European trip ?'s

Following up to "eatinBelgium" :


I looked at your fotos.
The Thames shot did not interest me.
The sky from the Ferry is interesting, the Ferry not so.
The last one is the best.
But is everything you take wide angle ?

I think that illustrates a difference in philosophy. It seems to me
(correct me if I'm wrong) that Mike takes photos for the graphic effect of
lighting and composition. Whereas you take photos for the interest of the
content. Different, and both equally valid points of view, but I see little
common ground.
--
Tim C.

Following up to eatinBelgium

Of the ones I looked at, there wasn't anything that interested
me, but different people want different things, for one thing, a
record of a trip, not something I do.

if you take fotos on a trip then it must be a record of the trip, it
brings back memories (of your trip) !

I use "record photos" to describe photos that record the
highlights of your trip rather than ones taken for aesthetic
reasons. This photo is a poor record photo because its not
something the average visitor would even been aware of seeing.
"http://www.fellwalk.co.uk/orkney012.htm"

By all means continue splitting hairs to no purpose.
--
Mike Reid
Walk-eat-photos UK "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" -- you can email us@ this site
Walk-eat-photos Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" -- dontuse@ all, it's a spamtrap

Following up to -hh

Its true that digital changes the cost paradigms...but we do need to be
careful. For example, most of us probably don't "count" the cost of
our PC equipment towards our photography costs ... nor the extra touch
labor that's required for us to manage our databases... and we ignore
these at our own peril.

One of my neighbours recently lost all his digital photos to a
hard disk crash. I wonder how many others have either no backup
or insufficient backup? A print may be vulnerable to damage but
it generally survives, a digital record is vulnerable to
technology change and faults that render it unviewable. It would
be interesting to know how many of todays photos will be viewable
in 50 years time compared to the past 50 years.
--
Mike Reid
Walk-eat-photos UK "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" -- you can email us@ this site
Walk-eat-photos Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" -- dontuse@ all, it's a spamtrap

Following up to eatinBelgium

I looked at your fotos.
The Thames shot did not interest me.

then you missed the point.

The sky from the Ferry is interesting, the Ferry not so.

then you missed the point

The last one is the best.

that's a matter of opinion and not the point.

But is everything you take wide angle ?

Do you really need to ask such a question?
--
Mike Reid
Walk-eat-photos UK "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" -- you can email us@ this site
Walk-eat-photos Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" -- dontuse@ all, it's a spamtrap

Following up to Tim C.

f you take fotos on a trip then it must be a record of the trip, it
brings back memories (of your trip) !

"Can", possibly "should" but not "must".

I find video is much better to capture a trip, its much less
selective and more honest than an "arty" photo, sorry, image.
(pronounce im-arge) but I find it difficult to concentrate on
both at once and found myself missing shots so I dropped video
when the machine broke. However, my unaimed footage of walking up
Catsycam is a force 9 blizzard is my favorite holiday memory type
footage, maybe except the footage of the Cluaine ridge used by
BBC Horizon last year put your hand under chin now and push
upwards, thats it, the flies wont get in now :-)
--
Mike Reid
Walk-eat-photos UK "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" -- you can email us@ this site
Walk-eat-photos Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" -- dontuse@ all, it's a spamtrap

Following up to Tim C.

me too, after I have paid money and wasted the environment to get them
processed.

Delete the digital photos after wasting resources getting a PC to see the
good ones on.

just about to order extra memory to get Photoshop to work at
sensible speed on 100MByte files :-(
--
Mike Reid
Walk-eat-photos UK "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" -- you can email us@ this site
Walk-eat-photos Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" -- dontuse@ all, it's a spamtrap

Following up to Tim C.

But is everything you take wide angle ?

I think that illustrates a difference in philosophy. It seems to me
(correct me if I'm wrong) that Mike takes photos for the graphic effect of
lighting and composition.

That's pretty much it. For landscape I find that I hardly ever
use the mid range focal lengths, I'm usually below 24mm or in 10%
of cases telephoto. I often don't take any photos at all if the
light isn't good unless I need a record shot for the website.

Whereas you take photos for the interest of the
content. Different, and both equally valid points of view, but I see little
common ground.

There hasn't been a lot so far, has there, I'm not convinced
Belgy is looking for it :-)
--
Mike Reid
Walk-eat-photos UK "http://www.fellwalk.co.uk" -- you can email us@ this site
Walk-eat-photos Spain "http://www.fell-walker.co.uk" -- dontuse@ all, it's a spamtrap

The Reid schreef:

Following up to eatinBelgium

I looked at your fotos.
The Thames shot did not interest me.

then you missed the point.

The sky from the Ferry is interesting, the Ferry not so.

then you missed the point

The last one is the best.

that's a matter of opinion and not the point.

But is everything you take wide angle ?

Do you really need to ask such a question?

you mention it a lot, so its a valid question, answer seems difficult
though.

Timothy Kroesen wrote:
You're being a technically insane detective here when the truth is it
was just a typo...

Funny how Tim has such a convenient pattern of little "slip-ups" that
are never his responsibility. I won't bother to detail how his email
address is one ISP, but he has a different ISP in his headers, for Tim
will have a 'plausible' explanation for that too.


...10 *G*b HDD which is puny and barely adequate...Not recommended
for digital photography uses to be sure.

So your latest arguement is that you have a capabilities mismatch.
Well, who's fault is that?


Perhaps instead of blowing your wad on the $300 Fuji, you should have
spent $60 to upgrade your PC to a 120GB EIDE drive before picking a
camera that ran around $240. Or since you find 3MP to be adequate,
spent $100 for the Kodak Easyshare 300 I mentioned yesterday, and left
the $140 balance in your pocket to help satisfy your self-confessed
"money complex".

You're digging yourself a deeper and deeper hole.


I'm running Win 98 on the *new* g box, with no USB ports of any flavor
to "worry about", supported or not.

Because you're unwilling to spend a mere $20 for one? Yeah, they're
that cheap:

http://tinyurl.com/ctcly



I have taken a variety of pix at various resolutions to *test out* the
camera. The pix I chose to have enlarged just happened to be at 3mp.

When "testing" is defined as A4 prints (and even the occasional 5x7 or
8x10), the problem is that your yardstick isn't capable of actual
descrimination - - you may as well be a one-armed fisherman gesturing
that the one that got away was "this big".



Rather convinced me I won't necessarily need to take 6mp shots of everything I
photograph!

Yes, its true that for low-data-needs A4 prints, you don't need more
than around 3-4MP to do an acceptable job. The problem is that when
you get that lucky shot that you want to make a nice enlargement, you
can't through post-processing add resolution that doesn't exist: it
must be in the original. With film, this is easy because its
automatic. With digital, it means that in order to have the reserve
capacity for the "just in case" super shot, it means that you have to
conciously shoot everything at max resolution, even though (and just
like film) you won't use it most of the time.

To use an automotive analogy, we only need a spare tire in your trunk
when we have a flat tire. But we carry the spare all the time because
you can't necessarily predict *when* we'll get a flat.




...with less than $100 in memory cards (2-512mb Xd on
sale after rebate, Mr. Detective),

For someone with a self-confessed "money complex", it again doesn't
look like you did your homework well, and ended up spending more than
you had to have. Anyone who's done the basic research knows that Flash
Media comes in different form factors, and XD cards generally cost more
than some of the others. For example, Pricewatch says that your 512MB
XD's start today at $60 each, which is literally *twice* the cost of a
512MB Compact Flash, or of Secure Digital (the card that that 3.2MP
Kodak Easyshare 300 takes).

You could have saved enough money right here to have fixed your PC's
alledged inadequate HD problem, even if by only buying one XD card.

Your actual decisions belies a logic that conflicts with your own
claims, Tim. If you haven't realized this, perhaps its time for some
honest self-reflection instead of more arguing.

BTW, my offer to host a couple of your images stands. And a ~3MP .jpg
should only be around 1MB in size, which takes well under 10 minutes to
transmit across a 28.8 connection. Set it up to run and then go have a
cup of coffee...the same thing you have to do now while waiting for a
Win98 PC to merely boot up :-)


-hh

The Reid wrote:
Following up to -hh

Its true that digital changes the cost paradigms...but we do need to be
careful. For example, most of us probably don't "count" the cost of
our PC equipment towards our photography costs ... nor the extra touch
labor that's required for us to manage our databases... and we ignore
these at our own peril.

One of my neighbours recently lost all his digital photos to a
hard disk crash. I wonder how many others have either no backup
or insufficient backup?

What I've personally done was recommended to me by Norbert Wu: an
external HD, but instead of the standard type, the drive is mounted on
a removable chassis. Here's the one I found:

http://www.cooldrives.com/dkrehaenusb2.html

Its $80 and comes with one tray. Additional trays are $15 each (buy
two more).

Once you have this component, you go buy 3 bare EIDE drives ... not
quite literally anything, but you can hit the weekly sale special at
your local "Computer Guys" brick-&-mortar, or you can mail-order. I
mentioned this to someone this past week, and as per Pricewatch, it
looks like that for $100 each, you can get up to a 300GB drive today
(or get 120GB for around $60). Anyway, for whatever you select, its a
good idea that they're all roughly the same size and equal to the
amount of data you want to back up...and that you get 3 of them.

It takes maybe an hour of your time to assemble the 3 drives into the 3
trays and to get it all hooked up to your PC. What you now have is a
standard triple-redundency backup system with "X"GB worth of storage
(where X is whatever capacity HD you bought).

You pick whatever backup cycle you want...weekly, monthly, etc. For the
first backup, you use Tray#1, the next time you backup, you use Tray#2,
the next time is Tray#3, and when you get around to your fourth backup,
you're finally back to Tray#1 - if the system blows up during the
backup and takes both your PC and the backup out, you still have two
(although slightly older) copies.

The beauty of this is fourfold:

1. The cost per GB is low, considering that you have triple redundency.

2. Labor savings. With a single big platter, its a single batch command
that can run unattended (overnight)... a huge labor savings instead of
having to babysit DVD swaps. Plus, its easier to manage a few HD's
versus a couple hundred DVD's.

3. HD's have faster I/O than DVD's. Faster to restore after an oops,
etc.

4. Your cost per GB will go down in the future, since tomorrows HD's
will be cheaper, plus you don't need to buy another chassis (just more
HD's and trays). For example, when I set mine up, the $100 per HD
price point bought a 250GB HD, but today, the same amount of money buys
a 300GB HD...that's a quick 20% gain in capacity at the same price
point.


A print may be vulnerable to damage but
it generally survives, a digital record is vulnerable to
technology change and faults that render it unviewable. It would
be interesting to know how many of todays photos will be viewable
in 50 years time compared to the past 50 years.

It is dated (1996), but on this general subject, I nevertheless very
highly recommend reading Clifford Stoll's book: "Silicone Snake Oil -
Second Thoughts on the Information Highway"; ISBN: 0385419945.

In short, the reprocussions are that moving the data file forward with
100% reliability isn't good enough: you also have to maintain the
reader application with 100% reliability, and eventually, the OS for
that reader application with 100% reliability. At least when you have
a physical copy, current technologies of the day can reproduce it, even
if it has suffered partial physical damage.


-hh