Landscape, Nature and Travel Photography

PhotoNetCast Episode 7 has just been released where a healthy discussion is covered regarding the Philosophy and Ethics of Editing and Processing . As always the photographers and bloggers involved in this podcast include Brian Auer of EpicEdits, Jim M. Goldstein of JMG-Galleries, Martin Gommel of Kwerfeldein, and Antonio Marques of Words: irrational.

Access the podcast and its RSS feeds via PhotoNetCast.

Technorati Tags: podcast, photography, editing, processing

The 18th episode of EXIF and Beyond has been released.

This episode features an interview with Leila Boujnane, CEO and co-founder of Idée. Discussed is the recent release of Idée’s image search engine TinEye. Although out for only 4 weeks now and in a private Beta, TinEye has captured the attention and imagination of the photographic community. Leila discusses the current capabilities and future direction of this groundbreaking image search engine.

Need an invite to TinEye? I’m happy to share those I have or go directly to TinEye and submit a request.

Download the latest episodes:
EXIF and Beyond: Leila Boujnane

For the non-iTune listeners a streaming version of this podcast can be accessed here.

Technorati Tags: EXIF and Beyond, podcast, interview, Leila Boujnane, Idee, TinEye, photo, image, search engine, technology

This weekend has been well for lack of a better term miserable. I’ve burned 90% of my weekend trying to figure out what has been causing some very odd behavior on my computer, as noted in my previous post Beware OS X 10.5.3 Bug That Destroys Adobe PSD Files. So what could I possibly be doing that has taken up so much of my time this weekend sorting through this mess?

First based on the corruption and disappearance of files on my production drive I’ve lost all faith in my previous OS and application setup. 10.5.3 and Adobe CS3 are not playing nice together. As a result I needed to generate a working environment that I could trust. Previously I had no problems working with CS3 in OS X 10.4.11. I decided to backup my second internal hard drive, erase it and install OS X 10.4 (AKA Tiger). That took quite a bit of time as the drive was full with about 230GB of data. Once backed up I tried installing 10.4 off the install disks only to face repeated kernel panics. I then tried to start up off of the 10.5 install disk also to face kernel panics. Eventually I was able to install 10.4 on my computer (a G5 Quad with 4GB RAM) by hooking it up to my older G4 workstation in target mode (essentially as an external drive). I then installed 10.4 and tried to restart it only to face another kernel panic. I got the G5 back in target mode and upgraded the 10.4 to 10.4.11. I was then able to restart my G5 on its own under Tiger (10.4) versus Leopard (10.5). It would seem that somewhere between 10.4 and 10.5.3 a change was made altering the firmware for my G5… I can only guess that is what happened to cause the kernel panics. After getting my computer up and running on its own I had to spend the time installing all my applications again.  At a minimum I had to get CS3 with updates and Lightroom in place to get my work done this coming week.

That only took all of Saturday and into Sunday late afternoon.

Second I started down the path of digital detective to find out if things now work with out further corruption. Is it a bug with CS3 and 10.5.3 or is it a corrupt external hard drive. It’s now 11PM on Sunday and I still don’t have a definitive answer. With various tests conducted I’m not seeing any problems in 10.4.11 and I’ll need to go back in and test some file alterations in 10.5.3.

One thing is clear though being your own IT person is the pits. Over 2 days wasted not getting work done that I need to tackle. I’m not happy about it and its yet to be determined whether my frustration is going to be directed at Adobe, Apple or my hard drive manufacturer.  Through it all I’m actually fortunate because even though I lost a weeks worth of work my paranoia and backup strategy has proven to be viable. I don’t have to go back very far to replace the files that are now corrupt or missing. It should be interesting to talk to Adobe technical support in the coming day or two.

Digital imaging… it sure is a time saver.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, CS3, Apple, 10.5.3, OS X, bug, photography

Up until recently it’s been nearly impossible to know for certain where your online photos might end up on the Internet. As we’ve heard over the years a growing vocal minority will be the first to jump on photographers complaining about online image theft stating “Get used to it. You put it online. That’s how it is.” This argument is anything but true and frustrates the hell out of photographers who know better.

It’s become clear there is a growing interest in new technologies to address the current “wild west” nature of image theft on the Internet by stock agencies and individual photographers alike. Google recently released a research paper on VisualRank that like text search assigns a weighting and ranking to images while also leveraging image-recognition software methods. Although Google is the 800 pound gorilla of search they’ve been beat to the punch by Idée Inc. who recently released a private beta of TinEye. As you’ll see in TinEye’s demonstration video they’ve created an image search that is as simple as a Google search. All an end user has to do is reference an image online or upload a low resolution image and TinEye returns results of where that image is currently found online. What is most impressive is their image matching technology that will match similar images even if they’ve been cropped, resized or Photoshop’d.

I am a born cynic, but after putting TinEye to the test with some of my photos I’ve quickly become a believer and can’t wait for them to expand their search index and hopefully implement a Google Alert like service. At the moment they’ve indexed a relatively small portion of the Internet (roughly 500,000,000 images), but they’re asking beta testers to recommend sites to index. The service at the moment is rather narrow, but I can see where this has legs to quickly expand.

Just to show an example I decided to search one of my more commonly referenced photos of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree in New York City. The blog post containing this image has been accessed nearly 50,000 times and it is one of my most popular photos. With out a doubt I knew this would end up somewhere it was not supposed to. In the past by monitoring my web site log I’ve caught a few people using the image with out my knowledge, so I figured this would be a perfect example to test on TinEye.

Click to Enlarge

Sure enough I referenced the image on my blog and found a few more sites (see above) that had slipped by me who have been using my photo without my knowledge or permission.

Granted the jury is still out with TinEye, but my initial experience has been a good one. The simplicity of the interface, the image-recognition capabilities and speed at which it finds images has caught my eye. I’ll definitely be watching TinEye as it develops and provide feedback through its beta stage.

If you’re curious to try TinEye let me know in your comment to this post. I have 50 invites that I can share.

Technorati Tags: copyright, photo, image, search, theft, technology, TinEye

For some strange reason I started to experience really odd behavior with Adobe Lightroom this weekend. In the end I burned a good portion of my weekend dealing with reviving Lightroom rather than working on my photographs. This made me a very unhappy camper as I’ve been short on time to catch up on post-processing. How far this will set me back I have no idea, but its not going to be a short amount of time as my schedule is growing increasingly busy. What I’ve since learned is that I was not alone in dealing with this dilemma over the weekend. I’ve since read up that Dawn Armfield and Raoul Pop experienced problems recently. Raoul ended up putting out a video detailing how to fix his specific problem (Dealing with a corrupted previews catalog in Lightroom).

So what was the deal? I started up Lightroom only to have nothing appear. Thats right nothing, yet my computer (Apple G5 Quad with 4GB RAM running 10.4.x and Lightroom 1.3.1) showed that it was running. I tried looking online for all kinds of information describing this problem and ended up pushing forward with a much delayed upgrade to OS X 10.5 and Lightroom 1.4.1.

After backing up my internal drives and completing the upgrades I started up my computer only to experience the same weird behavior. Only this time the program was indeed running, just with no windows open. None of my catalogs (original or backup) could be opened via File > Open. In fact when doing so I received the following error “Error on Mac: An error occurred when attempting to change modules.”

I searched online with limited results but eventually found this thread of discussion aptly titled “Error on Mac: An error occurred when attempting to change modules.” Nothing worked until I brought over my last backed up catalog from another drive. The application still would not open it via File > Open, but being on an Apple computer I was able to drag the catalog to the application icon and it opened finally. Once open, per the support thread noted above, I went to “File > Catalog Settings > Relaunch and Optimize”. This seemed to do the trick once I got my catalog open. The challenge was getting it open in the first place. Such a pain in the ass.

Only after I got Lightroom up and running and ranting on Twitter did I learn that others were also having this problem. Seeing as how nothing changed on my computer when this first started and continued to be a problem even after my upgrades I’m wondering what could have caused the problem. Watching Raoul’s video I noticed something we have in common. We’re both using mirrored drives. I also noticed in the support thread that I found that many Apple computer users were experiencing similar problems while using external FW800 drives. I myself am using two external FW800 drives. My primary catalog is stored on my un-mirrored non-FW internal drive so I have no idea what the cause is. It is possible that I had a problem at some point and had to hard shut down the computer or the drives and perhaps that contributed to the problem. Either way I hope that Adobe is able to put out a fix and/or if you happen to experience this problem (or one that is similar) my experience helps you save a few hours of aggravation.

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Photoshop, Lightroom, corrupt, catalog, error

Click To Enlarge

This has been making the rounds online this week and I had to share it in case any readers here have missed it. In 1975 Kodak developed the first digital camera prototype. Hardly something you’d carry around your neck to a family function. 100 line black and white image were recorded to a cassette tape and took 23 seconds to write. The “microcomputer” being the size of a large VCR was required to display the image on a “monitor” (actually a TV).

The question I have is how many MegaPixels rather MilliPixels would this have been?

Read and see more photos of this beast of a computer here:
Kodak’s First Digital Camera

Technorati Tags: Kodak, first, digital camera,

The 16th and 17th episode of EXIF and Beyond has been released.

These episodes feature an interview with Jeff Sedlik, President and CEO of the PLUS Coalition (usePLUS.org), current Professor of Photography at the Art Center College of Design and also a past president of the Advertising Photographers of America (APA).

Discussed is the Picture Licensing Universal System (PLUS). Although relatively young by comparison to other photographic standards bodies, PLUS is tackling tough contemporary issues facing photographers. Both episodes are packed with valuable information every photographers should be aware of.

Part I of the interview covers PLUS Standards including the PLUS Glossary, License Generator, PLUS – IDs and the differentiators between PLUS, IPTC, and Creative Commons.

Part II of the interview covers machine readability, pending Orphan Works Copyright legislation, metadata, the PLUS Artist & Licensor Registry and the future of PLUS .

Download the latest episodes:
EXIF and Beyond: Jeff Sedlik Interview Part I and II

For the non-iTune listeners a streaming version of this podcast can be accessed here.

Technorati Tags: EXIF and Beyond, podcast, interview, Jeff Sedlik, PLUS, Picture Licensing Universal System, PLUS Coalition, IPTC, Creative Commons, usePLUS, standards, Orphans Work

Over the past week I’ve received a few inquiries from readers wondering whether I use Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom. The answer… I use Lightroom. The decision is rooted back when Aperture was first released and Adobe put Lightroom out as a Beta. At the time I was about to purchase Aperture, but before I did I went to MacWorld to get a little more information on it. The 2006 MacWorld was one of the best ever because there was a huge push around photography so there were tons of organizations and software manufacturers that would have otherwise never been there. When I talked to an Apple rep about Aperture I asked questions around…

• How well does Aperture integrate with Photoshop?
• What color space does Aperture use?
• How flexible is the “vault” for image storage?

These three questions sunk my interest in Aperture.

How well does Aperture integrate with Photoshop?
Well it turns out at the time that it didn’t very well. I don’t recall the exact details but combined with the answer to the next question I felt the two didn’t play as nicely together as I would have hoped.

What color space does Aperture use?
This is what really turned me off. At the time Apple was using a custom color space that they created. When I talked to the Apple rep about this he was telling me how it supported more colors blah blah blah. When I asked him what hardware supported this color space he couldn’t answer. It all amounted to Apple creating a color space that went to 11 (a la Spinal Tap the movie). The only thing that he could say was that it must tie in to their on-demand print service. The discussion left me wary and unimpressed as most photographers at the time had begun to accept Adobe RGB and ProPhoto RGB as the standard color space to use.

How flexible is the “vault” for image storage?
At the time the “vault” storage model was very inflexible. The “vault” was tied to one drive. If that drive failed you were SOL and there wasn’t a meaningful system to back up the “vault” at the time. I believe Apple has since fixed this, but too little too late as far as I’m concerned.

So pretty straight forward about Apple’s Aperture… why Lightroom?
Lightroom was beta at the time and it too had its limitations, but…

1. Its ability to port files over to Photoshop with little hiccup was a big selling point to me. For the type of photography I focus on I still need to make localized edits in Photoshop.

2. The ability to start off with non-destructive edits and the space savings that afforded was huge.

3. Keywording and metadata… I really liked the system Adobe set up for this. Having a database to query and pulling images with certain keywords was huge. By the time the beta wrapped there was a backup mechanism in place as well.

4. Post-beta Adobe threw in mapping dust spot removal so you could carry over spot removal from one image to another, they expanded their web export features and they expanded the functionality of their RAW converter.

Additional feedback I heard from other pros was that Aperture had very unintuitive controls and this matched up pretty well to my initial demo experience at MacWorld.

Honestly I have no allegiance to one or the other. I’ll use the best tool available, but at the time Adobe had the edge even though it was beta and not all the features were baked in yet. As a result I’ve been on the Lightroom bandwagon ever since. Adobe did just release Lightroom 2 Beta and they’re expanding their feature set to include Smart Collections which is another huge feature I’ve been looking for & they’re expanding they types of non-destructive edits that you can make. Apple has never been open about their software so Adobe’s transparency and beta program makes it easier to stick with their software.

That’s the history behind my choice to use Lightroom.

What do you use and what factored into your decision?

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Lightroom, Apple, Aperture, software, photography, application, beta, post-processing, post, processing