New Web-Portfolio: India 2008

It’s been almost seven weeks since I came back from India, and I’ve finally finished my India 2008 portfolio. I haven’t been lazy or anything — it was just too much work. You might remember that I hate image-clutter, so I try to find the real keepers and I delete everything else. During the two weeks in India I shot 2900 images and already at night at the hotel I was able to reduce them to 1200. When I got home, I kept wading through the images — deleting, rating, deleting, adding metadata, deleting some more, editing casually then deleting again. I am now down to 486 images, and my aim is to get below 300. But before I spend another 7 weeks on that, I thought it’s time to make a portfolio.

Click on the thumbnail below to see the 16 images that I consider best. I hope you enjoy the images, and of course I’ll be very happy to read any comments you might have!

PS: I shot so intensively while in India that I haven’t wanted to take a single photograph since. But my hands are slowly itching again, so maybe I’ll go out and photograph some canola fields today. In fact I have to, since they are in full bloom right now and next weekend will probably be too late!

Review of HyperDrive Colorspace

For my recent trip to India I had to keep the size and weight of my backpack low, so instead of a laptop, I simply took a HyperDrive Colorspace with me. My backup strategy was:

1. Have enough memory cards to simultaneously hold all my images from the entire trip.
2. Every night backup each used card onto the HyperDrive.

I carried all cards in my photo bag and left the HyperDrive in my backpack at the hotel. My reasoning was that it’s extremely improbable that something bad would happen simultaneously to my camera bag and to my backpack. And I kept two copies of each card onto the HyperDrive because drive sectors do go bad from time to time, and “double holds better.” The HyperDrive was my insurance, and like all insurances, you virtually never need it, but it’s still good to have it. I imagine that for some of you making backups might sound like too much hassle while using only one backup drive might sound too optimistic to others. To me it felt just right.

Anyhow, how did the HyperDrive Colorspace perform? Well — it performed not too bad and not too great. I bought it sight unseen, based on the “highly recommended” verdict by Michael Reichmann and numerous other positive recommendations posted onto various Internet forums. Maybe due to all the positive feedback I had my expectations set too high, but I was quite disappointed with the speed, convenience and display quality of the HyperDrive Colorspace. It might be that it’s better than all other external drives out there, maybe even a lot better, but the Canon 30D has a much better and larger display and display layout, much better controls for scrolling through the images and it’s at least 15 times faster when scrolling through the images.

And there are some further issues with the HyperDrive Colorspace:

• The power-on button is always active, so if you carry the unit in a bag or in your pocket, it could accidentally get turned on, which of course uses battery power.
• The unit locked up twice in 28 backup sessions. Luckily I didn’t lose any data.
• Instead of showing thumbnails of the images as they were being copied, the HyperDrive displayed “random noise” instead. This might be due to the fact that I shoot RAW without embedded JPGs, but it’s still annoying. This problem appears to have been solved with the newest firmware, V24-45-32.
• After finishing the backup, I sometimes got conflicting messages. The status read “complete” while the time was shown as “15’08″ (1 Sec. remaining)”. This too appears to have been solved with the newest firmware.
• Using the function “Build Thumbnails” requires about 11 seconds for each RAW image from my Canon 30D. If you are viewing the images in a folder sequentially, it takes only about a second to change to the next image (which is still way too long).
• The sales materials advertise that the HyperDrive will backup 1 GB per minute. Using full data verification my unit needs 6:23 for backing up 1 GB off a SanDisk Ultra II CF card.
• The battery indicator is inconsistent. At one point it was alternating every few seconds between 70% (green battery) and 20% (red battery). It took me a while to realize that the 20% were showing when the hard drive was spinning and the 70% when it was at rest.
• The commercials advertise that you can backup 120 GB on a single battery charge. Up to the point were I was getting the alternating 20%/70% battery status I’d backed up about 18 GB. I didn’t want to risk anything, so I charged the battery before continuing.
• I am not able to get my personal background and icons to show up even though I think I’m following the instructions exactly.

In conclusion I’d say the following. If my camera had the capability to write onto two cards simultaneously, I’d probably just dump the HyperDrive and keep a set of cards in my photo bag and a set of backup-cards in the hotel. Furthermore, due to the slow operation and inconvenient controls, I used the HyperDrive simply as a hard drive and not as an image viewer, and for that kind of usage the unit is simply too expensive.

On the positive side, the user manual is written quite well.

B/W Portraits from India

What’s wrong with me?!?! I went to India, came back with 1187 images, and the first ones that I’m showing here are in black and white?!?! From the country that people go to to experience color ?!?!

The first thing that I did to my images was to group them according to their location (so I could apply metadata easily). But in any one location I took images of people, animals, buildings, temples, etc. and it just seemed right to group the people together, animals together and so on. So now I have directories according to the image content, and the first directory that I started organizing and editing was “portraits.” I started with about 100 images and after some light image editing, sorting and rating, I’m down to 62 images that I’ll probably end up keeping. Of those, the faces of the older people seemed the most expressive, and — you got it — older faces lend themselves very well to black and white.

So here are my four black-and-white portrait picks from the 2008 India images.

Cataloging My Old Images

I switched to digital in December 2003 and since then I’ve probably taken about 15000 images and I’d kept about half of those on my hard drive. But they were not ordered in any way and I had no easy way of finding any particular image. Moreover I had lots of near-duplicates and lots of so-so images. So on 6 July, 2007 I started a major undertaking: look through the 7500 images, delete the bad and mediocre ones and catalog, rate and add metadata to the remaining ones. Over six months later I’m finally done and I’m left with 2997 images that fill 17.7 GB of disk-space:

• 188 JPGs (120 MB) taken with a Casio QV-4000, which I owned between 23 Dec, 2001 and 18 May, 2003
• 701 JPGs (1.5 GB) and 364 CRW files (2.1 GB) taken with a Canon 10D, which I owned between 25 May, 2003 and 07 April, 2006
• 201 JPGs (340 MB) and 1423 CR2 files (10.5 GB) taken with the Canon 30D, which I own since 15 April, 2006
• 120 PSD files (3.1 GB).

Let me tell you, it was a lot of tedious work, but I’m very happy that I did it — for all the reasons listed here (1, 2) and more. My images are now copyrighted, fully “keyworded” and divided into 16 main categories (abstract, architecture, details, fauna, flora, food, macro, nature, panorama, people, performances, personal, places, seasons, still-life, transportation) and countless sub-categories.

I currently award Photoshop’s stars as follows:

• * — a snapshot; representative of a place or an event, but without artistic merit and possibly with technical flaws
• ** — an interesting and technically competent image, but still without artistic merit
• *** — some artistic value; can be shown in an Internet forum; non-photographers will be impressed
• **** — good enough to be printed or added to a portfolio; clear theme, technically and artistically very good; invokes some emotion in the viewer
• ***** — among the best 50 that I’ve ever produced

And the colors go like this:

• blue — interesting content, typical of the location
• green — funny situation or funny pose
• purple — a nice pose or expression of a person; he or she would be happy to have this image
• red — a sad or thought-provoking image
• yellow — currently not used

At this point I have 15 five-star and 59 four-star images.

Just for the record, I started shooting RAW in August of 2005, while on vacation in Sweden. I’d bought Bruce Fraser’s Real World Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS2 a day before leaving, and after the first 20 pages I was already convinced by the power of RAW. Reading the entire book taught me everything I needed to know about working with RAW images in CS2, and I’ve shot 99% in RAW since then.

And now, after all this talk about images and image ratings, I’d like to share an image with you, from my very first day with the Canon 10D. Before you think it was just dumb luck, consider that prior to that day I’d been chasing the wood warblers with my film body for a few weeks and I knew a thing or two about where they live and how to approach them.

Keyhole

It’s been relatively quiet on the photography front these past days, so here is an older photograph that I’d like to share with you. I like it very much and would have put it into “Best of 2007,” but it’s from 2006.

PS: I hope that everyone had a very Merry Christmas!

Next Step: Web Galleries

Ever since this post I’ve been spending 4-5 hours a week looking through my images: rating, adding metadata, organizing, cataloging and deleting the less interesting ones. This is a difficult, tedious and exciting job, all at the same time. It’s tedious because you have to compare dozens and dozens of similar images — zooming in, zooming out, looking for the image that’s best composed and has the best focus. It’s difficult because you have to rate images consistently, assign keywords consistently and sometimes make a tough decision to delete images which are good, but simply not good enough. And finally it’s exciting because you rediscover your good images from the past.

I’m now almost through with this process, and I’ve erased about 50% of my images. I know that sounds radical, especially when many people say that since disk space is so cheap, you shouldn’t delete any images. Well, I couldn’t disagree more! Keeping all your images not only fills up your hard drive — it also prolongs your back-ups, slows down your browsing software and makes it difficult to find the great image that you are just looking for. But most importantly, keeping most images that you make leads to a decreased self-esteem.

Take my trip to India for example. Even though I’d been deleting flawed and multiple images all along the trip, I came back with about 1200 images. I knew that I’d taken some very good photographs and some average ones, and my first thought was that all images have something special in them, so I should keep them all. As time passed and I showed the images to friends and relatives, I started thinking that they are not really that great. The really good ones were still there, but having to look at 30 average photos in order to see one good one makes for a very low success-ratio. Only about 400 photographs survived my radical clean-up, but when I now open an image directory, I see only interesting, colorful and sharp images. It’s a real pleasure now to point Bridge to a sub-directory and look through the 30-40 thumbnails that it contains. And through my star-ratings I can always filter out the 25 or so top images.

But actually I wanted to write about something else today. Having sorted, grouped and rated my images, I think the next logical step is to update my Web galleries. What you see after that link is, technically speaking, my second attempt. The first one was built purely by hand in HTML, and it was a tedious and error-prone job. The current pages are built around a Flash-plugin called SimpleViewer, which looks quite chic. If I had to name any disadvantages, I’d have to say that it’s flash-based (I cannot modify it and not everyone around the world has Flash installed) and that it loads all large images immediately, even if the viewer never looks at them. But SimpleViewer is small, fast and easy to use, so I could stay with it without any problems.

Recently I saw an exquisite Web gallery, and I’d like to have something similar. This one was generated by Lightroom (which I don’t have), but it’s based on Slimbox and mootools, both of which are free JavaScript scripts, so I could build my own galleries.

So now I’m torn between SimpleViewer and Slimbox. What do you think, which one looks nicer?

Captured Reflections

So I thought it’d be good to look through my past images and throw away any that are boring or double. At the same time I’m trying to assign stars, from 1 to 5, and give meaningful keywords. It’s a hard job that takes a lot of time, but I see some benefits from it:

• The images that remain tell the story in a more clear way. For example, the vacation photos of some place — if previously I had 100 images, now I’ve left about 30. Each shows a different aspect, different light, or a different mood. If I were to show the images to someone who’s never been to this place, it’s better to show only those remaining images.
• Constantly comparing images, skipping back and forth, trains the eye.
• Looking at the images I delete shows me what’s wrong with my images.
• I discover some good images
• I relive nice moments form the past.

So I’ll go on looking through my photos and trashing the hell out of bad and mediocre ones. If nothing else, I’m freeing up some hard-disk space.