Jul 31 2010

On Sorting Diverse File Formats — Simple Version

Category: AfterCapture & Rangefinder Articles, Technology Insights, Workflow & DAM — Ethan G. Salwen @ 4:05 pm

AfterCapture Blog_100730_Sorting Files_1We’re all shooting multiple file formats with multiple cameras. Even when photographing with only one camera we can easily end up with: Raws, Raw + JPEGs, JPEGs (only), and movie files. Yikes.

If you’re photographing with two (or more) cameras, super yikes — when it comes to efficient workflow, for archiving and processing.

Actually, there are some simple solutions.

For my last AfterCapture column, I provide some solutions. For “Sorting Out Diverse File Formats” I turned to Richard Anderson for advice, who applied dpBestflow.org knowledge to a real-life workflow dilemma I was facing. The article is valuable, but to be honest, the most pertinent advice might have gotten lost in the shuffle.

The bottom line, most important concepts you should consider for dealing with multiple file formats in your workflow are these:

• Separate each different file format into its own folder. Anderson explains that this is helpful because each type of file will (likely) require different workflow processing steps.

• Name each archive folder with the same base name used for you image files. Anderson explains that this best practice is important for archive sanity (although he didn’t phrase it that way.)

• Bring images together in a cataloging program – for organizing, editing and outputting. Catalog programs rule! They don’t care if your images are separated into different folders. In cataloging software — such as Lightroom and Expression Media — you can bring them together, seamlessly organizing by file name, capture time or any other metadata.

If this sounds complex complex or confusing, these images will show you what I mean:

AfterCapture Blog_100730_Sorting Files_3

See how all my “100302″ captures are divided into “DNGs”, “Jpegs” and “Movies”?

AfterCapture Blog_100730_Sorting Files_4

See how there is a gap between DNG 0174 and 0179?

AfterCapture Blog_100730_Sorting Files_5

No problem! Files 0175 through 0178 are JPEGs and, as you can see, they are in their own folder.

Just because these DNGs and JPEGs are in separate folders, they all come together seamlessly in my Expression Media catalog. If you are over 18 and don’t have a weak stomach, you can see an example here: Continue reading “On Sorting Diverse File Formats — Simple Version”

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Jul 28 2010

Love Your Family, Be Wary of Your HD-DSLR

Category: In-Camera Techniques, Multimedia & Video, Technology Insights — Ethan G. Salwen @ 4:43 pm

Since writing last night about a blog post by Gail Mooney, she’s written two more, and also done some major reporting Down Under for her “Opening Our Eyes” documentary project. Go Mooney!

Here are two key lessons I take away from Mooney’s “The Importance of ‘Family’” and “The Hard Part About Working with DSLRs”, both of which I encourage you to read — gaining insights from both Mooney’s Humane Side as well as her Tech-Nerdy Side:

• Family matters more than anything. So keep on building, loving and appreciating your “family,” even if these people are not related by blood.

As Mooney says of a young homeless man helped by the Oasis project: “His wants are simple – to love and be loved. How very basic and yet so tragic that being part of a family seems so out of reach for so many.”

• HD-DSLR cameras are not the best tools for recording video for making movies. HD-DSLRs are a major pain for capturing video, so (at least for now) for the best, most hassle free video-only shooting we’re better of with HD video cameras.

As Mooney says: “Yes, the visual [of HD-DSLRs] is stunning but I can’t help but think how many moments I may have missed that I probably would have gotten if I had been shooting with a video camera.”

Let’s go to the video. . .

To honor both family and not capturing video on HD-DSLRs — I used my measly Canon G9 — I share a home movie I made a year-and-a-half ago. Back then these wackos were just the wacky family of my girlfriend. But now, with the wedding set for January, these wackos are my family, too. Yes!

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Jul 27 2010

It’s Making Movies, Stupid!

Category: Creative Process, Multimedia & Video, Technology Insights — Ethan G. Salwen @ 6:17 pm

“After 11 years of shooting motion and over 30 years of shooting still images, my mind seamlessly makes the switch a hundred times a day between thinking and seeing in ‘moments in time’ or ‘time in motion’”, Gail Mooney shared yesterday in “True Convergence with the DSLR Cameras,” a great blog post from her “Journeys of a Hybrid.” Mooney speaks of how photographers new to video tend to get consumed by the technical challenges and “forget that they need to think and shoot differently when shooting video.”

This is something that I have been struggling with in my very initial steps into video and multimedia. I notice that I either shoot all stills or all motion. My mind is not only not switch seamlessly, it’s hardly switching at all. And when I am in video mode, I hardly know what I’m doing. And why should I? While I’ve been making still images for 20 years, I’ve only played around with multimedia a tiny bit over the past year. How would I know how to make a movie?

To make a movie. That’s the real challenge of photographers “moving into motion”: embracing video capture, as well as audio capture, as well as the editing these element together, or even “just” editing still images and sound into multimedia pieces. This “move making” factor might seem incredibly obvious, but I think few of us really realize this.

Maybe you realize this. But if you do, do you really realize this?

I ask because I recently finished up a 4,000-word article sharing photographers’ insights on embracing video and multimedia and, as good as the article is — I’ll share it with you when I have the PDF — I think I fail to communicate this obvious-subtle idea: Moving into motion is all about making movies, and making movies is hard.

Because of all the TV programs and movies we consume, we have a sense of how movies work, which is great. But, just as casual photographers Continue reading “It’s Making Movies, Stupid!”

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Jul 23 2010

Photographers Embrace Social Networking — In Ways That Ring True

Category: Business & Marketing, Creative Process — Ethan G. Salwen @ 3:59 pm

AfterCapture Blog_100723_SocialMedia_1Chloé Browne, a London-based wedding photographer, only started using Twitter after three clients found her through tweets written by others: clients raving about her services. Now Browne tweets throughout the day, and weaves this focused social media marketing into the fabric also comprised of the threads that are her active blogging and Facebooking.

AfterCapture Blog_100723_SocialMedia_2Brown is one photographer featured in “Hello, world: Social Networking for photographers”, a great article by Diane Smyth, published in the “British Journal of Photography.” As Smyth explains of Browne:

“Browne’s Facebook and blog pages link back to each other, her Twitter account and her main website, and she updates her Facebook page and Tweets each time she publishes a new blog, which is at least once a week. It is a lot of admin, she admits, but in her case it’s had real results – she only advertises online, and wins most of her new business this way”

AfterCapture Blog_100723_SocialMedia_3In “Hello, world” Smyth reports on just a few of the different ways that photographers are finding business and (just as important) creative success with social media. One, clear message that Smyth conveys is that these photographers are finding quantifiable, positive value from social media because they are using social media in ways that are true to their personalities and business goals.

This is refreshing. It is different from the Continue reading “Photographers Embrace Social Networking — In Ways That Ring True”

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Jul 21 2010

Should Photographers Learn HTML and CSS?

Category: Technology Insights — Ethan G. Salwen @ 11:31 am

Even if you are not a reporter, as a modern photographer you very likely consider yourself an “independent publisher/producer,” and so the flowchart posted yesterday on 10,000 Words will be of interest.

AfterCapture Blog_100721_shouldilearnprogramming-sm

According to this chart, if you don’t want to spend nights crying over your keyboard, you should not learn programming. On the other hand, if you want to build Web sites, you should learn HTML and CSS. This seems about right to me, and it points to the fact that, these days:

1. The act of building Web sites can be as simple as lightly customizing a blog template (theme), which can seriously help photographers in self-publishing images, photo stories and multimedia projects.

2. Most people do not consider basic HTML and CSS serious programming.

Few photographers will want to or will need to learn Continue reading “Should Photographers Learn HTML and CSS?”

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Jul 19 2010

When Ideas Have Major Sex, Hand Tools Change Big Time

Category: Creative Process, Viewpoint — Ethan G. Salwen @ 1:13 pm

AfterCapture Blog_100719_Ridley_1Ideas are really cool. Sex is really cool. What’s really, really cool is when ideas have sex. According to Matt Ridley, when ideas start having major sex — in the form of cultural exchange between different groups of humans — we end up with major cultural evolution and, in turn, prosperity.

I’ve been a big fan of Ridley’s since I read his “The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature,” and this recent TED talk by him is wonderful. I highly recommend you check it out. Even if you don’t agree with Ridley’s thinking, I’m sure you’ll find some of his thoughts intreguing. If nothing else, your thoughts will have the chance to have sex with Ridley’s thoughts and Ridley is right, this could be very good for all of us.

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Jul 16 2010

The Salvos Learn to Drive

Category: AfterCapture & Rangefinder Articles, Photographers — Ethan G. Salwen @ 3:21 pm
Vero o Falso?

Vero o Falso?

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” Suzanne Salvo told me during a great chat on Wednesday. She was laughing but speaking in earnest regarding the difficulties of passing the Italian drivers license exam. Given the utterly perplexing diagrams she posted in a hilarious post on her fantastic blog the other day, I can see why the test would be so hard. Still, I can’t really believe it’s the hardest thing she’s ever done. (See Bolivian jungles below.)

For his part, Chris Salvo (the amazing lens behind the husband and wife team of Salvo Photography) still hasn’t passed the driving portion of the test. Given that the guy has been driving for three decades now, I had to make fun of him, but Suzanne, with good humor, explained that the driving classes are mandatory and you have to pay for them and so, um. . .

Here in Buenos Aires we call it a “coima,” which usually doesn’t translate to “bribe” in the strictest, harshest sense, but can often seem more like “creative money earning.” Sounds like it might be similar in Italy, which makes sense, consider how Argentines are often referred to as “Spanish-speaking Italians.”

In any case, Chris, who I Continue reading “The Salvos Learn to Drive”

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Jul 14 2010

Wide, Medium and Close – The Key to Crafting Cool Videos

Category: Creative Process, In-Camera Techniques, Multimedia & Video — Ethan G. Salwen @ 3:24 pm

“When capturing motion and stills for use in multimedia it is essential to record all subjects in wide, medium and close-up shots,” Mary Lynn Price told me recently. As a video journalist focusing on “one-man-band” reporting, Price uses all three perspectives to carefully construct rich reporting experiences. One great example is her “Conserving Shackleton’s Historic Hut in Antarctica,” which she produced in 2008 for “Women Working in Antarctica.”

“The wide shot is the establishing shot, the medium shot clearly shows the subject, and the close-ups give us the ‘wow’ factor,” Price explains. She uses all of these to her storytelling advantage throughout “Shackleton’s Historic Hut.”

Even though it’s only five minutes, “Shackleton’s Historic Hut” asks a lot from Web viewers with short, fickle attention spans. Price holds our interest by presenting as much information as many, slower-paced TV documentaries would in a half hour.

Not only do get to know three different Continue reading “Wide, Medium and Close – The Key to Crafting Cool Videos”

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Jul 13 2010

Say “Stuff It!” to StuffIt Delux?

Category: Technology Insights, Viewpoint — Ethan G. Salwen @ 2:25 pm

AfterCapture Blog_100713_StuffIt_1Recipe for a major headache: needing to FTP 1.5 GB of image files using a seriously crappy Internet connection. (Notoriously bad in Argentina.) I would have pulled my hair out this morning, realizing that my efforts of last night had led to nothing (”disconnected”), but, um, I have no hair.

To reduce my 1.5 GB by about 10% I was using the nifty “Compress” zipping functionality of my Mac computer. But today I thought, “Maybe I can do better with StuffIt.” I was desperate, but not so desperate as to pay $79.95 (gulp!) or even to try the “free” trial (not so free, image below) without doing a little research.

I started to search around the Web, hoping that a reliable source would say, “StuffIt rocks! It reduces file size so dang much, and has offers other values worth way more than 50 bucks!”

What I found, on the StuffIt Delux 2010 User Reviews forum at MacUpdate was not encouraging, as in: “No thank you, just… Stuff It,” and, “Oh God… Here we go again with the freaking upgrades. I can set my calendar/clock to this company and their ridiculous upgrades,” and, “Stuffit is way outdated. And their current policies of asking for a credit card number for a demo are joke.”

Any Value to StuffIt?

So is there anybody who has anything good to say about StuffIt, or should we all say “Stuff it, StuffIt!”?

Continue reading “Say “Stuff It!” to StuffIt Delux?”

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Jul 10 2010

!Dale Pulpo Paul!

Category: Viewpoint — Ethan G. Salwen @ 7:40 pm

Sure, you know about Paul the Psychic Octopus, who got ‘em all right — “predicting” ever World Cup match winner just by. . .um. . .eating his dinner. But have you seen this wonderful, upbeat Pulpo Paul video?

Amazing how such a languid creature can produce such intense energy!

Here in Argentina we know “Paul the Octopus” as “Pulpo Paul” because, um, we speak Spanish. For a couple of days there he seemed to be Enemy #1, having predicted that the Germans would beat Argentina in the quarter-finals. Damn! The country was in a major depression for days — no joke — and so it was hard to find anyone who didn’t want to turn Mr. Pulpo Paul into calamari.

My girlfriend is an exception, saying, “¡Pulpo Paul es el mejor parte del Mundial! — He’s the best part of the World Cup! (Don’t get me wrong: she was as depressed as the rest of us by Argentina’s loss. But for her safety, after publishing a quote like that, I will keep her identity anonymous.)

It was my girlfriend Continue reading “!Dale Pulpo Paul!”

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