All posts by Thomas Pindelski

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Multi-media rocks!

Technique

What’s a web presence without sound and movies?

As my horizons have widened and simple creation – aided by great Mac software – has made establishing a sophsticated web presence far easier, I find myself reflecting as to why so few photographers’ web sites are silent. And stationary.

Adding sound is very easy with free tools like Audacity and inexpensive (if overpriced) digital sound recorders like the Edirol.

By way of example, a fellow photographer started working with me on a photo book some six months ago. What started out as a hard cover picture book has gestated into a web-based eBook with pictures, sound and QuickTime movies. Now which, for a photographer, do you think is more compelling?

True, it’s still not as easy to ‘leaf through’ an online book, despite advances in laptops, as with a hard copy tome, but then I don’t see how you can enjoy sound and movies in the latter.

Stay tuned for our upcoming twenty-first century interactive book.

Cheap sound recording for your computer

Photography

Add quality sound with a USB microphone.

With the growing focus in my work on multi-media, adding sound becomes an important part of the picture.

If all you want to do is add sound voice-overs to your web pages or podcasts, there’s a cheap, under $80 microphone, the Samson, that fits the bill nicely.

It may not be portable like the Edirol recorder I use, and it is not stereophonic, but then it’s not $400 either, and anyone with a notebook computer could use it in the field. The microphone plugs into a USB port and needs no external power supply.

Sound memories

Technique

Sounds add greatly to memories.

The very first column in these pages spoke about the nostalgia of family albums. I could not but help being reminded of it the today when a singularly unusual thing happened.

I was rummaging about in the desk drawer looking for something when my old Sony microcassette dictaphone surfaced from the dark recesses. Seeing it brought memories flooding back. Not of all the times I had used it in business to dictate cover-your-rear memoranda in the world of corporate politics. No, that is mercifully forever behind me now. Rather, I recalled that the last time I had put this great, if now very dated, analog tape recorder to use was some three years ago when our son was but one year old. He used to hang out in his crib and merrily squeal to himself as he discovered his vocal chords. So I had switched it on ‘record’ and placed it in his room under the crib, so he could chat away undisturbed.

Coming back half an hour later, sure enough, there were several minutes of squealing and general joie de vivre on the tape. I put it back in the desk drawer and pretty much forgot about it until it surfaced again today. Now with my new awareness of the value added by sound to my photographic efforts, it immediately occurred to me that the tape had to be somehow recovered and placed on the family web site, next to the snaps of our son. This proved trickier than you would think.

You see, the tired old tape, used who knows how many times, decided to come off the end spool when I rewound it. Now these cassettes are not rebuildable, being heat sealed, unlike in days of yore when they were actually screwed together. And the idea of somehow transplanting the precious tape to another microcassette was a prospect I dared not contemplate. Why not buy a regular tape cassette and splice in the tape from the microcassette? And she was right – the tape sizes are identical and I had always used the 1 7/8 inches/second tape speed on the Sony for best quality. That’s the same speed regular cassettes run at.

Off to the local Target store where, to my dismay, I was hosed down for no fewer than ten cassette tapes, individual ones no longer being sold. Still, at $7, the damage was bearable, particularly given the importance of my mission. Back home, I pulled out enough tape to make room for the spliced section coming from the microcassette, managed to get hold of the tape pigtail in the latter, and glued in the whole tape with superglue, winding it in laboriously with a pencil through the hub….analog to digital was never so difficult.

The next step was to track down a tape cassette player – our tape cassettes exited stage left years ago. Then it occurred to me that I had an old boom box in a guest room and before you could say ‘yipee’ I had the tape playing on the boom box with my Edirol digital recorder placed nearby.

Into Audacity with the MP3 file, a few moments later a noise sample was made and the noise filtered out (Audacity is great!) and our happy son made his way to the family web site for all to enjoy. They’re just squeals to you, so I will not repeat them here, but for us it’s a wonderful enhancement to our memories of Winston when he was but one year old.

So when you take pictures of your kids, why not record the sounds they make too?

A related lesson is to digitize all your old media – records, tapes, pictures, because before long it will be impossible to get the playback devices these need. Plus, backing-up of digital is very easy.

The photo gallery of the future

Photography

Flat screens continue to get cheaper.

If you are in a high sales tax state the chances are fair that you have purchased expensive electronic or photographic goods out of state by mail order. The sales taxes saved, not to mention the satisfaction of knowing that you are starving the beast that is government, outweigh shipping costs.

So it’s not lost on me that the wonderful B&H AV catalog is not only from an out of state vendor to this Californian, but also contains some 35 pages dedicated to televisions. Or, as I prefer to think of them, picture frames.

The traditional gallery model, adopted in my home theater requires the viewer to walk around and gaze at each wall hung picture in turn. He can, of course, enjoy an interactive experience by clicking on the hotspots in the electronic panorama version. That’s pretty neat. But it’s still nice to look at a Really Large Print mounted on the wall.

So why not just scrap all those frames and mattes and hangers and replace all of them with but one large screen flat panel television monitor? We look at pictures on computer screens all day and the definition is just fine. And while it’s true that a gallery with multiple hanging pictures can entertain more than one viewer at a time, in the home you are usually dealing with one viewer only, so that’s not an issue.

Let’s pause for a moment and consider the economics. My home theater displays fifteen pictures, each 13″ x 19″ framed and matted 22″ x 28″. Each picture costs maybe $10 to print, taking into account paper, ink and depreciation on the printer. The mounting board and matt add another $25, the frame and glass $35. So that’s $70 a framed print or $1,050 for the fifteen hanging on the walls. And those are DIY prices. Don’t even think of going to the framing store. Suddenly, I don’t feel so good….

The diagonal of a 13″ x 19″ print is 23″; the diagonal of the framed print, with matt, is 36″. The closest TV screen to this size I can find at B&H is 37″ and most run around $1,000 to $1,600 delivered, and that’s for an HDTV model. I can deliver the picture to this screen at no additional expense using my Sony AV unit in the home theater. This device, in addition to playing DVDs, plays CDs with JPGs just fine. Indeed, I can compile JPGs or TIFFs into a QuickTime movie slide show and route the output to a screen of my choice using my iBook laptop computer and a $19 adapter cable from Apple.

Plus I can watch regular TV on this screen and display as many slideshows as I want, as opposed to the static picures on the wall which are incredibly labor intensive to assemble. Indeed, I am comfortable in speculating that I could install one large flat panel television in less time, much less, than it takes to process, print, mount, matt and frame a conventional print. And that print will have a fraction of the dynamic range of the transilluminated ‘slide’ projected by the television. Further, adding music or virtual reality movies with sound effects is very simple, as I have illustrated in these pages.

So what’s wrong with this picture? With limited wall space and nowhere to store hard copy prints, why not scrap them all together and replace the lot with a slim flat panel TV screen? The prints will only get more expensive to make while the TVs will only get cheaper. And you no longer need acres of wall space to show your work.

Here’s the price history of one chosen at random from another web vendor:

I would guess there’s little to choose between brands quality wise, as most screens are made in just two or three factories in the far east. Sony and Samsung, strange bedfellows indeed, make their screens in a jointly owned factory, for example, so there’s no need to go ‘label shopping’ in the mistaken belief that a famous name means better quality.

Update May, 2011: Click here to see how I delivered on the above.