TB drive just blinks now.  After a day of trying to format / partition etc. and changing cables and getting tons of Delayed Write Errors, it went to the dark side.  I read a bunch of stuff saying that it may only be the power supply which has been known to fail.

I was using it as my online backup drive, so now I’m in the process of recreating backups of all my files, i.e. copying the live stuff to another external drive.

Over the last few years, I’ve used LaCie (dead), Maxtor Externals, and Western Digital MyBooks.  All have failed at one point or another, usually around the one year point.  I’d say that the WD drives have held up the best (knock wood), but not by much.  It’s just that the ones that haven’t failed have kept going the longest

Ah the beauty of technology.  I suppose I’ll try and get a new power supply and see if that makes the difference, but if it isn’t that — I’m out some dough.  It seems that they like to check out just as the warranty period is over.

I’ve never really had the extra cash to buy a proper solution.  Don’t really care if they are hot swappable; but it would be great if they’d last more than a year.  I’ve read tons of people with external drives that have lived for many years without a hitch, but I don’t seem to be lucky in that department.  I’ve got about 50,000 files being copied as we talk.  I also have the stuff on DVDs, but what a pain that would be if I had to go to them to do a drastic restore.

Maybe I should look at that other solution that’s been out there for a while — I forget the name — dumbro or something like that.  But I suppose what I’d like the best would be an array of raid drives in a unit with a super big fan.  This is one area where I really am not an expert and have been getting by by the skin of my teeth.

One thing I am going to do for sure – is do a lightroom catalog of all my sellable prints (gathered from many LR catalogs) and make sure that is properly backed up.  That should be easy enough since let’s face it, I only have about 275 prints – total – that are in the store, and I don’t keep them at various sizes anymore.  Just the original with it’s LR manipulations; and some super big ones that I used ProZoom to create (uhm extrapolate).  It was a wasted day though — what with trying to figure out whether it was the drive, the cable, some sort of BIOS thing; etc.   The last thing I did, while it was still visible was to partition the 1TB drive into three volumes, since I read somewhere that really large files could cause paging problems.

Yes, I played around with just about everything that could be effecting it (re-installing stuff; uninstalling stuff;) you know the drill, until I came across the forum where a bunch of people all talked about the blinking light and how they were saved by using a new power supply.

Well, in the meantime – I sent emails to my dad and his girlfriend to see if they’d buy some stuff from the Zazzle store.  I don’t think my father has ever bought a product or print from me – he expect them for free.  Which is fair since when I’ve run into financial crunches, he’s helped me out.  But I love the idea of having him sip his tea from one of my cups.  I am really curious to see if he can figure out how to do the order on Zazzle (along with his wife).  They said they were going to give them as gifts – and so the word spreads.

Busy times.  Orders came back when the mats were put back in the dropdown box; and I’ve been selling at least one item a day through Zazzle, as well as picking up a fair amount of pocket change with their referrals; i.e. someone goes in from my site, and goes somewhere else and buys something and I get 15% of the sale.  A very good incentive for me to keep working.

The mugs have all turned out well.  But my sister ordered a shirt for her daughter – dark material – and it seems to have melted in the dryer.  She was just going to ignore it, but I talked her into writing back to Zazzle to complain about the melted shirt and they are going to send a replacement.  The real question is how this stuff holds up in the heat of the dryer.

It’s not an issue with light fabric.  But the technology that Zazzle uses for dark fabrics is completely different.  You know what, I’ll do my own tests (force me to do my laundry) and if this does turn out to be a problem, I’ll be stuck with either printing on light fabric (no ink is put down where the image is white) or doing the dark fabric but with a warning not to stick it in the dryer; or – just remove the shirts altogether.  Other than the ones I’ve bought for testing, I don’t believe I’ve sold any shirts yet.

Oh -just to keep me on my toes – the photo lessons continue.  I have another two lined up.  So my idea (figured out last year) of trying to have three separate streams of income – well – hard to believe but it’s working.  And wonder of wonder – the FEDEX TUBES (triangles really) are excellent for large prints (and they’re free) and so I don’t need to clutter the house with the big Kraft tubes I had been buying from uLine.  Since the tubes come flat, I can slice them in half and have a sort of telescopic triangle tube for the smaller unmatted prints, which actually works well since it doubles the layer of FEDEX cardboard (which is the strongest cardboard I’ve ever run across)….  so the story continues…

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the delayed write errors are not a system wide thing – but were just related to that one freakin’ LaCie drive.  So far, that seems to be the case.

(Now – how’s that for an all over the place post.  I think that’s what my writing trademark: start with one subject and take a grand tour of everything that’s on my mind.  In the best posts, they come back to the topic sentence.  But not here.)

Happy end of first day of the new year.

Cat in Neighbor’s Window

I began to work on my project to combine all my images into one Lightroom catalog.  My Lightroom catalogs are organized by year.  So the first thing I noticed was that in 2009 I had shot 12,000 images (we’ll just do the rough math).  Lightroom has a feature which allows you to flag what I’d call “possibles” and I had flagged 2,000 possible images, meaning that they were worth looking at for posting in the store.  From those 2000 possibles, I posted 14 new images in the store from 2009.  Now, as the years roll by, I am sure to go back to these images and will find a few that I’ve missed, so let’s make it all even and say that I have 20 “keepers.”  20 keepers out of 12,000.   If my math is correct, my keeper ratio is substantially less than 1%.  It’s actually 0.16%

I looked back at the previous year, also a digital year, and the keeper ratio was about the same.

Then I have one catalog where I keep my scanned negatives.  That really doesn’t do any good because in essence, it’s only showing the keepers, and I have closets and cabinets filled with un-scanned negatives.

Now – this isn’t counting assignments, i.e. I shot two weddings, and a few parties.  There the ratio is totally different.  The keepers may be as high as 75%.  Which is all a long-winded way of saying that one of the qualities a photographer needs is the ability to be a good critic of their own work, as well as to accept failure as the road to success when it comes to the art of photography.

A few more facts.  I still shoot digital in a similar way to film.  I never have the camera set to rapid-fire.  Almost every shot is pre-focused, while I’m waiting for the so-called moment.  The reason for the high ratio is that unless it’s for a project, I have ideas when I’m shooting, and even if I pull it off and capture that idea – it’s still not enough because my idea wasn’t interesting.

However, there is a completely different way of looking at it – and that is digging for gold.  There’s a wonderful scene in Treasure of the Sierra Madre where Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart) and his  Curtin along with the old prospector (Howard) finally find gold.  Fred C. Dobbs looks down at the rocks which are glistening, and wants to start digging.  The old prospector has to explain that they are going to have to set up the sluice, and dig tons of dirt to get the tiny amount of gold dust in each ton.

Dobbs complains that the always thought that when you discovered gold, you just had to bend down and pick it up.  He can’t get over how much work is involved.  The time they spent digging for gold, running it through the sluice, and pulling out the gold dust – that isn’t time wasted.  That’s how it works.  It is true, that once in a while you can bend down and just pick up a nugget of gold – but that’s unusual.

In the film business, a common expression (overused) is “that’s gold!”  And I know that I’ve said the same thing to myself while photographing.  Ah, that’s gold.

So here’s to all the photographers out there searching for glittery stuff.  I hope you find it in the New Year — and I hope that you retain an attitude like Curtin (Tim Holt) – and not Fred C. Dobbs.

A few quotes from Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Fred C. Dobbs: I sure had some cockeyed ideas about prospectin’ for gold. It was all in the finding I thought. I thought all you had to do was find it, pick it up, put it in sacks, and carry ‘em off to the nearest bank.

Fred C. Dobbs: Do you believe that stuff the old man was saying the other night at the Oso Negro about gold changin’ a man’s soul so’s he ain’t the same sort of man as he was before findin’ it?

Fred C. Dobbs: This is the country where the nuggets of gold are just crying out for you to take them out of the ground and make ‘em shine in coins on the fingers and necks of swell dames.