Complete Archive

Polymer Photogravure at Asheville Bookworks

I will be teaching my final polymer photogravure workshop in Asheville this January. Bookworks will be closing as a public-facing entity at the end of March 2019, and this is the last photogravure class I will be teaching there.

The workshop will use a modern polymer coated plate to create an intaglio-etched surface, which will then produce the photographic gradation of tones making the photogravure one of the most beautiful continuous tone photographic printing process. The process presents a fantastic opportunity to expand the range of visual content that can be included in books and other similar projects.

QuadToneProfiler-Quickcurve polymer calibration

Al Dente - show at Pink Dog Gallery

Opening reception November 16 from 5:30PM to 8:00PM. I will have a large show with selected large format work from my Telos, Detritus, Gnomon and Curve series on display at Pink Dog Gallery in November and December of this year.

The show is named al Dente - I’m throwing it on the wall to see what sticks. Please come and check it out!

Polymer Photogravure at Asheville Bookworks

I will be teaching a polymer photogravure workshop in Asheville this autumn. This workshop will use a modern polymer coated plate to create an intaglio-etched surface, which will then produce the photographic gradation of tones making the photogravure one of the most beautiful continuous tone photographic printing process. The process presents a fantastic opportunity to expand the range of visual content that can be included in books and other similar projects. ⇒

Platinum-Palladium printing at Asheville Bookworks

This class is an introduction to the platinum-palladium printing process. This particular alternative photographic printing process was invented in the 1870’s by William Willis. Because the process precipitates a chemically non-reactive noble metal into the paper fibers, it creates a print notable both for its permanence and its beauty. ⇒

Polymer Photogravure at Cullowhee Mountain Arts

I will be teaching a polymer photogravure workshop at Cullowhee Mountain Arts in June, 2016. This workshop will be held at the campus of Western North Carolina University in Sylva, which is just a stone’s throw from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This workshop will use a modern polymer coated plate to create an intaglio-etched surface, which will then produce the photographic gradation of tones making the photogravure one of the most beautiful continuous tone photographic printing process. The process presents a fantastic opportunity to expand the range of visual content that can be included in books and other similar projects. ⇒

Polymer Photogravure in Asheville

I will be teaching a polymer photogravure workshop in Asheville this next spring. This workshop will use a modern polymer coated plate to create an intaglio-etched surface, which will then produce the photographic gradation of tones making the photogravure one of the most beautiful continuous tone photographic printing process. The process presents a fantastic opportunity to expand the range of visual content that can be included in books and other similar projects. ⇒

Digital Negatives at Project Basho in Philadelphia

I will teaching a digital negative workshop at Project Basho in Philadelphia from January 15 through 17, 2016. The primary focus will be on using the Quadtone RIP printer driver to create easy-to-use printing profiles that will allow the user to use a single edited digital file to create digital negatives for any number of alternative photographic printing processes. Because it is a fairly straightforward process to learn, we will be creating digital negative printing profiles for palladium prints using the QTR driver. ⇒

Exercising your printer with Automator and crontab

A high quality printer is a significant investment for an enthusiast photographer. They are a marvel of modern technology, but the pro-level wide-format printers needed to print on the larger roll paper stock are designed to be used in a print-every-day production environment. The infrequent use that is common among enthusiast photographers can result in clogged print heads that may require ink-wasting power cleaning cycles, or in the worst case, an expensive printer head replacement to remedy. ⇒

Platinum-Palladium printing at Asheville Bookworks-2015

This class is an introduction to the platinum-palladium printing process. This particular alternative photographic printing process was invented in the 1870’s by William Willis. Because the process precipitates a chemically non-reactive noble metal into the paper fibers, it creates a print notable both for its permanence and its beauty. ⇒

Polymer Gravure at Asheville Bookworks - April 2015

I will be teaching a polymer photogravure workshop in Asheville in April 2015. This workshop will use a modern polymer coated plate to create an intaglio-etched surface, which will then produce the photographic gradation of tones making the photogravure one of the most beautiful continuous tone photographic printing process. The process presents a fantastic opportunity to expand the range of visual content that can be included in books and other similar projects. ⇒

Apple pay vs. CurrentC

Analysis of what the proposed CurrentC consortium is, and more importantly, is not..

Furthermore, let’s review again the impetus behind the MCX consortium. If merchants simply needed a place to push out more coupons and drive more business, they could have partnered with Google or Apple. But they didn’t. They set up their own payment processing capabilities, because the real impetus here is avoiding interchange fees.

Yeah, I think giving a business like Home Depot a direct link into my bank account is a great idea.

Transmit iOS and EC2

Mac OSX 10.9 Migration Pain

A quick note on a discovery I had this morning. I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my old Quicken for Mac 2007 installation to the newish Quicken for Mac 2015. Paid for it, downloaded and installed it per the instructions. But as soon as I clicked on it, it would crash with an error message indicating that I did not have permission to create a folder in the Application Support directory.

Hmmm. This is strange. This is part of my user directory. Why the heck would I not have permission?

Patience and warm beer

We had a very sudden and fairly violent thunderstorm pop up this evening right at sunset. It moved from the southwest, as they tend to do, and pretty quickly the violent gusts of wind and battering rain had moved on, leaving a fantastic hole in the clouds revealing the remains of the sunset just off in the west and northwest sky. I stood under the eaves of my deck, dialed in 2 stops of underexposure compensation on my camera and just waited for something interesting to happen. It did, the shutter lag did not lose the shot, and I got something I like quite a lot.

My beer did get warm during the wait, however. This falls under the category of ‘first world problem’.

Platinum-Palladium printing at Asheville Bookworks

This class is an introduction to the platinum-palladium printing process. This particular alternative photographic printing process was invented in the 1870’s by William Willis. Because the process precipitates a chemically non-reactive noble metal into the paper fibers, it creates a print notable both for its permanence and its beauty. ⇒

Enabling gzip compression on EC2

I am still tweaking small things on the Amazon EC2 server that is hosting my site. One of the things that I did not do immediately is enable gzip compression of all the site data when it is served to a browser. What this does is compress all the files down before they are pushed across all those tubes that make up the internet, and the browser then decompresses the files on the other side. ⇒

Polymer photogravure at Kalamazoo Institute of Arts

I will be teaching a polymer photogravure workshop at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in May. This workshop will use a modern polymer coated plate to create an intaglio-etched surface, which will then produce the photographic gradation of tones making the photogravure one of the most beautiful continuous tone photographic printing process. The process presents a fantastic opportunity to expand the range of visual content that can be included in books and other similar projects. ⇒

Adding SSL to an EC2 instance

I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical about the need for enabling secure https access to my website. I am not engaging in any ecommerce. I don’t ask anyone for their money or even their opinions. ⇒

Amazon EC2 server and Statamic

Why would anyone want to roll their own webserver from scratch? I’ll say up front that even asking the question brands you as a bona-fide member of the techie crowd. But their are some legitimate reasons you might want to do this: ⇒

The Apple SSL fail - goto not recommended

Back in the dark ages of the 1970s when I was a freshman learning Fortran on computers that used punch cards, the professors were telling us how toxic the simple ‘goto’ instruction was to good programming hygiene. The Apple SSL fail may be exhibit Number One…

A stuttered cut and paste keyboard miss, or nefarious NSA tampering? You decide: ⇒

Mac OSX Lion Textedit and Preview Crashes

And all of a sudden, the built-in apps Textedit and Preview began to crash whenever they were opened. ⇒

Flickr feeds from Lightroom

If you have had the patience to labor through all the material on this part of my website covering the subject of photo website creation, you will notice that the driving force behind all my modifications over the years have had to do with ease-of-maintenance and my efforts to come up with methods to streamline the process of updating content, especially photo content. ⇒

RAID is not a backup, RAID is not a backup

Did I mention that RAID is not a backup? Or that RAID is not a backup?

My posts lately have tended toward the computer-ish side of things, and this one will be no different. It will be brief and concise, to wit:

RAID is not a backup

I realize that is the third time you have read this in the last 14 seconds, but there is the story behind it:

Most of us photographer types have a lot of data that needs to be stored digitally. The days of ring binders filled with plastic negative and slide sleeves are coming to a close. I still shoot a lot of film, but in just my casual, non-professional digital shooting over the last seven years, I have accumulated about 1 terabyte of digital images on my computer! Naturally, I don’t want to lose any of these photographs. So what is the best strategy for protecting them?

I’ll start by admitting that my job involves using seismic data for oil and gas exploration. We have HUGE amounts of data and interpretation that we need to access on high powered graphical workstations. What I have learned the hard way over the last thirty years are a few things:

• Hard drives will fail. Always. It is not if, it is when.
• A copy is not necessarily a backup
• Your strategy is only as good as the weakest link
• Belts and Suspenders are fine, but it doesn’t hurt to use a little super glue too

It seems like every day I will see some offhand comment on a photography forum from someone who has just gotten a new RAID device (often a Drobo or Buffalo-type device) and that they can now breathe easy. Well, this is a misplaced sense of security. Here is the deal: A RAID device is only as good as the the piece of hardware or software that controls it. A RAID uses multiple drives and distributes the data among them in a systematic way. But the hardware or software controller is like the map. You lose the map, and your data is gone, and likely can only be recovered by some very pricey specialists who make quite a good living by being able to reconstruct your map. It is hugely complicated, and is akin to reconstructing a wine glass that has had an encounter with a concrete floor.

“Oh”, you say, “But I have RAID-5, and I can have one disk go bad and it will rebuild the data if I lose a disk”. Yep, it could work that way. Or not. That assumes the failure point is a bad disk. What if something else fails? Say, for instance, that you have a hardware based RAID-5 standalone box like the Mercury Elite QX-2, and have it configured in 3+1 mode, which means that it is RAID-5 and can reconstruct the data with the ‘hot spare’ if one of the primary disks goes down. What if the hardware/firmware inside the box goes bad? Where does that leave you? Up a foul-smelling estuary without means of locomotion. This isn’t a disk going bad, this is the hardware-controller having a brain aneurysm and not having any recollection of where it left the car keys.

This happened to me about three weeks ago. No disk failures. Just a hardware failure at a level above the disks. Did I freak out? No, because now I don’t trust anything, and I had two spare copies of that data off site and one live copy on-site that is cloned once a day. I just packed up the box and sent it back for a replacement. But the moral is: Don’t trust a RAID as a backup. The only safety you have is many copies of your data in many different places. And for backup purposes, I would prefer two or three copies on high capacity single drives over a RAID anyday.

Another lesson I learned is not to rely on a piece of software to automatically backup your data. You need to have a method of confirming that the backup took place. I like to use Carbon Copy Cloner for my mac, and I have it send me an email when a backup starts and when it finishes. I also have it use the Growl notification windows to tell me the same thing. If I get up in the morning and I don’t have matching pairs of Growl notifiers on my screen when I log in, I know there is a problem.

Trust, but verify, in short. I learned this the hard way last spring when my backup software failed to run for two weeks and then my system disk went bad. I was all smug that I had a live clone, and then horrified to find out that it was two weeks out of date because Super-Duper software hiccuped and stopped backing up. I hadn’t set all the notification routines in place that I have currently, and I had no clue there was a problem. I switched to Carbon Copy Cloner, and so far (fingers crossed) I have not had a problem.

And while I am on the subject of Carbon Copy Cloner, I want to emphasize that this is a replication method, not a true backup. All the software does is ensure that the files on one piece of hardware are duplicated onto another. If you have a major screwup on the parent copy, all the cloning does is to ensure that you have the same screwup written to your child copy. Backup software like Time Machine allows you to store incremental copies of your data, and if you decide you want to go back to the work you had a week ago, it will make that possible. A replication approach will merely allow you to go back to the most recent copied version, and that is it.

So here are a few pieces of advice:

• Backups to hard disks are fine, but use more than one, and DO NOT use a RAID as a backup
• Have a copy of your data in a location that is not in the same place as your computer. Fire and flood will destroy both the original and the backup
• Analyze your system. There is always a weak link.
• Redundancy is your friend.

Hiking in the Wind Rivers

I have been taking later-summer/early fall hiking and climbing trips to the Wind River mountain range in Wyoming for the last fifteen years. These trips have ranged between week long excursions focused on climbing to simple hike-in-and-set-up-camp for a few days trips with larger groups of people with widely varying levels of fitness. This year, I suggested to Doug, one of my very fit friends, that we try a slightly more aggressive loop hike that would cover almost fifty miles of trail over the most scenic spots in the Southern Wind River range. ⇒

Wet-heads, Masterplaters and good times

This group of photographers are all part of that hard-core subgroup of photographers whose primary means of photographic expression involves the use of the wet-plate collodion process. ⇒

Hint 2 - iframes

The html-based iframe tag apparently is one of those embarrassing things that no self-respecting professional code jockey would ever be caught using in a website design. But just as the chimpanzees at the zoo have no idea that they are part of the Hominidae family and go ahead and pleasure themselves in public anyway, I am not a professional code jockey, and any sense of shame is vastly overshadowed by the pleasure I get from a dirt-easy way to embed my Lightroom HTML galleries directly into a web page. ⇒

Hint 1 - take advantage of browser capabilities

Safari, Chrome and Firefox are all browsers that have implemented many of the features of the upcoming HTML5 and CSS3 specifications. So you can do some very easy styling customizations for getting things like nifty Web 2.0 rounded corners and cool gradients for many of your html elements. No need to go to the trouble of making some slick mockup in photoshop and then slicing it into nine pieces so your shiny button will scale properly. Just add a custom style to your Thesis custom.css file. ⇒

DIY website with Lightroom & Wordpress

The first part of this series of how-to posts will begin with a short discussion of the components I have used to build this site and my reason for using them. ⇒

Creating a photo website - part 6

By the fall of 2009, the web world had moved ahead quite rapidly. Photo-sharing sites were plentiful. And blogging had become about as common as breathing. ⇒

Creating a photo website - part 5

In the fall of 2007, I decided that I needed to make a little more updated version of my website. I had been reading up on the purported benefits of a nice clean HTML/CSS approach to laying out the website. The philosophy behind this approach is solid: It effectively allows you to (in theory) separate the website content from its appearance. All the content is supposed to go into HTML files which then contain a reference to a external CSS file that tells the browser how to display this content. Don’t like how it looks? Then just change the CSS file and leave your data alone. It all sounded good. ⇒

Creating a photo website - part 4

So I decided to suck it up and learn html and css and all the other things you need to roll-your-own. But it was like being the person at the rear of the car trying to push it out of the mud. The car wasn’t going anywhere, and I was getting very muddy. ⇒

Creating a photo website - part 3

The first two posts covered some basic considerations and options for creating a photography related website. Now I want to relate a very quick timeline of the wobbly path I have taken through the maze of website creation possibilities over the last six or seven years. ⇒

Creating a photo website - part 2

The previous post discussed what I view as the essential requirements of a photographer’s website. Now I will discuss some of the pros and cons of each approach. ⇒

Creating a photo website - part 1

This is part one of a series of posts I am going to make about the process of creating a website for displaying photographic work. I have had a live website for about five years, and the one you are currently viewing is about release level 3.1. ⇒

New Year's Eve

I decided to work a half day on New Year’s Eve, 2009, and that morning woke up to the first nice winter fog we’ve had in Houston. I drove by Lake Woodlands, and decided it would be worth stopping for a few minutes to take some pictures. ⇒