After marching through my existing digital archive last year, I embarked on the daunting task of scanning my entire negative film archive—more than 15 years of color and black and white negatives. I started with color, which was smaller—only about 10 years’ worth, and have now begun scanning black and white. Here’s my color workflow. My B&W is still under refinement, as I contemplate the best solution for removing dust and scratches. Unfortunately, the miracle of ICE, which automagically uses infrared light to somehow sense and eliminate blemishes from color film does not work with the silver emulsions of B&W film. So sad. BUT, ON WITH COLOR…!

1. Scan in NikonScan

• I scan directly in NikonScan—rather than doing a Photoshop import scan—because this allows you to save scanned images while another scan is in progress.
• Scan at maximum resolution
• Leave curves alone, unless you need to tweak to avoid clipping in the histogram
• I leave multisample scanning in Normal (1x) mode—for my purposes, higher settings just seem to add a lot of processing time without significant improvements in quality. I did a bunch of side-by-side comparisons to come to this conclusion.
• I also only can at a bit depth of 8 rather than 16 like all the purists out there. For my purposes (primarily freelance journalism, microstock), I can’t justify the additional hard drive space.
• I use the following ICE/ROC/GEM settings:
  • ICE=normal (I don’t find higher settings make significant difference)
  • ROC=0 (ROC is supposed to fix faded colors from old negs—which hasn’t been a problem for me)
  • GEM=3 (GEM reduces the appearance of film grain. This can introduce artifacting and loss of detail if overused, so I set it at 3 for a happy medium)
  • Note: using any of these settings significantly increase processing time–though I find that the results from using ICE far outweigh the time I’d spend retouching in Photoshop with the clone or heal tools.
• I didn’t discover Nikon Scan’s batch feature until I was done with the bulk of my color archive. That was frustrating. But it took some fiddling to figure out that you have to set the settings for each frame before they’d stick during batch scanning. Still not quite sure what I did to make it work right, but here’s the forum thread that I read to help me figure it out. Nikon scan also has pretty good naming options in batch mode that are real time savers, allowing prefixes, suffixes, and sequences with a selected number of digits. Now if I could only get all those evenings back I spent single scanning. At least I got through all five seasons of Lost on Netflix instant viewing…

2. Save as TIFF

• Though I swear by RAW formats when shooting digital, I’m not convinced that it’s necessary or an improvement over lossless formats like TIFF when scanning.
• TIFF also embeds metadata when retouching in Lightroom, eliminating the need for XMP sidecars required for RAW (NEF with NikonScan) formats

3. Import to Lightroom

• Make all color corrections, adjustments, levels
• Add captions, keywords, etc.

4. Export JPEGs for online archive, microstock

This tip is probably obsolete for most of my photographer friends shooting digital nowadays, but … I just discovered that a 55mm lens, aperture wide open, makes a nice loupe if you don’t have a real one handy. That is, looking directly through the lens—not with it attached to a camera.

I’m doing a lot of scanning these days, so it’s critical to be able to check sharpness, etc. before popping the negative into the scanner or you end up wasting a lot of time previewing when you can just click “scan” if you know it’s good. Look for a post on scanning workflow sometime soon. It’s definitely a work in progress.

I’ve just recently been approved to submit photos to both iStockphoto and Veer. Though neither accept editorial submissions—which are my bread and butter—I have a fair collection of royalty free qualifying images that I can experiment with. I’m just getting started, so it’s hard to say if the sales will be worth it, but my motivation is spurred partly because they’re owned by Getty and Corbis, respectively, two major stock houses that one would assume would do a good job of supporting their microstock stepchildren.

First impressions: both are extremely picky compared to my top-selling sites Dreamstime and Shutterstock. It took a couple of rounds with each to get accepted as a contributor, and I’ve gotten a lot of rejections on the basis of “artifacting when viewed at full size”—sometimes on virtually noiseless photos taken at ISO 400 in broad daylight. Sometimes images from the same series seem to be somewhat arbitrarily accepted and rejected. Both are also hard core about “chromatic aberration”—something that can’t always be fixed in Lightroom. I sometimes feel like they’re trying to get me to buy better cameras and lenses.  But I’ll stick with them for a while to see if the sales make up for the hassle.

Other first impressions: iStock’s user interface and upload process is so stupid terrible that there seems to be  a host of third party software offerings to make it halfway reasonable. For example, on using their basic upload tool (they don’t offer FTP!) keywords and other IPTC data were not automatically imported, or imported only on a sporadic basis. User forums confirmed that this was a pervasive problem. Wow. I’ve been using the free software Deepmeta to manage my iStock uploads, and it works pretty well. Veer’s interface is considerably better—and quite elegant—but their batch processing is still pretty lousy compared to sites like BigStock (the best processing backend, in spite of lackluster sales).

BTW, my Fotolia sales are pretty crappy so far. I think the sites that accept editorial stock will always do better for me, but I figure the experiment with other sites is worth it, even if they only send a trickle of income my way.

After yesterday’s post extolling the value of full-frame DLSRs and the wisdom of Ken Rockwell, I feel compelled to offer this snippet from one of his articles on the “full-frame advantage”–which helps to illustrate why I value his perspective. He’s no gear pimp.

WARNING:

If you just want to make great photos of things that matter, don’t worry about this baloney and get whatever you find convenient. I use my D40 and its kit lens or my 18-200mm VR 90% of the time for my photos that matter. …

Don’t start counting pixels until you can make the right pixels. I was an idiot and wasted my first 15-20 years of shooting worrying about the wrong things, like resolution instead of color. This is why I so strongly caution you not to get caught up in this foolishness. This article, like many of mine, deals with minor technical issues. These fine points are only significant after all the far more critical basics of location, composition, lighting, timing, color, tone and gesture have been mastered. Worrying about minute details like noise and resolution before you know how to make a good photo will ensure you never learn enough about the important issues to make great photos. If you’d like to learn how to make great photos, don’t bother with these technical articles, instead read good books or take a local photo class. Your camera doesn’t matter if you know what you’re doing, and if you do know what you’re doing, a better camera just makes it easier to get the results you demand.

He has longer rants on similar topics here and here.

I frequently pray for wisdom when approaching major gear purchases, and try to keep this tension active within me as I invest more time, energy, and yes, money in my photography. I don’t generally find it helpful to calculate the number of starving children that could be fed with, say, the $1200 I just spent on a lens that I should be able to use for the rest of my life. Hopefully, the images I make with that lens will inspire action and advocacy that will change the structures that result in starving children.

But even so, nuggets like Ken’s here help me to keep things in perspective, and will hopefully prevent me from an ever-increasing spiral of gear acquisition, and keep me focused on a few wise strategic investments that will stand the test of time.

Because I report my freelance photo earnings as a small business, I usually make most of my new gear purchases at the end of the year to spend down my revenue, reduce my tax burden, and invest in new gear for the coming year.

This year, I became convinced by both experience and research that it’s time to upgrade from Nikon’s DX format to a full-frame FX DSLR. However, I didn’t pull in enough income from freelance sales this year to finance the jump, so instead made some purchases to prepare for it–mostly lenses.

For those unfamiliar, DX is Nikon’s first digital sensor format, which has the effect of increasing all of your lenses’ focal lengths by 50%. Click here for a more complete explanation of why this happens. That might sound great at first–your 80-200mm zoom is now a 120-400mm zoom! But I hadn’t done my homework when I bought my first DX format camera (a Nikon D70s), and was disappointed to learn that my trusty wide-angle 24mm f2.8 Nikkor was now effectively a 36mm standard range lens. And I just can’t work without a nice, fast wide angle. This is why most kit lenses that ship with consumer level DLSRs are in the neighborhood of 17-55mm or 18-70mm. They’d be a superwide on a standard format sensor, but are just normal wide on a DX camera. However, many of those lenses are made exclusively for the DX format–slap them on a standard format film camera and there’s massive vignetting around the corners of the image–beyond the edges of what the DX sensor would cover.

Aside from magnifying focal length, the DX format also messes with one of my top priorities: low-light capability. It’s a basic fact of photography: Increased focal length requires increased shutter speed to freeze camera shake. That means no more bracing against a wall and shooting at 1/30 or 1/15 hand-held. Even shots at good ‘ol 1/125 can get jiggly when I’m using my trusty 50mm f1.8 wide open for low light scenes like candlelight vigils. Newer stabilized or vibration reduction (VR) lenses help to cope with this, but only help to freeze the camera–not the subject.

So for these and other reasons, Ken Rockwell has me convinced that FX is the way to go–both for sharpness and for that boogeyman of high ISO digital shooting: noise. The D700 has the mind-blowing available ISO of 25,600, but more importantly, according to Ken: “if you want to shoot in available light, ISO 6,400 looks great without excuses on the D700 or D3, but not on any DX camera.”

This becomes especially important when my microstock sites reject photos for too much noise, forcing me to abandon higher ISOs on my current D90. So here are the lenses that I invested in in anticipation of the Nikon D700 that I plan to purchase in 2010, all purchased used on eBay:

17-35mm f/2.8 ($1200)
28-200mm f/3.5 – 5.6G ($285)
70-300mm VR f/4.5-5.6G ($450)

As mentioned, I already own a 50mm f/1.8, and routinely use an 85mm f/1.8 and 80-200mm f/2.8 which are owned by Sojourners, though I’m trying to build up my personal kit. Granted, these together cost more than a used D700 body ($1900 or so on eBay), but without the lenses to use it effectively, it seemed better to put these horses before the cart. I also figure the longer I wait, the more prices on used D700 bodies will come down, while lens prices are relatively stable. I also jumped on some SanDisk rebate deals to stock up on 16GB CompactFlash cards, since the FX cameras all use those instead of the SD cards I currently use in my D90.

You may have noticed that most of the links above go to KenRockwell.com, which was an extremely valuable resource in researching lenses. I recommend hime for his encyclopedic listings of Nikon cameras and lenses, including discontinued models that may be just what you need. This is especially true in hunting down FX-compatable lenses (aka 35mm film lenses!) and separating the deals from the duds among Nikon’s catalog (like skipping the otherwise tempting 24-120mm VR).

To be honest, I’m still a little shocked at how much I’ve spent on this pile of lenses. But part of it is due to relative success in my first year of microstock, and the other part is justified by a need to make some longer-term investments in gear for reasons I will detail in a future post…. I’ll also likely write about my rationale for buying a new Lenovo T400 laptop that arrived at the office two hours after I left for the holiday break….

I’ve just uploaded another archive gallery of storm damage and volunteer work in Biloxi, Mississippi, a year after Hurricane Katrina. Some favorites:

I continue my march backwards through my photo archives, nearing the end of my digital files. (Then, on to—gasp—scanning negatives!) Here are some selections from my time in New Orleans about a year after Hurricane Katrina:

Last week I went to two different rallies–one for health-care reform, the other, the DC event of the International Day of Climate Action. The galleries are now online–here are some favorites:

Getting in line at 2:00 in the afternoon was completely worth it. I was two spots from the front rail at the U2 show at FedEx Field. Though I didn’t risk taking my D90, I did get some pretty decent shots with my point-and-shoot—a Canon PowerShot A570IS. Here are some favorites from the gallery:

I also caught the Charlottesville, VA, show—this time in the reserved seats a little farther away. So I took a few shots there to get a sense of the amazing set:

Here’s one of those posts I wish someone else had written before our trip to the Middle East last spring. I had to figure this all out myself. So, you’re traveling to Israel as well as several neighboring Arab countries who don’t recognize Israel’s right to exist. Turns out, these countries have chosen to take out their ideological differences on hapless travelers by barring entry to folks who have Israeli markings in their passports.

The solution used to be that you could request that Israeli border officials stamp a visa on a piece of paper kept in your passport until you exit Israel and the Palestinian Occupied Territories. When we checked official web sites before our trip earlier this year which said that they still do this. But friends who live and travel in the region said they are not consistent in responding to such requests, and will sometimes not stamp your passport at all–which is OK for travel within Israel proper. But if you plan to pass back and forth between Israel and Occupied Palestine–which means passing through Israeli military checkpoints–not having a stamp can be a problem.

So, bottom line, you need two passports: one for Israel to stamp, and one for traveling to Arab countries, such as Syria or Lebanon. Syria will even look to see stamps from neighboring Arab countries like Jordan, so don’t hand them a blank passport just for them as if you dropped out of the sky with a new passport–they’ll know why–and want to see your Jordanian entry stamp, for example. Israel doesn’t seem to mind getting an unused passport, even if you’re crossing the Jordanian border and don’t have Jordanian stamps.

Try Googling “second passport” and you’ll get lots of broker services that want to charge add-on fees for facilitating and expediting the process. But for you DIY types who want to make a direct application to the State Department, instructions are hard to come by.

There is no application for a second passport, per se, but buried on page 3 of a State Department PDF, under the heading, “U.S. Department of State Foreign Affairs Manual Volume 7 – Consular Affairs,” are these relatively simple steps:

1. Fill out a regular passport renewal application
2. Include a signed letter saying why you need the second passport, which for some reason needs to include your promise that if you lose it you’ll report it to the nearest embassy. They give an example of such a statement.
3. Include your current passport, but plaster it with post-it notes saying something like “APPLICATION FOR SECOND PASSPORT, DO NOT DESTROY, PLEASE RETURN”
4. Two passport photos
5. Your fee, currently $75 if you already have a passport.
6. The State Dept. recommends you use a traceable delivery method such as UPS. I do not recommend FedEx.

That’s pretty much it. Give them at least four weeks to process it, though you can pay extra for expedited applications. Here’s the official U.S. passport site, which has other info and details you may need. Also, don’t panic when your second passport arrives without your original. The original is returned separately.