My spy in Japan tells me that the new Canon 5D MKIII is due to be released any day now, although they’re not sure what it’s going to be named. I hope they stay with the 5D name, because it’s already seared into our psyche as near legendary status (like the ultra-cool, classic Leica M6);  and besides, “5E” sounds kind of lame, like the room number they send the boneheads to when they mess up. In Tlingit, Eeeee means something bad, so that will not do at all, no sir.

It was important that our guy blended easily into the crowds in Japan. We think it worked, because a few people approached him, asking something in Japanese. He replied with a smile that he was Ainu and mysteriously vanished back into the masses. The last time anyone saw him he was quickly firing off a few frames on the night train out of Tokyo.

This essay is kind of a departure for me, because just about all of my published material in books has been about art, not camera gear. For artists, digital techno gear has become something that we have to stay on top of in order to push our art along. It doesn’t necessarily mean that gear drives the look of our art, I think it means that we need to constantly question how to make it all easier to get the looks that we imagine.

I'd say that the 5D is the best DSLR of the first decade of the 21st Century, and that's saying a lot. Look at who has it at his side all the time. What it all comes down to is having the ability to allow our imaginations to have the run of the world, and in my opinion, Canon does this better than anyone else.

My heartfelt open letter to Canon. I hope they take it seriously, man.

Run-of-the-mill, dull digital camera review sites & dealers

I’ve been noticing that many of the typical digital camera review sites write nearly identical reviews of each other with little new information. Too many of them lean towards the banal techno-babble style and they often merely parrot the blurbs from the camera manufacturers. So much for original thinking. With the internet we’re pretty much overrun with dummies who simply cut and paste from other sites. Like we won’t notice. On the other hand, there are some very good ones out there too and I’ve come to look forward to their reviews before going to play with a new camera at the camera store. I’m impressed with B&H when I go to NY and had my own favorite people at Gassers in San Francisco. The first place I met my wife was at a camera store in San Francisco, so as you can see, I’m serious about this stuff, no messin’ around.

The Real Deal; the best photographic gear reviewers in history (stand up & take your hat off)

The premium labs for performing accurate scientific measurements of photographic equipment simply do not exist outside of camera manufacturers anymore. Dang. It means that the independent scientific quantification of photographic equipment is really quite minimal compared to past decades when it was very rigorous and lively. It means we’re regressing on this front, and if we don’t watch out, we may be grunting our reviews to each other.

The magazine "Modern Photography" had the best lab in the world for objective, precise measurements for an entire array of benchmark tests, along with a large staff of highly skilled technicians. They essentially epitomized the scientific independent review of cameras and lenses, so that manufacturer's claims could be either confirmed or repudiated with hard scientific facts, and subjectivity was removed from the equation. My version of the lab test is to drop a camera on the sidewalk and if it doesn't crack or break, it earns the "Dang Good" rating.

My own 5D MKII experiences

I got my own 5D MKII three years ago, in February of 2009, and it was love at first sight. I was wrangled into shooting an annual report for Sealaska Corporation in Alaska and needed to bring a good all-around camera with me. The Canon 5D MKII was perfect because it  worked just as well in a studio setting as in a driving winter blizzard; harsh elements. I ran it through it’s paces, gave it the works from a hard driving pro who wrings every little bit out of his gear. After that I used the camera on a one-year Arts and Humanities Fellowship on a project having to do with the Global Climate Crisis, a couple trips to Aotearora (New Zealand) to work with cool Maori artists, and various art projects. It hasn’t failed me yet.

I’m fairly familiar with this 5D MKII and have grown to like it’s tough build, fairly compact size, ease of use and very intuitive controls, not to mention its sumptuous 21 Megapixel photographs.I like how Canon has evolved their camera designs from one camera generation to the next, because if you know one well, chances are good you’ll know the others too. Keep that going Canon, it’s brilliant. However, there are a few improvements that could be made, and hopefully they’ll show up on the new 5D MKIII, so here goes with my suggestions.

Drum roll please:

#1 Increased megapixel size and more efficient electronics, the medium format slayer on the loose

Of course, a digital camera is really a computer with a lens that captures images, and like us, it’s only as good as the brains that run it. I vote for the one with the better brains.  In that sense, Canon did a superb job with it’s Digic 4 processor. They say that every 18 months computers double their processing power and speed, so we’re likely in for quite a jump in hardcore image crunching power with the new MKIII. I would bet that we have an increase in ISO speed with less noise, but who knows? If this is the case, it would also foster the logic of increased megapixel size. I’m guessing 38 Megapixels, only because of the math with improved processor performance.

Ok give it up; you know that our number one request is more pixels. Hand 'em over.

If we do in fact end up with a 5D that has 38 Megapixels at an affordable price, that would mean that this MKIII went beyond being a straightforward DSLR and could theoretically represent a medium format slayer; that digital medium format cameras are on notice that their days are numbered. Especially if all those pixels can be fit onto a full sized sensor that didn’t have to make the leap to a larger medium format sized sensor. If this is the case, I can see why it took longer than usual for this MKIII to be released.

I would also make the argument that Canon should not charge a medium format price for a camera with this amount of megapixels. One of the reasons that the Canon 5D MKII was such a bestseller was because Canon did not get overly greedy with the price and charged a fair price for the camera. If Canon wants sales to skyrocket for a camera with this kind of configuration, it has to be priced affordably or else they’ll just sit on shelves in the store.

I’d like to see the electronics made more efficiently so that they use less power. I realize that the big LCD screen sucks up a lot of battery power, maybe that could be tweaked to be more efficient. Maybe even a firmware option so that only 40% of the screen is used in a pinch when you’re running low on power. The batteries are inordinately expensive. On the other hand, I am  happy with the image processor. It operates quickly and I’ve never had to wait for the frame capture to catch up with my shooting, even when shooting in fast bursts (such as my aerial photos of a coal mine from a small plane when I had to shoot like a machine gunner).

#2 Keep the full frame sensor size

I do like the size of the 5D body, but it could be made even smaller. I know some people with big hands like big cameras, but let them be ditch diggers or something more suited to their physique. Let us normal sized people have smaller cameras. This means not making the sensor larger, that would be a step backwards.

The full frame sensor is a perfect size for the array of lenses already out there, so I’d advocate for the sensor to stay the same size for optimal image quality while making the body smaller. In the future, smaller sensors are going to be the norm, but the technology is not there yet. I can easily imagine image sensors eventually being reduced to only the smallest fraction of the current full sized sensor, which will be a most excellent prospect because it will also mean having pro cameras and lenses that are only a fraction of the current size. Until that day, keep the full sized sensor and try and cram more pixels onto it without compromising image quality. Big cameras are a 20th century contrivance and should join the ranks of 8-track tape players, so pretty please with sugar on top, don’t make the 5D larger. Good riddance big cameras, bring on the tiny cameras with quality that current high-end pro cameras can only dream about.

#3 Wifi & GPS, because after all, we’re on the run, always

My next wish for the new 5D MKIII is Wifi. Look, it would just fit on the far left! The portrait is of the honorable Dr. Walter Soboleff, for the annual report shot for Sealaska, of course made with the Canon 5D MKII.

Wifi capability for a pro digital camera is long overdue. Look at what makes the iPhone so popular, it’s ability to easily send photos. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to log onto a wifi connection and have the ability to send high-end photographs? This would help make any pro DSLR an instant bestseller. Just make sure that the controls are fast and intuitive so that we don’t have to mess around too much, we’re likely to be in a hurry. Wifi should’ve been made available to pros before amateurs, but better late than never. As long as you’re at it, put in a GPS, because we like to occasionally geotag photos along the way, it would come in handy. It’s critical to have the ability to easily switch it off though, because after all, some of our places are meant to be secret; mystery is good.

#4 Make it more rugged man, don’t hold back

While shooting a coal-fired power plant for one of my projects, it was driving rain when I arrived, and it only got worse as the afternoon progressed. It sounded like little pebbles hitting the windshield. I was losing light fast and had to do something, so I jumped out and fired off a bunch of shots from a few different angles, got back in the car to dry off the camera and repeated this until I got the shots I needed. This 5D earned my respect that day, and the photographs looked exceptional; way better than I could have expected.

Don’t get me wrong, the 5D MKII is tough, but it lacks the formidable feel of the previous generation of film cameras. Even after all these years of shooting with DSLR’s in snow storms and pouring rain, I still get the feeling that they’ll fail me if I shoot in the snow or rain for too long. Maybe it means using an even more robust covering with more rugged seals. I noticed that the camera body covering gets a little slippery when it gets moist. I want a camera that’ll be able to take a direct phaser blast and keep on shooting without skipping a beat, no wimpy cameras allowed.

Leica has a practice of sometimes letting people design a special edition of a camera. If Canon would let me design a limited edition 5D MKIII, it would be made out of brass, have special heavy-duty seals and the black paint would be weathered around the edges so that the brass would show through. How cool would that be?

#5 Figure out how to get rid of the image sensor filter

Let’s be honest here, it’s kind of ridiculous to make an image sensor with a filter in front of it that softens the image sharpness. This is where film is still better than digital photography. You can’t beat the sharpness from a film camera with a set of high quality lenses, and in the second decade of the 21st century, that’s just plain silly. Are sharp photos too much to ask for? This may be even more challenging to get rid of because of the addition of the integrated cleaning system, which puts even more material in front of the sensor, but does make it cleaner. It’s like making lenses out of the best quality glass and putting a cheap filter on it, resulting in unsharp photos. In this instance, film beats digital cameras, it’s no contest.

#6 Do a better job of streamlining the stinkin’ postprocessing tasks

After days deep in the shadowy labyrinths of the postprocessing mines you feel gritty & thrashed, and wonder why you're spending your life in front of a computer instead of behind a camera. Fresh air and bright light seem alien after days of digital postprocessing grunt work.

Every single photographer will agree that postprocessing simply takes way too long. It eats into slim profit margins and turns photographers into computer slaves. Instead of spending time on the creative end of things behind the camera, we’re spending more and more time in front of a computer doing postprocessing tasks. It means that our digital workflow is taking way too long. For an example, why not have the photographs shot at a native resolution of 150 or 300 pixels per inch, since these are already standard sizes for digital editing? Programs like Lightroom are automating many of the postprocessing tasks, but the interface settings between the camera and postprocessing software could be improved and speeded up substantially.

Another reality is that editing film is way faster than editing digital photos. It used to be that a professional photographer would shoot with transparency film, do a set of edits on a light table and simply put the film away in some orderly fashion. A big job could be edited and archived in less than a couple hours. With digital photography it can take days instead of hours to do the same thing. In this sense, digital photography is still way behind film photography and needs to be dramatically speeded up.

Maybe it simply means figuring out a way to speed up the electronic pipeline between the camera and the computer so that archiving and database protocols are way more automated than now. I get the feeling that this is caveman work, striking two stones together to build a fire and we’re missing something very basic here. Maybe it just means that this particular part of the evolution of digital photography is going too slow and something needs to be jump started to get it up to the proper speed. A better compression scheme for files? Pixels that are dual function? You read it here first. This is a copyrighted idea so don’t steal it. Fly me over to Japan to talk to your research and development people; I’ve got some interesting ideas on how to do this, we can solve this bottleneck.

#7 Sturdy interchangeable LCD viewfinder prism & magnifier attachment

One of the really amazing things that medium format camera manufacturers did was to make an entire array of viewfinders that used high quality optics for image magnification and to help shade bright light. Many also had high quality prisms so that you could hold the camera comfortably and naturally while composing your photos.This should be a built-in option for high-end viewfinders to attach to the 5D MKIII LCD screen. For an example, look at the variety of viewfinders that Hasselblad made for their viewing screens. They were both lightweight, had high quality viewing, and built extra rugged so they could take being banged around in everyday use. It’s completely absurd to not have the option of a built-in viewfinder for the LCD screen on a professional camera. I hope that the 5D MKIII eliminates this glaring shortcoming, especially with the advent of shooting digital video, but even with everyday still photography.

Canon can learn from Hasselblad with premium viewfinders. The interface needs to be made out of sturdy metal that has a simple attachment with few moving parts and made as compact as possible. Hasselblad viewfinders were elegant and built like armored tanks and you were able to choose from various prisms that allowed for viewing from different angles (with an LCD, 90º for looking straight down, 45º for near eye level, and straight out for looking straight into the LCD viewfinder with just magnification and no prism).

#8 Metering, camera controls, digital noise, white balance, etc.

I’m generally impressed with the camera controls and would advocate for increased simplicity whenever possible. As the electronics, image processor and firmware become ever-more sophisticated, their design should aim towards making the camera operations easier and more automated. It’s good to go into manual override along the way too, and there is much to be said for a clean, uncluttered design. If the controls become more sophisticated, something is wrong, because the controls should become simpler as the circuitry becomes more sophisticated. Therefore, the MKIII should be even easier to operate than the MKII.

I do like the philosophy of using dials and buttons for many of the more commonly used controls, it is way faster than navigating through all the layers of menu items. The menu items are nicely and logically planned out too though; I’d try and hold onto this simplicity in future versions.

There is always a bit of digital noise to deal with and this has to do with improved sensor technology. I get the sense that this is very evolutionary and will improve by degrees, unless there is a leap in technology, which could very well may happen at some point. I am certain that in 20 years we’ll be laughing at how crude today’s high-end DSLR cameras were designed. Same with things like white balance and more precise metering. It seems to me that it’s time for a leap in image quality for RAW files with things like an expanded exposure latitude with a broader dynamic range. I don’t want the sky, only better digital photographs.

Same with white balance; it seems that this is also one of the holy grails of digital photography in that it’s a constant quest for making it better. The bottom line lies with how well the camera sensor and image processor interprets specific scenes. The easiest scenes to replicate are simply ones with bright daylight. Good old 5000º Kelvin is easy as pie to interpret, even for cheap point and shoot amateur cameras. I would give the 5D MKII high grades on making accurate photographs in tricky lighting. One of the hallmarks of a good pro is how they make great photos in low light or mixed lighting. I would encourage the Canon research and development people to keep hammering away at how the 5D interprets white balance and to make it even more sensitive to the light and to keep striving for precision, especially in challenging situations.

#9 Don’t sweat the small stuff, but…

I do miss having a built-in flash, even if it’s a piddly wink. It’s useful in a pinch when you just need a burst of light quickly. Sometimes I try raising my hands towards the heavens and bellowing “LET THERE BE LIGHT,” but it hasn’t worked that well yet. I’ll get back to you on that one.

I was horrified at the tinny quality of the built-in microphone. It sounded like a 1960’s recording device, not a 21st century microphone on a top of the line digital camera. For the first time ever, I found myself purchasing an external sound recorder for one of my pro cameras. Even a video neophyte like me didn’t like the built-in mic, so video pros must’ve been even more disappointed.

I like it that there are interchangeable viewing screens and would advocate for a center split screen viewfinder so that photographers can focus more accurately when using manual focus.

Yes, we photographers can still sometimes focus better than the autofocus function, especially in tricky situations where you’re using a specialized lens or are shooting a scene with a complex composition where the auto settings may be utterly confused and it’s preventing a photograph from being made quickly. We pros need speed in all situations and it simply does not do to wait for the camera to try and decide where to focus, which is why a better interchangeable viewing screen is critical for getting sharp photos fast.

High Definition Video is all the rage

I’ll confess that video is my weakness and I hardly use it, although I am learning. Shooting high definition video is obviously both an art and a skill with a broad array of collaborators that are necessary if you are to do a bona fide video production. I can see that shooting video is radically different than still photography, and it takes way more production skills in order to do it well, such as scriptwriting, directing, sound, lighting, editing and so on. One of the key elements that is driving the push towards video is the reality that so much of the online content is leaning towards video, and even amateur point and shoot cameras can shoot decent video for online purposes. It makes me curious as to whether us photography professors need to rethink our photography curriculums so that they are more inclusive of current trends like digital video. In the past, video production would be a separate program; maybe now they need to be more closely linked.

I’m not even going to pretend to be an HD digital video pro, but instead, will send you to the Canon website where they have a very informative place for you to learn about what the Canon 5D is capable of producing in the hands of video professionals; check this out:

Canon DLC: Gallery: Cinema EOS: Insights from the Crew.

Canon has an interesting and useful "Digital Learning Center" segment to their website. I liked this one in particular, because they had a cinematographer and director talking about how they used a 5D for a video production. Pretend the video isn't a wannabe copy of "Blade Runner," but rather more an exercise in what the camera is capable of producing on HD video. Then click on the "Cinema EOS Media Gallery" link for more samples of video shot on the 5D. The clear message here is that you can get big-budget looks at a fraction of existing production costs. I suspect that the 5D may lead to other large sensor HD video cameras designed specifically for video, but we'll see.

State of the art

Well, there you have it; my nine (or was that 11?) suggestions for taking the MKIII way better than the MKII. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I suspect that the camera is due to be released fairly soon, and it’ll be fun to see which features Canon has implemented into their new 5D. And I hope that Canon takes me up on my request to talk with their research people as to how to add dramatic speed to their pixels. Until then, happy shooting.

"Winter in Juneau" was really shot in a blizzard in Juneau, deep in the heart of winter. I was thinking about Raven as one of our mythical creatures, and how the image is kind of a bridge between two bodies of work.

If you shoot with Canon professional cameras for over 20 years, you earn a tattoo that qualifies you for secret preferential services. Don't tell anyone I told you.

Story and Photographs Copyright Larry McNeil, 2012, All Rights Reserved.

We have much to be thankful for. Sh tugáa haa ditee yagéiyi át kaax.

(From the Tlingit Phrase of the Week from the Sealaska Heritage Institute website.)

Our thankfulness stems from having known Dr. Soboleff and being the recipient of his decades of service to the community doing so many distinct tasks for the community that he so obviously loved.

Dr. Walter Soboleff at the pulpit of the Memorial Presbyterian Church in Juneau, where he became Alaska's first Native ordained minister (photo courtesy of First Alaskans Magazine).

Thinking about Dr. Soboleff’s passage “Into the forest” as they say, left me sad. His service to the Church and Native organizations intertwined with so many families in Southeast Alaska. He performed our parent’s wedding ceremony back in the 1940’s; it must’ve been soon after he earned his degree at the Theological Seminary from the University of Dubuque. My only baby picture has my dad cradling me and my mom holding my hand on the same day that Walter baptized me in the Presbyterian Church. Everyone is in their Sunday best and it’s a happy photograph.

Like many other teenagers of the day, my mom, Anita Brown McNeil was one of his students in the church bible school in the early 1940’s when she was still a teenager. Our family connection with Walter goes back long before I was born.

These are some of the graphics that I made for the Sealaska Annual Report. I really love the way the raven is marching, the ancient weaving designs, including the killer whale teeth on the right border.

In January of 2009, I got a call from Todd Antioquia, the Director of Communications for Sealaska Corporation. He asked if I was interested in doing some commissioned art for their upcoming annual report. The theme had to do with “the spirit of perseverance,” and they wanted me to photograph three elders who epitomized this spirit and use my visual aesthetic with the compositions.

One of the elders was Dr. Walter Soboleff. We talked about how we wanted the final print to look, and I loved the idea of making prints that honored these three elders from Southeast Alaska (Dr. Soboleff represented Tlingits, Dolores Churchill represented Haidas and Mary Jones represented Tsimshians).

The first step towards this project was making the portraits. I shot them all with a Canon 5DMKII 24MB camera with a set of portable strobes set up in one of the meeting rooms at the Sealaska building in February of 2009. There was a heavy snowstorm and Walter was attending meetings all day and it was challenging to fit me into his busy schedule.

I had a good idea about how I wanted to portray Dr. Soboleff in his collaged print because I knew that he had a gentle sense of humor and a sharp wit. My challenge was to try and capture this fleeting moment. He came into my makeshift studio with a very neutral expression, like he was deep in thought about something else. Having worked for various projects with Sealaska over the decades, I knew a lot of his colleagues very well, so I started asking about which one he left in his dust today, and that made him actually laugh. I told him “I bet it was so and so,” and that left him grinning. It was a good natured banter, and I got him to laugh again by saying “I bet ’so and so’ came back from lunch looking like he needed a nap,” and he laughed again, which is the photograph that I ended up using. We both enjoyed the good-natured jokes, because in reality, his colleagues are the hard driving types who don’t put up with much nonsense in their lives.

When I'm shooting portraits, I'm really fast behind the camera and try to capture the very elusive looks that I'd preconceived.

I was finished with the photographs in pretty short order, and he stood up, shook my hand and gave me a nice complement. He’s had his portrait made dozens of times by pros over the years, and he said “You’re good. You’re really good.” I told him, “I ought to be, I was baptized by one of the most intellectual ministers in Juneau.” He laughed again, because he clearly remembered both my mom and grandmother, and of course, baptizing me all those decades ago.

I was very happy with how Walter's collage turned out in the Sealaska Annual Report. It was a labor of love, as were the other two. My intent was to have Walter making eye contact with the viewer, allow their eye to go in a general circle and back to him again.

Walter’s gentle spirit is what made the print work. Here is to you Dr. Walter Soboleff, for having made this a much kinder, better world for all of us.

Sh tugáa haa ditee yagéiyi át kaax.

Story Copyright Larry McNeil, 2011, All Rights Reserved.

If you’re like nearly everyone else, you’ve got shoeboxes filled with old family snapshots and photos under the bed or in the garage. Hey, it’s what we do. Or rather, did. Lots of people have not really thought about whether their digital photos will be around in the next decade, let alone 100 years from now. The photography film paradigm has shifted and nobody is left to fill the void with digital shoeboxes. Can’t we just stuff all the memory cards in a bottom drawer or something? Ironically enough, it’s one of the things I’ve heard that some people are doing with their digital photos. Other people are uploading their photos online somewhere; that’s good enough, right?

My great-granddaughter's Cyberdude, hand delivering my Gold DVD's to Juneau in the year 2131. The discs are well over 100 years old, and thanks to a smarty-pants relative, the first generation of digital photographs from the McNeil clan still exists.

So what is the best way to archive your digital photos? Your hard drive? Nope. Online storage companies? Definitely NO. Memory cards? Nope. A shoe box? The bottom drawer in the spare bedroom? The storage shed? Your camera? No, no, no and NO.

Yes, Optical Media is the answer. It’s the only digital media that is guaranteed to last decades. This means either CD-R, DVD-R or Blu-Ray recordable discs.

What makes me a Mr. Smarty Pants about this? I’ve been teaching digital photography since 1997, which was also before most photography schools had a digital photography curriculum, and before most of them realized that a digital transformation was soon to take place with photography. My own photography, research and art as both a scholar and artist was and is about transformation, so it all morphed from a cosmic digital enigma to something that made a bit more sense. I had my first digital photography curriculum approved by an art school in 1993. This makes me a bona fide authority on digital photography, and my core intent here is to simply help you make your digital photographs last as long as possible, and hopefully to have a bit of fun along the way.

Scientists have coined the term “Digital Amnesia” to note the reality of lost digital information that is already going on, especially with outdated digital technologies, such as floppy discs (remember those?) and the former pro media such as Zip, Jaz, Bernouli, etc. In my opinion, hard drives fit in this category because they lose so much information, especially as people get new computers, or hard drives corrupt data. There is a booming business out there with hard drive data recovery, which should be an indicator of their overall reliability. I’ve lost entire folders of photos over the years, and luckily got most of them back with software hard drive recovery programs.

Hard Drives: I never imagined that hard drives would incite some photographers to be such impassioned digital zealots. You’d think that I was disparaging their mother’s honor or something. I’ve had photographers literally get red-faced angry when I told them that hard drives are not any good for long-term photo archiving. One even emailed me what amounted to a long, tedious hard drive manifesto. Daang. Ok, this is not personal, step back, take a deep breath and repeat this digital mantra soothingly after me:

Hard drives are the fastest way to upload your memory cards, and some people confuse this convenience for them being the supreme digital media of the universe. Well, (ahem) they’re not. Hard drives have an appalling habit of crashing and losing data, it’s a part of their mechanical persona. They are only designed to last a half a decade at best, especially if you give them hard use. When you think of it, hard drives are at their essence kind of a crude 20th Century phenomenon. I think they’ll be replaced by some other media by the end of the decade.

How old is your oldest hard drive? Be honest. I’m willing to bet that it isn’t older than five years. I can guarantee that your hard drive won’t last twenty years, let alone over a hundred. Take my word for it. Hard drives are convenient temporary storage, nothing more. People have lost millions, if not billions of their precious photographs to hard drives. Don’t join them.

Same with back-up hard drives. So what? It’s still a hard drive. On the other hand, using a backup hard drive is a sound archiving protocol. Just remember it’s still temporary and not expected to last long, so is not suited for long-term archiving.

Online storage companies use hard drives, so forget them too. A couple of years ago, one of the professional storage industry leaders went out of business unexpectedly. Thousands of professional photographers lost millions of their best digital photos that they thought were safely archived. Can you imagine that? All the company could say was, “Oops! Sorry, they’re all gone! By the way, we’re not liable for the loss and we’re also broke.” Photographers had zero recourse and could do little more than whimper about a tough lesson, which was DO NOT USE HARD DRIVES FOR PHOTO ARCHIVING. PERIOD! This goes double for online photo sharing sites, like Facebook and Flickr. Websites in general have a very short shelf life and disappear startlingly fast. Disappearing websites could be the subject for not only a blog entry, but an entire book.

Back to Optical Media. What makes them better than hard drives? The easy answer is simple longevity. They are the longest lasting digital media out there. Nothing else even comes close. What makes them last longer is how they store digital information. First of all, they’re non-magnetic (hard drives are sensitive to anything magnetic) and the digital information is literally burned into the dye substrate with a laser, which makes tiny physical pits within the disc.

Not all discs are created equally, and the cheaper run of the mill DVD-R’s and CD-R’s are made with aluminum and an inexpensive dye material sandwiched into polycarbonate. These are the name-brand discs that you typically get from an office supply store. They’re high quality, but are not the best. The top-of the line discs that photographers should be using are called Gold discs, such as the ones made by Mitsui. Instead of an aluminum layer, they use 24 karat gold, which more than triples their life, and they also use a special Phthalocyanine (try to say that fast three times) dye, which has been rated to last over 100 years. They cost substantially more than regular DVD-R’s or CD-R discs, but on the other hand, this is your photo archive we’re talking about.

This here is Gold, folks, designed to last over 100 years. The good stuff. I found a reputable seller on ebay who sells the Mitsui DVD-R's for around $100.00 for a spindle of 50, which makes them around $2.00 per disc.

Women have been the family photographers for nearly 100 years and manufacturers learned this early on, targeting their ads towards them, right up to today with camera phones. Our mom shot the most beautiful Kodachrome 8mm home movies back in the 1950's and I must confess that I have them in a shoebox in a bottom drawer.

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Part 2

The nitty gritty stuff

Burning discs is easy these days. It just takes a bit of patience. If you’ve got a Mac, Toast Lite is a great program to use for burning discs. You essentially just drag and drop folders, name your disc and burn away. It does take patience though. I find that it’s easier to use DVD-R discs because they hold 4.7 Gigabytes of storage, which is nice. Name your disc with your last name and whatever your subject matter happens to be.

Organizing your photos prior to burning them

I like to organize my photos via the heirarchical database order, just because it’s easiest to remember. For an example, the starting point is a single folder on my desktop named something easy to remember, like “Digital Cameras.”

The easiest way to navigate to your photos is to make a single folder on your desktop named something like "Digital Cameras." Then make a subfolder for each camera you have.

I’m a big believer in simplicity and ease of use. Things should be fast and easy. Since I’ve got a bunch of digital cameras, I find it’s easiest to navigate using the above folder system. Use whichever one is most logical for you though. Sometimes if I have specific subjects, I’ll make a folder specifically for that; for an example, when I went home to Juneau last summer, I made a folder called “Juneau” within the June of 2010 folder. Just use whatever folder system makes the most sense to you.

Digital Cameras (a step back for a moment)

Set your camera to it’s highest resolution. We’re aiming for getting the highest quality photos here, and if we’re going through the trouble of making photos in the first place, you may as well make the best ones you can. Get the largest memory cards you can afford. They’re pretty cheap these days and it’ll make you grow horns out of your head to have a full memory card while in the midst of shooting something cool.

Many of the little point & shoot cameras are now pretty darned good too; use the same archiving model for all your cameras.

Mobile phone cameras are becoming very common, and some people use them more than a regular digital camera, just because it’s always right there in their pocket. You still need to organize and archive these photos. If you’re like me, you have thousands of them and lots of them are very, very good.  Both your regular digital camera and cell phone camera shoots high quality video now too. You’ll find that they make very large files, and it is important to archive all of these too. Just use the existing “Movie folder,” on your computer and make subfolders within it and organize them in much the same way as your photographs and burn them to DVD-R discs too. You may want to dedicate an external hard drive to just photos and videos since they take up so much drive space and archive them to DVD-R’s as you go along.

This Pro Canon 5D shoots 21 Megapixel photos and will plug up your hard drive in nothing flat. It shoots fabulous HD Video too, which essentially means it gets it's own external hard drive. Yep, it all goes to DVD-R's, because even a 500GB drive gets filled up quickly. I also use Firewire 800 connections to speed things up a bit. A nice coffee can be worth it's weight in gold dvd's.

Many digital cameras have what is known as the RAW file format. It’s the best file format out there, and if your camera has this capability, I’d strongly advise using it at all times. You can also shoot a RAW file and jpeg simultaneously, which is a cool option if you mostly do things like uploading your photos to online sharing sites. If you don’t want to mess with RAW files, you can still shoot them and archive them for later editing. RAW files are great for low light and tricky lighting situations. It can render good quality photos from poorly exposed images, especially using a program like Lightroom.

Archiving Programs & RAW Converters

You don’t necessarily need a photo archiving database program. In theory, you can just make all your folders and burn them directly as you go along. Easy as pie, no fuss, no mess, no interface to muck things up. On the other hand, photo archiving programs do additional things like perfecting a photo (color corrections, sharpening, resizing, reduce noise, making slideshows, galleries, etc.) and doing RAW photo conversions.

Most pros use some kind of  photo editing and database program for their archiving, and on the professional end it’s dominated by Adobe’s Lightroom, and Apple’s Aperture programs. They’re really database programs that are optimized to view, edit, organize and render RAW and other image files. Some people really like Apple’s iPhoto program, but it’s an amateur lightweight program and limited with how it organizes photos. It’s also arbitrary and heavy-handed with how it limits your ability to control your archive. My advice is to avoid it and cough up the money for Lightroom when you can afford it.

The cool part about the Lightroom site is that it has lots of free and easy to understand online videos that teaches you how to use the various components.

Aperture is a direct competitor to Lightroom. They're both very sophisticated and excellent programs for archiving your photos. If you like iPhoto, you may want to gravitate towards Aperture. If you're a pro, you'll find that more people in the industry are using Lightroom, and to fit in with this crowd you may want to use this instead of Aperture. They're both great programs.

When you use these programs, you still end up with folders to burn to your optical media. If you can do all this editing stuff prior to burning your discs, consider yourself a professional calibre photographer, and can also call yourself a Smarty Pants Photographer. Congratulations. However, like mentioned above, if you’re an amateur who just wants to ensure that your precious family snapshots are going to last as long as possible, just do the organizing and burning to discs. That’s more than enough.

After the Burn

After you’ve burned your discs, you can write on them with a sharpie pen. There is some debate about getting ink on the discs themselves, so try writing the information on the tiny blank area next to the center hole. It’s pretty small, but you can write some basic information there with a fine-tipped sharpie. Don’t use labels, it just takes up lots of time to print and likely isn’t good for the discs anyway. Always handle the discs by the outside edges, making sure you don’t get any fingerprints on the surface areas.

DVD-R pages are way easier to use than the jewel cases. The jewel cases will start using up too much space. If you add index pages, you'll start seeming like a real live photo archivist. Store your discs in a cool, dry dark place.

The last step has to do with more of a professional archive. Pros make two of each disc, one to store off site and the other to use on a regular basis as working discs. The theory is that just in case anything disastrous happens to your house or office, you always have a duplicate set somewhere else. I definitely do this, because my livelihood depends on digital photographs and images. Not only that, my images are very valuable and represents nearly all of my work since the mid-1990’s and it would indeed be a catastrophe to lose any of them (the sound of knocking on wood here).

Another solid archiving protocol for pros is to make prints of the images you want to last the longest. Kodachrome was rated as being the longest lasting color film, but they’re discontinued now. If it’s a black & white print, make a platinum or palladium hand-coated photo emulsion; they last much longer than silver prints. Many of the newer digital printers, such as Espon, use inks that are rated for decades of life, much longer than regular color darkroom prints. Wilhelm Research does scientific research on the stability and preservation of digital photographs and films and makes their findings freely available to the pubic via their most excellent website.

My last bit of advice is to approach this as a long-term endeavor and to start your archive a few discs at a time, especially if you feel overwhelmed. Start with your most recent photos and go backwards, one disc at a time. You may want to wait until you have a few months worth of photos to archive, and look at this as something you do three times a year or something like that. If you’re a pro, you do this archive the moment you’re done shooting, or the next day.

Have fun, and here’s to having your great-granddaughter enjoying your photos in the year 2031 and beyond.

All text and photos Copyright Larry McNeil, 2011, All rights reserved. Please get permission from McNeil prior to using any of it. Thanks.

It occurred to me this morning that it seems a bit arbitrary to measure our journey around our home star on this day, January 1st. A new year. I like to think that every day is the start of a new year, but on the other hand I don’t have to worry much about astronomical details in my everyday life. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah was back in September. The Mayan new year starts in July, the sacred color is blue, and the idea of renewal rules the day. Each culture of the world has their own measurement system for years and seasons- what’s yours?

At any rate, most people on Earth note today as being the fist day of the new year of 2011 CE (Common Era). It seems that a commonality with humans and the measurement of time involves how long it takes to circle our star and nearly everyone embraces the idea of renewal, regardless of which cultural or celestial calendar they use.

In that dim blue light of renewal, my first act of the new day of the new year was to make a photograph. I walked out the back door and saw the crescent moon over the hill in our back yard. It was beautiful, and I shot off a number of frames.

My first photo of 2011, the view outside our back door in Idaho.

I shot this with my Canon 5D, a wonderful digital camera. I noticed that it had digital noise and found myself wishing for Kodachrome, which would have rendered this scene without any noise and offered rich colors and detail. Heavy sigh.

It was a beautiful sight and I stood there quietly until my camera started frosting over so I went inside to warm up. Happy new year, and run with the renewal thing. Where’s the coffee?