Friday, May 27, 2011

How To: Searching Multiple Files In Lightroom

I am going through ten years of archive photos at The New York Botanical Garden Herbarium and creating Adobe Lightroom catalogs in preparation for a massive file type migration.

Catalog of CD Archive

We have over 800,000 images taking up about 27 terabytes of space. Many of the files are duplicates in various formats. There are about 400,000 legacy small derivative files (500GB) in a format that is no longer supported by our web client. While they are duplicates, we will not throw them away, they will simply be taken offline and put on tape. There are also about 300,000 TIFFs which are production masters. As discussed in an earlier post, these files are rarely if ever accessed and there are corresponding RAW archive masters. These TIFFs will also be moved offline on to tape. This will free up close to 8 terabytes.

The challenge I have created for myself, is to have at least one of every image remain on our server, so I am looking for files that do not exist in RAW format (there are about 3000 files - 1% - that were not archived properly). So, how to find 3000 files out of 300,000?

I tried a Windows search of the image server using a semicolon delimited list. Unfortunately, this produced poor results for reasons I can not explain. So then, in my newly minted Lightroom catalog, I tried a filename search "Contains" semicolon delimited list.

Semicolon delimited search

This was a test. I knew those files were in there. So, I tried a Filename "Contains" comma delimited list.

The winner

Thursday, May 26, 2011

NirSoft Sys Exporter


I found a great tool that lists the contents of a Windows Search and allows you to save it for use in Excel.

I was trying to list TIFF file names on our server, but they were in a legacy file structure. There are over 35,000 TIFFs in over 9000 folders.

So, I ran a Windows Search and used NirSoft's SysExporter to save the search results as a text file.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

LeafSnap: An Electronic Field Guide


Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, theUniversity of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. This free mobile app uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves.

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

More Free NYBG Wallpaper - Rare Hibiscus dasycalyx

The latest free wallpaper is the rare Hibiscus dasycalyx, or Neches River Rosemallow.

1280x1024

iPhone

Widescreen

1600x1200

Photography by Matthew Pace

Monday, May 23, 2011

METRO - Intro Photoshop Class


Thank you to everyone who attended the Intro Photoshop and Digital Imaging workshop. Here are links to the presentation in .pdf form and the sample images we used in class. The presentation is all fuzzy when viewed in Google Docs, so make sure to download it to see it clearly.

Metro Intro Photoshop Class

Workshop images

Here is a link to the NARA Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Archival Materials for Electronic Access that I reference in the presentation. It is an excellent source of information for digitization projects.

Thank you to everyone at the Metropolitan New York Library Council.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

70 Megapixel Image Online - Zoom.it

The New York Botanical Garden is a contributing partner in the Global Plants Initiative. So far, NYBG has produced close to 80,000 high resolution scans of specimens.

Our current challenge is how to present these scans on our own website. The majority of the images in the Virtual Herbarium are produced with Canon digital cameras whihc produce 8MB Jpegs.

The GPI scanned images are close to 70 megapixels. As Tiff files, they are over 180 MB. Even if they are saved as full size Jpegs, they are still close to 15MB.

Our current image viewer is sufficient for showing Tiffs of this size, but the viewer software is no longer supported (oh yeah, and it's Flash based so iProducts don't show our images). We will either be faced with down-sampling the images, which would reduce the magnification, or finding a new viewer.

Stumbling around the internet, I found zoom.it, which is a cool Microsoft (oxymoron?) Silverlight viewer. Click the specimen below to see an amazing full size image.



Monday, May 16, 2011

MK Direct Photo e-Box 1419

It occurs to me that I have been talking about the MK Direct Photo e-Box a lot and it has mostly been abstract. This is because I have yet to take a very good picture of the set-up. I still don't have a good picture, but at least this will give you an idea.

MK Direct Photo e-Box 1419

The camera is above the box pointed down through a hole. The specimen lays flat in the box and is illuminated with fluorescent light.

What I like about this system is that it is compact, but more importantly the light is perfect. The inside of the box is reflective ensuring even light across the entire specimen. The light is constant not a strobe, so what you see is what you get - there is no glare from reflections off shiny leaves. And the light is consistent, it doesn't fluctuate from shot to shot which makes post processing fast and easy.

I have no dislikes, but as I mentioned the camera brace that comes with the box is not built for larger cameras. Fortunately there is a table top copystand already in the Herbarium, so I use that to hold the camera. And, as previously illustrated, I need to use a 50mm lens to shoot, which means I will have to cut a larger hole in the  top of the box. This will not be a trivial undertaking given my general lack of dexterity and mechanical incompetence.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

More Free Desktop Art - Milk Berry Specimen Wallpaper

Today's free desktop art is Sideroxylon americanum - or milk berry. Click the image to download and use as wallpaper.

Widescreen

1280x1024

1600x1200

iPhone

Photography by Lisa Vargues

Monday, May 9, 2011

Lens Distortion

I have been testing the MK Direct Photo e-Box 1419. In order to shoot the entire specimen, I have been using the EF17-40mm f/4L USM lens that I rented from Adorama Camera.

The pictures look fantastic, but unfortunately, the lens - even though it has very very little distortion, still causes a bit of a curve around the edges.
Curvature is most noticeable at the bottom of the image. 

To test this, I printed a test pattern of 1 cm squares, photographed it using the 17-40mm lens at various focal lengths from 30mm-39mm. I found the least distortion at 32mm.
The black lines are the original test pattern, the red lines show the distortion at 32 mm.

These results are consistent with the excellent distortion chart found at SLR Gear.com:

While this may seem trivial, when you are dealing with text, any curvature becomes noticeable. It looks like I am going to have to stick to the Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 Macro. Here is how this lens stacks up:
Again, the black lines are the the original pattern, the red lines show the distortion from the 50mm Macro.

The 50mm Macro shows virtually no distortion. But, as with everything in photography, there is a trade off. To cover the entire specimen with a 50mm lens, the camera has to be about 30" above the shooting surface. With the camera this high, the opening in the top of the MK Direct Photo e-Box is too small making it look like I am shooting specimens through a keyhole.

Peephole photography

So, it looks like I am going to have to get out my band saw and cut a bigger hole in the top of the box. Stay tuned...

Thursday, May 5, 2011

MK Photo-eBox PLUS 1419

I have been testing the MK Photo-eBox PLUS 1419 for copy photography of flat objects. The eBox is really designed for product photography not flat work. So I wasn't sure how it was going to work out. The camera mount is not really designed for heavy SLRs, so I had to make a couple of modifications (I detail these in a later post).

That said, I am blown away by the results so far. The light is perfectly even across the entire shooting area. I am shooting with zoom lens (more on this later, too - thanks to SLRGear.com for the great reviews) set at 30mm at f11, 1/40 second.

The combination of the lens and the lights produces incredibly sharp images with almost no light fall off at the edges. Oh... and it's compact and easy to use. Here are a couple of initial shots. Click on them for a bigger image.



Lots of details to follow. I just wanted to put these first shots up.