Hugh Morton Collection at UNC

I just found a collection of photographs taken by Hugh Morton on display at the University of North Carolina. They are still in the process of archiving his collection but have posted some of his images online at  http://www.lib.unc.edu/blogs/morton/

Mr. Morton was very well known and respected by many photojournalist in North Carolina and he helped shape the respect for the working press in NC.

I met Mr. Morton several times, usually at UNC basketball games and always found him to be a gracious humble man who loved photography.

The fall of the CD/DVD is near!!

Yahoo has an interesting story on technology that won't be around in 2020. It looks like the CD will be one of those items soon to go the way of the VHS tape. A lot of people, myself included, use the CD as a second backup of the contents of a computer. The CD is usually my third backup of a set of images. One on the hard drive, one on the external drive, and one on a CD or DVD.

Going forward it looks like more will need to be moved onto the Cloud or some other yet announced media. It looks like the DVD and CD will go the way of film. You might be able to find some but you need to look a lot.

Go ahead, try to find a roll of film. I dare you. I double dare you to find a roll of slide film.

Here is the link to the story: http://shopping.yahoo.com/articles/yshoppingarticles/717/7-gadgets-that-wont-be-around-in-2020

Nikon Super Coolscan 9000 ED Scanner

If you look on the used scanner market you will find a few Nikon Super Coolscan 9000s on EBay. With out a doubt this is the best scanner I've ever used. Alas, Nikon no longer makes or supports the scanner so getting it connected to a new Mac will be an issue.

I believe it also requires Rosetta in order to run in the new Mac environment and OS 10.7 doesn't support Rosetta anymore. It's also Firewire 400 so it doesn't take advantage of the Firewire 800 speed newer makes offered.

If you have one sitting around I'd recommend putting it on EBay. There are selling for more than when they were new. If you have one and are using it then keep it happy. Odds are there isn't a replacement in the works by Nikon.

Not only did they take our Kodachrome away they even took away the best way to digitize it!!

"Leave your boyfriend far from home.....momma don't take my Kodachrome away...." Paul Simon.

Man, I'm getting old.

Keeping backup copies of your work

A recent HDR image.

At present I've been doing a lot of HDR (Hyper Dynamic Range) photography documenting some of the abandoned places around the Piedmont, Virginia area.

It go me to thinking that when you have multiple copies of an image you need to keep a good backup as you work.

Most of my HDR work involves combining three images and then three or four edited Tiff files before I make the final prints. What this means is that I will have somewhere around 12 different images before I arrive at the final print. If I ever want to restart the process I need to keep everything!!

What this means is it's important to backup at least once or twice a week in order not to get into a jam.

9/11 Images are important

Ten years ago I was a photographer at Elon University in Elon, NC. I remember seeing a blip on Yahoo about a plane hitting one of the twin towers. I first thought it was something involving a small plane and didn't give it much thought. I left the meeting I was in to discover a crowd around the large screen TV in the School of Communications. I remember one of the students saying her mother worked in one of the buildings next to the World Trade Center.

I spent most of that day and a few more documenting how the campus reacted to the tragic events of 9/11. Even though were were a long way away from the event it made a real impact on the community. I'm glad I was there to document the events and how we came together during that event.

The university has a link to some of my images at http://www.elon.edu/e-net/Note.aspx?id=954755

It's good to know that 10 years out the images I took still survive and are a part of the communal history.

Pacific Image Powerslide 3650 Rolling Case

Having to move around a lot of equipment over the last few weeks I found out that a Pacific Image Powerslide 3650 will fit into a Think Tank Airport Security rolling case.

You can add a loupe and a few extra things and have an easy way to move things around. The Think Tank isn't cheap and if you are a DIY (Do It Yourself) type you could easily adapt a rolling suitcase for the task.

Here is the link to the Think Tank website: http://www.thinktankphoto.com/

They make some of the best photo gear I've ever used and it's really well made. If you need to take a scanner on the road you it's a great setup.

Photos Are Important Save Them!

A photo from a family reunion in the 1940's.

We spent the weekend going to the Cupp Reunion in Briery Branch, VA and it just reaffirms the power photographs have to suspend time and help us travel back to places and events in the past.

On the table was a photograph of a group of people taken sometime in 1940. There in the middle of a group of kids was my wife's mother. Beside her were some other kids who became her aunts and uncles.

I hope that the images we are creating now will still be around 70 years from now for others to enjoy.

Goodbye LU!!

It's official today was my last day at Liberty University. It came down to a choice between continuing in my position at the university or starting graduate school full-time at Radford University.

I think they were left with a pretty good workflow process and I hope someone else will come in a pickup the process I started. I'll miss my coworkers

I'm looking forward to getting my MFA at Radford and plan on keeping this blog current and active.

Goodbye LU!

The Image Numbers Add Up Differently Today

Some Wolf Pack action from the 90's.

If you start to go through a lot of film negatives to decide what you want to digitize you may find there is a lot less to choose from than we have in the digital age. Let's take a basketball game for example.

At most games it's not unusual to shoot 500 to 700 images per game some even shoot 1,000 or more and out of that around 50 or so may get posted onto a website and around 150 or 200 will get archived.

When I worked as a photojournalist using film I'd shoot about two rolls per game. That's 2x36 or 72 exposures for the entire game. For two games I'd shoot four rolls or 144 frames. Why you ask? Well when you went back to the paper you could dunk four rolls of film in a tank and be done. If you shot more than that it required a second film run and there wasn't time on deadline.

Also, unlike today,  there was a cost with shooting more images. Compact Flash and SD cards have a one time cost but after that you can use the same cards for years if you treat them well. Just remember things were a lot different not that long ago.

Library of Congress site on Digital Archiving

If your looking to start archiving digital materials you have around the house you might want to check out the Library of Congress site on Digital Archiving. It has tips on how to go about archiving photos, video and audio files, and even websites and email.

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/you/

It has a lot of good trips and best of all you've paid for it with your tax dollars.

The art is a little bit lacking but it wasn't done by a photographer.

Now if they can just fix that deficit thing.

Pacific Image Power Slide 3650 and Mac OSX Lion Driver Issues

If you have a Pacific Image PowerSlide 3650 slide scanner and have just upgraded to OSX Lion you'll find that your scanner will no longer work. I tried using the VueScan software and it is still looking for the Rosetta driver that doesn't work with the Lion software.

The Pacific Image support page isn't much help.
It tells you the scanner you have will be supported in the near future. Thankfully the OS 10.6 Mac I have will still allow the scanner to operate.

The Big Move

The collection is now in a new home.

 

 

   Today was the day of the big move. We are reorganizing at Liberty University and moved the archive negatives, slides, and prints into a new location.

We have a collection of images from around 1974 to early 2000 that needed to be moved and reshelved.

My coworkers Meghann an Kevin helped get things together and worked hard all morning putting binders into place.
Things went pretty well overall. Now it just needs to be edited, scanned, retouched, captioned, moved onto the server, and archived. In a few years it
just might be finished.

iPod Touch plays with Lion

As part of moving on to the Mac Lion operating system I had to sync my old iPod touch to the new machine.

Everything went OK except for a few issues. First the Mac tried to import all of my music not my playlist. It couldn't so then it quit. It deleted my photo galleries and didn't like to play with some of my apps.

Because I'm a good Digital Asset Manager I had a backup, actually two, of my photos from my iPod.
Using my network connection I copied them into iPhoto and put them onto my iPod Touch.

I would have hated to have lost my photos from Greece.

Backups are a very good thing indeed!

Stories of 911 Photographers

It's not really about archiving but it makes you appreciate what someone must do in order to record history as it happens.

http://news.yahoo.com/lenses-shield-9-11-photogs-capture-history-041242188.html

It's important we record and save the images we take today in order that they can be remembered tomorrow.

I want my..... I want my....... I Want My META TV!!!

OK, so this is a new one on me. Metadata embedded into TV programs so you can easily find your favorite episode of "Lost" or whatever.

In case you didn't know it Metadata has been apart of photography since digital cameras were first introduced in the mid 90's. It keeps track of the data recorded by the camera when it creates a photograph. You can see exposure, color space, and other items. More importantly it allows digital asset management software the ability in input keywords an descriptions that become part of the digital file.

It's been a part of still images for a long time but TV. Interesting, here's the link:

http://mashable.com/2011/08/08/tv-everywhere-metadata/

Rain in the Clouds??

Ok, so now I'm on the Mac OS 10.7 Lion operating system. Is it time to move the personal photos I have onto the cloud? One look at a CNN Money story tells me I'm going to wait.

Here is the link:http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/02/technology/flickr_deletes_account/index.htm

I'd be a very unhappy camper!!

Mac OS 10.7 Lion Upgrade

I've upgraded to OS 10.7 Lion and haven't seen any issues with using Photoshop CS 5.1 or PhotoMechanic on my machine. The only issue I've had is with the Adobe Flash 10 player. It still doesn't like to play well with Mac and the version they have for 10.7 is a beta.

DAMMY Awards

Who knew there were awards for Digital Asset Management!

A company called Createaspher is sponsoring the second annual Dammy Awards for "Excellence in Digital Asset Management.

Here's the link: http://createasphere.com/En/dammys.html

I'd personally like a DAMMY of the Year on my resume.

Scanners may have a problem with Lion OS

If you are looking to buy a new Mac and have an old scanner you may end up having some issues. For some of the older scanners, like the Nikon Coolscan, they will not work with the Mac OS 10 Lion operating system. They require Rosetta (A software app that was still in OS 10.6)  in order to run.

Hopefully some third party software maker will come up with a solution.

Portfolio 10 Released

Extenis has released Portfolio 10 for Digital Asset Management. We're in the process of getting a new server and upgrading to the newest version.

I've used their products for years and think it's one of the best DAM software programs available.

http://www.extensis.com/en/digital-asset-management/portfolio-server-10/index.jsp?id=hpb

Lots of Books

An interesting story about a guy trying to build an archive of real books.

http://news.yahoo.com/internet-archivist-seeks-1-every-book-written-183621648.html

Sounds like a big project. I hope he has time to read a few.

Do you have a lot of time?

So you've decided that there are a bunch of old slides or negatives you want to get scanned and put into some type of an archive system. If that's you then you'll need to decide how much time you really want to invest in the project. The industry standard that has been quoted to me is 15 minutes per image.

Yep, that's four images in an hour,  times eight hours of work,  and you'll have a grand total of 32 images archived for one days worth of work.

Can't be true you say. Think about it.

You need to find the negatives or slides, sort them, put them into a scanner and scan them at a high resolution. Then you'll need to retouch and color correct the image and save it in a format that you've set as your standard. Then you should write some type of a description and add in a few keywords before moving it into your Digital Asset Management System. And just to tidy up you'll need to refile those negatives or slide.

It's a lot of detail work and it takes time.

What's in a Name?

When you decide to archive your digital images you need to decide on how you will name your files and stick with it FOREVER!!!

If you change your naming conventions or don't have a standard good luck finding your images later on. Sure it might work out one or two years later but how about 10 to 15 years out. Just try to find img_6745.jpg in a pile of 20,000 images in twelve folders on two hard drives.

A good system is to use YYYYMMDD_Filename. You can also use MMDDYYY_Filename. It's a good system to use and you can batch rename your raw files or jpegs using a variety of programs.

So, for example, a photo taken on July 2, 2011 would be called 20110702_filename or 07022011_filename.

Whatever you decide, remember you need to stick to that system.

It's DAM not dam!

It's Digital Asset Management or DAM for short. Someone with a sense of humor must have come up with the title. More than likely they worked in a newsroom where the statement "Where's the dam photo"!? has been uttered since the Speed Graphic came into usage. Some do call it Digital Image Management or DIM. I'm not sure that's much better.

It's about being able to manage the images you produce when you are a photographer so why not call it Photo Image Management or PIM for short? Right now I'll go with the common usage for this blog but I'm open to suggestions.

Welcome to the Pixel Archivist

Hello, if you are reading this then you must have some involvement with the management of digital files and the process of archiving them. Given that almost everyone now uses a digital camera it should cover at least 90% of the population. I've been a digital shooter since 1994 when prices were expensive and megapixels were small. I'd like this to be a place for the exchange of ideas on how best to manage digital images and keep them for future generations to enjoy.