08.21.08
Posted in Geeking Out at 7:02 am by Katie
NGM’s Director of Photography, David Griffin, had an interesting post on the balance of film vs. digital stories in this month’s issue of the magazine. Joel made the switch later than most, starting with Nikon’s D2X back in the summer of 2005. Three years and several massive investments later, we’re fully digital and adapting to it.
One of Joel’s main reasons for a late switch is the potential incompatibility or obsolescence of digital media. The example he usually cites is the original moon landing data — NASA still has it, but no longer has the machines to read the media. With slide film, you hold a transparency up to the light, and voila, there is your image. No special light or eyeball is required.
I recently had a personal run-in with the film-digital divide. Last Wednesday, I broke my ankle (in a very un-dramatic fall down all of three stairs.) The first set of x-rays from the urgent care doctor were digital, and they burned them to a DVD so we could pick them up and take them to the orthopedist (who would be casting my ankle once the swelling subsided.) Because my husband and I are what some people might call huge gigantic nerds, we brought along a laptop so we could have a gander at the disc ourselves. For those of you who are curious, here’s the fracture:
The DVD contained an auto-running program to read the x-rays, which were in a DICOM file format. Amos got them pulled up in Photoshop, no problem. The orthopedist, however, tried the disc in three different computers and couldn’t get it to work on any of them. We pulled them up for him on the laptop and saved Blue Cross Blue Shield the cost of three more x-rays.
They x-rayed me again once the cast was on to make sure everything was held in the right place, and I talked with the x-ray technician about their decision to still use film. He said they were waiting for the technology to improve a bit, and that their thirty year-old machine let them do things that they just couldn’t do digitally.
There’s no real moral to this story (except, perhaps, be careful on stairs.) It’s just interesting to see the analog/film - digital switch play itself out in another industry.
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07.28.08
Posted in In the Studio at 11:41 am by Katie
Joel is supposed to be on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 tonight (Monday 7/28/08) discussing his latest NGM story on Bioko Island. It’s television, so that could change at any moment, but that’s the news for now.
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06.11.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:07 pm by Katie
So there’s this legend that tornadoes will never hit Lincoln. There are a few versions of it — one attributes this to the bishop (we’re the seat of the diocese), one to Bob Devaney, and the more sensible ones to geography. I’m beginning to think that they’re all horse hockey.
The sirens went off again tonight, so I’m in the basement listening to our brand new weather radio. (It got here today, just in time.) Apparently good portions of the highway a mile or so from our house are under water. This is by far the craziest early summer weather I’ve experienced on this end of the state.
Anyway, while I’m killing time waiting for the warning to expire, here’s a velcro strap alternative from reader Richard:
I have a comment on the velcro strapping mentioned in your blog. Double lengths of adhesive-backed Velcro would certainly work for straps but would be a bit stiff. A much better solution is available from REI. Called Quick Tape it is basically the same think in a flexible design that can be cut to length. It comes in regular and heavy-duty.
See the link. http://www.rei.com/product/618739
Looks neat, and at under $1/foot it’s not too terribly priced.
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06.05.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:19 am by Katie
I grew up in western Nebraska, where summer storms whip themselves up to ferocious proportions over relatively flat expanses of land. I’ve probably spent time totaling two entire summers huddled in the basement watching the Weather Channel as tornadoes ripped through our county. Compared to some of the stuff I’ve seen out west, Lincoln’s storms are relatively mild. At least, that’s what I thought until this year.
The Sunday before Memorial Day, this happened in my back yard.
Then last week, I came into work and found this in the driveway.
The same night, a friend’s house in Aurora — which they haven’t fully moved into yet — got hit with a tree as well. Compared to a lot of the destruction between Kearney and York, a couple of trees on the ground isn’t much, I guess.
We don’t have cable and are generally pretty oblivious to any weather not immediately outside the window. My mom called last night to warn us that something nasty was headed our way. Tornadoes don’t usually hit Lincoln, and in ten years of living here I don’t think I’ve heard the sirens go off once. They went off last night, though, and that was enough to scare us into the basement. Hank the dog chewed on a bone whilst Amos and I shopped online for a weather radio.
For those of you unfamiliar with them, weather radios tune to specific frequencies that broadcast only about the weather in your area. Those stations also have some sort of magic emergency signal that can actually turn on your radio and alert you to anything particularly awful that’s going on. It’s the perfect thing for us, and I’ll actually feel a bit better once it arrives.
I checked the paper this morning to see how bad things got last night, and the first reports are not terrible. However, those of you in Nebraska should check the batteries in your flashlights and make sure you unplug your electronics when you go to bed. It looks like we’re in for more of the same tonight.
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05.09.08
Posted in Thinking at 6:40 am by Katie
The Brazilians have a word — gambiarra — that is used to describe home-brewed solutions and fixes. One of my loyal readers, Brian Strong of New Zealand, wrote in with the following two gambis:
I have a tip which may be useful to keep things together. Get the usual double lengths of adhesive-backed Velcro. Stick them back to back. Cut into useful lengths - 12 to 18 inches is what I use. You now have a bundle of self-fastening straps. Just wrap them around whatever you need to keep under control. I use mine for everything from tripod legs, loose raincoats around long lenses, fastening things to backpacks, around my trouser legs to keep bugs out — the list goes on and on. If you lose them its only pennies.
Long lens raincoat: Get a pair of rain trousers to fit about a 3-year old. Lay them out with the legs facing away. Take scissors and cut them down through the belt line to the crotch so you have two identical pieces [one leg and a body bit]. Thread leg over long lens and body bit over your camera. Put Velcro strap around far end of lens to hold it in place. Two bits of Velcro and a short piece to hold camera cover in place. The same trick can be used for a camo cover if you use one.
DIY velcro straps in multiple lengths will come in *very* handy here. Really, who can’t use more velcro ties?
Secondly, I was reading up on the Orphan Works bill and noticed one of my favorite thinkers, Larry Lessig, has weighed in on the issue.
Also, in case you haven’t already noticed, we’ve got some video of Joel online:
Full length talk at the EN Thompson Forum on World Issues and
A short video called Fragile Nature, featuring wildlife photos
Look for more coming soon. They will likely be more shorts, because (a) Joel won’t hold still long enough to do anything extended and (b) YouTube has ruined everybody’s attention span. Including mine.
Happy spring, folks!
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02.10.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:40 am by Katie
Photographer John Harrington has done a series of videos to help train new hires about his kits. Interesting to watch. I am, however AGHAST that there are no lens back caps or body caps present in the D3 camera kit. Even Joel uses those. I wonder how Harrington keeps his sensors from getting absolutely filthy.
Joel and I have talked about this before, but it’s worth repeating. With digital photography, crucial things (like CF cards, card readers, and USB cables) are often very tiny. If you forget them, though, you’re just as hosed as if you would’ve forgotten your camera.
One thing digital makes somewhat easier, though, is getting to the archive. I had to dig into the film yellowbox archives yesterday. (Yellowboxes — so called because it all used to be processed by Kodak, who packed slides in yellow boxes — are the not-even-close-to-selects from a shoot.) It involved moving 30 pound boxes around, well over my head, and wrestling with a cramped film room. Heck of a lot messier than pointing and clicking.
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01.26.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:39 am by Katie
Happy 2008, dear readers. The studio news:
* We’re now and all-Apple studio, save a pieced-together Windows server for non-vital data. I *heart* my new dual-screen workstation. (Had been using a five year-old Dell running Win2K with a CRT monitor. Now I can actually work with, you know, pictures.) Going from Mac at work to PC at home has really messed up my mad keyboard shortcut skillz.
* We now have the capability to do wide-format prints in-house, thanks to Epson. The new printer’s ink cartridges are the size of BetaMax cassettes, and I’m not even close to kidding.
* Former studio helper David Story is now in Antarctica — you can read more about him here: Link
News from Joel’s world - he recently finished up shooting on an endangered species story (slated, I believe, for ‘09), and just returned from another assignment in Africa (due out yet this year.) As far as we know, has no new flesh-eating parasites, and for that we are most thankful. We left his gear out in the truck overnight in hopes that freezing temperatures would kill off any hitchikers.
Personal news: Amos and I bought a house back in August. It’s a nice older place in a historic neighborhood and we love it. We also got a dog named Hank, who is a basset hound blue heeler mix. (Yes, weird, I know.) He looks like a basset hound wearing a blue heeler sweater. Here’s a photo of him pretending to be a fennec:
The lighting in that photo is provided by my beloved’s latest on-the-cheap invention — shop lights modified to hold lighting umbrellas and controlled with boxes intended to vary the speed on routers. He’s been tinkering with video and wanted to experiment with shop lights. At $6/light (including stands) plus under $50 for the rheostats, it’s a cheap way to play.
All for now — I’m running extemp draw at a speech meet and Round Two is about to start.
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08.26.07
Posted in Geeking Out at 8:08 am by Katie
… we leased an Apple XServe/XServe RAID system. In a way, it went against every fiber of my do-it-yourself being. Pay that much for hardware when I could build something similar for 2/3 or less of the cost? But then I started thinking about the logistics of rack-mounting a monster like that. And power supplies. And cooling. And backup. And expandability. And how much time I wasted getting our last server up and usable.
I kid you not, the hardest part of getting the Apple system up was mounting all the rack hardware and then wrestling the gear into it.
I’m even getting used to the slightly-different keyboard shortcuts. Networking between the two Mac Pro workstations and the PC and the printers hasn’t been much of an issue. And the workstations seem to require less fussing-over than the old PC ones did. We spend more time up and running (and working) and less time setting up, fixing and recovering (and not working.) It’s nice.
Something else that I suspect will be nice, very nice indeed: Nikon’s new D3.
In other news: August marks my eighth year at JS Inc, and just under 30% of my life spent doing this job. It would be an understatement to say that the job has changed a lot since I first learned how to file slides. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the good feeling I get from working here and surfing on the chaos.
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04.22.07
Posted in Geeking Out at 11:59 am by Katie
My beloved, Amos, is a Beastmaster and Cat Magnet. He is shown here playing some ‘tendo as Midget (so named because she was once the runt of the litter) lounges on his legs.
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03.22.07
Posted in Geeking Out at 4:14 pm by Katie
Oh, the time I could spend going over WordPress templates…
That’s my better half in the new header photo, by the way. It was taken by yours truly during our honeymoon in London this past October. He’s using my Voigtlander R2 to take some snapshots. But really, with a rangefinder, there are no snapshots.
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