Archive for the 'Photography' Category

A Matter of Perspective

Another shot from School photography class back in 1986.

Again, not fantastic (I was only 13), but it shows an interest and appreciation of the effect of “perspective”, something I was to explore in much more detail during technical drawing classes in later years.

Spent the day scanning old photo negatives today, and generally sorting through all our photos and getting them organised.

Our photo collection so far consists of 16151 photos (yes, that’s over sixteen thousand !) starting from 1985. That’s unique photos too – no duplicates counted there … if you count duplicates (multiple scans at different resolutions or multiple edited copies etc), then there’s actually over 18,000 files. At least that’s what I’ve scanned so far – there are more yet to be scanned, so this number will grow.

All of the more recent photos in our collection are digital only, and the rate of photo taking increased significantly once we went digital as film/processing cost was no longer an issue. It might be interesting to graph average number of photos taken per month over that period to show just how much our photo taking has increased.

With so many photos, disk space is of course an issue, with the photo collection now taking up 115GB of drive space. I have an external network drive using a Thecus N2100 with two 500GB hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration (mirrored disks), so if one disk fails, the other will still have a copy of the data. I also have an offsite backup (not completely up to date) stored at Leanne’s sisters house.

I also managed to scan some really old photos that were not in 35mm format – they are actually square shaped. The Nikon Coolscan scanner spat them out and didn’t want to scan, and the image is too large for the Epson 3200 flat bed scanner negative strip holder – so I rigged up the medium format transparency adaptor to hold the negatives while I scanned them on the flat bed. Seemed to do the job okay – the quality of the photos wasn’t great to start with, so it wasn’t worth getting too fussy about the results.

A Wheel within a Wheel

Keeping with the bicycle theme for now – here is another photo taken back around 1986, again for photography class at school.

I quite like the “wheel within a wheel” perspective effect from this shot.

The Bicycle

Not a particularly good photo – but it’s one of my earliest … taken when I was about 12 or 13, in year 8 at school. This was for a photography class – which was actually quite enjoyable.

The photo is of my bike which I rode to school sometimes. Murray Bridge High School was about 5km from our place.

I recently bought a Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED Slide / Film Scanner so I could scan in all my old negatives. Since early 2000 I started getting Kodak PictureCDs burned whenever I got a roll of film developed, but it added a lot of cost to the process, and I was never completely happy with the results. I tried using my old Epson Perfection 3200 Photo to scan negatives, but found it quite slow.

I don’t actually take film photos anymore – I stopped back in February 2006 after I got fed up with the cost. I’ve now gone exclusively digital, although I’m only using a Canon S50 – 5mp compact digital camera I bought in Hong Kong back in mid 2003, while I’m saving up for my digital SLR. The new Canon EOS 40D is due out next week … that is what I’m going to get (when I can afford it) !!

One nice thing about the Nikon scanner is that you just shove your strip of negatives into the slot and it works out where each frame of the film is – you just need to fine tune the cropping and then the scanner will scan all the photos one the strip at once. It’s all much faster than doing it on the flatbed, and at 4000dpi, the quality is very good too. It also does infra-red scanning to aid in the removal of dust and scratches.

I use software called Vuescan with the scanner – it’s faster and easier to use than the software that came with it, and I’m very happy with the results (although I’m somewhat disappointed with the condition of some of my negatives – quite scratched and faded, and some are even mouldy … next job is to research cleaning up negatives … I’m sure there’s some solution you can buy to clean them with.

Anyway, I’ve also taken the opportunity to sort through all my old photos and start cataloging them (sorting the negatives, putting them in labeled envelopes and storing them in chronological order). I’m using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to manage and edit my scanned photos as well as all my newer digital photos. According to Lightroom, I now have 15,673 photos in my collection, and I’ve still got quite a few rolls which haven’t been scanned yet!

It’s been good going back over some of my older photos – even finding some that I had forgotten I had!

I might start posting some of my best and favourite photos to my blog