Web Galleries to the Rescue

Last time I expressed the view that no foolproof mechanism for long term preservation of digital images seems to have emerged. For that matter, the same problem remains unsolved for ALL forms of digital data. Just how should one archive one's files for the medium to long term, confident that the digital media itself will have survived and that means will still be at hand to interpret the file and storage formats?

Well the answer is .... I don't know!!!! I just hope that someone else, much smarter than yours truly, DOES - or if they don't, that they soon will. It is a huge problem getting still larger by the minute.

Traditionally we viewed our images on photopaper, usually stored in photo albums. Once closed, the album storage format enables our prints to be protected from light and history shows that they can be preserved for very long periods indeed. Perhaps long term preservation of important images should remain in that form - on long life paper, in long life inks in books. But then just what do we mean by "important".

Going down through the ages, past our children and grandchildren, we reach descendants who will never have actually met us, interracted with us, spoken with us - or indeed have especially much interest in us and our lives at all. To them, pictures of our overseas trip to Bali in 2009 (including pictures of me posing next to the colourfully dressed hotel doorman) will hardly loom large in importance. Is it really so vital that such images survive? Beyond our lifespan and perhaps our children's, will anyone ever want to look at them again? In the final analysis, who are our images FOR?

The answer, of course, is that they are mostly for us - OURSELVES. Most especially they are for our twilight years when we will have the time for indulgent nostalgia sessions and when images of our early years and those of our forbears acquire a meaning and importance they never had during the hustle and bustle times of youth, early parenthood and career building.

In truth, most of our personal "good time" pictures can safely die WITH us.

Pictures of our children and grandchildren however, will need to live on down the years to be enjoyed and appreciated during the twilight years of SUBSEQUENT generations. Perhaps therefore, our only real image obligations are to our children. We should merely be obliged to ensure that our CHILDREN get the pictures that will remain of interest to them. Let THEM battle the vagiaries of future data storage/archive systems.

In any event, are images becoming less and less important as a whole?

Our generation comes at the end of a series of generations for whom photographs were a relatively precious commodity. Not everyone owned or used cameras. Professional shoots, film and processing cost real money. In my youth, significant occasions with my family are remembered by one or two images at best. Some significant relatives like my Uncle Earnest are remembered by one or two images IN ALL. The images which remain of such times and individuals are relatively few and commensurately valuable.

These days it seems quite different. EVERYONE has a digital camera. There are cameras in mobile phones, for heaven sake. Images arrive by phone call and email everyday - "Here's me and my new boyfriend hanging out at Tim's party" - "Here are sixteen pictures of the new puppy" - "Here's a dozen pictures of the new car" - "Look who we just ran into, down at the mall ... Sandra ... haven't seen her in days" - "Look at Bob's funny hat" - "Here's Sue spilling an ice cream on her new sweater".

Effectively, images today are FREE and so we capture them with total abandon. Most such pictures are intended for immediate viewing and disposal. In our present culture, images grow more and more numerous, more transient, more trivial and less treasured. The trouble and time associated with printing, mounting and preservation can often seem pointless.

When a photograph was taken in days of yore, it was taken with intent. All of them were important. If it hadn't been important we would never have taken it in the first place. Today things are decidedly different. Nonetheless even today's youth may eventually have sober moments and decide that certain images have a value beyond the moment. What should they do with them?

Web based galleries seem the way to go. They are becoming immensely popular and as a concept seem destined to survive the next human generation or so. Today it is possible to establish FREE galleries. Some gallery sites offered guaranteed preservation of uploaded images. Some sites like Pbase seem perfect for hobbiests whose pages can be highly customised and (like all web galleries) offer instantaneous display to international enthusiasts.

With web galleries, any relative in the world can immediately see all the images of our grandchild's birthday party, last Tuesday. Masses of old family photographs can be displayed for any relative to download or share. Our memories can be preserved no matter how quickly the bushfire comes to destroy our home. All of our artistic image attempts can be appreciated by others (anywhere in the world), who can upload encouraging comments as well.

Maybe - just maybe - web galleries are the preservation and sharing medium of choice ... at least for now .... I hope.

Looking at Pictures

Time was that if you wanted to see the family pictures, you went fishing around in the back of some out-of-the-way cupboard and eventually emerged with several well worn old-style photo albums. Blowing off the dust, you opened the tomes to reveal hundreds of old family memories going back generations.

Each time you returned to the albums, the black and white prints had turned just a fraction more sepia and the colour prints just a fraction more faded - but we remembered what the tones and colours really were supposed to be so it didn't matter ... too much.

Then of course back in the sixties and early seventies we all got modern and started taking coloured slides and could watch our family memories sort of like we were at the movies. Of course it began to dawn on us that slide shows frequently became tedious for the "trapped" visitors, effectively bolted into position before a seemingly endless parade of excruciating, underexposed, overexposed, blurry, pictures of frequently decapitated people they didn't especially care about. Likewise slideshows involved far too much trouble to be an entirely practical method for casual viewing.

To make the problem still worse, we discovered that many transparencies faded dreadfully. By the beginning of the nineties, many of my precious slides from the sixties had pretty much faded to a uniform blue - especially the Agfa, Ansco and Fuji ones. Remarkably the actual Kodachrome slides (not so much the Ectachromes) had endured pretty well.

In any event, these days, masses of families are urgently scanning what remains of their transparencies into digital form where their colours can be preserved or even restored a little. Lots of people, too, are methodically scanning their old prints. The biggest difficulty lies in finding someone who has the necessary combination of skill, patience, time, familiarity and affection for the task.

Just when we started to think that the problems associated with preserving our ancestral images had at last been solved (i.e. scanning to digital), brand new problems begin to emerge - sigh!

While slides had barely lasted 20 years, some of the oldest of our prints have lasted 150 years to date. How long will digital images last (and that includes our current images direct from our digital cameras)? The immediate, reflex answer is "forever", but is that really the case?

Once digitised, of course, images can be enhanced before being printed afresh. But how long will the new prints actually last? We have just lived through a period of 15 years during which photograph printing technology has undergone massive change - not always for the better. Unfortunately a lot of 10 year old prints (even those from SOME commercial labs) are simply fading to nothing. Over the last 5 years or so, the performance of new prints would appear to be rather better - especially those produced at home where "chrome pigments" and "archive" papers promise genuinely long life. The trouble is we don't know for sure - simply because the current methods and materials are too new.

Then there is the matter of digital image storage. Our local hard drives are hardly suitable. Hard drives last three to four years at best and frequently not as long as that. Back up drives are okay in the short term. I have two back up HDs for my main drive and get by on the hope that all three drives are unlikely to crash simultaneously ... they wouldn't .. would they??? After that I download to "archive" DVD-Rs. I produce multiple copies at any one time and hope to high heaven that my ancestors will not find them to have become meaningless plastic junk in 20 years time. If that is INDEED the case, the much hyped digital format and storage will have performed still worse than slides!

Deteriorating and unreliable digital storage is a very real fear. Experiments on present technology recordable CDs and DVDs suggest that long term reliance on such devices might well be fraught with danger. Even if the disks themselves survive the years intact, how do we know that the means will remain at hand to retrieve data from them? Think back to the relative technological instability of the IT industry. File and storage formats come and go like the wind. 8 inch floopy disks gave way to 5.25" mini-floppies and then to 3.5" hard case floppies and then to "Iomega Zip" disks and then to "Iomega Jazz" disks and then to recordable CDs, mini-CDs, DVDs and blueray DVDs and then to "flash memory" devices such as SD cards, CF cards and "memory sticks" etc ad nauseum.

In 20 years time, god alone knows what the (then) universally accepted digital storage media and/or imagefile formats will be?

Far from living in a technological golden age, we live at a time when we can't even be certain that our great grandchildren will be able to see our photographs.

But wait! Perhaps there IS a solution after all .... but that is for next time.

Light is a Harsh Mistress

Like most people who use cameras, I find myself constantly bitching about the light. What a delight it is when you find yourself in the right place at the right time with the ideal light for your purpose. Of course, in the matter of light, good photography is largely a matter of planning in which one tries to be at certain locations under certain lighting conditions.

Trouble is, at this time of year (mid-summer in the southern hemisphere) good outdoors lighting is hard to come by and potentially ideal light is really only available for a few hours at the beginning and the end of the day. "WHAT?" .... I hear you say. "Look out there. The sun is shining. Bright colours are to be found in every direction. There is a lovely blue sky. Start shooting quick."

The pity is that these latter statements are just not true. At the height of summer, in the middle of the day where I live, the light is quite appalling for good pictures. The sun is effectively directly overhead for much of the day. This means that the tops of people's heads, the roofs of houses, the crowns of trees are all beautifully lit by the sun (from the direction of the sun) while the sides of all of those things (from the photographer's perspective) are composed of broken shadow.

The strength of the sun is such that highlights are extremely bright while shadows are very dark meaning that most idle pictures of the squinting relatives lined up at the beach barbecue are dominated by shadows which render the faces indecipherable. At the same time, the sand and all whitish objects are a featureless blown out haze. Terrific picture ... NOT!

If one were to shoot pictures between (say) 7 and 9 am or (say) between 4 and 6 pm, the situation is a great deal better. At those times of the day, the sun lights things from the side, enabling more saturated and consistent colours. Face your human subjects away from the sun and many good things start to happen. For a start they stop squinting in the glare, their faces and fronts are in consistent shadow allowing reliable exposure. Fill in flash can brighten the faces moderately and the whole picture improves out of sight.

In winter, the situation is much better. The sun is softer and comes from an angle ALL DAY. Highlights and shadows can BOTH be captured and the limits of camera dynamic range are not generally threatened. Most importantly, if you devote a day to go somewhere interesting for the purpose of taking pictures, you can keep shooting ALL DAY and take your time while doing so. You can get many more useful images of a location because you don't have to stop shooting between (say) 9 am and 4 pm and find some halfway useful thing to fill in your time meanwhile.

People who look at my "Photo a Day" gallery on Pbase will note that there is currently a paucity of scenic pictures. Most of my summer hobby images tend to be close ups and indoor locations because outdoor pictures are much too tedious to plan in what is presently a busy lifestyle.

See my work at www.pbase.com/davidhobbs

The Passing Parade

It's amazing how the international photographic equipment industry has changed since the 1960s. Back then, who'd have thought that by 2009 the following would be true:

• The Konica and Minolta brands would have disappeared
• Leica and Panasonic (the people who make transistor radios???) would effectively be in partnership to make cameras
• Sony (more transistor radios???) would be a leading camera maker
• Leading European camera brands such as Voigtlander, Contax et al would have effectively disappeared
• Hoya (the filter makers?) would own Asahi Pentax
• Photographer's darkrooms would have turned into desktop computers

.... and here's the big one

• Except for highly specialised people and applications there is effectively no such thing as photographic film any more

When digital cameras first appeared in serious numbers it is amazing how many photographers (who should, by now, be knowing better) predicted that they'd remain a frivolous toy - just like motor cars, aeroplanes, talking pictures, CDs, personal computers and everything else that entrenched minds have always failed to get their heads around. No one, however, predicted the suddenness with which film would finally die - except perhaps the folks at Kodak, who for years had been trying to diversify in something of a panic.

In the light of phtography's recent history it is fascinating to predict what is likely to happen in the near future. Someone who makes predictions every year about what will happen to the photographic industry and its leading playes is Thom Hogan. You can read his predictions for 2009 here: http://www.bythom.com/2009predictions.htm

Looking back over previous Thom Hogan predictive articles, it is fascinating to see how generally correct he has been. Of course, on this occasion he predicts that the international economic downturn will hasten the death of so many prominent photographic businesses including the passing of most specialist photographic retailers and the demise of almost all specialist photographic equipment manufacturers. Wow - let's hope not. A world without Nikon, Pentax, Olympus? What a bleak prospect that would be.

See my work at www.pbase.com/davidhobbs

Could Primes be Past their Prime?

Let me summarise what I meant to say in my last article. Given the power of current post processing software, lenses produced today by prominent manufacturers have probably ceased to be a significant constraint in our efforts to secure quality images.

Class by class, it probably doesn't matter whether your lens is made by Canon, Nikon, Leica, Sony, Pentax, Olympus, Sigma, Tokina or Tamron. All other factors being equal, any given image (except maybe resolution charts) will look much the same.

It is interesting, by the way, to see how all of the makers are lining up to define lens classes. Looking at APS-C sensor bodies, all makers seem to offer some entry level (or NEAR entry level) zoom versions of (circa)18-55, 18-120, 18-200 and 70-300. The 18-55s are often surprisingly good if flimsy, the 18-200s are fairly solid but optically iffy while the 18-120s and 70-300s are something of a compromise.

Then there are the 12-24s, and 70-200s. In both cases, the optical and build quality usually represents a major step up in class. Then too, there is a slight step down from this latter level to the often reasonably fast (circa) 17-70s.

Leaving specialised items like macros, fish-eyes and super telephotos out of the discussion, the really rugged up-market lenses (some new designs plus some scrubbed-up film era designs) seem to be reserved for the full frame bodies principally in the fast 24-70 sort of range.

Most new lenses (that aren't intended for stabilised bodies) seem to incorporate a form of optical stabilisation. Significantly the most professional full frame models often leave this latter feature out. Presumably the lack of such complexity may render the lenses in question more ultimately reliable, the limited focal length ranges make stabilisation less vital ... and then again, the potential users should have pretty reasonable hand held technique at their disposal, rendering its usefulness questionable.

To my mind, given my aforementioned observations on optical quality, the choice of lenses, probably comes down to two major parameters:

• How much does it cost?
• How well is it made?

If you are basically a keen amateur whose gear often sits for long periods in dark cupboards, you might easily be best served by something cheap and (if it comes to that) easily replaceable. If you work your gear on a regular basis during which jolts, bumps and even drops are effectively inevitable, maybe you are better off with something more ruggedly constructed.

Yes, but what about primes (i.e. fixed focal length lenses)?

Let me return to our macho types, pixel peepers and status chasers on the web forums. These people constantly complain about the lack of prime lenses - at least modern versions of same. A lot of these people own lens collections consisting ONLY of primes. They seem to think that such will bestow upon them some sort of professional aura and/or ultimate image quality. In reality, except for some highly specialised applications (dedicated portrait & macro advertising studios, high profile sports photo-journalism and papparazzi work perhaps) they are probably deluding themselves.

Thirty years ago there may have been some point in all this. The quality of zoom lenses was pretty dismal. At the same time, most accumulating dust finding its way onto light sensitive surfaces in the camera was whisked away with every turn of the film winder.

These days, if you have to change lenses every couple of images, your digital sensor will soon be caked in muck, more than negating any alleged optical advantage offered by primes. More importantly, with all of the fooling around, you will more than likely miss vital shots. Anyone will tell you that the good (but technically less than perfect) image of the perfect composition/subject is a long way better than the technically ultimate image of the perfect composition/subject you just missed.

I am inclined to think that, for most general use at least, prime lenses may have had their day.

Modern Lenses are Fantastic

I thought I'd leave off talking about post processing for a while and air some hobby horse issues on the subject of lenses.

You see it all the time. People post forum messages on dpreview or other such sites, declaring their dissatisfaction with this lens or that lens. They complain primarily about "softness" or perhaps about distortions or maybe about mechanical aspects of the lens like autofocus or how smoothly the zoom ring operates. They rabbit on about lack of manufacturing quality control and how they obviously got a bad example - which they are about to take back to some poor long suffering retailer, for exchange.

The first thing is that few of these people are really qualified to comment on such things. They simply don't have the experience or skill to make the evaluations they presume to. Examining the pictures in question it usually appears that the perceived "softness" has little to do with lens quality. It almost always has much more to do with depth of field and camera shake. The posters complain about edge softness, completely forgetting that objects on the periphery of an image are often much closer than objects in the centre. A lot of the time, they are simply out of focus.

The other thing which is very often true, is that few people know how to hold a camera competently when they shoot. Nor do they seem to "get" the fact that there are certain shutter speeds they should not fall below in field use. I know its old but the traditional hand held rule still applies. At 120mm focal length, use a shutter speed higher than 1/120 sec. At 50mm use a shutter speed higher than 1/50 sec etc.

In lower light, you might well be using "vibration reduction" or "image stabilisation" and you may well be braced against doorways, railings and tree stumps but if you want to make sure you get the shot nice and sharp .... use the rule. It's that simple. In my experience, the difference between the perceived resolution of a (so called) poor lens and a (so called) excellent one is almost always LESS than the actual resolution difference between poor and excellent field technique - believe it.

Lens reviewers make a lot of the need to stop a lens down for best results or they harp about "refraction" softness due to the use of very small apertures. I am certain that resolution charts reveal the shocking truth on a regular basis but I tend not to shoot pictures of resolution charts. Differences in sharpness between f8 or f11 and wide open do not often intrude upon my consciousness with respect to REAL subjects in the REAL world.

Manufacturers of quality cameras and lenses face stiff competition today. They quite literally cannot afford to be marketing sub-standard gear. In fact, in my humble opinion the optical standard of modern lens designs is far and away better than it has ever been. There is no doubt that the quality of modern zooms is good enough for them to effectively replace prime lenses for most people. The lack of speed is more than made up for by the on-going high ISO improvements in image sensors. We used to be thrilled to use f1.8 at a film speed of 64 ISO. In reality, f3.5 at a perfectly acceptable ISO 400 is a good deal faster all up. To be sure, throwing subjects into stark relief against out of focus backgrounds is a little harder ... but we'll manage. Why not use longer focal lengths and try standing back a little?

Yes but what about distortions? ...... It's called the lens distortion routine in Photoshop or Elements. Barrel distortion has always accompanied wide angle lenses. Pincushion distortion has always hounded telephoto. The difference is that today we can push a slider across the screen and straighten everything up. We can also remove chromatic aberration fringes, intrusive vignetting etc In the final analysis, if we really think that an image is too soft we can use some light Unsharp Mask treatment. If the image was fundamentally sound and we don't overdo it, the softness problem goes away.

Then at last there are the moans and groans about how one lens autofocusses faster than another. The plain simple fact is that basic autofocus technique turns almost ANY lens into a "quick one" if we do it right. From day one of the autofocus era I learned to "find an equidistant edge" and immediately recompose. Works everytime and fast - no matter what the lens (well almost) It beats the hell out of 51 active focus points, which in the heat of the moment could be fixating on ANYTHING.

The pixel peepers, macho shooters, forum hawks and resolution chart obsessionists notwithstanding, if your pictures look soft, it almost certainly means it is YOU who fouled up - not the lens.

Noise Reduction in Elements

Let's discuss the two most likely sources of noise we are likely to encounter.

HIGH ISO NOISE

When we went and set the ISO to 3200, we knew we were in trouble. We went there because we had no choice. Given the poor light, we couldn't possibly hope to get a high enough shutter speed or a small enough aperture to freeze the action, compensate for the telephoto shake, get all parts of the room in focus etc etc. We knew that we were going to have to accept some compromises with noise in order to get the shot but there was something ABOUT the pic which was more important than the potential noise problem. If we went to the trouble of hiking up the ISO, we will probably feel that the image is important enough for some heroic efforts towards optimisation.

UNDEREXPOSURE

Even at civilised ISO settings, we can still get into noise trouble. Often we find ourselves having underexposed a relatively important image on a paying shoot which then has to have substantial mid-tone boosting - a perfect recipe for noise. If I have bracketted or gotten other, better exposed versions of the same subject I'll discard the pic in question but sometimes Sod's Law applies and it's all I've got. I then have to try to do something acceptable with it.

In either situation, we are going to have to accept that the noisy image will never be the impeccably smooth and colour precise object of beauty it MAY have been at low ISO settings and/or if we'd have exposed the thing correctly. What then are we to do?

• We can accept the noise as it is.
• We can make the noise seem more acceptable.
• We can try to reduce the noise.
• We can try to eliminate the noise

There are times when the actual picture and a reasonable degree of detail will be all important in which case we may need to leave the noise alone. There are times when the subject of the picture is very important but small detail is not the essence, in which case we can risk smearing small detail so long as the principle features of the image remain clear and defined. There are times when some form of film grain style noise might prove more acceptable or actually assist the image. Here we might remove colour noise and/or reduce colour saturation - perhaps render the image in greyscale. Sometimes we can compromise, particulary for smallish prints - remove SOME noise but accept the fact that some must be allowed to remain. There are times when smoothness and softness is the most appropriate look and loss of fine detail can be "lived with". In this case we can go further with noise reduction. Each of us must decide, in the case of every new noisy image, which is the best approach.

Certainly our decision making will be influenced by the ultimate display application. If the image will finish up as a small print or a relatively small image on a website, we enjoy a little more latitude than if it is to be published in the print media or blown up for framing. Likewise, depending on its subject value, a news pic will sometimes be acceptable in grainy greyscale but a commercial image in a display ad must be as technically perfect as possible.

Let's get one thing straight. With very few exceptions, noisy, high ISO images will RARELY be converted to clean, sharp, high detail images with one, simple, carefree pass of the NR software. It never really works that way. When we set out to remove noise artifacts, inevitably some details and texture will be interpretted as noise and get removed as part of the deal. In the final analysis, we WILL have to accept one or other of the above compromises ..... albeit, only after a good fight. For the purpose of THIS exercise let us decide to reduce noise to roughly acceptable levels - suitable for small prints and medium sized website illustrations

Until recently running "Noise Ninja" or "Neat Image" as a plug-in was the way to go. In recent times Photoshop and Elements have had the benefit of a serviceable noise reduction facility of their own in the form of Filter - Noise - Reduce Noise. Neat Image & co. are more powerful but with the judicious use of Layers and multiple passes on selected areas it can do pretty well.

Here is an approach upon which you may like to base your own experiments:

1. Go to Layers menu and click on Duplicate Layer
2. Go to Filter - Noise - Reduce Noise. Strength 10, Preserve Details 20% and Reduce Colour Noise 70% Click OK
3. Choose shadow areas and expanses of featureless open space (e.g. sky & walls) which continue to show noise, select them roughly with the Quick Selection tool. Re-run Reduce Noise on the selected areas with the previous settings.
4. Tour the image, viewing it at 1:1 (100%) and using the "Blur Tool", tidy up any last remaining spots of noticeable noise or processing artifacts
5. Run the Unsharp Mask. Amount 200, Radius 1, Threshold 10
6. Using the Opacity slider, fine tune the blending of the treated and untreated layers
7. Save as a .psd file. Flatten image and save as a jpeg.

See my work at http://www.pbase.com/davidhobbs