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Through at least seven computers, from DOS, OS/2, and Windows 3.1 to Vista x64, while mice have had their little balls clog and been replaced with ones with LEDs and cameras, I’ve used the same keyboard — an IBM 1391401 manufactured on December 12, 1990. That ‘board, and many variants that group together under the name of Model M keyboards, use a technology called “buckling spring” to give a distinctive feel. As you depress the key the force required gets greater until, at a point near but not at the bottom, you hear a fairly loud click and feel the resistance lessen. You don’t have to push the key all the way to the bottom of its travel to know that you’ve typed a letter. It’s addictive; regular keyboards feel mushy to me.
In the era when a personal computer was a PDP-8, the gold standard for typewriter keyboard feel was the IBM Selectric. IBM made the Selectric in Lexington, Kentucky. When it came time to pick a keyboard for the IBM PC, Don Estridge and his Boca Raton team reached out to the folks in Lexington, who provided a keyboard with a feel that was similar to the Selectric typewriter, but with slightly longer key travel and a louder click. People all over the world got used to the feel of a really good keyboard. Soon the PC clones came, and they pretty much universally cheaped out on the keyboards. No matter; you could still buy just the keyboard from IBM and use it on your clone.
IBM tried some fancy footwork in the late eighties to try and get the clones off their back. It didn’t work, but everyone did pick up the PS/2 keyboard connector, which replaced the clunky five-pin DIN and persists until this day on high-end PCs and workstations, also it’s getting pushed aside by USB. The keyboards themselves mostly moved on to quieter, less-expensive technology.
I’ve been having highly-intermittent keyboard problems for the last year or so. Every few weeks, my keyboard stopped working. No response to key presses at all. A reboot always fixed it. When something occurs rarely and seemingly randomly, it’s an invitation for misdiagnosis or magical thinking. Not being big on actual magic, I blamed the closest thing to magic in the computer world: the operating system.
A few days ago, the keyboard, or the software, or whatever, did its thing again. I had some work I needed to do that could be accomplished with a mouse, so I kept on using the computer. After I while, I forgot the keyboard was wonky, and fired up Word. I was into the second paragraph before it occurred to me that it was supposed to take a reboot to fix it.
The next morning the keyboard failed, resurrected itself, and failed again, all without a reboot. I began to think that I had a hardware problem that was slowly getting worse. On one level, that made me feel good: there was a good chance I could fix the flakiness, instead of living with it. On another level, it was terrible: the now-suspect keyboard was my favorite.
I set my old keyboard aside and went downstairs to rummage through my storeroom. I returned dusty, but proudly bearing a Lexmark 1428401, a keyboard with similar technology and feel, but missing the numeric keypad (I think it came with a separate one, but I’ve lost it over the years). IBM sold the keyboard business to Lexmark when it spun off the company in 1991. Lexmark continued to manufacture keyboard for five or six years. The one I swapped in was manufactured in 1995.
I have a functioning, good-feeling keyboard, but I’m not happy. The layout is different enough that it will take me a while to get used to it, and I miss the numeric keypad. At least I haven’t had any problems. It’s too early to call it fixed, but we’ll see.
I did some research on what you can buy now. Refurbished and unused IBM and Lexmark keyboards are thin on the ground, but available. Lexmark sold the keyboard business to Unicom in the late 1990s, and Unicom still makes keyboards with the same technology. I ordered an unused old one and a modern one using the same technology; it’s even got a USB connector. I sure don’t want to go cold turkey on my clicky keyboard.
I got an email from Drobo support yesterday with the following instructions:
“Since Drobo1 is only a back up, then instead of just reformatting, you might try starting the array from scratch by performing a Clear Disk per the attached instructions. Once this completes, verify that “Tools” tab indicates that this Drobo is running v1.3.1.
Set up Vice Versa to run on your Drobo and if you hit any problems then run CHKDSK to see if it finds any problems. After that, try generating a fresh diagnostic file. If you get the “I am unable to save the diagnostic information.” message again, then try rebooting the Drobo and the computer and trying again.”
The “Clear Disk” instructions were pretty straightforward: shutdown the Drobo, straighten out a paper clip, pull the USB cable, pull the power cable, stick the paper clip in a little hole in the back of the Drobo while plugging in the power cord, hold the paper clip down until the Drobo is all booted.
I did all that, formatted the virtual drive with the Drobo Dashboard, and wrote about 600 GB of data.
So far, so good.
In an unrelated Drobo event, I had a hard disk fail on Drobo2. I swapped in a new one. The rebuild (of about 2 TB of data), took more than 24 hours. Not on a par with a conventional RAID, but adequate for the intended use.
We’ve got a new CPA web site. The new site has ditched the old red-on-black color scheme. I’ve changed web hosting companies. I’m still using WordPress for my blog software, but I don’t feel the need to match the colors of the old blog, which colors I chose to provide some continuity with the old CPA look.
So I’ve kicked over the traces, and now the site has a look that’s not much related to any version of the CPA site. I picked the new look mainly for its function (I resist the word “functionality” even though it’s been popular for going on twenty-five years; it seems like a noun that got turned into an adjective, and then back to a noun, while gaining heft, but loosing clarity). I will retain that function. If I get the chance, I’ll change the colors so that they harmonize with the new CPA web site.
Enjoy…
I got an email from a Drobo tech yesterday afternoon telling me to install the 1.3.1 release of the Drobo firmware. I told him I’d already figured that out but that I couldn’t do it until the Drobo console recognized Drobo1. He called and said to try power cycling it without the USB cable attached, and if that didn’t work, pull all the drives and power cycle.
I left the power off for a good minute and a half, and Drobo1 booted. I plugged in the USB cable, and the Drobo console saw the hardware. The lights on the front panel of the Drobo said that the disk was appropriately full, but Windows reported that the disk was corrupted and unreadable: I had lost all my data. Thank goodness it was just a backup.
I upgraded the firmware on Drobo1, and for good measure, did the same for Drobo2, which had been operating well. I formatted Drobo1 using the Drobo console. I recreated the directory structure, set Vice Versa to work backing up all the files that had been lost, and went to bed.
When I got up this morning, the backup had failed. There was about 250 GB of data on Drobo1. The Drobo console reported everything was healthy. The file structure appeared correct for the data that was there. I tried writing a file to the Drobo and couldn’t. I tried opening a file stored on the Drobo and got a “file not found” message with the suggestion that I make sure a disk was in the specified drive. I went down to the server room and took a look at the Drobo. All the lights were normal. This is the same situation that the box was in when my most recent troubles began. It seemed that the firmware update had not fixed the problem.
I thought about rebooting the Drobo, but it occurred to me that I might lose useful data from the log if I did that. I right-clicked on the Drobo Dashboard icon in the system try and selected “Get diagnostic information”. I got a popup that said that I should wait while the console gathered diagnostic information. I waited…
…and waited. Finally, I got a popup that said, “I am unable to save the diagnostic information.” And, like so many of these windows that report bad news, the only option was to click “OK.” Why can’t there be a “That sucks” button?
And that’s where it sits. I will notify Drobo tech support.
I poked around on the Drobo support site until I found a firmware update that’s supposed to fix the Error 51 problems. Unfortunately, the instructions only apply to updating a Drobo that the Drobo management software recognizes.
I hadn’t heard from Drobo support this morning so I decided to try some things myself. I shut down the server, and Drobo1 didn’t go into standby. I pulled the USB connector, and it still didn’t go into standby. I power-cycled the Drobo. It came up with just one blue light in the capacity row, and no lights at all in the column down the right side that indicates the health of the disks. After it settled down, I powered on the server. The display didn’t change, and Drobo1 didn’t show up in the Drobo management console.
Maybe it is a hardware failure. I’ll wait some more for Drobo to get back to me.
I went to check on the server backups today and noticed that they had been failing for the last two days. Vice-Versa reported “target folder not found”. It only seemed to affect one of the Drobos, Drobo1; unfortunately, that was the one with the most-rapidly-changing data. The Drobo management software reported that all was well. I looked at the file structure on the Drobo that VV couldn’t write to, and, although the top-level directories appeared to be there, there was nothing below them. The error log was full of the dreaded Error 51 entries, pointing at the Drobo that VV couldn’t write to.
I tried reading files on the server RAID, and they looked good.
I did a reboot on the server, and it took a long time. In fact, I thought it had hung. I was patient, and finally it came up. Drobo1 didn’t show up when I fired up the Drobo management software. It looks like it is well and truly dead, although this doesn’t seem like a hardware problem.
If you remember the previous Drobo entries, you’ll remember that the Drobo folks said they had found a bug that was causing the Error 51s. They said they’d get me a fix by 60 days from the first week in February. That would get the fix to me by the first week of April. It didn’t happen, and I didn’t worry about it since it looked like things were working.
Now I’m worried. I will contact Drobo support and let you know what I find.
I went to Monument Valley last weekend. It was just a quick trip, and with non-photographer friends along, I mostly just played tourist. I did take one camera, one lens, and no tripod. The camera was a 4000 by 6000 pixel 35 mm format digital. I amused myself by snapping off 6 to 12 picture panoramas.
When I got home, I fired up a stitching software package called Autopano Pro 2. I’d never used it before, and I was truly amazed at what it could do.
The first revelation was its ability to accurately automatically detect groups of photographs that needed stitching together. It doesn’t do this by analyzing the images; instead it looks at when the photographs were taken, the exposure information, and the focal length of the lens. When I took the pictures I didn’t know how the program worked, and it still did a pretty good job; now that I understand it I can easily do things (like changing the focal length of a zoom lens slightly between panoramas) that should make it essentially perfect.
The second surprise was the quality of the results. When I had done panoramas before I had always used a tripod, and usually I went to the trouble of adjusting the camera so that the pivot point was at the nodal point of the lens. Even so, the stitching software left artifacts that took a lot of manual cleaning up. For distant scenes, with the camera handheld, Autopano did a flawless job. There were some problems if the foreground was too close to the camera, but it’s hard to blame that on the stitching software, since I didn’t use a tripod.
The combination of ease of use and quality of the results has given me a new perspective on stitching. I don’t think it’s just for panoramas any more. Consider the numbers: holding the camera that I used vertically, making three exposures, and assembling the result into a 35 mm shaped horizontal gives a 6000×9000 pixel image. If you’re hand holding it, you probably going to have to crop a little, so you’ll have maybe 5500×8250 pixels. Holding a camera the same way and doing two rows of three images each gives you (figuring in some overlap) a 9000×13500 pixel image. Both of those resolutions are seriously into scanning back territory.
Let’s take a moment to review scanning backs. They’ve been around since the early 1990s, a time when rectangular image sensors captured less than two megapixels. The idea was that, although it was incredibly expensive to make a high-resolution sensor that could capture an entire image at once, it wasn’t a big deal to build a line sensor with thousands of pixels. If you had a subject that wasn’t moving, you could use a motor to slowly move the sensor across the entire image. Several companies built scanning backs that slid into 4×5 cameras like film holders. It was a little like having the guts of a flatbed scanner in your camera. There was an umbilical that plugged into a box that you put under the tripod, and the box had to be connected to a computer that you took into the field. Capture times were measured in single-digit minutes. The results were spectacular. Quality exceeded what could be obtained with 4×5 film by quite a bit. The long exposure times limited the choice of subject matter, and the requirement to tote a computer along made field work slow and awkward.
Today, the standard resolution for a scanning back is 6000×8000 pixels. If you need higher resolution and have $23,000 lying around, you can get a 10200×13600 pixel back.
There are two big differences between scanning and stitching that make comparisons more complicated than just counting pixels.
The first favors scanning: each pixel in a scanned exposure is a combination of independent red, green, and blue sensing elements, as opposed to the pixels in an instant capture that are interpolated from the Bayer pattern in the sensor. I discussed that issue several years ago, and I figured that, to get the equivalent of real three-color pixel capture, you should divide the number of pixels in an instantly captured image by two, the equivalent of dividing each dimension of the image by 1.4.
The second favors stitching: view camera lenses are not built to give the kind of resolution demanded by high performance scanning backs. It’s axiomatic in lens design that as coverage increases, resolving power (measured in line pairs per millimeter) decreases. A bigger capture area and a bigger lens will get you more good pixels, but the increase will be less than proportional to size. When you use stitching to get high resolution, you can use a small lens with high resolving power; you get the increased resolution by using the lens over and over for each exposure, rather than the much more challenging procedure of trying to get a lens that can resolve the entire shot at once.
For studio use with no people in the shot and continuous lighting (no strobes), the scanning back still has a place. But in the field, where the bulk of all the equipment you have to carry with you (camera, back, tripod, cables, electronics box, computer, etc.) can really limit your mobility, increase your set-up time, and send you to the chiropractor, stitching together small images is getting increasingly attractive. As I found out in Monument Valley, sometimes you don’t even need a tripod.
In the past, my reaction to the difficulties associated with using a scanning back was to just forget about really high-res images. With the twin improvements in instant-capture sensor resolution and stitching software, I think I’ll change my mind.
However, I do have a problem with some of my Monument Valley pictures: wall space. There’s an image I like especially well. It’s composed of twelve verticals arranged horizontally and it’s 15000 by 6000 pixels. At 360 pixels per inch, that’s 17×42 inches. It’s a nice picture, but it’s not good enough to turn that much wall over to it, and if I print it smaller, you won’t see all the detail.
As I mentioned in the preceding post, I’ve been working a lot more on CPA business. How’d I get so involved? It’s a long story, and one that I’ll probably get into later; I’ve been on the Board since February, and President since March.
In March, we made a long list of things that needed work. The web site was right up there. One thing that grated on me when I went to the old site was the aesthetics; the red-on-black color scheme never did anything for me. But that wasn’t the big problem. Behind the scenes, the site was set up so that you made changes using an administrative panel, using an ordinary web browser rather than an html editor.
Done right (and that includes being suited to the task), an administrative panel can be a real time-saver, trading flexibility for speed and ease of use. Done wrong, you get all the inflexibility and none of the ease of use, making it maddingly difficult to do simple things, and essentially impossible to do anything out of the ordinary. Ours was like that. In addition, it had a nasty little quirk: whatever changes you made became immediately effective on the public web site; there was no way to test anything off line. You also couldn’t save the old files so that you could easily revert after a mistake.
We had a few technical glitches in getting the new site going. Huntington Witherill did the basic design (and a fine job he did) using GoLive. I’m using Dreamweaver CS4. We tried working on the site together, and it was a disaster; we kept stepping on each other’s toes. Huntington couldn’t upgrade to Dreamweaver because he had a IBM-architecture (PowerPC) Mac and the new version only runs on Intel. He was in the process of upgrading to an x86 processor, but in the meantime, we were at loggerheads. Realizing the difficulties we faced, Huntington passed the responsibility for the web site to me; he will get it back when he’s completely converted.
A lot of the GoLive design automation didn’t travel well to Dreamweaver. I reconstructed most of the repeating aspects of the site using Dreamweaver templates, added content, and you can see the results. I think it’s a big improvement, buy, hey, I’m deeply prejudiced. The esthetics are entirely Huntington’s, and a lot of the content is his as well. I was able to add all the interviews I did for the old newsletter.
The new site is here. Let me know what you think.
The most important thing I learned at PhotoLucida was how much time and energy it takes to sell your work. It can be a lot. In fact, for some, it seems to be more time than they spend making photographs.
That isn’t a happy realization for me. I love to make images. I like to have people enjoy my images—the more people, the better. I like to show my work to the photographic gatekeepers. I enjoy trying to fit what they say into photographic reality as I see it. While I don’t mind traveling to get to where I’m going to make pictures, I don’t like traveling to show my work. I don’t like making cold calls or knocking on doors.
Above all, I hate the thought that getting people to see my work could mean that I get to make a lot less of it.
Since I’ve gotten back from Portland, I’ve done no follow-up with the people I met at PhotoLucida. It’s worse than that. A few days after I got back, I received a voicemail message from a local gallery owner who expressed interest in the farm workers images. I called and left a return message, and then forgot about it. I’ve been really busy with CPA work, but is that the behavior of a photographer committed to getting his work out there?
When the CPA workload eases up a bit, I need to come up with a plan with limited goals and manageable demands on my time. I may need some help, and I’ll consider talking to a marketing consultant. Probably I’ll keep things fairly local: only places I can drive to.
I’ll let you all know how it goes.
I’ll write later about PhotoLucida’s effect on me personally, but in this post I’d like to attempt a summary for anyone considering attending PhotoLucida or a similar portfolio review convention.
The program’s target audience is mid-career photographers. If you already have gallery representation, your work is in museum collections, and you have had many individual exhibitions, this convention is designed for you. If you fall into that category, you know what gallery you want to be in, what curators you want to see, and what book publishers are likely prospects. PhotoLucida is perfect for you. There is no more time-efficient or cost-effective way to get your work before the gatekeepers of the photographic art community. For the price of a roundtrip plane ticket, a hotel room, and the not small, but certainly not exorbitant conference fee, you can get your work before at least 20 of your top prospects, assuming they are represented at the conference. Gallery owners who would normally review your work only in private after you have dropped it off will go through it with you and give you feedback.
It seemed to me that many, if not most, of the photographers at PhotoLucida were, on the photographic career ladder, a rung or two below the mid-career point; let’s call them early-career photographers. These people are looking for the first or second representing gallery, the fourth or fifth individual exhibition. They also want feedback on their work, as they are not completely confident of their artistic direction and completely committed to a style. For those people, and I put myself in that category, PhotoLucida is a good thing, but not the home run that it is for the mid-career folks.
As I mentioned in a previous post, the feedback that you’ll get on your work it is pretty gentle, at least compared to what you’d experience at an intensive workshop, or a portfolio review with the reviewers are teachers and other photographers. This is in keeping with the direction of PhotoLucida towards mid-career photographers, who don’t want or need to be raked over the figurative coals; they just want to know if the reviewer wants their work, and if not, why not.
There are some reviewers at PhotoLucida whose business or avocation is to give career counseling and marketing advice. They are not heavily represented in the reviewer roster, but are a great resource for the early-career people.
The best advice I can give early-career photographers seeking representation or shows is to heavily research your prospects. This is not rare advice—you’ll hear it from almost everybody—but hardly anybody does enough research. I certainly didn’t.
There was one systemic problem throughout the hotel where the PhotoLucida portfolio review was conducted. The lighting was terrible. It was spectrally spiky, preventing decent color rendition. It was dim. It came from all over the place, but the light sources weren’t diffused, causing specular reflections on the glossy prints no matter what angle you held them at. I sympathize with the organizers; they had to deal with the hotel as it was constructed. However, it made it hard for everybody to see what was really on the paper.
There is a great benefit of conventions like PhotoLucida to early-career photographers: contact with your fellow photographers. Although PhotoLucida is not juried, I found the quality of the work to be extremely high. There was plenty of opportunity for looking at other photographers’ work, and the photographers were uniformly generous in taking time to present their work in detail. They were happy to look at other people’s work too, although the comments were almost always complimentary. Looking at so much high quality work, and meeting so many creative, dedicated photographers is a wonderful experience, and one that can only increase your motivation to go home and do some great photography yourself.
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