I don't understand why the entire world suddenly thinks that documentary = journalism, or documentary = cinema verite.
Documentaries certainly have points of view, and they always have. At least Moore's is blatant; the "objective" documentaries *still* have some slant, because they are made by humans and humans have opinions.
I imagine most everyone's been on a team with someone who badly needed to be trained hard, demoted or fired. I wouldn't want my manager to get out of the way of that.
This is a good point, though one that I'd lump into "get your people what they need." That could include lowering the bozon level in the workplace.
I got the impression from the original post that there was a solid, functioning team in place. In those cases, the *best* thing a new manager can do is lay low for a while. While you're right that building a structure within the team can be important, trying to do that when you've just been airdropped into a functional team is usually catastrophic.
Maybe that's the most important question: What approach would you take as the new manager of an established team?
Actually, that was a conscious decision on my part. I was following the lead of another post that referred to a hypothetical female manager, experimented briefly with the typographically horrific s/he, and finally decided to use one example in each form.
FredFnord's right. 802.11 is CSMA, just like ethernet. There is no collision detect, particularly because of the "hidden node" problem, and the lack of a full-duplex radio.
So, they've implemented a RTS/CTS handshake (which are themeselves packets) to avoid collisions.
I'm surprised to hear you say that, because I still dust off my 2100 from time to time. It's an order of magnitude better than Palm/Pocket PC *still*.
It does everything, and does it well. You could build a NewtonOS device in an iPaq form factor today and it would blow the doors off anything else out there.
Yes, the form factor sucked. Apple made a tradeoff on form factor vs. power that wouldn't apply today.
1. No, but at 100lbs+, I don't think there's a lot of innovation there.;) Get me a 5lbs vacuum back and I'll pay attention.
2. Agreed, and I haven't the faintest idea why.
5. Back that one up. I went crawling through the Kodak aerial data sheets and couldn't find a color film that was better than 80 lp/mm at 1.6:1 and 100 lp/mm at 1000:1. Velvia, on the other hand is 80 lp/mm at 1.6:1, and 160 lp/mm at 1000:1.
7. I think it's called the Cage at every photo school on the planet.;) RIT Imaging and Photo Tech, in my case.
8. As I said, it's very cool that he's shooting stuff this big.
Vacuum film planes are ancient tech for prepress cameras. At 20x24 and up, it's not just cool, it's an absolute requirement to use film (instead of plates).
Mirror alignment check to get the film plane and lens parallel? Useless in landscape work. Worse than useless. You don't *want* them parallel. You want the film plane vertical, and you want to tilt the lens forward (top away from the film) to move the plane of focus and *improve* sharpness. Otherwise the only way to get the depth of field you need is by stopping way, way down. And you're right, there are diffraction limits, (you obviously do telescope optics) but they don't start to bite you until at least f/45, more likely f/64.
"Aerial Film has a MUCH higher resolution..." Not really. The color aerial films only have 80-100 lp/mm resolution...pretty much the same as professional chrome film. They have wacky spectral sensitivities, because they're designed for data collection, not photorealistic images, and that's what forces this guy to scan the film and work in Photoshop. There are some very high-resolution b/w aerial films, but they really aren't that much better than something like Tech Pan. The real reason he's using aerial film is because he can get it in that size.
[Note to another poster: You do get it in rolls. In fact, that's the only way you can: 9.5 inches by 200-2000 feet. This guy is cutting sheets off one of those rolls...yet another reason he needs a vacuum film plane.]
Getting film this big is actually a real problem because nobody uses it. I checked out an 11x14 view camera from the cage over Christmas one year, and had to shoot Cibachrome directly because I couldn't get film. EI 6 and 30CC Cyan over the lens, but it worked....and let me tell you, contact prints look soft next to a direct Cibachrome.
Sandbagging view cameras is nothing new...and for all your discussion of the arc subtended by the image of a blade of grass...remember that the grass is likely to move.;) I don't see any thing special about the "aluminum cradle" either, this looks like a classic studio view camera.
The camera isn't a new thing at all. It's a very old thing, in territory explored and abandoned decades ago, with a few bits of new tech to work around not being able to get the right old tech.:)
Now, with all that said. I do think it's very cool that there's someone out shooting 9x18" film. Big view cameras produce really amazing images, and I applaud this guys work. (I understand the problem too...Mt. Sopris is gorgeous, and all of my photos of it are really dull.)
The real problem here is that the article was written by someone with no knowledge of the subject.
The *only* time I've had anyone at Fry's tell me something intelligent was this:
I was looking for something that was on sale that week, probably an HD. Sunnyvale was out, but the guy I asked check the computer, and Palo Alto still had a dozen or so.
Me: "Can you call them and have them hold one for me?"
Him: "Sir, this is Fry's. You can get there before I can get someone on the phone with a clue."
There is in fact a section of part 15 (don't remember it now, sorry) that permits very, very low power transmission on VHF and UHF frequencies. Garage Door openers and the like. 433MHz has become popular for weather stations and similar devices.
What you fail to understand is that there is no other frequency to change to.
BPL wipes out all of HF, and a little bit of the bottom of VHF. These frequencies have unique propagation characteristics that are not present on any other bands. (The ability to talk half-way around the world, for starters)
So, if you're willing to kiss-off an entire class of communications in the name of your broadband (which either telco or cable could provide better under the same conditions), there's a whole bunch of us who are willing to kiss you off....sympathy for CB? sigh...
They aren't safe, but they aren't the worst thing in the world either. The NIST guide indicates that alcohol-based pens are less harmful than aromatic-based pens, and all three of the solvents listed on the Sharpie MSDS are alcohols. The last one, diacetone alcohol, is a little worrisome, but as acetone is itself highly volatile, I'm not too worried.
Looks like water-based felt pen or printing on printable-surface DVD-R is the right answer long term, but I think your CD-Rs will last a couple more years.
"Nope, analog wins even at color. Ever seen a 100 year old Autochrome image? I have. They're much more vivid than any of today's inkjet prints you'll see 100 years from now."
Yes, I've seen 100 year old autochromes. I said "C-print," which at the school I went to (RIT) specifically meant a chromogenic print. The number of photographers who are using the sorts of processes that you do is nearly zero, and has been since long before the advent of the digital camera. If processed correctly, gelatin silver B/W prints have very good stability, and color that was meant to last was always Cibacrhome (err...Ilfochrome).
"Just output to a film recorder" suggests resources far beyond even most professional photograhpers. I admit that I have been intrigued by some of the inkjet-negative approaches for silver/platinum/palladium printing, which can be done with far more modest resources.
I'm a little concerned that you're contradicting yourself. On the one hand you're saying that you have some proprietary tweaks to your process that makes the "TRULY archival." On the other hand you're saying that accelerated testing is inherently bunk. So how do you know that you haven't done something subtly wrong that will cause your prints to go sideways in 50 years, unless you haven't changed the process in 50 years.
There's a trap here. Leaving aside the asthetic qualities of these processes, (which are wonderful, don't get me wrong) you're basically saying that the only processes that will last 100yrs are necessarily 100yrs old.
"In fact, the salts will promote oxidization in pigments that are NOT prone to oxidization. This is not an effect that shows up in accelerated testing like Wilhelm's, but it will show up as REAL time passes."
Chemistry 101 disagrees, so there must be a second order effect here. The rate of a chemical reaction is proportional to temperature, as anyone who's ever souped a negative knows. So what's going on that prevents this from showing up in accelerated testing.
Unless the archivists start working with the materials scientists to develop accelerated testing methodology that works, no archival technology will ever be developed again. There's no economic incentive to develop a product with a century-long test cycle.
The risk of losing a generation's work is far greater if the only "accepted" print technologies are ancient and prohibitive. And, to your final point, the risk of losing work because the final print degrades is much lower. Brett Weston notwithstanding, I believe that the original data will be preserved perhaps even more carefully than the prints. But more importantly, if you save the file just before you press print, you have a file that contains all of the creative effort that normally would be considered part of the printing process.
Think about it, given (very) good process control, if Ansel Adams was working digitally, he could email a.psd to me and I could replicate that "original", because all the artistry (magic, really) that he applied to the printing process would be captured in that output file.
The art of printing is no longer tied to the longevity of the print.
I'm not sure that I agree that it isn't a fundamental limitation. Maybe I wasn't clear, but the issue is getting shallow DOF, not deep.
Small sensors lead to short focal lengths. It's hard to build fast, short lenses, so you end up with small apertures.
It really is a physics problem, and the only way out is to increase the size of the sensor. And that hits different physics problems in manufacturing, at least at sane price points.
You're assuming that he meant interpolating to a larger size. There are real issues with dealing with the scaling issues between the grid of pixels in the digital image and the grid of blobs of ink that the printer can produce. Keep in mind that printers have limited control over drop size, so there's a balance between color depth and spatial resolution.
That aspect of getting a good print alone is non-trivial.
Everyone's beating on the resolution of film. But remember that the noise in film is much higher than modern digital systems, so the amount of information in a film image is less than the raw resolution would suggest. (Especially since those resolution numbers are usually at 1000:1 contrast. Look at the 1.6:1 numbers before you presume that film blows away digital.)
And, as rebelcool pointed out, you're mixing formats. There are two amazingly sharp photograps on my folks' living room wall. I took them with an 11x14, loaded with Cibachrome. These are truly one-of a kind...the emulsion on the wall *is* the emulsion that was exposed in-camera. Even contact prints aren't this sharp. But that doesn't have anything to do with the film vs. digital debate until there's a 11x14 CCD back available. (And don't get me started on scanning backs and temporal iridescence.;)
You're ignoring something very significant here: Depth of Field.
The sensors in most digital cameras is simply too damn small physically to give any decent control of depth of field. It's very difficult to take a good head shot outside of a studio environment (where you can put the model a long way from the background) with anything but one of the latest and greatest full-size sensor cameras.
We're *almost* there, but shallow depth of field is a real problem with current digital cameras.
It's not like we don't get something in the deal, though: You can do macro work with digital cameras that you could only dream of with 35mm.
Oh, probably. That said, the original poster's point is still nonsense. I'm using MS Gen4 inks on a range of papers (Museo is my favorite, which is odd, because I used to hate warm-tone papers in the wet darkroom) and pigment on watercolor paper is an order of magnitude more stable than any C-print will ever be. (And an order of magnitude less stable than Carbon...are you using film for capture, or do you have a good way to get from a digital image to a carbon print?)
I'm still not convinced that inkjet will ever be able to produce a B/W print that comes close to what I can do in a real darkroom, but the ease with which I can do color means there's no contest for color prints: Digital wins.
I still love silver as a capture medium, but I'm willing to trade convenience and cost for quality for much (not all) of my work. The latest generation of full-size sensors (Kodak 14n and Canon 1Ds) can comfortably replace 35mm in my opinion. But 35mm is SMALL-format, and has barely-acceptable control of DOF. Anyone who starts talking about 6 megapixel 17x22mm sensors "replacing film" doesn' t know squat about depth of field control.
OK, I'm ranting.
PS: Are there any accelerated test methods that are accepted by the art conservation world?
"You can't actually print them in an archival format"
Absolutely false. Recent HP printers are pushing 50-year Wilhelm numbers, and you can always get a CIS and run real ink on real paper. I'd be shocked if any of my prints looked any different in 50 years.
Check out InkJetArt for a start. (Not an endorsement, just an example)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand why the entire world suddenly thinks that documentary = journalism, or documentary = cinema verite.
Documentaries certainly have points of view, and they always have. At least Moore's is blatant; the "objective" documentaries *still* have some slant, because they are made by humans and humans have opinions.
ADD eh?
Note "2" in your link.
I imagine most everyone's been on a team with someone who badly needed to be trained hard, demoted or fired. I wouldn't want my manager to get out of the way of that.
This is a good point, though one that I'd lump into "get your people what they need." That could include lowering the bozon level in the workplace.
I got the impression from the original post that there was a solid, functioning team in place. In those cases, the *best* thing a new manager can do is lay low for a while. While you're right that building a structure within the team can be important, trying to do that when you've just been airdropped into a functional team is usually catastrophic.
Maybe that's the most important question:
What approach would you take as the new manager of an established team?
Actually, that was a conscious decision on my part. I was following the lead of another post that referred to a hypothetical female manager, experimented briefly with the typographically horrific s/he, and finally decided to use one example in each form.
Oh well.
You, no doubt, have an idea what constitutes a good manager. If you don't, here's my opinion:
A good manager:
1. Fights for her people with upper mgmt.
2. Gets her people the resources they need to do their job.
3. Gets the hell out of the way.
Put another way:
1. You know he will be there when you need something.
2. Otherwise, you'd never know he was there.
These are the traits you're looking for.
FredFnord's right. 802.11 is CSMA, just like ethernet. There is no collision detect, particularly because of the "hidden node" problem, and the lack of a full-duplex radio.
So, they've implemented a RTS/CTS handshake (which are themeselves packets) to avoid collisions.
Pretty good writeup here.
All of this is why you get 4Mb/s on a good day out of 11b, and a similar efficiency from 11a/g.
How they ever got to be so popular I have no clue.
New York City employees had some.
They kept working in Manhattan on 9/11.
Instant bulletproof reputation.
Really ticked off the palm.net guys, who are on the same network, but didn't benefit from the war stories.
I'm surprised to hear you say that, because I still dust off my 2100 from time to time. It's an order of magnitude better than Palm/Pocket PC *still*.
It does everything, and does it well. You could build a NewtonOS device in an iPaq form factor today and it would blow the doors off anything else out there.
Yes, the form factor sucked. Apple made a tradeoff on form factor vs. power that wouldn't apply today.
Have *you* actually used it?
It's a CPU and memory PIG, and the bandwidth limits have *never* worked for anything but G2.
They need the help...no question about it. I gave up on the unified app thing and went back to Azureus, Acquisition, and eMule.
1. No, but at 100lbs+, I don't think there's a lot of innovation there. ;) Get me a 5lbs vacuum back and I'll pay attention.
;) RIT Imaging and Photo Tech, in my case.
2. Agreed, and I haven't the faintest idea why.
5. Back that one up. I went crawling through the Kodak aerial data sheets and couldn't find a color film that was better than 80 lp/mm at 1.6:1 and 100 lp/mm at 1000:1. Velvia, on the other hand is 80 lp/mm at 1.6:1, and 160 lp/mm at 1000:1.
7. I think it's called the Cage at every photo school on the planet.
8. As I said, it's very cool that he's shooting stuff this big.
So many misconceptions, so little time.
;) I don't see any thing special about the "aluminum cradle" either, this looks like a classic studio view camera.
:)
OK, here goes:
Vacuum film planes are ancient tech for prepress cameras. At 20x24 and up, it's not just cool, it's an absolute requirement to use film (instead of plates).
Mirror alignment check to get the film plane and lens parallel? Useless in landscape work. Worse than useless. You don't *want* them parallel. You want the film plane vertical, and you want to tilt the lens forward (top away from the film) to move the plane of focus and *improve* sharpness. Otherwise the only way to get the depth of field you need is by stopping way, way down. And you're right, there are diffraction limits, (you obviously do telescope optics) but they don't start to bite you until at least f/45, more likely f/64.
"Aerial Film has a MUCH higher resolution..." Not really. The color aerial films only have 80-100 lp/mm resolution...pretty much the same as professional chrome film. They have wacky spectral sensitivities, because they're designed for data collection, not photorealistic images, and that's what forces this guy to scan the film and work in Photoshop. There are some very high-resolution b/w aerial films, but they really aren't that much better than something like Tech Pan. The real reason he's using aerial film is because he can get it in that size.
[Note to another poster: You do get it in rolls. In fact, that's the only way you can: 9.5 inches by 200-2000 feet. This guy is cutting sheets off one of those rolls...yet another reason he needs a vacuum film plane.]
Getting film this big is actually a real problem because nobody uses it. I checked out an 11x14 view camera from the cage over Christmas one year, and had to shoot Cibachrome directly because I couldn't get film. EI 6 and 30CC Cyan over the lens, but it worked....and let me tell you, contact prints look soft next to a direct Cibachrome.
Sandbagging view cameras is nothing new...and for all your discussion of the arc subtended by the image of a blade of grass...remember that the grass is likely to move.
The camera isn't a new thing at all. It's a very old thing, in territory explored and abandoned decades ago, with a few bits of new tech to work around not being able to get the right old tech.
Now, with all that said. I do think it's very cool that there's someone out shooting 9x18" film. Big view cameras produce really amazing images, and I applaud this guys work. (I understand the problem too...Mt. Sopris is gorgeous, and all of my photos of it are really dull.)
The real problem here is that the article was written by someone with no knowledge of the subject.
-Z
The *only* time I've had anyone at Fry's tell me something intelligent was this:
I was looking for something that was on sale that week, probably an HD. Sunnyvale was out, but the guy I asked check the computer, and Palo Alto still had a dozen or so.
Me: "Can you call them and have them hold one for me?"
Him: "Sir, this is Fry's. You can get there before I can get someone on the phone with a clue."
There is in fact a section of part 15 (don't remember it now, sorry) that permits very, very low power transmission on VHF and UHF frequencies. Garage Door openers and the like. 433MHz has become popular for weather stations and similar devices.
73 de N6MOD
It's a motorcycle.
You figure it out.
This is roughly what prompted the short story that became Rush's Red Barchetta. ...wind in my hair... ...shifting and drifting...
What you fail to understand is that there is no other frequency to change to.
...sympathy for CB? sigh...
BPL wipes out all of HF, and a little bit of the bottom of VHF. These frequencies have unique propagation characteristics that are not present on any other bands. (The ability to talk half-way around the world, for starters)
So, if you're willing to kiss-off an entire class of communications in the name of your broadband (which either telco or cable could provide better under the same conditions), there's a whole bunch of us who are willing to kiss you off.
de N6MOD
Since nobody else seems to have acknowledged the pun, I will:
;)
*GROAN*
-Z
They aren't safe, but they aren't the worst thing in the world either. The NIST guide indicates that alcohol-based pens are less harmful than aromatic-based pens, and all three of the solvents listed on the Sharpie MSDS are alcohols. The last one, diacetone alcohol, is a little worrisome, but as acetone is itself highly volatile, I'm not too worried.
Looks like water-based felt pen or printing on printable-surface DVD-R is the right answer long term, but I think your CD-Rs will last a couple more years.
"Nope, analog wins even at color. Ever seen a 100 year old Autochrome image? I have. They're much more vivid than any of today's inkjet prints you'll see 100 years from now."
.psd to me and I could replicate that "original", because all the artistry (magic, really) that he applied to the printing process would be captured in that output file.
Yes, I've seen 100 year old autochromes. I said "C-print," which at the school I went to (RIT) specifically meant a chromogenic print. The number of photographers who are using the sorts of processes that you do is nearly zero, and has been since long before the advent of the digital camera. If processed correctly, gelatin silver B/W prints have very good stability, and color that was meant to last was always Cibacrhome (err...Ilfochrome).
"Just output to a film recorder" suggests resources far beyond even most professional photograhpers. I admit that I have been intrigued by some of the inkjet-negative approaches for silver/platinum/palladium printing, which can be done with far more modest resources.
I'm a little concerned that you're contradicting yourself. On the one hand you're saying that you have some proprietary tweaks to your process that makes the "TRULY archival." On the other hand you're saying that accelerated testing is inherently bunk. So how do you know that you haven't done something subtly wrong that will cause your prints to go sideways in 50 years, unless you haven't changed the process in 50 years.
There's a trap here. Leaving aside the asthetic qualities of these processes, (which are wonderful, don't get me wrong) you're basically saying that the only processes that will last 100yrs are necessarily 100yrs old.
"In fact, the salts will promote oxidization in pigments that are NOT prone to oxidization. This is not an effect that shows up in accelerated testing like Wilhelm's, but it will show up as REAL time passes."
Chemistry 101 disagrees, so there must be a second order effect here. The rate of a chemical reaction is proportional to temperature, as anyone who's ever souped a negative knows. So what's going on that prevents this from showing up in accelerated testing.
Unless the archivists start working with the materials scientists to develop accelerated testing methodology that works, no archival technology will ever be developed again. There's no economic incentive to develop a product with a century-long test cycle.
The risk of losing a generation's work is far greater if the only "accepted" print technologies are ancient and prohibitive. And, to your final point, the risk of losing work because the final print degrades is much lower. Brett Weston notwithstanding, I believe that the original data will be preserved perhaps even more carefully than the prints. But more importantly, if you save the file just before you press print, you have a file that contains all of the creative effort that normally would be considered part of the printing process.
Think about it, given (very) good process control, if Ansel Adams was working digitally, he could email a
The art of printing is no longer tied to the longevity of the print.
I'm not sure that I agree that it isn't a fundamental limitation. Maybe I wasn't clear, but the issue is getting shallow DOF, not deep.
Small sensors lead to short focal lengths. It's hard to build fast, short lenses, so you end up with small apertures.
It really is a physics problem, and the only way out is to increase the size of the sensor. And that hits different physics problems in manufacturing, at least at sane price points.
You're assuming that he meant interpolating to a larger size. There are real issues with dealing with the scaling issues between the grid of pixels in the digital image and the grid of blobs of ink that the printer can produce. Keep in mind that printers have limited control over drop size, so there's a balance between color depth and spatial resolution.
;)
That aspect of getting a good print alone is non-trivial.
Everyone's beating on the resolution of film. But remember that the noise in film is much higher than modern digital systems, so the amount of information in a film image is less than the raw resolution would suggest. (Especially since those resolution numbers are usually at 1000:1 contrast. Look at the 1.6:1 numbers before you presume that film blows away digital.)
And, as rebelcool pointed out, you're mixing formats. There are two amazingly sharp photograps on my folks' living room wall. I took them with an 11x14, loaded with Cibachrome. These are truly one-of a kind...the emulsion on the wall *is* the emulsion that was exposed in-camera. Even contact prints aren't this sharp. But that doesn't have anything to do with the film vs. digital debate until there's a 11x14 CCD back available. (And don't get me started on scanning backs and temporal iridescence.
You're ignoring something very significant here: Depth of Field.
The sensors in most digital cameras is simply too damn small physically to give any decent control of depth of field. It's very difficult to take a good head shot outside of a studio environment (where you can put the model a long way from the background) with anything but one of the latest and greatest full-size sensor cameras.
We're *almost* there, but shallow depth of field is a real problem with current digital cameras.
It's not like we don't get something in the deal, though: You can do macro work with digital cameras that you could only dream of with 35mm.
"Wilhelm is absolute bullshit."
Oh, probably. That said, the original poster's point is still nonsense. I'm using MS Gen4 inks on a range of papers (Museo is my favorite, which is odd, because I used to hate warm-tone papers in the wet darkroom) and pigment on watercolor paper is an order of magnitude more stable than any C-print will ever be. (And an order of magnitude less stable than Carbon...are you using film for capture, or do you have a good way to get from a digital image to a carbon print?)
I'm still not convinced that inkjet will ever be able to produce a B/W print that comes close to what I can do in a real darkroom, but the ease with which I can do color means there's no contest for color prints: Digital wins.
I still love silver as a capture medium, but I'm willing to trade convenience and cost for quality for much (not all) of my work. The latest generation of full-size sensors (Kodak 14n and Canon 1Ds) can comfortably replace 35mm in my opinion. But 35mm is SMALL-format, and has barely-acceptable control of DOF. Anyone who starts talking about 6 megapixel 17x22mm sensors "replacing film" doesn' t know squat about depth of field control.
OK, I'm ranting.
PS: Are there any accelerated test methods that are accepted by the art conservation world?
"You can't actually print them in an archival format"
Absolutely false. Recent HP printers are pushing 50-year Wilhelm numbers, and you can always get a CIS and run real ink on real paper. I'd be shocked if any of my prints looked any different in 50 years.
Check out InkJetArt for a start. (Not an endorsement, just an example)
Not in the least. Paul Allen hasn't had much to do with Microsoft in a number of years.