Pro photo

Found at RobertBenson.com, here is probably the best description of how a photographer evolves in time (from larva to beautiful butterfly, one would say). You may be any location on this evolution chart, but it’s good to recognize that you still have the possibility to move forward to the right of the graph.

Stages of a photographer

• Knowledge
• Quality of Photos
• How good you think you are

Where are you located? Please, use the comments below.

After that, don’t tell me that the iPhone 3GS is not really a camera.

Of course, the final photos have been edited in Photoshop afterwards, but isn’t it the case for all studio work?

You could do much worse than learning from the best wildlife photographers. Actually, the BBC Wildlife Magazine is now providing an impressive list of compact training courses for wildlife photography. There are titles like:

• Wild Places
• Mammal Portraits
• Plant Portraits
• From Dusk to Dawn
• Underwater Photography
• Invertebrate Portraits
• Birds in Flight
• Animals in their Environment
• Bird Portraits
• Reptiles and Amphibians
• Creative Visions of Nature
• Wet Weather Wildlife
• Cold Weather Wildlife
• Black and White Photography
• Urban and Garden Wildlife
• Zoo Photography
• Bird Behaviour
• Mammal Behaviour
• Extreme Close-Up
• Innovative Wildlife Photography
• The World in our Hands

Those are complete courses that have been published previously on paper in 2006 and on. If you did not get them at the time, you can now grab the PDF files. You will appreciate the progression from mostly animal portraits to more sophisticated or more subtle kinds of pictures. All of them are great.

I had missed it, but you should try and look at this marvelous collection of microscopy pictures found at the Nikon’s annual Small World photomicrography competition in 2009. They honored 20 images of very high-quality. Not something that everyone of us would be able to do, but a very beautiful display: 35 Years of the World’s Best Microscope Photography.

Some really look like art pieces more than mere photographs of nature phenomenons.

1996: Doxorubin in methanol and dimethylbenzenesulfonic acid (80x), Polarized Light. / Lars BechNaarden, The Netherlands. Courtesy of Nikon Small World.

As a matter of fact, this tool is simply able to control a digital SLR camera. The big button on the side is a knob to set the focus and it is de-multiplied enough to warrant the name of micro-focus.

Bu the most surprising or the most noticeable is that if you have an iPhone available, you can slide it into the device and it will display the aperture, the focal length or zoom factor and a few other parameters.

Show time! (but not very audible)

Two problems: This gadget will not be available before Summer 2010, and the price will be around 1000 US$ (or more than 800€).

GigaPan announces a new motorized panorama head: Epic Pro. This robot-like tripod-based camera mount automatizes the shooting of pictures that will be assembled into one giant panorama image. This leaves GigaPan with a full range of panorama mounts:

GigaPan range of panorama heads

The EPIC costs $349, the EPIC 100 $449 and the EPIC Pro $895. All three should start shipping in April 2010.

With these, you will be ready to do great panoramas. If you want to get some inspiration, I suggest you jump to this panorama of Paris, France: 26 billion pixels.

Paris @ 26 giga-pixels

Nota bene: I love this image image because I live in Paris, but I have to admit that when you zoom deeply into it, you will see that the photo should have been a little more crispy and detailed. And be sure to cut to loud speaker before jumping to www.paris-26-gigapixels.com.

If you want to have fun, you could look for the two clocks showing a different time and the old guy in front of his window.

Thanks to Pierre.ch and Mash.

Associate professor Yojiro Ishino and his students at the Nagoya Institute of Technology obtained an official recognition of their achievement when the Guinness World Records certified them as holding the world record for a camera with largest number of lenses.

Record camera with 158 lenses

Usually, a DSLR has 1 lens attached. Some 3D cameras have two.

This piece of technological achievement has four rows of 39 or 40 lenses allowing it to take 3D images of complex objects like a flame using Computed Tomography (CT) technology.

As could be expected the lenses are quite small (2 cm in diameter, less than an inch) and cheap, and mounted on an aluminum structure. It reminds me of the 120 photo camera structure created for the slow motion “bullet time” sequences: Many photo cameras triggered in sequence. Same idea but for a smaller object and a much more affordable price.

Sunshine is a Danny Boyle movie from 2007 which scenrizes the crew of a space ship sent to save a dying sun. The American Cinematographer offers us a long interview with Alwin Küchler who designed the shooting and the light of this film. Even (or preferably) for a studio photographer, it will be quite interesting to understnad the way light, color and their relative organization were used to sustain the psychological intensity of the movie.

Read it.

Via Strobist.

Studio photography is clearly a real specialty and I don’t hide my admiration for those photographers able to master its difficult techniques.

I recently found three demonstrations of what may be a beautiful studio lighting, along with dense explanations and welcome details.

• Anatomy of a photo: Balvenie Scotch
• Professional Studio Lighting – Playing with Mirrors by Peter Kirring
• One simple photo of glasses, by Scott Kelby: from the studio shot to Photoshop.

But, if this is not enough and that yo want to dig deeper into the studio lighting technique, I recommend you start a browser window on Strobist’s Lighting 102 (Introduction). An exceptional source of information.

After that, we only have to try and apply these advices and these examples. Can you reproduce these studio flash lightings?

Following our previous article about online backup for the photographer’s files (which ended up with a recommendation of Mozy Backup), it could be noticed that Lifehacker published an article on a similar subject (but in more general terms) and recommends the following 5 tools:

• CrashPlan (Windows/Mac/Linux/Open Solaris, Basic [No online storage] Free, Premium [Unlimited] $4.50 per month)
• Mozy (Windows/Mac, Basic [2GB] Free, Home Premium [Unlimited] $4.95 per month)
• Dropbox (Windows/Mac/Linux, Basic [2GB] Free, Pro [50GB] $9.99 per month)
• Jungle Disk (Windows/Mac/Linux, Pricing: $2 per month + Per GB Fees)
• Carbonite (Windows/Mac, Unlimited Storage $4.58 per month)

Source: Five Best Online Backup Tools [Hive Five]

Pendant la session d’ouverture des Nations Unies en septembre dernier à New York, Platon, photographe pour le New Yorker et connu pour quelques portraits réussis de Poutine par exemple, a installé un studio dans l’immeuble des Nations Unis pour y photographier les grands de ce monde qui passaient là.

Click to reach the slide show

Il a maintenant rassemblé ces photographies dans un diaporama où vous pouvez apprendre bien des choses sur cet exercice et sur les “puissants” en question.

Source New Yorker.

The leopard seal is really a big predator (check its size on the photos) and it’s perfectly adapted to its environment (much more than a man in a diving suit). But this one, not only let National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen shoot great pictures, but tried to help him by feeding him live penguins.

Do not forget the next Wildlife Festival in Montier-en-Der, from November 19 to 22, 2009.

Sony will soon offer (at the end of October) a Premium service for after-sales and warranty. It will target pros and top-flight amateur photographers. For a period of one, two or three years (at the price of 109, 219 or 329€), the customer will get a warranty extension (directly from Sony Style Georges V or from the consumer support department of Sony France) associated with some complementary services:

Sony Alpha 200

• Yearly, professional cleaning of the camera sensor with opening of the mirror cage and removal of the sensor itself
• Repair priority
• Availability of an equivalent DSLR during repair time
• Door-to-door service (the camera is collected and returned at the location of your choice)

This could attract some pros. The amateur photographer could also be interested provided that they need some re-assurance, and they have a Sony Alpha 850 or Alpha 900.

But there is still an open question (for now): Will this be applicable out of France (I only got the confirmation from Paris)?

Source: Alpha-Numérique.

As a summary for the recent series of posts about options open to the digital photographer willing to protect his/her picture files (i.e. backup all photo files), here is a table of contents that should help you find again all solutions I presented over the last 4 weeks.

1. Local backup options (External hard disk drive)
2. Local backup options (Optical discs (CD/DVD), RAID drives). Interim conclusion is “No local storage“
3. Online backup options (Photo web sites, Friend-to-Friend)
4. Online backup options (Specialized online backup and online sharing web sites, web storage options, software for online storage) and conclusions

Previously, we just scraped the surface of what can be done to archive and backup large amounts of photographic data. While the local storage (hard disc drives and optical drives) are fine, they are not solid enough to protect against all kinds of accidents that we want to be able to sustain.

So, we started to describe online solutions. Let’s see the most serious and most extensive approaches to online storage.

Specialized online backup and online sharing web sites

Many web sites are now offering services that may be exactly what you need: You send them data files they keep them for you. The most interesting ones include a backup utility which will automatically transfer files in the background.

Now, the big difference (with the previous options) is that you get a fully integrated service. Exactly what most people are looking for: Fire and forget… until you need to restore.

An important feature of nearly all of these services is that they offer a first level of service for free: A few GB of storage without a credit card. But they have a business model relying on some of the biggest users paying a rent on the disk space.

Some of them (like LiveMesh, Live Sync or Syncplicity) include the possibility to synchronize between computers (if you have more than one computer, it is a good way to ensure that the office and home computers have a copy of the same files). This could come handy to the photographer who is traveling with her laptop and is not sure of copying everything back and forth between the laptop and the desktop.

Some services may look interesting but are unusable in backup mode because this function is left to the responsibility (and the hard work) of the user: SkyDrive (despite its 25GB free storage space) and MobileMe fall in this category; They go in the right direction but stop short of it.

Let’s compare some of the best offers on the market.

Of course, these are not the only ones and the readers may offer some additional advice in the comments. You are welcome.

Special recommendations for online backup (or any other backup)

1. Always try and restore a few files to confirm that your setup is correct (it’s not enough to have the service telling you that it’s alright);
2. Check regularly that you did not stop the backup service (it happened to me recently: I wanted to do a test and I forgot to re-start my Mozy backup, for more than a week).
3. Check that the space you rent is sufficient and that you are not nearing the limit. You don’t want to hit the limit while in the middle of an important assignment. And it would be the worst to be -temporarily- unprotected.
4. Notice that the initial backup may be very long. It is not unusual to wait backup 2GB per day. So, the first backup may take days. The next ones will be depending only on what new/modified files must be sent to the server.

The web storage options

Now, there is also a pretty easy option that can be applied. All in all, what you need is a bunch of disk space available for you to store files. This is exactly what most web services provide to people willing to create a web site, except that you will have a size request much larger than most web sites. Instead of 1GB of space, you will need 1TB of disk space.

Pure online storage

Some web hosting companies actually include this possibility. There is usually a cost because they include the cost of serving that data (what you will mostly not use: Once backed up into the web store, you’ll only access to check or to restore). So, you can go and find a web hosting company. For reasonable needs like those of many amateur photographers, nearly any host service will be OK. For example, OVH (the hosting service for my web sites, currently) has a plan for a small server with storage extensible up to 1000GB (RPS_I) for 9.99€ (ex-VAT) plus 2€ per 10GB slice added. It will add up: for 500GB, you would pay 110€ per month. Or you can get a dedicated server (a bit more complicated to setup) with 4x 1500 GB of RAID drives for 89€ per month.

If you want something even bigger and with a much larger upgrade path, you still can ask Amazon. The large bookstore is also reselling part of its networked storage through the Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). It’s priced flexibly and they have essentially no limit to what they can provide. Of course, prices are not always cheap, but it’s hard to beat them.

Example of Amazon S3 options

Example of Amazon S3 costs

You can test your own options with their online calculator.

ADrive is also an option here. It offers 50GB of free storage, for individual use, but the Premium offer goes up to 1000GB. But the web interface has been improved, even if the file uploader still requires Java.
If you sign up for a paid account, ADrive is offers advanced features like FTP access (needed here, see below), a larger number of concurrent downloads (for faster restore), SSL encryption, and a desktop client for Mac, Windows, and Linux computers.

Software for online storage

In both these cases, all you need is a way to download data back in case of a crash (essentially nearly all web browsers could do this, but an FTP program will be OK too) and upload data as simply as possible. I recommend using some powerful FTP software program like FLING.

Fling is entirely free, like most of its competitors. And, as I quote from their web site: “Fling is software to help you automate uploading or transferring files. It is typically used to maintain a web site on a remote hosted server or to automate backup of folders. The software supports both file transfer protocol (FTP) and [local] network file transfer.” Exactly what we need here!

One last comment here: It has been said repetitively that Google is preparing a similar offer under the name of Google G-Drive. Nothing exists yet, but it could well be a similar offer starting with a completely free entry point. But this is only a rumor for now.

Conclusions

Which one is for you? I can’t decide if you don’t tell me what kind of photographer you are. But if you are one of the normalized photographers I described, it’s relatively easy.

• The Digital Granddad will most probably go for the External Hard drive (probably along with some Flickr or RedBubble account.
• The Expert has already decided to go the Mozy way.
• I recommend the Pro to check an online solution with FLING.

You’ll have to read the article to be sure in which category you fall, of course. But remember that digital data is flimsy. In a moment, all of your pictures may be gone. Do you really want to try your luck?

After exploring the external hard drive and optical drive backup options available to photographers willing to protect their images from accidental damage, let’s see what on-line storage options we have.

These all have the advantage of protecting your backup against one aspect of risk management: There is no longer a risk of seeing a local accident corrupting all of your backup data. No fire, no earthquake can take down both your photos and your backup files. You put the backup on the network, and it is located in some distant location (often with its own integrated company-level backup solution, too: A backup of your backup). So, it’s fairly safe.

On-line backup options

Photo web sites

Right! It may be like an obvious option, but it’s not always a bad one. If you put all your photos on Flickr, not only can you share your images with the rest of the world (or the rest of the family), but you immediately have a copy of your pictures in a server farm at the other end of the world. And, while it may not be easy, you can definitely get them back in case of a too-fast delete or disk crash on your computer.

Of course, there are many options. Those I can think immediately about are:

• MyPhotoAlbum
• Flickr
• PBase

Pick your own.

Obviously OK for small quantities of pictures. But also consider the long time it would take to collect images one by one in case of a computer crash. Tedious is a word coming to mind and it is a clear understatement.

Friend-to-Friend

There is an interesting development to the availability of fast Internet connections: P2P or Peer-to-Peer data exchange. While it is usually associated to music and video files being exchanged between young people and older pirates, there is a surprising extension being seen.

What some people call Friend-to-Friend (or F2F) allows a group of friends (or associates of some kinds) to share some data. Nobody outside your group can see what is happening, but it can be used for distant backup. Let’s suppose you don’t really have an issue with disk space. Why not let your friends backup their data on your disk while you backup your data on theirs?

This is as simple as it comes. Of course, technically, it’s a bit more complex, but it works well. Some software programs like the following, ease that approach with a fully packaged solution:

• Crashplan offers more traditional backup option (see below), but it’s most interesting option is F2F with a friend’s computer, a remote server you rent, etc. Of course, it includes some encryption to ensure that your friend’s do not know what your files are, and its interface is plain simple. CrashPlan is freeware available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• Cucku works on Windows only. It allows to send encrypted (with 256-bit AES) backups to your friends computers. You’ll notice that it is well integrate in Skype to support part of the exchanges.
• With Zoogmo installed on your computer and your friends computers, you can search each other and send files back and forth. You set it up and it will send files around every two hours. It seems very simple and efficient. Zoogmo is a free download for Windows systems only, and requires a free sign-up.

This is very fine except that you need to use the drives of others. So, you need to get some fairly large available space on the computers of your friends or family. Usually, the reciprocating approach works well, but it means that you must have some level of confidence and a relatively similar interest in backing up each other data. That makes it OK for close friends, or photo clubs members/partners. It usually is less applicable to family links, but it is very interesting indeed: Your backup drive is bought for others while others buy their own backup drive for you…

[To be continued]