Frogs and Crawdads

I took my son, Calvin, for a walk in the woods the other day. He loves to “go hiking” especially when we go to a place where there is water. He’s becoming a real trouper – I rarely have to carry him back to the car anymore, he doesn’t whine too much when he falls on some slippery rocks, we even got caught in a torrential downpour where it rained so hard it hurt and by the time we got back to the car we were soaked to the bone and he still likes to go hiking.

This day was overcast with a 60% chance of rain so I wasn’t sure if we would get far before it rained. In the end it turned out great. The heavy low clouds threw a wrinkled grey blanket over the hills or “the land beyond” as Calvin called it while we were driving. It was damp, drippy, mossy green, and quiet as we walked in the twilight under the trees. The forest felt calm and content and willing to let a couple of gnats like us wander around for a couple three hours today.

As we walked through the woods Calvin had a lot to say about the strange fungi, the pretty flowers, and the various bugs that we saw. And he had tons of questions of course. He kept up a pretty constant stream of conversation.

Of course I led him down into a gully where I knew there would be water. He had on his yellow boots, but they didn’t keep his feet dry. In no time at all he had them filled as a result of chasing frogs into water that was too deep. As usual I followed suit by getting in over my hiking boots while taking pictures and hunting for crawdads. We let the stream lead us higher up and further into the woods.

While I took pictures, Calvin would look for frogs or drop fallen leaves onto the water to watch the current drag them downstream and over the small waterfalls. Usually I wasn’t done before he pulled me away so that we could see what was further on up the gully.

After a while I figured it was about time to turn back. Calvin started to protest, but he didn’t hold out for long. I reminded him that we had a long walk back and he decided after all he was starting to get a little tired. We made it back to the car without ever getting wet – well without getting wet from rain anyway.

MDW

Storing Digital Photos – Part 2

OK, so I got a little carried away on a tangent with that first post on storing digital photos. I had really planned on talking more about hard disks and backups than trips down memory lane. So lets try it again.

The instant you take a photo with any kind of camera be it film or digital, the clock starts ticking on the life span of that image.

We often think that film images are permanent because the rate of decay is slow. You can take some slides and throw them in a drawer and when you take them out ten years later they look pretty much the same. Take those same slides and let them sit around for sixty or eighty years and maybe they still look good – then again maybe not. How long film images last varies widely depending on what film you are using and how you store it. Slides stored in the dark under proper temperature and humidity could last hundreds of years. On the other hand, if you expose them to light or store them in a damp basement or a hot attic or the dog chews on them or your house catches fire, then their lifespan could be much much shorter.

In the digital world things move a little more quickly. Digital images stored only on your hard drive are in trouble. Of course everyone knows about hard drive crashes. Modern drives are very reliable but they are mechanical and, as with all mechanical devices, they are subject to failure. On my day job in the computer world, I see drives fail all the time – I’ve even seen some catch fire. The files on a trashed drive might be recoverable (at a cost) and then again they might not. Certainly the chances of recovering all your images intact from a failed drive are slim. Personally I get nervous about files stored on drives that are more than a few years old, but even new drives can fail due to mistreatment or manufacturing defect.

Even if your disk doesn’t crash and burn there are still things that can rob you of your favorite photos. Like say you accidentally delete them while making room for some new images. Or maybe you pull up your original full size image to make it smaller so that you can email it to someone and you accidentally hit “save” instead of “save as” – now the image is too small to be printed decently. On top of all this, the magnetic imprint of your photo on disk can “fade” over time. Your disk may be running fine, but those photos that you haven’t pulled up in a few years might be unreadable now.

Check out this link on digital longevity – http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/events/digitallongevity.html

And this one on storing your images – http://internetbrothers.com/photo_storage.htm

So what do you do? Well everyone knows that you should backup your hard drive regularly. Unfortunately this is easier said than done and most people’s backup plans are spotty at best. I worry about making sure that proper backups are in place at my workplace every day, but even I tend to get lax when it comes to the home front.

And what about those backups? Tape – subject to failure and fading just like hard drives, maybe worse. I find backup tapes all the time that are partially or ccompletely unreadable after just a few months of storage. CD/DVD – better than tape, but depending on the quality of the disc and how you store them they can last anywhere from a hundred years (estimated since they haven’t been around that long) to just five years.

Your photos are also in danger of being completely intact yet still unreadable at some point in future due to changes in technology. In the digital world everything is obsolete as soon as you buy it. I have film cameras that can still be used after thirty years. I have five year old computers that are boat anchors. There are a bunch of different file formats in which to store your photos. Which ones will still be around in ten years or twenty years? Try getting your current word processing program to read files from twenty years ago. How many times have you sent a file to a friend and they can’t open it because they have a different version of the same program?

So what do I do? I’ll tell you and you can decide if it is too little or too much for your situation.

My film scanner scans my slides into TIF format files. The original files are around 50MB. I set my Nikon D200 digital camera to record both raw file format(Nikon NEF format) and JPG for each photo. The NEF files are around 15MB and the JPGs are around 5MB.

I drop the original files to my main 80GB hard drive. This is where I do my photo editing. I always keep the original file (in whatever format) in its original form – I save edited images to a separate file. That way I can always get back to the original if I decide that I didn’t like my changes or maybe I get an upgrade for my photo editing software that has a better sharpening function.

I save my edited files in either TIF or JPG file format – sometimes both. Which format is best is the subject of too long a discussion for right now. My deal is that to keep the most information in the image I use TIF, but TIF files can be very large and it is a pain to try and work with them routinely so I like to have JPGs around. I always set my editing software so that it uses no compression or as little compression as the format will allow. Never throw away information through compression!

OK so here is the exception to the “never use compression” rule. Always use compression when you plan to post an image on a web site or send it in a email. Uncompressed files can be very large and that is not what you want when someone is trying to download it. So besides the original untouched file and the edited but uncompressed file, I also create smaller sometimes compressed versions as needed for things like posting in this blog.

Now, I have a second hard drive in my computer. After making changes to images on my main drive, I copy the files to the second drive. That way if one drive fails, I have a backup. Copying the files to the second drive gives me redundancy in a relatively rapid way versus tapes or buring CD/DVDs. Even if my PC dies, I can move one or both disks to a new one and still get the files.

As I finish editing a batch of images, I name them according to my own quirky system and start grouping the batches together under a common folder. Once I have enough to fill a CD or DVD, I burn the files. I make sure that I always buy brand name high quality CDs and DVDs. This is no time to cheap out. You want some assurance that the burned discs will last. For really important files I use gold based archival quality discs.

Now that I have a copy of the files on CD or DVD, I delete the files from my main hard disk so that I have room for more incoming images. However, I have a third disk. This is a 300GB external USB attached disk. I copy the images to this disk for “long term” storage while still being able to pull the files up without having to dig out the CD or DVDs. This disk is slow compared to an internal disk so it is no good for quick backups, but the large size lets me keep heaps of images close at hand over the long haul.

At any one time I make sure that I never have less than two and usually three copies on different media of all my images. If I was a little more paranoid, I would store the CD/DVDs somewhere off-site in case my house burns down.

For things like family snapshots that we take with our 4MP point and shoot camera I still make sure that I never have less than two copies of every photo. I keep them on hard disk and I keep a copy on CD or DVD. I always keep the original file intact while saving any edited images in separate files with as little compression as possible.

Finally over the years you need to look out for that fading problem. Copying your files from one hard drive to another every year or two (like when you get a new computer) will refresh the files. You can also buy a program like SpinRite from GRC to refresh your files in place.

And of course always keep those shoe boxes full of prints around for extra security.

MDW

Storing Digital Photos – Part 1

My parents have a desk in the front foyer of their home. It’s a big wooden two level vintage 1950 thing about eight feet long and five high. It has a fold-down writing surface that hides lots of cubby holes when it is closed. There are lots of roomy drawers for storing everything from my father’s business records to packs of playing cards to phone books. Not much there to interest a kid on a rainy day except – down at the bottom behind a couple of sliding doors in some battered, worn and torn shoe boxes – the family photos!

I remember many times when I was a kid, pawing through the miriad of images of friends and relatives (some known and some unknown) detailing historic family events. They are still there. Fifty or sixty years worth of our lives depicted – sometimes they go further back when pics from Grandma’s hoard get inherited. Some are black and white, some are color, some are faded, some are yellowing, some are torn from rough kid handling. Some have the negatives with them, but many got separated over the years and may never reunite.

We don’t have such a thing at my house. Sure we have the odd stash of photo envelopes here and there, but nothing substantial. Since my son was born four years or so ago, we have been taking digital photos. Most of our family history is hiding on a computer hard drive somewhere. Although we could pull them up at any time, it is really a case of “out of sight, out of mind”. There isn’t the chance to just run across the pics while looking for a take out restaurant menu. You can’t haul them out and spread them all over the dining room table or on the living room floor and let your eyes flit from image to image in a “random” sort of way making intuitive connections based on a part of a face sticking out of the pile here and a favorite pet tail there.

I really miss that kind of thing and I think as time goes by, so my son will miss out on a chance to connect with the family (however insignificant in the grand scheme of things) history. I can tell him stories of relatives past and present, but they say a picture is worth a thousand words and I’m not a real talkative guy.

Technology is a great thing and as a digital photographer and professional computer geek, I’m generally all for using gizmos. However, I think people are at their core analog creatures and not digital. Organizing things in neat little electronic folders by date and subject is all very nice and no doubt essential in some situations, but I think the human mind is naturally more “free form” than that and certainly the human imagination is not so cut and dried. People think and dream - computers merely compute.

So I think it is time to buy a pack of photo paper and bust out the printer. We need to stop just looking over the pictures we take and then saving them off to a disk as cold cruel one and zeros. We need to make a bunch of real live touch-able hold-able shuffle-able prints and stuff them into as old and beat up a shoe box as we can find and we need to squirrel that box (or boxes depending on your age and how itchy your shutter finger is) away in some drawer that doesn’t get opened too often – just every once in a while especially on rainy days.

MDW