Archive for the 'technology' Category

I returned home from vacation to find Kodak decided to stop production of Kodachrome slide film. This is no surprise as clearly the demand for most film products has dropped significantly with the digital age and the fact producing Kodachrome is complex.

Being I’m over 40 years old I grew up in the era when the little yellow boxes were everywhere and Paul Simon’s hit “Kodachrome” played on the radio. In the 70s camera’s, even SLRs, were fairly simple and getting the best quality film was your first step to success after good glass. The film of choice? Kodachrome of course.

What’s the attraction for railfans? Kodachrome had vibrant colors and the slides lasted darn near forever. Both of these features helped to solidify it as the film of choice in the hobby. Being one who always wanted something better I jumped to Kodachrome and used it exclusively once I saw what print film did in my SLR.

I moved over to Kodachrome 64 slide film in 1988. My first K64 photo was Amtrak 7 entering the east portal of the Cascade tunnel on June 7, 1988. Over the next 4+ years I shot K64 and K200 in the Northwest and in Michigan finally finishing my Kodachrome run on July 24, 1992 with a Central Michigan B23-7 stopped at signal 2D at Durand.

Why did I stop shooting Kodachrome and film in general? Over the next 3 years my life changed dramatically with a move from Michigan back to the Northwest and the birth of my first child. Moreover I became increasingly frustrated with the whole film process (shoot today, mail tomorrow, results back to you in two weeks) and the limited capability to improve the image in any way without dark room equipment. I desperately wanted something more flexible than what Kodachrome and film in general offered.

Despite my feelings about its post production limits Kodachrome was magical. Yes, the colors were vibrant and accurate and capturing a good sky (quite important to railfans) was easy. I’m proud to say I used it and I still occasionally sing Mr. Simon’s song when I look out and see a deep blue sky with puffy white clouds. So with fond memories of railfan adventures with Kodachrome in the camera I say so long Kodachrome….and everything looks worse in black and white.

Addendum: While researching the Kodachrome song for this post I found several interesting interpretations of the lyrics. The funniest is that the song is actually about LSD. Apparently replacing the word Kodachrome with LSD throughout works just fine. I wouldn’t know.

The popular belief is the song was originally written to fly in the face of those that didn’t believe artists should include commercial references in their songs. Clearly with its repeated mentions of Kodachrome and Nikon this song archives that. Apparently there were several songs at the time that had commercial references in them and were banned from the radio for a time.

Another interpretation is that Paul was just reminiscing about about the good old days of the 50’s and 60’s when color photography really came into its own. Anyway you look at it, the song is great and really memorializes a great product from Kodak.

When I originally started the conversion from Photoshop Elements Organizer to Lightroom I ran into a pretty big snag.  The snag was the captions from RAW images were not transferring into Lightroom when I used the Import from Elements feature.  Everything else imported just fine but not having my captions concerned me.

Since my January 1 attempt I’ve contemplated several workarounds to get the captions over.  My ideas were (in order of feasibility):

1.  Export the captions from Organizer and copy and paste them on each image in Lightroom
2.  Export the captions from Organizer and build .xmp sidecar files that could be read into Lightroom
3.  Wait until a later version of Lightroom and hope that caption transfer would be added
4.  Ignore the missing captions

I ruled out option 4 because I value my captions too much.  Option 3 was the plan I went with for some time but not having my catalog in Lightroom was becoming more and more difficult (mainly due to an import issue that raised its head in March).  That left me with options 1 & 2.

I experimented quite a bit with option 2 as it would make the caption import mechanical and eliminate potential errors.  I have been using Lightroom since the first Windows betas in June of 2006 so I had quite a few images that I’d edited already.  Those edits are valuable just like the captions and I wanted to make sure they were included in my new Railroad catalog.  To do this I wrote out .xmp sidecars containing the edit information.   Now I have a dilemma, some files would have two sidecar files.  That won’t work because Lightroom reads in the data in the sidecar file as a replacement for the data it has in the library.  This means when you read the side car file Lightroom overlays all the information on the image.  With two files I’d either get the edits or I’d get the captions but not both.  As much as I hated it, option 1 proved to be the most fool proof and accurate way of getting my captions into Lightroom.

The conversion 

After much grumbling about copy and paste I decided to make the leap and convert the catalog knowing I’d have a copy and paste job ahead.   Here’s the steps I performed to prepare.

In Organizer:

1.  I used the Write Tag Info to files feature to write what information I could to my image files.  This put the caption on about 1350 of my images that were originally .jpg, .tiff, or. psd
2.  I reconnected all missing files to make sure Organizer knew the location of all the images
3.  I recovered the catalog to compress it and make sure it is ready for Lightroom

In Lightroom:

1.  I selected all the images in the Library grid and went to the Metadata menu and chose Save Metadata to files (this is my ‘working’ catalog that did not contain any keywords, captions or anything, just edits).  This saved all the edits I’d made in Lightroom to xmp sidecar files
2.  I created a new catalog and chose Import from Elements.   This started the import process from my Organizer catalog

In less than an hour I had a Lightroom catalog minus captions from about 7950 images.

The clean up

The conversion process wasn’t perfect and I had many duplicate keywords.  As near as I could tell if an image was in a version set in Organizer the keywords were duplicated, one within the keyword hierarchy and one at the root of the hierarchy.  I checked several out and they were truly duplicates so all I had to do was remove the keywords that were not in the hierarchy and the keywords would all be correct.

As a double check that all of my photos were converted I went to each folder and imported all files from the folder.  I found about a dozen images that were not in organizer and thus were not converted to Lightroom.  In the end I wasn’t missing anything valuable, but it was nice to know everything had converted.

The clean up took between 3 and 4 hours total.

The captions

Thanks to Paige’s comments on the previous post I knew that the Organizer file could be opened by MS Access.  I decided to extract the captions from there into an Excel spreadsheet for ease of entry.  This is the query I used.

SELECT ImageTable.fImageOriginalFilePath,
       ImageTable.fImageOriginalFileName,
       ImageTable.fImageDate,
       ImageTable.fImageTime,
       MediaShortCaptionTable.fMediaShortCaption,
       ImageLongCaptionTable.fImageLongCaption  FROM (ImageTable LEFT JOIN ImageLongCaptionTable ON
                           ImageTable.fImageLongCaptionIdFromImage = ImageLongCaptionTable.fImageLongCaptionId)
                 LEFT JOIN MediaShortCaptionTable ON
                           ImageTable.fMediaShortCaptionIdFromMedia = MediaShortCaptionTable.fMediaShortCaptionId;

The results of this query were exported into Excel where I combined the short and long captions (I used both over the years) into one caption giving me something that looked like this:

The copy and paste

In both Lightroom and Excel I ordered the images by file name and went after it one image at a time.  What I quickly discovered is I tended to give blocks of images the same caption.  When you have a DSLR and blast off 10 images of the same train there really isn’t much different information from one image to the next.  I found I could apply the same caption to a block of images by selecting all the images in Lightroom and then pasting in the caption.  For example if you look at the Excel screen shot above you can see IMG_2347.CR2 - IMG_2350_edited-1.psd all have the same caption.  Instead of copying and pasting 7 times I can finish these images with just one copy and paste. 

In the end I captioned over 1000 images and hour.  With just under 7000 to caption that worked out to between 6 and 7 hours worth of effort.  I spread the effort out in small pieces so as to not kill myself.  I also intentionally didn’t set a deadline to complete this because with my personality if I did that I’d have to find some way to get it done before the deadline which would likely translate into some late night marathon.  

The reward

I’m now working exclusively in Lightroom and I don’t have any more copy and paste to do!  As nasty as it sounds the copy and paste wasn’t really that bad.  My decision to to a little here and there really made the job go quickly and took away the monotony that comes with a repetitive task.   Now that the hard work is over I can sit back and enjoy having a complete Lightroom catalog of my railroad photos.

Are you having trouble figuring out which of the Adobe Photoshop products are right for you?  Check out Scott Kelby’s discussion on his blog.  Regular readers of my posts on Lightroom will not be surprised by Scott’s conclusions. 

Even if you don’t agree with Scott I hope you can get a better feel from Scott’s post on where the main photo editing products from Adobe fit in.

Over the holidays I considered converting my photo catalog from Photoshop Elements Organizer to Photoshop Lightroom’s Library.   There are lots of reasons to convert but the overriding item for me is how the Library and Develop pieces are more integrated than in my current work flow.   On top of that Lightroom allows me more access to meta data which as time goes on will be more and more important.   After I set up a test catalog in Lightroom to see how things would look I found the steps I used to catalog images in Organizer would be about the same in Lightroom.  At that point the decision was made.

Now to convert.  I thought it couldn’t be all that hard to convert because Lightroom has an “Import from Elements” option built right in.  Software developers you can stop reading here, you know what happens next… 

As with any conversion there are some things which must be done to the ’source’ data to make it more usable in the ‘target’ system.  I carefully read several posts on the preparation needed and once done I fired it off.  Happily I could sit and watch as Lightroom imported my photos and tags and went about the process of organizing every thing in the Library.  In a geeky way it was fun! 

When the conversion finished the first thing I noticed is that some of my Organizer Tags did not land in the Lightroom keywords in the same hierarchy.  As I snooped around some and I found the keywords outside the hierarchy were simply duplicated so deleting them would solve that issue.  Various discussions around the Adobe Lightroom forum confirmed my conclusion.  At that point I estimated 30 minutes or less to correct.  So far so good. 

The next thing I noticed was the captions were missing.  Oh oh, that’s not good, that’s my record of train symbols and other miscellaneous facts at the time the photo was captured.  Back to the forums I went looking for how to convert the captions.  After hours of digging it became apparent the captions on RAW files just weren’t converting from the Organizer database to Lightroom.  Lightroom’s conversion was always taking the caption from the image meta data instead of pulling it out of Organizer’s database.   Some quick math told me I had just over 5,000 images with captions.  To quote Aaron “That’s a lot of copy and paste”.

Lightroom is a fabulous product and it is where I want my catalog to end up.  With each version it becomes more and more bug free so my hope is in one of the upcoming releases this conversion item is addressed.  If its not, I will likely make the decision to convert anyway and do the copy and paste.   Hey, my daughter is always wanting to earn money maybe she’d do it? 

 For now I’m back to Organizer.

Where’s my caption?

I don’t really hide that fact that I’m a geek. I work with computer software for a living and enjoy checking out random tech gadgets. I’m quite into blogging. I write at a few other blogs. And I read blogs. 258 of them is the current count.

It’s interesting to watch the railfan world overlap with tech. Last year I discovered Steve Sloan’s blog. He’s helped Vic with Winterail for quite a few years. Like many others, I also read Robert Scoble’s blog. He’s a former Microsoft employee who’s now involved with a podcasting startup. As one of the most-read voices in the blogosphere, he has some interesting things to say.

Like today, when Robert posted I Like Trains Too, admitting he’s a railfan. He specifically mentions the new version of MS Train Simulator being created and points to one of the developers’ blogs.

It’s great to see my various interests collide. We’ll have to see about getting Robert up to GorgeRail at some point…

A couple of Saturday’s ago I went to a railfan slide show (not a multi-media presentation) in Portland that was attended by many nationally and regionally known railfan photographers.  It seems in the past few years at these gatherings, a discussion of film vs. digital always breaks out.  This time was no different and the discussion this time made me more aware of one of the barriers to entry into the digital world.  One of the film photographers commented he’d attempted digital but has been less than impressed by the results.  The common theme was the images just didn’t look as good out of the camera as slides. 

I’ll agree with him on that point because DSLR produced digital images (as we know them today) need post processing.  I have to believe that this is the most complicated transition point for a film shooter who is used to the images arriving in a yellow box fit for showing. 

How to handle images after loading them onto the computer can be an adventure because unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your point of view) there is no single ‘perfect’ post processing workflow.  My film friends should not be frightened by this though because there is help available.  I have found three workflow tutorials that I return to over and over for guidance.  These are Workflow Guidelines on the Fred Miranda Post-processing & Printing forum and Luminous Landscape tutorials A Digital Workflow Primer and An Image Processing Workflow.  All three are written for the full version of Photoshop (6, 7, CS) so using a different tool requires adaptation, however the general concepts still apply.

These tutorials will probably not make new digital photographers experts overnight, but I hope they will help others improve their output like they helped me.

One last note on the film vs. digital discussion.  Most of the traditional film photographers agreed that digital will likely take over eventually. Until it becomes impossible for them to use film most agreed that they’ll be sticking to it for the foreseeable future.  In my opinion this is just fine as they are comfortable with the medium and they still produce long lasting quality images.

You probably saw the announcements this morning about Adobe’s Lightroom Beta 3 for Windows.  So, what is Lightroom?  Lightroom is a workflow and editing package which is one part Photoshop, one part photo organizer, and one part import tool.  Adobe calls it a ‘project’ at this point because as they describe, the software is being ”built from the ground up by photographers, for photographers”.  According to Adobe the goal is to provide a flexible streamlined work flow adaptable for any photographer or photographic style.

As a Windows user, this is my first opportunity to get my hands on this and see what it can do for me.  I’m excited about this because from what I’ve heard from my Mac friend this software is spectacular and really improves the import functions.  My current photo editing tool is Photoshop Elements 3.0.  This software is certainly adequate for the amateur photographer and has served me well.  I’ve long been thinking about jumping to CS2, but on the average foamer budget that isn’t necessarily possible.  According to what I’ve read, Lightroom is supposed to be priced somewhere between Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.  So, if the price is right and the features are focused to photographers this could be the right thing for advancing the state of the art in my room.

If you are serious about your digital railfan photography and digital processing, go check out the 20 minute overview video on the Lightroom site and see what you think.

If you haven’t checked out Trainfoamers, you should.  It’s where a lot of the decent ex-Trainorders members (photobob, Don Winslow, MargaretSPfan) have gone, and it hasn’t yet been invaded by the immature teenagers that seem to be taking over RailroadForums.

The other site worth monitoring at the moment is RailroadPhotoEssays - it’s a bit slow, but the quality of the material and discussions is usually pretty good.

One of my favorite features of IMatch, falling into the “gee that’s nice info to have accessible” realm, is Data-Driven Categories. IMatch can dynamically assign images to categories based on the EXIF or XMP data stored with the image when it was shot on a digital camera.

What does that mean in real life? Well it means I can tell it to index on the EXIF lens field, and get something like this:

If I want to quickly see all images shot with a particular lens, the info is ready to go. You can setup a data-driven category for anything in the EXIF, such as aperture, focal length, lens, etc.

Looks like another big name is now in the Digital Asset Management field.  Microsoft has purchased iView, makes of iView Media Pro, one of the biggest DAM tools.  This means Microsoft will now be competing against Adobe, Imatch, Extensis, and others in the market for tools for cataloging photos and other media.

With the popularity of internet photo critique forums, one has to wonder, how would some great photographers of the past fare on today’s message boards?  A humorous piece of satire by The Online Photographer.

Luminous Landscape has done an extensive test comparing medium-format digital backs along with traditional 4×5 cameras. They compare backs from Phase One, Canon’s high-end DSLRs, a few selections from Linhof, along with the Hasselblad H1 and Mamiya 645.

I don’t feel that I’m qualified to comment much on this, but it’s interesting reading if you want to find out more about the big boys of digital. 39 megapixels, anyone?

Read the article here

Am I the only photographer who is for the most part quite plugged-in to the whole digital Web2.0 world that doesn’t ever use Flickr for anything?

… your AdSense monitor shows $8.44 and you go “Oooh a steam locomotive!”

Apparently the RSS reader Pluck doesn’t properly display the images I post on the blog such as the one yesterday of the stack train in storm lighting.

I’m trying to figure out if this is a widespread issue amongst many readers, or if it’s just Pluck having issues. I’ve verified that the Google Reader and Bloglines both display images correctly.

Anyone else care to report success or failure with another reader?

Since day one, I’ve offered a RSS Feed for this site.

However, I know that a lot of you don’t use RSS. I bet that almost all of you use e-mail. Recently I’ve had a couple people tell me about Squeet, a service which will turn an RSS feed into an e-mail notification.

In English, this means if you want to get an e-mail every time I post something new on this site, go to http://www.squeet.com, fill out the form - Dogcaught’s RSS feed is at http://www.dogcaught.com/feed/ and you will then get an e-mail delivered to your inbox every time I post something new.

Just a random note to other bloggers: Don’t make me register to leave you a comment. Because I won’t.

I’m sure a bunch of my readers here simply browse to this webpage and read. That works just fine. However if you have several blog-style sites or discussion forums you visit, you can use a technology called RSS to gather all that information into one place for browsing.

At first I thought the “23 Easy Steps” thing was a joke, but it’s fairly accurate and not that difficult.

Read about RSS in 23 Easy Steps from the Chicago Tribune

One of the imgSeek developers saw my earlier rant about how their implementation was sucking my bandwidth. They’ve now changed so that they’re caching the thumbnails on their server.

Further thoughts on imgSeek:

• Let me choose which image(s) to bookmark. The current bookmarklet sends all of the images on a page to their server. The result is that header images and other such junk ends up in the database. On this site, it takes my headshot from the sidebar when that surely isn’t what I wanted to bookmark.
• Give the images some context. Linking directly to a raw image file on a server doesn’t provide much information. Instead, do like the search engines’ image searches, and link to the page that has the bookmarked image so that the user can see the context.

I’ll be honest, I don’t foresee myself using this site, since I really don’t go searching out images such as this… I use google image search probably twice a year, and it’s when I know how to describe what I’m looking for.

This morning I read about another new social bookmarking site in town, and this one has a twist, it’s for photos. our.imgSeek.net seeks to combine the likes of flickr and del.icio.us by letting users “tag” images they find on the web. Based on the user’s tagging of images, the site then makes recommendations about other images the user might like.

I’ve got one huge beef with this: the way the site is implemented, it steals my bandwidth. I signed up for an account, and for kicks decided I’d go tag one of my images. I chose my photoshopped down-on shot of the CN 5714 I posted last week. Once I tagged the image, I went to the site and looked at the photo. A “view source” revealed that they’re embedding the photo directly off my domain using an IMG tag. Every time someone looks at the photo on their site, it sucks my bandwidth.

Come on guys… this isn’t going to fly. Update your code. Create your small little 90 pixel wide cache image on your site, then if a user wants to see the whole image, let them click through to my site and see the image in its original context. It’s a brand new app with almost zero impact (only 39 users as of this posting) but if it catches on, I’ll block the domain if they don’t shape up. Deep-linking embedded images (especially large ones) has always been a no-no, and our.imgSeek.net needs to use some internet etiquette.