Category Archives: Photography Articles

Photography-related articles.


How to Always Get the Perfect Shot

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There’s one technique that I’ve found useful, when you’re waiting for the perfect photography moment, to never miss it.

Snap so many shots, you can’t miss.

You’re bound to get a good shot of those falling raindrops if you take 50 photos instead of one. Now, there are a few pre-requisites. First, you have to have the shot well composed. The shutter speed must be adequate, and the exposure dead center. If you mess up this, you’ll just end up with 50 bad shots instead of one. Focus can be a problem, because the camera may change itself automatically between shots. Switch to manual focus once you’re locked in if possible, or keep your eyes peeled for blurriness through the viewfinder or on the LCD screen.

If you’re working with a digital compact, switch to burst or continuous shooting mode first. With a DSLR, you can just click away. Here’s an example of what I shot yesterday of raindrops on my front porch:

Overshooting in practice

Click to enlarge, and you can see I took no fewer than 35 distinct photos. All in a period of two minutes. But for something as chaotic as falling water, you need to do this to get the perfect moment. The masters in film photography did it despite the terrible expense, but the cost is nothing besides wear and tear on your camera in the digital age. You can delete all but the best afterward, but you won’t even get the best unless you shoot ten times more than what a normal person would.

As you can see above, my favorite was the second one. So why didn’t I just stop then? Because I had no idea what would come afterward. I just parked myself in the same space, and kept clicking away, because who knows what may appear? Perhaps the drops will form a heart shape, or collide with each other in mid-air?

If you really want to go overboard, you could film it instead, and then grab the best frame from the video. My Canon PowerShot A620 offers this. But a standard camcorder is only about 640×480 pixels, which is 0.3 megapixels (compare to 10 with my Canon Rebel XTi). The optics and picture quality are lower, and there are more compression artifacts. You won’t be able to freeze action with a 1/4000 second shutter speed like with my raindrops. And many frames will be blurry, because their meant to be watched in succession, not picked apart. An HD camcorder may be better. But overall, I don’t recommend it.

Generally, the higher-end your camera is, the bigger it’s storage buffer, so the quicker you can take shots. On my first camera in 2004, I could only take a shot every three seconds, max. But on my DSLR, I can shoot ten shots in five seconds, and then only wait a few seconds to take some more. And that’s in RAW mode. You want to use RAW mode if you can, because if there’s a problem with exposure or white balance, you can recover from it, and you have more editing leeway in general. But if your camera has a fast processor and you switch to JPEG, you may have a much larger buffer for burst shooting.

Now you know how to not miss the moment. You have to do this to get a good action shot; I’ve done it on all my best work, like Raindrops and Speed. Sometimes it takes dozens of shots. But if it’s a good scene, and you have the other factors right (exposure, focus, composition, aperture, shutter speed), then it will work and it’s the way to go.

Of course, you can’t even get the best shot if you don’t even have your camera at the ready. Read 8 Tips for the On-Cue Photographer for advice with that.

How to Use Zooming for Explosive Photos

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This is an interesting technique that I used in my latest photo, The Explosion. Simply, you zoom the lens as you take the photo, and you get some cool motion blur, no Photoshop required.

The Explosion — the world pops using zooming

Now, there are some concerns that you wouldn’t face with your normal photo, where the focal length stays constant through the exposure. Namely, these are:

• You can’t do it on most compacts, because the zoom is locked while taking the photo, as it’s controlled electronically. Using the method on a DSLR, where you turn the barrel yourself to zoom the lens, is usually the only option.
• You can’t do it with a prime lens (non-zooming), such as my favorite, the Canon EF 1:1.4. There’s just no zooming to be had.
• You need a slow shutter speed. It has to be fairly dark out, or in daytime, you have to close down the aperture as far as it goes, and maybe use a filter to keep more light out.
• With a slow shutter speed, you need a tripod. Camera shake does not look good, even in a zooming photo.
• Don’t try this with film, unless you want to waste a whole lot of film. Getting the process just right will take dozens of shots, and you’ll need to see what progress you’re making immediately to have any idea how to improve. This is really a place where digital shines.

To cut down the light, I screwed on a polarizing filter for the photo above, on the Canon Rebel XTi with the kit lens. It will work just fine; any 58mm circular polarizer will do for the lens. It cuts down about 1.5 stops of light (like F5.6 to F9.5), and makes the sky dark blue, depending on how you spin the ring. You can also cut down on light with a neutral density filter, though I haven’t tried one.

I opened up to F14 for The Explosion. Granted, I could’ve gone up to F22, but there wasn’t a need to. A 1/8 second exposure was plenty slow. I turned the timer on, held the camera down firmly with my left hand, and began zooming with my right just before the shutter tripped. That’s one thing you have to watch out for—it’s easy to jostle the camera while zooming, and it usually doesn’t look good because you won’t get a sharp center. So hold it down firmly.

Try over and over to get something cool-looking. Zoom slowly and just a little through exposure, quickly and over a wide range of focal lengths, zoom in steps rather than smoothly, and try different subjects. A simple subject works best. I zoomed at a moderate speed and evenly for the trees photo, and though it’s a complex subject, it draws the eye nonetheless. Try doing this on flowers, still life such as marbles or a baseball (I should’ve tried it with those), or even a highway (that’s motion blur, but zooming could’ve worked too).

Try starting zoomed out all the way, then zoom in. Then try zoomed half way to full telephoto, or wide-angle to medium. Next, go from telephoto to wide-angle (zoom out) as you expose; the world will look like it’s imploding rather than exploding.

An example of stepped zooming

The above is an example of stepped zooming. This was with a long exposure of 2.5 seconds; since it was dark and indoors, exposing for that long wasn’t a problem. The picture is of a door at the end of a hallway, with the light from outside flooding in from around the door. There’s a brightly lit door on the left also. Instead of zooming smoothly, I zoomed from 18mm to 55mm using the in nine steps over the period of the exposure. This gives the light a cool staggered effect. I did 30 similar shots and this was the best; it’s important for the line around the center of the door to be sharp for my purposes, meaning no motion blur. I put the camera on a milk crate and held it down myself, since I don’t own a tripod. You can improvise in the same way.

If you don’t have a zoom lens, you have a digital compact, or you just want to try something different, you can hold the camera steady while walking and get a similar effect; perhaps even better. It’s going to take a lot of tries and good luck, or a tripod on wheels or tracks to avoid other types of motion blur. I can see some cool results coming about if you try this in a hallway; maybe one at school or a hospital (and you’ll get quizzical looks from passersby).

This is a good technique to add to your arsenal, and I don’t see many people doing it. I’m sure you could work something similar in Photoshop, but getting it straight from the camera is much more fun.

How to give file names to your photos

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This is a lengthy post (~4500 words). I cover file names in great detail, but go much further into the differences between a literal and abstract asset management system (descriptive file names vs. not), spend many paragraphs debunking time zones, daylight time, traditional date formatting, and use 500 words to debate underscores vs. hyphens vs. spaces to break up words in your web addresses. The implications go way beyond mere file names. Read on if you’re in for a adventure . . .

I don’t like that all the articles I read on organizing your photos recommend giving them descriptive file names. The problem with files and directories is that they’re just like their non-computerized equivalents: rigid and inflexible. Your photo cannot appear under “flowers” and “macros,” because a file can only belong to one folder. Similarly, it can only have one file name, and if you fill that with keywords so you can use the Windows search to find it, the name becomes long and unwieldy. Plus, if you take a lot of photos (I’m averaging 500 a month), it’s totally impractical.

Why is it impractical? Because you’re restricted in length and taxonomy, there are no connections between files besides rigid folders and rudimentary keyword searches, and you’re adding metadata in a bad place, because the file name should be the unique and persistent identifier for the image. If you want to change all your pictures of “cars” to “automobiles,” you’re in trouble. Every time your taxonomy scheme changes, you have to change dozens of file names. This is fine if you’re the average, uninformed user: you have one copy of each photo in “My Pictures” on your hard drive, and that’s all that exists. But even then, unless you’re use batch renaming software like 1-4a rename (the biggest kludge ever), it’s still tedious to change your terminology. If you’re an informed, smarter user, you’re backing your photos up to the closest thing we have to an archival media: recordable CDs or DVDs. And then, you have to deal with all sorts of tracking issues when you change your file names, because the names of the files on the discs you’ve already burned are etched in stone.

The ideal file name provides no information whatsoever about it’s content. I’m all for ideals, but this is just impractical. No info about the file is like DSCF0001.jpg. A serial number, sort of. But really, what we need to use is some constant, timeless fact about the photo. The date and time. If you’ve set your camera properly, it’s recorded in the Exif metadata of each file (or for RAW, somewhere like it), so we can just pull it out and use it as the file name. But first, the other options . . .

Maybe you think you can be smart—you’ll just combine it all to get the best of both worlds. Create folders by date, make the start of the file name the date. Then, give a whole bunch of info about the file after that. Perhaps you’ll even pioneer a controlled vocabulary system so you have a taxonomy you feel you can stick with for the next few decades. I love this page: File Naming Conventions for Digitally-stored Images. It’s a classic example of this newbie mindset: that you can control everything within the Draconian structure of the file name, enumerate all the important details, pick a syntax to stand the test of time, fit it all in 64 characters, and apply the same processes to the hundreds of photos you’ll be taking every month. With this gauntlet, you could become a librarian and fill eight-hour work days, because there’s no end to the battle. As soon as you take a photo, five minutes of administrative decisions for your “catalog” come into play. And you don’t have a “catalog,” because if you had one, you wouldn’t be using file names.

For pre-computer libraries, we had card catalogs. We can’t move books about on a shelf like we can records in a computer database, so it makes sense to have the metadata stored separate from the items being cataloged. Film photographers devised similar (though hopefully less complex) methods to track their negatives. With a card catalog, if you want to add a new subject, you create new records for all the items under that subject, even though they already have other records (cards). If an author has a pseudonym, he gets a separate card. Card catalogs waste space, are redundant, hard to use, and torturous to update. Using file names to organize your photos is no different.

One principle that I hold, is that it is easier to have one way to do things, than several divergent methods. The same applies to organizing your photos, and I suggest you simplify your life by doing the same everywhere.

What are these things? First, write the date as YYYY-MM-DD, always padded with zeroes if needed, and never omitting the century. The time is HH:MM:SS with a 24-hour clock, always padded with zeroes. When written together, separate the date and time with the letter “T”. So the time now is 2008-06-08T18:30:22. This is ISO 8601 date formatting, and it will serve you well for all your papers and computerized files. The reasons: first, it’s unambiguous across regions. In the U.S.A. we often do MM-DD-YY (completely senseless), and in the U.K. it’s DD-MM-YY (better, but still senseless). When you put the date in descending order, with the full year, everyone understands it. No one’s going to think it’s YYYY-DD-MM… because that would be stupid.

Also, we have this crazy predilection for dividing the day into two halves, one “A.M.,” and the second, “P.M.,” which stands for something in Latin. I don’t even want to know how this came about. It’s just pointless. Don’t even think of naming your files with that format. They won’t even sort properly. The correct form of the date (descending order, each field padded with zeroes), sorts chronologically in even the oldest, simplest computer systems, because they’re all based on lexicographical order.

Next, give up time zones. Even if we’re looking just at your file names, why would you use a time zone? What are you going to do when you begin your great photographic adventure, crossing time zones left and right? Are you going to change your camera’s clock each time? What happens when you get home, and you want to show a chronological slideshow of your journey to your family? But then, you have photos you snapped at 3:30, and then you have photos that you snapped at 3:00, but really they were snapped a half-hour later than the ones from 3:30, because you crossed into a new time zone. Do you want to have to work out that mess every time you travel the world?

“But Richard,” you might say. “Why can’t I just use my home time zone all the time, and put that in my file name?” Sure, you can do that. But then you’re holding an arbitrary time zone while in another, arbitrary time zone. What if you live in California, but you vacation to Florida, keeping your California time zone on your camera? Then a year later you move to Florida, and switch the time zone for all photos from then on. Then you go back to California to visit your family, but now, you’re keeping the Florida time zone. Then 50 years later your grandkids are trying to decipher the mess you’ve left them. Or ten years later, you want the exact time you shot a photo, but you can’t even remember.

Even worse than time zones, is Daylight Saving Time. Just looking back in Florida (my state). In 2006, it started in April and ended in October. In 2007, it was changed to start three weeks earlier and end one week later. In 1974, it started on January 6. And try to figure out the rules in any other state or city, and you’re in for headache. In Indiana, there is no daylight time till 2006, and now they’re on board with us. Some cities followed daylight time before, though. Daylight time isn’t enough; many counties and even half the state have switched back and forth between Eastern and Central time. There’s a whole article on Wikipedia about it: Time in Indiana. Can you tell me they’d need that if they followed rational time all the time (UTC)? We even have a year 2007 problem due to the U.S.A.’s recent changes to daylight time. I don’t remember where my government got the power to declare to me what time it is.

This is a mess, a terrible mess. It’s so bad, the Zoneinfo database defines rules by city, because it can’t even assume the rules will be consistent across a particular region. Reading the Wikipedia entry… “The database attempts to record historical time zones and all civil changes since 1970, the Unix time epoch.” It attempts? We aren’t even daring enough to claim that it has all the rules for the past 38 years? In 2050, maybe we will be attempting to remember all the rules going back to 2012? Do you really want to be poisoning your photos’ metadata with this nonsense?

Daylight time can even kill you. This report, titled FDA Preliminary Public Health Notification: Unpredictable Events in Medical Equipment due to New Daylight Saving Time Change, warns about the changes to daylight time that began in the U.S.A. in 2007:

If a medical device or medical device network is adversely affected by the new DST date changes, a patient treatment or diagnostic result could be:

* incorrectly prescribed
* provided at the wrong time
* missed
* given more than once
* given for longer or shorter durations than intended
* incorrectly recorded

A treatment could be missed or given more than once? And we’re doing all this to “save” energy? In reality, it leeches from everyone. Computers, DVRs, VCRs, and countless other devices need to be needlessly complex to accommodate these idiotic rules. People have to change clocks—dozens of them—twice a year (everything has a clock now). And I’m sure the missed appointments number into the thousands. It messes up all e-commerce systems too. All the sudden you have one hour that’s skipped in the spring (2 to 3 A.M.), or duplicated in the winter (2 to 1 A.M.). You don’t have accurate statistics for that day or hour, and any order tracking software that’s worth its salt has to include extra code to work with the phenomenon without exploding.

The entire concept of time-zoning is evil and pointless. Daylight Saving Time is even worse. We must forsake both in a unilateral shift of thought. You can be the catalyst. The beast must be slain. Of course, you can’t give it up for appointments, or at your job (unless you’re a free-thinker and self-employed), because everyone else is using a convoluted system. But like Ghandi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” So do it wherever you can.

When you switch to better date formats and smarter time, you’ll fix all sorts of issues on your computer. Now you can just prefix your documents with the date (YYYYMMDD), and they’ll sort in order because the date is in the right order. Same for the time, with the better 24-hour system. I gave up daylight time and local time on 2007-01-01, as my New Year’s resolution. Before that, I’d have lots of issues with file synchronization, because the modern NTFS file system is pretty smart about time zones, and uses UTC all the time just like you’ll be doing. Your time is just an offset from it, and when your computer’s clock switches for daylight time, all the files change (even if they shouldn’t and don’t need to). So then, if you’re backing up to other devices, especially ones using old file systems like USB flash drives, all the time stamps are wrong. You’re synchronization software (I use SyncBackSE) will re-copy all the files thinking they’ve changed, even tens of gigabytes of them. There’s some option to override that in the newer versions, and most other software has hopefully provided for the problem as well. But it doesn’t need to be a problem. If you’d give up the silly notions of changing time that you’ve been brain-washed into by the state, you won’t ever need to deal with this problem again.

You do have to go all the way and give up time zones while you’re at it. My clock says 20:00 right now, but the “real time” is 16:00 here (or 4 P.M. if you’d prefer). If I need to make the adjustment for friends or relatives that are still stuck in their old ways, it’s a snap to do in my head. Then, if my friends use my computer, they get to be confused and ask funny questions like “why would anyone do this?” Before, I’d just say “nevermind, I could never make you understand it.” Now I can, with this article. You can too. Don’t let anyone sway you in your decision to rebel against time zones. Time zones are for average people. They mess up online communication, they hinder commerce, they confuse travelers. “Noon” should be completely arbitrary. It isn’t even when the sun is at the top of the sky now, with the daylight time problem and our expansive time zones. Do you think that with a time zone that’s hundreds of miles wide, that “true” noon is going to be at the same time in all of them? To do that, we’d have to have time zones by the second, that change every few feet. We don’t even have a good system now, so whatever we move to has to be better.

What’s my final recommendation? Switch your camera and computer to Universal Coordinated Time (four hours ahead of North American Eastern Daylight Time). Abandon “logical” file names. There was nothing logical about them after all. Keep the Gregorian calendar. Use the date for your name; don’t go for completely arbitrary names (like DSCF0001). Format it as YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS@#. The number counts from 1 if there are multiple photos in one second (burst shooting). The @ is your initials. Not your name, just two or three letters in case you get your family on board for naming files like this, and you need basic tracking. You can name your photos with their titles, if it’s small scale like for an email or a website. Never do it in your main archive, because you’ll have a lot of photos there and you want consistency. If you’re any sort of photographer, then you will have a lot of photos there. 100 a day perhaps. 20 a day if you’re like me and cull a bit more. It’s still a lot, so you need a good system. Put the files into folders by month, like 200806.

The whole reason to name your files like this, is because it can be easily automated. You can have a computer program apply your file-name format to all your photos as you save them to your computer. I recommend and use Downloader Pro for this, because it’s flexible but not horribly complicated. My file-name string is {Y}{m}{D}-{H}{M}{S}rxt{l} . Then, after downloading and backing up my photos (which Downloader Pro can do too), I delete them from the memory card immediately. Oh, and when I plug in my memory card, the software starts up and copies the photos automatically. Very nice and swift. It’s $30 though.

If you want something free, Digital Image Mover looks good. If I used it, my string would be %Y%M%D-%H%m%Srxt . There’s no counter that only comes into play if there’s a name clash, so if you have two photos in the same second, it won’t work for you. You can use %c, but then you’ll have a number on every file. What I’d do is just rename the problem files on my own, because it doesn’t come up often (unless you burst shoot and don’t do your deletions in-camera). Be sure to check “Use EXIF ‘DateTimeOriginal’ field” and “Verify files after copying” under Options. You should always use Exif time instead of the file time-stamp, which can be seconds later (because it’s from when the camera wrote the file to the memory card, not exactly when it was snapped). Verifying checks the source against the new copy twice. It’s slower, but it’s insurance against corruption.

The third option is to just move your files over in Windows Explorer, and then use IrfanView to rename them. I used to do this. It works well, though you have to do it each time you import your photos. Go into File > Batch Conversion/Rename, and specify a file name like this: $E36867(%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)rxt . Replace “rxt” with a two or three-letter name for yourself. You’ll have to deal with file name collisions in the same second on your own.

Keep in mind that Exif metadata is only a property of JPEG files, not RAW, and you should be shooting in RAW if you have it. I know Downloader Pro gets the date in whatever proprietary format my Canon Rebel XTi formats it to, but I’m not sure about the other programs.

Anyway, it’s important you switch file name schemas now; change gears completely. Whatever you did in the past is past. Gone, zilch, nada. Don’t change old stuff, don’t update, just switch to a smart naming scheme now, because this is something you shouldn’t have to deal with anymore. Same if you’re on board to abandon traditional date formatting and time zones in your daily life. You shouldn’t have to wait until you catalog your photos to being archiving them to discs or sharing them with friends. But that’s what you have to do if you use “reasonable” file names.

Let me make a note here that you should never use spaces or capital letters in your file names. When you post them to the Internet, that causes trouble. URIs aren’t supposed to have spaces; read this for a good discussion of it: spaces in file names. In the UNIX world, which your web server will probably be using a derivative of, all file names are case sensitive. I know, I don’t like it either. But it’s better just to stick to lowercase so if anyone writes down a web address from your website, they don’t get mixed up. Sure, when you need to post your photos online, you could just change the file names. But it’s so much better to get it right to start with.

I remember posting an album to Photobucket to share with friends… and I found that since I’d used capital letters in the album name, it wouldn’t work when you typed it in lowercase. Not at all. Photobucket considers “Photos” and “photos” to be completely different. You can even have both albums and put different photos in them. This is nothing like Microsoft Windows (which is case insensitive except for display), and it’s confusing for everyone. So just stick with lowercase.

For separating words in file names, don’t use spaces ever. Hyphens or underscores are your best bets. I like hyphens, because if you have something like my_photos, and it’s underlined, it shows as my_photos. The underscore looks like a space. And it will be underlined, if it’s a part of a URI on your future website. And it will confuse your readers, because they’ll be sending the URI about by email when your site gets popular… and then someone will write it down on paper to share with a friend… and they’ll use a space instead of your beloved underscore… and then the world will end, because someone won’t be able to look at the photo or article that will change their life, all because you used underscores instead of hyphens in your URIs.

Historically, Google has treated underscores as part of a word, but hyphens as spaces. This meant that if you used underscores, you’d rank much lower in Google searches in general. This changed a year back; read Underscores are now word separators, proclaims Google. But still keep using hyphens, to prevent the issue with underlining. Also, they look nicer and are easier to type (no holding down Shift). You may be asking: why are you talking so much about the Internet, if this is an article about the file names of photos on my computer, which aren’t even on the Internet? The reason is that if you ever post your photos online, the file names will become an issue. It’s always easier to do things one way, as I talked about several paragraphs up. Your computer keyboard doesn’t do things one way, and that is why the Caps and Num lock keys cause so much trouble.

How should you implement your catalog? Definitely not by file name; that’s the lowest form of cataloging. It hardly even deserves to fall under the umbrella term of “digital asset management.” But of course you know that (or are fighting it) if you’ve read this far. Don’t do it directly with IPTC metadata either; that’s barely a step up from file names. Use an abstracted database. Browse your photos in that database. I like IMatch, because it’s scalable, terribly complicated yet still easy to use, and it decouples your photos from your files. Basically, the assumption that you should have the files on the computer to browse them is gone. It was never a good assumption anyway. You can browse your photos by thumbnail and metadata with just the database (~3% the size of the files), and they’re in “offline” mode; but you’ll be fine for copying or manipulating them once you bring them online (i.e. turning on your external hard drive, or inserting the CD the photos are on), and nothing blows up or disappears. You’ll wonder how you got by with the old way, where the photos had to be there to be browsed or cataloged, even if they took up 250GB (like mine are approaching). And of course, photos can be assigned tags, called “categories,” though of the flexible kind. A photo can belong to any number of hierarchal categories, or none at all, or child categories but not parent categories, or anything you can think of, without wasting space. The categories aren’t even like folders, because when you click a high-level one, and it shows its images plus all the images in sub-categories, which is much better than clicking through dozens of folders in Windows Explorer. But of course, you can change this if you want.

IDimager is my second choice, and seems to do all the above. ACDSee is third, though I haven’t used it. If you switch between software, you can export your work by embedding it into the IPTC metadata, and then importing that in another program. IMatch provides a bunch of other methods, and the others probably do, too. The problem with IPTC metadata is that it puts your files out of sync with the backup copies you’re making to CDs or DVDs, because they can’t be updated. I don’t like that. Think of the files as books on a shelf, static and permanent. Your database is your card catalog (on steroids). Using file names or inline metadata is like going to each book on the shelf, and putting a whole bunch of keywords on its spine label. Senseless and impractical. We wouldn’t even try that sort of thing in the stone age.

So, avoid syncing IPTC data with the database, unless you don’t mind your archival copies being out of date. I mind it. I don’t use IPTC, even as a backup; I just backup my database instead.

The three programs I mentioned are all about $60, quite a hefty investment. But less than your camera, and certainly worth it if you value your time. I see people spending more time naming their pictures, than actually taking them, and I don’t want you to fall into that trap. You can easily fall into that trap with a dedicated cataloging application. But accomplishing as much as you did with file names takes a small fraction of the work, and that’s the important thing.

Don’t touch Picasa with a ten foot pole. I just tried v2.7, and it still has the same horrid behavior it had when I attempted to use it in 2005. What did I do? I indexed a folder on my USB flash drive. Then I closed it, removed the drive, and started it again. What happens? All the photos disappear. Oh wow, Picasa. You’re so smart. Not. They reappear with my captions when I plug the drive back in (as long as it has the same drive letter). But Picasa shouldn’t pretend to be a photo management solution, with captioning and descriptions, if it’s all smoke and mirrors. And it is. Read this: Dear Google: Picasa Needs Improvements, particularly the “Database Export/Import” section. Picasa makes it really hard to move the keywords and descriptions you’ve assigned between computers. Some settings are strewn through the file system in “picasa.ini” files, others are in a proprietary database, which is dumb and sloppy. They should all be in the database, and the database should be easy to transfer, backup, and export to other formats, if Picasa wants to be a real cataloging application. But it’s not, and if you use it, don’t treat it as such. Oh, and the keywording interface is awful.

Abandon the old and start with your new abstract file-names immediately, even if you haven’t thought up how to catalog your work. With 2000 photos, it’s not too hard to find them by thumbnail, and you’ll have more time to shoot when you end the tedious process of assigning descriptive file names. If you use Picasa, don’t touch the functions for keywords or captions. I don’t even recommend the program for browsing; FastStone Image Viewer is simple, free, doesn’t pretend to solve digital asset management, loads thumbnails quickly, has a great slideshow mode, does batch converting and file renaming well, and can be run from a flash drive.

Always, when you’re cataloging your photos, catalog what you will search for. I do this with the photos in my gallery; you can see a list of tags below each one, and they link to similar photos. There aren’t many tags. Just simple stuff like flowers, raindrops, dark, bright, shallow dof, etc. See, if I wanted to be thorough, I could record where each photo was taken, add the hour, year, aperture, etc., each as a tag, use scientific classification for plants and animals, and other terrible stuff. Newbies to cataloging get caught in this trap. It ain’t worth it—you’ll never need it. And if you do need it once in a blue moon, it’s still a waste of time. The time to reward ratio just doesn’t match up at all. It’s all pain and no gain.

Don’t be too dedicated to tagging your photos, whatever method you choose. I follow all the stuff I recommend for file names here, which is done automatically with Downloader Pro, but I haven’t cataloged anything in six months, despite having my abstract database. It’s just not needed when I only use 4% of my photos for my website or exhibition; I can keep track of those fine, just browsing by thumbnails. I’d rather be out shooting.

How to Brand Your Prints

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the back of a photo, annotated with laser printing

Photos in print are much harder to brand than photos on your website. If your printing in any great quantity, the tedious process of writing out your name, website, and other pertinent information on the flip side becomes insurmountable. Secondly, most photographic papers have a resin-coated backing, which stubbornly refuses any water-based inks. My methods in this article are aimed toward unframed 4*6 prints, as that’s what I deal with myself, but they can be easily applied to other formats. In fact, the fundamentals of permanence at the end are essential to any print medium.

Whether your printing photos for your friends, family, art, or business, it is doubtless that any copies floating about can make convincing advertisements. Your very livelihood is at stake; what can you do to make sure that everyone knows that you are the creator of those photographic masterpieces? Luckily, you do have options.

1. Put your name right on the front of the print, straight from the digital source files. This is an easy way to demarcate your work; you don’t have to deal with any hand writing or messy backprinting. Unfortunately, it’s a bit distracting, and anything more than the title and your name is pushing it; include your website and the text will get more attention than the photo. Plus, if you’re going to put the info anywhere, it’ll have to be at the edge of the print, perhaps in a border surrounding the image. You’re going to have to deal with the bleed edge, and it’s a pain because what looks fine on the screen will often get cut off in a borderless print. This becomes especially important if you’re out-sourcing to a lab, as they often crop tightly, and you have less control than with home printing. Nonetheless, as long as you use a big enough border, this is effective, especially if you’re drop-shipping your prints and can’t intercept them to label the backs elegantly. I’m using this very technique for The Freedom Project, my free print offering; the image area is 5×3.34 instead of 6×4, and the extra space is used for a border, with the title and my name at the bottom.

2. Label the back of the print by hand. This is fine in low volume, and provides a connection to your audience. There are downsides though: it’s slow and eats away at your time, your handwriting won’t be as readable as printed type, and getting the ink to stay without damaging the print is a challenge. Don’t even think of using a ballpoint pen; the point will leave a noticeable impression on the front side, and if the ink is water-based, it’s not going to adhere anyway. Your best choice is a pigment-based permanent marker; a Sharpie or equivalent. Ultra fine point is good, as long as you don’t press down too hard.

3. Rely on your lab to label your prints. Usually, they print a tiny dot-matrix label, including the file name or custom text. Winkflash prints the file name, and SmugMug offers custom text, for example. Both are limited to about forty characters—hardly enough space for your name and website. This post by dogwood at the Digital Grin forum sums it up:

Just my two cents, the backprinting option is a GREAT idea… though in reality, it does look pretty poor. The printing is tiny, there are frequent errors, you can’t use symbols (including the copyright symbol), and it looks like one of those 1980’s dot matrix printers is used to create the text.

The provided backprinting is a step up from nothing, though.

4. Label the back of the print with a rubber stamp. You’ll run into the same problem as above: dye or water based inks will never dry. Your only choice is pigment-based or permanent ink, which are less common and more expensive. It’s hard to clean either off your stamps, and the former has the con of not being permanent. Read more here: Ink Pad Basics. Look into alcohol based inks if you pick this route, as they will stick to even plastic.

5. Label the back of the print with an ink-jet printer. This won’t work at all. Trust me, I’ve tried it. It’ll come out looking fine, but as soon as you touch the ink, it smears all over the place, even if it’s sat out for two weeks. It’s fine if you’re using double-sided paper, but if you are, you don’t need to read this anyway.

6. Label the back of the print with a laser printer. Now we’re getting somewhere. This is what I do for all my 4*6 prints using a Lexmark E450dn; the opening image is an example. This won’t work with many printers, and has some problems. For starters, many laser printers get too hot and will damage the finish or curl your prints permanently. Don’t expect any specs on this from the manufacturer. You run the risk that the plastic in the print will melt and get caught up on the rollers, immobilizing your expensive machine. This happens more often with inkjet photo paper, which isn’t designed to stand up to heat. And many printers don’t like to label 4*6’s; you’ll have trouble setting up the tray, and getting the print to be centered. The upside is if it works, you have a cheap and fast way to batch label prints, even with lengthy annotations that fill up the whole back side, like in my example image. The “ink” will always stick, because it’s in fact toner, ground up particles of plastic, which are burned to the paper with a fuser as hot as 400 degrees (Fahrenheit). I lose about one in two-hundred prints, because the printer messes up and crinkles them. But I can run a stack of seventy-five through in eight minutes, usually with no intervention, provided their all the same photo.

7. Use water-based ink, but cover it with a piece of scotch tape. The ink smears a bit under the tape, but remains legible. This looks really ugly. It works, but leaves a bad impression, so I don’t recommend it. Another downside is that the tape may peel with time or under wear.

8. Use printer labels. Get a pack of 2000 clear inkjet labels (just over a cent each), then print on them with your inkjet printer. The ink will absorb into the label, and then you can just stick the label on your print. This is a good method because it overcomes the problems of the prints’ non-absorbent surface, but applying the labels is more time consuming than printing directly as in method five, stick-on labels don’t look as good, and they’re expensive. Plus, they can be easily peeled off.

9. Give up and do nothing. No, no, you can’t do this. Moving on . . .

Now that you know how to do it, the next question is what to do. By do, I mean write. Pick facts to stand the test of time. Your name is a good start, but unless it’s terribly unique (like mine), you’ll want a bit more information so people can track you down—not to stalk you, but so they can buy more of your work and commission you to take photos of their children and pets. Put your website on the back, but be wary that a URI like http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardxthripp/ doesn’t inspire much confidence. It isn’t good for you either—what if Flickr bans you for some unjust reason, or you get tired of the limitations and want to move out on your own? All the photos you’ve labeled and distributed are going to be out of date. Fortunately, you can have the best of both worlds; register your permanent domain for about $10 a year, then set it up to forward to your Flickr account (or SmugMug, or deviantART, or whatever). Any good registrar will offer forwarding, and then if you change photo services or start using your own domain, you can change the settings. All your photos and t-shirts you’ve printed will never go out-of-date, because they’ll be forwarded to the right place as you so smartly set up.

Regarding permanence of information, the same applies to phone numbers. While your number may be better relegated to a business card than to the backprinting on a print, either way, get one you can stick with. You can’t count on your parents or roommates to forever take your calls, but a good solution, if you don’t mind a new number, is GrandCentral, a free proxy phone service with voice mail, multicast forwarding, and other perks. I use this for the 510-936-2417 phone number I bandy about on my contact page and elsewhere, yet it forwards to both my secret home and cell phone numbers, simultaneously. When I change numbers, I just update the record at the website, and start receiving calls at the new number, even though I’m still using 510-936-2417. Since Google has acquired the service, it should remain free and reliable for a long time. You have to sign up for a waiting list, but when I did it, I was chosen in about a day.

So now that you have your shiny, permanent web address and phone number, what else do your fans have to know about their beloved artist? It’s debated, but I feel that every great photo deserves an equally wonderful title, and if there’s anything your print viewers should know, it’s the title of the gem which has entered their collection. Flaunt it proudly on the label. It’s the first thing on mine. An index number is a good idea, so if you’re called for reprints, you can look up the photo by number right away. If each of your photos has a unique title like with mine, I suggest skipping it, however.

Now, what not to write. Unless it’s photo-journalism, don’t write the date. Photos like my Raindrops are timeless, but if I announce that it is from two years ago, people will think it’s old and not valuable, especially when I want to pass it off, implicitly, as recent work. Put the name of your photography studio if you run it, but not if you’re an employee, unless your employer requires it. I have an aversion to “copyright” and “all rights reserved” for backprinting. It’s a waste of ink, your work is copyrighted regardless in the U.S.A., and it won’t deter any thieves. Going with this theme, don’t watermark prints, ever. Even if you’re giving them out. It’s bad karma. Besides, a scanned print won’t be near the quality of your master files.

Do write some notes, if you’re labeling with an efficient laser printer. I do this on a lot of my pieces now, and my friends enjoy reading of the method behind my creative madness. Sign a few prints with a blue Sharpie, so it’s not mistaken for a facsimile signature; they might be collectors’ items someday. Put your website down, but don’t think of detailing your pricing or photography services; people can contact you if they’re interested, and that information is perishable anyway. Whatever you print, make sure it’s big and readable. I use Arial, size 14 for my branding, size permitting, so even blurry-visioned folks can read the title without glasses.

I do hope I’ve helped you in tackling this issue. Marking your prints is a major step toward developing your personal photographic brand, and the virtues of the printed format continue to complement Internet publication. May your followers never wonder who you are, and may your contributions shine through the photography community.

Dynamic Galleries and Random Images for WordPress Photoblogs

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I was looking for ways to optimize my website . . . to make it quicker and easier for me to maintain and update, while being fun to browse for my visitors. The problem with the old gallery and random photos at the top of each page, was that I had to make the thumbnails and update the page and database for both (I was using the this randomizer plugin for WordPress), each time I added a photo. It was good because I’d crop, scale down, and sharpen each image to look its best, but the extra work was too much. I found the Post Thumb plugin is the perfect solution. I installed it, set it to make 100×70 thumbnails, and then added this code to my blog header:

<?php the_random_thumb(“link=p&limit=5&category=8”); >

That makes it show five random photos from the category for my photos, linking to the page for each instead of the file. The great thing here is that the thumbnail folder and accompanying MySQL table is updated automatically, so photos are added to the pool as soon as I publish them. A random photos section is good for the casual browser, who just looks at what catches his eye.

Next, I wanted to create a dynamic gallery and random image page. I added the Exec-PHP plugin so I could use PHP code in pages and posts, but found that WordPress inserts a line break between each thumbnail, against my wishes. For that, I added this modified version of Text Control by Jeff Minard, then setting it to not auto-format the gallery and random pages.

The code for page one of the gallery is:

<?php the_recent_thumbs(“subfolder=g&width=200&height=160&link=p&limit=60&category=8”); ?>

and for page two:

<?php the_recent_thumbs(“subfolder=g&width=200&height=160&link=p&limit=60&offset=60&category=8”); ?>

The parameters with all the ampersands tell the script to make 200×160 thumbnails instead of the default, to save them in a subfolder named “g” (for gallery of course), to link to the posts the photos are in, to display sixty thumbnails per page from category 8 (my photos), and, on the second, “offset=60” means to start with photo #61 (computer programming languages count from zero). When I get over 120 photos (I’m at 83 now), I’ll have to make page three manually. I don’t mind that, since mine is a low-volume photo-blog focusing on quality, so I’ll only need to make a new page every few months. I’m stoked enough by what can be done without my help.

Next up was the random page:

<?php the_random_thumb(“subfolder=g&width=200&height=160&link=p&limit=24&category=8”); ?>

This is almost the same as the first gallery page; the function is the_random_thumb instead of the_recent_thumbs, and I reduced the number of photos from 60 to 24. It worked great, except the random photos would not be refreshed on each visit to the page. The problem was the caching module I use, WP-Cache, so I solved it by adding “/random” to the list of rejected URIs in its settings. Unfortunately, this makes the random page the most computationally expensive on the site, which is especially a concern because I’m on cheap, shared hosting. I’ll keep an eye on it, and if it gets too popular and things start crashing, I’ll reduce the number of images or pull the plug.

As if this wasn’t enough, I had another feature to add: a link to a random photo for sale in my expensive shop (powered by YAK), at the top of the sidebar on each page. After doing the above, this was easy:

<?php the_random_thumb(“subfolder=s&width=128&height=86&link=p&category=389”); ?>

This time, there is just one thumbnail per page, so “limit=” is omitted (it defaults to 1). The subfolder for the thumbnails is “s” for shop; you can make the subfolder’s name longer, but I’m keeping it short for simplicity. The width and height are different to match the size of my sidebar , and the category is #389, to show only posts from my shop for framed prints. I’m letting WP-Cache in place, but it clears every day (a.k.a. 86400 seconds), so each page will show a different print each day.

Is that enough? No, Post Thumb isn’t done helping me. I normally create the thumbnails and HTML code showing them for each photo, but the plugin can take care of that automagically. I made these choices in the settings:

Alakhnor's Post Thumb auto-thumbnail settings

For the screen capture of the settings you see above, I added the rel=”nothumb” tag after the alt text, because it’s 475 pixels wide, so resizing to 400 isn’t needed. But I’ll be letting it auto-thumbnail most of the time. For Sunrays 3, for example, I would normally make a thumbnail, upload it, and write this HTML for the post:

<a href=”http://thripp.com/files/photos/sunrays-3.jpg” title=”Sunrays 3 — orange rays of sunshine pierce black clouds”><img src=”http://thripp.com/files/photos/sunrays-3-sm.jpg” alt=”Sunrays 3 — orange rays of sunshine pierce black clouds” /></a>

But now, I write this:

<img src=”http://thripp.com/files/photos/sunrays-3.jpg” alt=”Sunrays 3 — orange rays of sunshine pierce black clouds” />

. . . and the plugin resizes and saves the photo, uses the new version as the image, links to the full-size version, and specifies my alt text as the hover title, while showing the abbreviated code when I return to edit the post. And this is all done before sending it off to LiveJournal and Xanga (with LiveJournal Crossposter and Xanga Crosspost). Very cool, and better than what WordPress does out of the box.

Post Thumb finds the first image in a post, then using a thumbnail of it to represent that post. Since I only put one photo to an entry, it’s perfect in my case. I have both the convenience of a photo-blog and the versatility of a text blog. I can write text articles like this one right alongside my photos, both show up to my RSS and email subscribers, and I can include lengthy descriptions for my photos, while WordPress and Post Thumb do the heavy lifting to compile a detailed blog and minimalist gallery. This is more than can be said for WordPress 2.5’s built-in galleries, or the add-on solutions. It is much preferable for teaching galleries like my own, with lots of text and information accompanying images, than for people who just want to put up scads of photos with no details. I use Gallery2 for the scads of photos (my gallery is private). WordPress and Post Thumb bridge the gap.

While I was at it, I switched default fonts on the site from Lucide Grande to Arial, because it’s included with Windows, and renders better at small sizes in Firefox. I also changed the banner from olive green to a powerful black. The last step was to add links to the new gallery pages below the banner. Changes are good.

The “Pure Photography” Myth

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Pink and Purple Sunset 3, an example of heavy editing

I do whatever it takes to make the photo look good, but I try to avoid spot editing like removing stray tree branches, power lines, etc. Unlike most, it’s not for “ethics,” but because it’s a terrible pain to remove elements while holding to a realistic ideal (no smudge marks, dark spots, obvious cloning, etc.). Spot editing with a soft brush for dodging, burning, or desaturating is easy, but for removing distractions, it’s easier to recompose or chop down a tree than to fix it in Photoshop (usually). If you’ve spent three hours meticulously removing telephone poles, houses, and reshaping trees like in the title photo, then you know why (right is mirrored to show continuity).

I get a few hecklers saying that efforts are no better than a forged bank note, and must be labeled as photo-manipulations—the Scarlet Letter to any “real” photographer. To them I say: how could I dare claim that of my work when I’m doing basic stuff like color shifts and increasing contrast, while others are spending days weaving dozens of photos into a cohesive vision? If anything, it’s not the ambitious photographers that are the trouble, but the people who press “auto levels” and then call their pieces digital art.

To all the fledgling digital photographers: don’t let anyone tell you that you’re “cheating” by editing your creations. This is the new revolution; this is your photography. Go wherever your art takes you. You’re stymying your creativity by not enhancing your photos. Know that when to stop is not when the image is looking too different from the “original,” but when it is looking bad on its own accord.

Over-saturated version of Pink and Purple Sunset 3

^ This is no good. When colors go to solid pink or blue, there is no detail or brilliance there; just an unshaped blob of light. Sometimes, like in the silhouetted trees, no detail looks good. It takes a human to know this, not Photoshop. You are that human. Let no one stand in your way. You are the artist, and the world is your canvas.

For more about this, read Being a Free Photographer.

Energizer’s AA/AAA Chargers

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Energizer CHFM1 Energizer CHDC7 Energizer CHUSB

This is Energizer’s current lineup of budget AA/AAA battery chargers. I was fortunate enough to have Margaret Welch of Blick & Staff Communications send me these on Energizer’s behalf, and I’ve had plenty of time to try them out.

All three work with AA and AAA; with AAA, there are smaller contacts that flip down to accommodate the batteries’ smaller lengths. None of them are made for the forgetful person needing power for their camera at the last minute; to fully charge four 2500 mAh AA batteries, it takes 5 hours, 6.5 hours, or 8.5 hours (from left to right, respectively). However, if you rotate sets, or let them work overnight, these are perfect for use at home or when traveling. If you want a charger that works quickly, Energizer offers a 15-minute charger (Amazon.com), and it has a fan, so your batteries shouldn’t get too hot. I didn’t get one for this review, but customer opinion is positive.

From left to right, as labeled on the packages:
Energizer CHFM1: e2 Rechargeable
Energizer CHDC7: e2 Rechargeable Compact Charger AA/AAA
Energizer CHUSB: e2 Rechargeable USB Duo AA/AAA Charger

These newer chargers turn off automatically, not based just on a timer, but rather they detect when batteries are done, which extends the life of your investment.

In case you’re in the dark, you can use these to power any AA or AAA Nickel-metal hydride batteries, even if they are a different brand. This includes the new low-discharge variants, such as the Rayovac Hybrid brand.

My favorite of the three is the compact one (middle, CHDC7). The charging part retracts into the body, so you can throw it in your bag without wasting any space. The light indicators are innovative; when one is blinking, the charging is begun; when two are blinking, the it is past half way, and when two are solid, it is complete. This makes it easy to track the progress. Plus, it looks cool, and the charger isn’t as wide as the first. It took just over six hours to empower a fresh set of four Energizer-brand AAs, and I’ve taken over 300 shots with my Canon PowerShot A620, with no low-battery warning in sight. I don’t use the flash as I prefer ambient lighting; the batteries will drain faster if you do. Back in the stone age (a.k.a. 2005), I used Mattel’s Juice Box as my MP3 player; it uses three AA batteries, and I always hated that many chargers would only work in groups of two. This one is no different, unfortunately; you can only charge two or four batteries at once, not one or three. Two can be AAs and two can be AAAs, at least.

The Energizer CHFM1 (left) isn’t much different from the compact charger, except for being bulkier and slower (8.5 vs. 6.5 hours). It too charges batteries in groups of two. You can change the face plate; there is white, silver, and black, which is a nice touch. I like the black one, though the back is dark gray and doesn’t match. The only indicator light is red for charging and green for done; there is an on/off button, so that you can turn it off but leave it plugged in; I just unplug it, so I have no use for the button. One thing that worries me about both is that they have no extension cables, but instead have a plug that flips out, so if you plug them into a power strip they’ll block a lot of outlets, and they weigh a pound each with batteries, which puts stress on the outlet. If you’re using a regular wall outlet, it shouldn’t matter, and the simplified plug saves space.

The USB charger (right) touts itself as working in two hours, but actually needs five hours for Energizer’s current 2500 milliampere-hour AA batteries (mAh, generally a measurement of battery capacity). Don’t expect to restore your Fujifilm A900‘s two AA batteries from deadness before your laptop’s battery gives out, but you can get the boost needed for fifty shots if you have your laptop, and a half hour to kill, right in the field. The charger will power up a pair of AAA batteries in two hours, but no serious cameras use them because they drain so quickly. The Fujifilm and Canon A series cameras are still being made and all utilize AAs, though many of the Canons, such as my PowerShot A620, use four AAs, so this charger will be less practical. You can refill one battery at once if you choose, unlike with the others. I can see this being useful for my MP3 player/voice recorder, it being powered by one AAA. The charger also comes with a wall plug so you can use it in a standard U.S. power outlet, away from your computer. The USB cord is just six inches long; that saves space (the cord wraps around the body), but can be inconvenient.

A unique feature of the USB charger is that you can download software at http://energizer.com/usbcharger/ that displays how long you’ll have to wait. The software is available for Windows 2000 or Mac OS 10.4 and above; the Windows version is 3MB, occupies 13MB of space, and is non-portable (writes to the registry), so you can’t keep it on your USB flash drive. It adds a shortcut in “Programs” in your Start Menu AND at the top, which is overkill because the program starts automatically when you plug the charger into a USB port. When I was installing it, Windows XP gave this message:

Energizer USB Charger warning on Windows XP

It’s a pointless warning message, but will confuse many unexperienced Windows users.

Here’s what it looks like when the charger is plugged in but with no batteries:

Energizer USB Charger software: insert battery

And with a battery, the remaining time is displayed; 3 hours, 48 minutes here:

Energizer USB Charger software: count-down

If you are charging 2 batteries, the time displayed is just that of the battery that will take the longest. The software is really basic; you can change the color (mine is orange, as you can see), and configure the software to start and terminate when you attach and detach the charger, but that’s all. I have no idea why Energizer UsbCharger.exe is 12.3MB, nor why it eats up 31MiB of RAM all the time, other than inefficient programming.

The left one (CHFM1) comes with 4 AA rechargeables, the middle with none (CHDC7), and the right (CHUSB) with 2 AAA rechargeables. I used the AAs from the first in the second, and they work great. They can be more expensive, but, if you’ve read my article, Simple Advice on AA Chargers & Batteries, you know the dangers of cheap, gray-market batteries. Energizer batteries always work well and last a long time, so I have no hesitation in recommending them. Plus, I have Duracell batteries where the labels peel off after some use, but this annoyance doesn’t crop up with Energizer, which is nice. All of Energizer’s new peripherals are good despite my gripes; I’m glad we’ve finally passed the age of timer-driven (or even timerless), “dumb” chargers that I’ve complained of. While AAs don’t last as long the Lithium-Ion battery in my Canon Rebel XTi, they’ve come quite far, are cheaper, and are far easier to find.

The Death of CompactFlash?

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CompactFlash slot of a Canon Rebel XTi

Canon has announced the Canon Rebel XSi (EOS 450D outside the U.S.A.); the sequel to my beloved Rebel XTi (EOS 400D). While there are many revisions, the one that sticks out the most is the switch from CompactFlash to Secure Digital memory cards.

CF vs. SD

CompactFlash is 14 years old; it is the oldest and largest memory card format still in use. It owes its longevity to having the controller in the card instead of the camera, so that the technology can evolve with old devices still working with the new memory cards (for the most part). Other formats have gone through revisions that sacrifice a lot of backward-compatibility, such as the Sony Memory Stick PRO (2003, overcame 128MB limit), xD Type M (2005, overcame 512MB limit), and SDHC (2006, overcame 2GB limit). CF cards are also sturdier because there are no exposed contacts, and they’re bigger and harder to lose. The interface is pin-based like parallel ATA (used for hard drives), as you can see from the photo of the Canon Rebel XTi’s slot at the top. If you break or bend the pins, you’re in trouble, which is one thing that’s worse than SD.

The Rebel XSi will take SD and SDHC cards; a 4GB card is not unreasonable as the RAW files are 12MB each. Back in the day, CompactFlash cards were common in consumer-level cameras, such as the Canon PowerShot A95 (2004-09), but now they’ve disappeared in even entry-level DSLRs, such as the Nikon D80, Pentax K10D, and now the Canon Rebel XSi. How much longer before SD takes over entirely?

One thing I can say for sure: CF cards do not make good flash drives.

CF card reader

“Use as a USB Flash Drive by inserting Memory Card”

Look mom, I have the biggest flash drive ever.

CF card reader, diagram

Now I can block four ports at once!

No Safety in Multiple Memory Cards

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For years, I’ve been hearing this wonderful argument: don’t put all your eggs in one basket; it’s better to have several smaller memory cards than one large one, so that if one fails, you’ve only lost a portion of your prized photographs, instead of all of them.

Seems to make sense, no? Distribution and redundancy are the core of safe computing, so we take this argument without question, spending extra to get four 512MB cards, even if the best bang for our collective buck is at 2GB. Yet do we ever stop to think that the entire concept is flawed?

The multi-card proponents convince us that all things equal (reliability and failure rates), four 512MB cards is the safer option.

But hold on a second there. Are the extra cards going for live, RAID-style backups? Are we afforded the advantage that while we sacrifice the space of one card, if any one card fails, no data is lost (RAID 5)? No. We have nothing. Until you get your pictures copied to your computer, there is only one copy in existence, and your work is in danger, either way. Your camera isn’t going to mirror your data for you. Maybe your fancy $3000 Canon EOS-1D Mark II does, but for us mortals, such extravagance cannot be afforded.

Remember that everything is equal, and we’ve just reached the beautiful world of digital permanence by splitting our eggs into four baskets? Billy’s 8th birthday will not be lost, because you had to spread the shots across four cards. If one fails, all is well, because you still have great shots on three other cards, right?

But it is that if that is important. Have you noticed that when you have multiples of something, you’re more likely to have one fail? In a family with three computers, one is constantly on the fritz. With five school-aged children, one is always sick. And with four memory cards, you’re four times as likely to have one short-circuit. The question is, do you want to lose a day of photos every two years, or an evening of photos every six months?

Our friend Murphy says that you will be losing the photos of Billy blowing out the candles, rather than the guests or the clean-up party. You’re going to lose digital photos occasionally, and the multi-card philosophy does nothing to prevent nor reduce this.

Someone is going to protest: “Richard, all memory cards are not the same. Some are more reliable than others; you cannot pretend they are all equal. Plus, you are more likely to have one memory card fail under intensive use, than to have one of four fail under intermittent use.” For them, I want to take this out of the realm of theory, and into the realm of practice.

How often does a door spontaneously fall of its hinges? It doesn’t; it fails when you open it. I have a Canon Rebel XTi, and it relies on a flimsy plastic hinge to stay attached to the camera. When the door is open, the camera magically does not work at all. This is one part I don’t want breaking in the middle of my adventure at the Grand Canyon (no, I’m not going to the Grand Canyon, this is an example). And when is it going to fail? When I open it in the dry, sweltering sun to swap cards, of course!

Memory cards and readers are usually rated for 10,000 insertion/removal cycles. We cannot assume that they’ll last this long; every time you swap, it’s wear and tear on the camera and cards, and with something as important as our photos, we want to avoid as much risk as possible.

Technicalities aside, trading out tiny, expensive, static-sensitive, photo-filled memory cards in the field is just bad practice. No matter how careful I am, I’m ten times more likely to drop my postage-stamp SD card in the grass at the park, or trip and have it fly into the river, than it is to fail on its own accord. Plus, you’ll miss great photos by having to switch memory cards. It doesn’t matter how well you schedule it—you’ll be clicking away, and the Kodak moment will pop up just as your camera flashes “card full.” It happens to me; I don’t even keep half the photos, but there isn’t time to delete on the spot. You can’t be ready for anything if you have no space.

You should have two memory cards, so that when one fails, you can order a cheap one online (with caution, of course), without your camera being completely useless for a week. Beyond two, there are no advantages.

Simple Advice on AA Chargers & Batteries

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Rechargeable AA batteries and chargers — Photo by Richard X. Thripp

Normal alkaline AAs are fine for the casual shooter, but in the long run, you’ll save money with rechargeables. Duracell and Energizer are good, but my favorite is Tenergy (sold at all-battery.com), which are cheaper and have worked well for me. Get a charger that is “smart,” in that it doesn’t stop just on a timer. I like the Duracell CEF90NC 30 Minute Charger, though I have an older version. Mine doesn’t take long (one hour), has built-in cooling, stops based on some sort of charging detection system that works well, and has worked without fail for 2+ years. The new model should do the same, unless they’ve messed things up. Then, you won’t have to change batteries often, unless your camera is particularly power-hungry. The charger runs $30 and comes with 4 Duracell batteries. Avoid 15 minute or faster chargers, as they stress your batteries more, are prone to overheating, and cost more.

When I got my first digital camera, I bought a charger with four AA batteries for $10. The charger took 16 hours, and would not stop automatically. It was inevitable; I charged the batteries for 24 hours once, but fortunately there was no apparent damage, likely because the charger is less apt to damage batteries for being so under-powered. One month later, one of the batteries leaked acid. If it had been in the camera, it would have corroded the contacts and perhaps render it unusable. I bought new batteries, but continued using the original three for my CD player. Another month later, I opened the player to find that the battery had leaked, and the acid had burned through the compartment, onto the CD, corroding it so that it was unusable. It was a CD I burned, but if it had been a commercial release it may have been a loss of up to $20. I stopped using those batteries, filed down the corroded part in the player so that the CD wouldn’t touch it while spinning, and used aluminum foil to fit the battery against the corroded spring. After several months, it became such a hassle to keep the aluminum foil in place that I stopped using the player; the batteries would frequently fall out of place despite my efforts. I paid $33 for that CD player; this was three years ago, and it was one of those fancy models that would play MP3 files from CDs (flash memory was expensive back then), so it was quite disappointing to lose.

That is my cautionary tale: be careful of the batteries you choose; the cheesiest option isn’t the best. Digital photography is expensive, but this is no place to skimp, as your camera is useless without working batteries.

In the banner, the chargers, from left to right: Tenergy V-2833, Duracell CEF80N, Energizer CHDC, Digital Concepts CH-1800. The Duracell CEF80N is the one I’m saying good things about above; the Digital Concepts CH-1800 is the one I’m saying bad things about. The Energizer one uses an 8-hour timer, so I don’t like it. I haven’t opened the Tenergy one, but it says it takes 18 hours, which is too long. The batteries on the left are Rayovac Hybrid brand, which are low self-discharge batteries. I’ve kept them for a year without charging and they still work, but I only recommend them if you use your camera infrequently, as they’re pricier. The middle ones are Tenergy brand, which I like. The Energizer brand batteries on the right are good too, but are $10 a pack.

If you don’t want to worry about changing batteries, or want some spares to keep in your bag just in case, lithium AAs are a good choice.