GASA Show at Radford University

This week the my fellow graduate students and I setup the annual GASA show at Radford University. I have three pieces in the show including my first illuminated light box.

 Admission for the show is free, and it is located in Gallery 205 in Porterfield Hall. The exhibit is open Monday through Friday 8 a.m. – noon, 1 p.m. – 5 p.m, and ends of December 14th.

plustek Optic Film 120 scanner

The plustek Optic Film 120 scanner

 

 

 

 

For the digital archivist looking for a product to replace the Nikon Coolscan 9000 the new plustek Optic Film 120 scanner should be given some consideration.

At a $2,000 it goes beyond what most consumers would want to spend. I would like to see one in use before I made a purchase. Sometimes I've found the products by plustek to have some hardware/software issues.

The best part of the package is the enclosed SilverFast Ai Studio 8 software. I've found it to be very good in terms of speed and removing dust and scratches. Best of all it works in the newer Mac OS software platforms so the Mac people now have a good choice of options when it comes to scanning.

In a production environment I've found the single film holder scanner can slow down scan times. Because you only have one film holder you need to finish the scan, remove the holder, replace the negative/slide, and then reload the scanner. All of this takes time. If I had a large volume of images to scan I'd consider buying a second set of film holders so that they can be loaded as the scanner is scanning the image.

SPE South Central Region Show

Pocahontas Coal Shadows 2012

An image from a series I've taken in Pocahontas, Virginia has been accepted for the  Society for Photographic Education South Central Region show. 

A special thanks goes out to my classmate Karie Edwards who helped me get it framed and even cut the mat for me. 

The image is part of my ongoing exploration of abandoned places using HDR photography.

I'm published in Creative Quarterly

This week I received the spring issue of Creative Quarterly and was very pleased to see one of my photographs printed full page in the magazine.

I've been working on my MFA degree for the last 2 1/2 years and it's good to see my work is getting some recognition.

Although this doesn't have much to do with archiving I do wonder how long artists, and others for that matter, will be published in a printed format.

The cost of printing and sending out a magazine in the electronic age is not very cost effective. It's sad because they may never know what it's like to open up a publication and see your work inside. There is also that new magazine smell!

The Dead on Facebook

With over 900 million users on facebook I, as a digital archivist, wonder about the dead on facebook. What happens to their account? I'd guess no one calls up facebook to let them know a person is dead. 
So......how many users are dead? We already know that many of the accounts are fake or that people have multiple accounts. But who keeps track of the dead? Also.....I do wonder what happens to all those posts and the dreaded timeline. Does the company keep all of that info? 
I would argue they should. If the web posts we make today are the record others will look at tomorrow then we should keep this information public and preserve it for future generations.

Photo Crimes

There is an interesting read in the New York Times Lens Blog about how photography in public places is being criminalized. It is an interview with  James Estrin a lawyer with the National Press Photographers Association.

Estrin rightly points out that police are restricting access of press photographers and misleading the public about where images can be taken in a post 9/11 world. Basically if you are on a public street and are not interfering with anyone you can snap away to your hearts content. It's still a free country!

When I worked as a photojournalist I had a few conflicts with EMS and police about if I could take photographs at a spot news event. One guy told me I needed to respect peoples privacy. My response was that if you wrap your car around a telephone pole on a public street it isn't private anymore.

Sometimes I think we've given up to much freedom in order to be "safe" in a country founded on individual rights.

Scoopshot is a bad idea.

I just saw a link to the website Scoopshot a way for mobile photographers to upload their images so that they can be used by news organizations. So now an army of people with a cell phone camera can descend on a Spot News event and snap away. You might even make a few bucks.

Sorry, but if you come across an accident or house fire do what you can to help someone out. Even most full-time paid photojournalists are people first and photographers second.

If you don't know how to help then get out of the way of the people who know what they are doing.

My thoughts on the matter.

Screw up your Courage Clean your Sensor!

Today I undertook the task of cleaning the sensor on my Nikon D7000 for the first time and am very pleased with the results. I had an accumulation of crud all over the sensor.

(Note to sell avoid changing lenses in the rain ..... never mind)

I used the sensor swab kit from Photographic Solutions and found their kit to be a cost effective way to clean my camera.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to working on my camera. I took apart the AP/Kodak NC2000e press camera more times than I can remember to replace batteries and fix connections.

It's just when it's my personal camera and if I mess it up I need to fix it I think twice before facing a sensor replacement bill. One things I miss about not being in the photojournalist world anymore were the free annual clean and checks by Nikon. I could have sent it off to a camera service department to have it cleaned but that would cost more than the kit I ordered off of Amazon.

Chick-fil-a & Historical Archives

I'm not going to weigh in on the Chick-fil-a debate on who is right and who is wrong.

As a person who's worked in archiving I'm more interested in how, ten years from now, this event will be remembered.

I wonder if all of the Facebook disagreements I've seen will come back to haunt the posters.

Will a comment, made in the heat of anger, come back as a proof of being intolerant or discriminatory? Will those comments be used against the posters? Will we even care?

I do think the visuals from today will get more play in the media because they are more dynamic in content. An image of a crowded restaurant is at best a ho-hum photograph when compared to the exchange of a kiss between two same-sex individuals. It will be interesting to see how the story plays out in the news media.

Rob Galbraith Site Signs Off

Log time blogger/digital pioneer, Rob Galbraith has stopped updating his website because of some life changes.

I've followed his website for a long time.

He was a lone voice in a world of digital technology when the AP/Kodak NC2000 digital camera was new. In 1994 when I went digital, there was a less than helpful manual and even less technical service available for the $15,000 handed to me by my boss Woody Marshall. 

Galbraith, a staff photographer at the Calgary Herald and had the mental capacity and visual acuity to not only explain the technology but still make great images from a camera that had a lot of issues.


I wish him well as he moves onto academic and thank him for all of the knowledge he has shared over the years.

Hipstamatic isn't Hip on this one.

I just finished the British Journal of Photography and am a bit disturbed by what I read. It looks like Hipstamatic is coming up with the plans to create a Foundation for Photojournalism. Not a bad idea but after reading the story I see many problems.

I see legions of people becoming "photojournalists" because they have a camera phone and Hipstamatic software. According to the article CEO Buick states, "create an educational platform, where professionals will be able give some of their time to educate up-and-coming photographers on how to go into Libya, for example, and not get shot."

And if something else goes wrong then who do they call? The bigger problem I see is the local community guy who decides he is a photojournalist simply because he has an iPhone and the "photojournalism Goodpack" and thinks that makes him or her part of the 4th estate.

Covering spot news is dangerous and not for everyone. A photographer can be seriously hurt of killed if they are in the wrong spot. And if you are not there as a member of the real press then you are just in the way of police and firefighters who have a real, and more important, job to do.

Photojournalism, as I practiced it for many years, needs some CPR if it is going to survive but I'm not sure the foundation knows the correct technique.

Here is the link: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2193262/hipstamatic-plans-launch-of-foundation-for-photojournalism#ixzz21jV1kEzm

How many photos do we need?

If you take a look at sites like Photo Weekly Online you'll see that sites like Facebook have over 100 billion photos on their site and around 6 billion photos are uploaded each month.

My question is do we really need those images? Are we just snapping pictures of things instead of enjoying the experience of the the people and places? As a photographer my interaction with people changes. I wonder if it's the same with all of these cell phone grabs. Do we really need a day to day, moment to moment documentation of our lives? Can't we just experience a moment?

Time to Change up the Blog

A Gum Bichromate print I recently created.

I've been away from this blog for a long time and many things have changed in my career as well as my personal life. I have started my final year in the MFA program at Radford University.

I don't do digital archiving anymore but, I still have a deep knowledge of Digital Asset Management. I've decided to use this blog to cover some of my projects and I continue to work on my degree.


The image of apples I've put up with this post is a Gum Bichromate print.
It is a non-silver process and it should outlast most images printed today.

Daminion Digital Asset Software

Looking across the web recently I found a new Beta release from a company called Daminion. You can download the 0.8.9b version at the company's website. http://daminion.net/.

It looks like the product would serve a small digital asset management setup among a few users. The range of file types supported by the software seems extensive but I wonder how it embeds the data in Nikon and Canon raw files.

If you are looking for a way to setup a DAM system then this program might be a good solution at an affordable price. The only down side I see to the product is that it is a Windows only program. It looks like the Mac users are out of luck with this product at this time.

Lightroom 4 Beta and Metadata

In case you have been asleep for the last week you may want to know that Adobe Labs has released a beta version of Lightroom 4.

I've been looking at how the software handles metadata of the images I've processed and must admit I've been impressed.

I would still like to see a larger box to input keywords and descriptions. And I think for high volume users with several photographers this may not be the best solution. But after a few test runs I think the ability to add metadata to images as well as the many post-processing features of the software make it a must have software program for the professional or semi-professional photographer.

Right now it's available for trial at: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4/

Snapseed Software Now in the App Store

A simple snapshot of the cat can be turned into something really cool.

It's not really related to Digital Asset Management but Snapseed is now for sale in the App store. It allows you to do a lot of things to an image and create some nice effects.

The only disadvantage I've found so far is that it will only allow me to save images a jpegs.

At the price of $19.99 it's hard to beat.