Night Photography - Nikon

I used to enjoy night photography with film, because you never quite knew what you would get. Now with digital photography, I probably enjoy night photography even more precisely because of the instant feedback.

Eiffel Tower at night as seen through a Nikon D50

If you want to try night photography, you will be dealing with very long exposure time since there is not a lot of light at night as far as the camera is concerned. This means, you should have a tripod to get the best results. I don't like lugging a tripod around, so I just place my camera on the ground, or in the case of the picture above, the hand rail on a bridge.

In this picture, my camera was set to ISO 400 and aperture priority. I wanted a long exposure time to burn in the tower and the street lights and I wanted a broad depth of field, so I set the aperture at f16. This resulted in an 8 second exposure. To avoid camera shake from pressing the shutter release, I set the timer and waited.

This is the result:

What the camera recorded

I used Adobe Lightroom to get to the final version. How I did that will have to wait for another post.

Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle - Bussy Saint-Georges Scanning Facility

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. The purpose of my visit was to tour their high speed scanning facility in Bussy Saint-Georges.

I have put together my notes in a Power Point with photos from the tour. Click here to view or download the presentation (select File/Download Original to see the pictures clearly).

Important update - Thank you to Simon Chagnoux and Odile Poncy for their contributions.

Star Trek - Extras - Memory Alpha

When it comes to archiving, no project is more important than keeping track of extras from Star Trek.

My friend, Goldie, told me last night that she was an extra on Star Trek The Next Generation. This puts me only a few degrees of separation from Gene Roddenberry.

Check it out on Memory Alpha.

Preview RAW Formats in Windows 7 and XP

Here's a useful tool for anyone who wants to preview RAW image files in Windows 7: FastPicture Viewer Professional.

Once you install the trial, you will see you will be able to see your RAW images as thumbnails in Windows.

Digital Photo Archiving Practices

As I contemplate what to do about the growing and vastly underutilized collection of TIFF files residing on our server, I thought it would be a good idea to review the goals and intentions of an image archive. There are a number of great resources online that have informed my observations, including the National Archives Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access:   Creation of Production Master Files - Raster Images, the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative, and ASMP's Digital Photography Best Practices and Workflow.

While I may not follow the recommendations to a tee, the following is my interpretation of the similarities between the three sources on the subject of file types.

Archive Master
The purpose of an Archive Master image is to preserve the original recording. All subsequent images are derived from the Archive Master. The image processing and file format of derivatives is determined by their intended use.

Production Master
A Production Master image is a rendition of the Archive Master. The Production Master is intended to show the image when reproduced in ideal form. Image processing may be applied to Production Masters.

Derivative

It is common practice to save a compressed version of the Production Master to serve as an access Derivative. Derivative images are usually saved as 8-bit Jpegs. For ease of reproduction, Derivatives may be stored as sRGB images.

Obsolete File Formats

With regard to my earlier post regarding the archiving of RAW files or TIFFs, I now have a very good case study of what happens when you use a proprietary file format.

The Virtual Herbarium at one point used a proprietary file format (that shall remain anonymous) to display high resolution images online. The images are excellent, but there are downsides: the files are expensive, they cost money to generate and they are large, eating server and tape backup resources; the anonymous files require a plugin to view them online; and being proprietary, it makes them harder to share with others.

Our new online image viewer, FSI by NeptuneLabs, accesses our Jpeg derivative files. It's a Adobe Flash based viewer, and what computer these days doesn't come with Flash (except iPads and iPhones, but who uses those anyway)?

So, we have over 200,000 files eating 291 GB on our image server that aren't being used. They are now backed up and will be stored offline (probably next to my 8-track tape collection).

We still have all the images archived as RAW files (and TIFFs) and can therefore migrate the images to new file formats if need be. And isn't this the purpose of an archive?

Munsell Color Values in Lightroom

A very important part of image quality control is having a properly calibrated monitor on which to evaluate exposure and color balance. Unfortunately, my monitors and my viewing conditions are less than ideal for image evaluation. I have two Dell flat screen monitors that are fine, but depending on what angle I view them at, the images can look too bright or too dark. I also have an enormous east-facing window behind me which fills my room with great sunlight and is very cheerful, but terrible for looking at my monitors (and the room light conditions change by the minute). So, I check image quality "by the numbers" using the Munsell Color Checker by X-Rite.

Every NYBG Herbarium specimen photographed includes a mini color checker (discontinued - now being replaced with the Color Checker Passport).

You may notice that we have cut the Color Checker in half to fit it along the top edge of the image. This is a trick I picked up from Rob Gerhardt, the imaging specialist at the Whitney Museum of Art. Thanks Rob!

I used to know the RGB values for the Color Checker in terms of 8 bit values, but  now Adobe Lightroom uses percent white as RGB values. So, I did a little math to figure out what values I wanted in % form. They are as follows:

I have seen this discussed on other blogs and we are all coming up with similar results so I am comfortable recommending these values to others.

Archiving RAW Files

I am beginning to wonder about digital archiving practices, specifically when it comes to RAW file formats.

Currently, The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium archives RAW files (Canon's CR2) and a Production Master File (TIFF). Jpegs are derived from the Production Master file for access in the Virtual Herbarium.

I am not certain what role the TIFFs play and why we should be archiving them. They consume a lot of server space, and therefore cost a lot of money to store. Isn't the RAW format sufficient for the purpose of archiving?

The traditional belief I hear a lot is that since RAW formats are proprietary to the camera manufacturer they are subject to the whims of the market place and may not be supported in the future. Aren't all archives subject to technological change? There is currently a collection of 3000 35mm slides in a closet upstairs. A slide archive is not very much good without a slide viewer and hardly convenient or easily accessed by the public.

It is commonly believed that TIFF is a more broadly supported format and that the decoding of TIFFs is well documented. Of course, DNG, Adobe's RAW format could solve this problem. It is well documented and the instructions for decoding the files are readily available.

I guess, just like the slide collection, should the day come that RAW formats are no longer supported the images will have to be migrated to the next format.