A flashback.

When I take my boy for his karate lessons I invariably wander down the street and peek in at the camera store on 25th Street in San Mateo. It’s one of the few left. I’m not sure how they survive in the age of Amazon and online comparative shopping, but I invariably gravitate to the several display cases full of consigned used photo gear. Most of it is 35mm SLR film hardware, of little interest to anyone, and rarely seems to change between visits. I would guess that most sales are to photography students forced to use film by crank teachers who failed as photographers. There are a few interesting 4×5 sheet film cameras and the usual gamut of tired lenses, but the display which always catches my attention, for some reason, is the one with all those exposure meters.

It’s pure nostalgia. I used a selenium cell Weston Master V for several decades, even having the cell replaced by Quality Lightmetric in Hollywood when it died, and my Leica M bodies invariable sported a selenium cell Metrawatt MC or cadmium sulphide MR clip on meter which coupled to the shutter speed dial, requiring only that the indicated aperture be dialed in. Despite their small size these worked well, as long as you treated them gently.

Now every new camera comes with exposure automation built in, yet go the the Apple iPhone AppStore and what will you find?

Note the old time Sekonic exposure meter icon.

From the unattractively named Nuwaste, complete with typographical errors and a broken developer’s site link, comes the Pocket Light Meter app. And it works really well.

The meter can be used either with the front or rear facing camera in the iPhone and is close to a spot metering design. This means it meters a small part of the image, so if you are hoping for an overall averaging of the scene this is not for you. Indeed, an appreciation of dynamic range and an ability to determine whether you want detail in the shadows or highlights are required skills to make proper use of this tool.

You can see just how small the metered area is in this screen snap:

The red rectangle defines the metered area.

The cut-off around the red rectangle is so-so; it’s not razor sharp like, say, in the semi-spot meter in a Leicaflex SL of yore, which had the best manual in-camera meter ever made, but drops off steeply within one rectangle’s worth of the periphery. Not bad. Best of all, just touch the iPhone’s screen and the measurement rectangle will jump to the touch point, so taking multiple readings in a couple of seconds is trivial. Readings take under one second to stablize and touching ‘Hold’ freezes them, though the developer could usefully add an indicator that Hold has been enabled. So aficionados of the Ansel Adams Zone System, where you measure and determine the dynamic range placement based on your selected tones, will love this.

It gets better. Dial in the ‘Display additional info’ option and you get:

Additional display option.

You can see the selected area’s brightness in Lux and FootCandles, as well as EV readings at two ISO settings. Many sheet film camera lenses came with EV settings which, once you get used to them, are pretty handy as they permit locking of the shutter speed/aperture combination, so if you change one, the other changes to compensate. Great for tuning in just the right depth of field. Sadly no color temperature display option is available, which would make this a particularly useful tools for cinematographers seeking color balance betwen scenes.

The intrusive advertising can be removed by sending the developer $0.99. Otherwise the app is free.

Though the specifications refer to reciprocity correction, (correction for the non-linear response of film emulsions at low light levels), I could determine no such feature. The aperture range is f1 – f/512 and shutter speeds run from 32 seconds down to 1/8000, regardless of ISO. The ISO range is 6-102,400.

I tested this app on my iPhone 4S against the meter in the Panasonic G3 and it was in exact agreement under a variety of lighting conditions, including daylight, fluorescent and incandescent light. The developer says it works on the iPhone 3GS or later and all iPad2 models. I tested sensitivity to be down to 1/2 second @ f/5.6 at ISO320. Not Lunasix territory, but not bad either. The Gössen Lunasix meter’s claim to fame was that it could measure exposure by the light of the moon! The meter was about the bulk of five iPhones …. By comparison, the Panny G3 blows away both, easily measuring down to 20 seconds @ f/5.6 at ISO320!

At the price asked, anyone needing manual exposure measurement should not pass this by, so long as you make the effort to learn how to use a spot meter in the first place. The developer should consider adding a center-weighted or averaging option to make this app more broadly useful. But it’s a lot cheaper than even a very well used Weston Master, Sekonic or Lunasix.

Catch that thief.

This is clever. Given that most cameras record their serial number in the photo file’s metadata, this app allows you to track pictures published on sites like Flickr using that serial number, searching for it on the web:

Click the picture for the maker’s site.

Now my Panny G3 is not exactly something I would really miss were it stolen. It’s not ‘throw-away cheap’ but it’s close and, if stolen, likely does not warrant the expenditure of time and effort to recover it, though I suppose the psychic satisfaction of catching a thief might be worthwhile. But if I owned something silly-priced like a Leica M9 or S2, or a digital Hasselblad, then this app would get my attention. As for the iPhone, whose content has value far above the cost of the hardware, ‘Find My iPhone’ does the trick at no extra cost and stories abound of the flat footed set apprehending thieves.

For UK residents, there’s a like app named StolenCameraFinder.

Something to bookmark should that awful day ever come.

Miracles do happen.

Five months after OS X Lion was released xRite has finalized its Intel version of the application used with the i1Display 2 colorimeter for profiling displays.

I had no issues with the earlier Beta version, other than an error message when restarting the computer which was meaningless, but it’s nice to know this has been finalized. All those photographers still maintaining a running version of Leopard or Snow Leopard so as to use the earlier PPC/Rosetta app can now migrate to Lion. It runs fine on a Core2Quad, Core i3 and Core i5 Hackintosh, so it may even work on your stressed out MacBook or iMac!

Click the picture for the download site.

If the click link fails for you (this is for US consumers) try the xRite site.

Not that many choices.

I suppose this really has to be divided into two sections.

Desktop and Laptop:

These are the ‘serious’ platforms photographers use to process pictures and not a lot has happened here in 2011.

It’s as well to start with the worst new software for desktops by awarding that dubious distinction to OS X Lion which, in one fell swoop, dumbed down a robust predecessor, OS Snow Leopard and destroyed all PPC functionality. Apple accomplished this by deleting the 32-bit kernel in earlier OSs and the wonderful Rosetta code which made it possible to run Power PC apps from the G3/4/5 CPU days on a modern Intel Mac. Given that including this functionality would have been trivial, you really have to wonder what Apple was thinking of. Millions of users of Intuit’s Quicken through 2007 were left dead in the water, scrambling for an alternative, and jumping through hoops to convert their data files and hundreds of thousands of photographers had to run a parallel Snow Leopard machine to allow them to use their xRite display profiling software. xRite finally fixed that, and no prizes for taking so long, Intuit never will. So why even upgrade to Lion with it’s childish UI? Well, if they dropped Rosetta/PPC support, Snow Leopard will be next. Mercifully, much of the dumbing down can be reversed and much of the Snow Leopard experience reclaimed, though much tinkering and wasted time is involved.

The dumb-as-a-brick LaunchPad, confusing touch screens with desktops, one of the ‘features’ of Lion.

Not satisfied with kicking millions of its loyal users in the nuts, Apple went one better and ceased shipping software on physical media. You want an application in the AppStore? You had better have high speed broadband working. And the poor vendors who cave to this extortion have to hand over 30% of their revenues to Apple for the privilege. No wonder the smarter ones continue to sell direct through physical distribution. How long before Apple prevents any app not downloaded from the AppStore from working?

For this photographer the Wow! application of 2011 was the addition of Content Aware Fill by Adobe in Photoshop CS5. It’s now simple to remove clutter. Where agonizing hours were needed with the clone stamp to remove clutter, it can now be done in seconds.

Before CAF – original.

After CAF. Click the picture to download the video.

If nothing else, the video will show you just how speedy this technique is in practice.

Combine CAF with the ability to easily select and blur backgrounds using the Magic Lasso tool, and you have the perfect pair of tools for making vibrant street snaps where, as often as not, clutter and ‘everything sharp’ backgrounds detract from a dramatic photograph.

Other than that, looking through my Applications directory I see little else to raise the pulse of the desktop user.

iDevices – iPad and iPhone:

When the iPad came out I was one of the first to write that this would become a compelling creative tool, when all the pundits were saying this is purely a consumption-only, couch potato device. This is gradually happening as programers are coming to grips with the touch interface and arguably none has done it better for photographers than Snapseed.

Maybe for the first time for this worker, processing as picture is actually fun.

The above image being processed in Snapseed on the iPad.

Snapseed is ridiculously cheap, intuitive, a blast to use and very much my iOS Software of the Year.

Drills deep. Works, too.

Update January 1, 2023:

Disa Drill is very much NOT recommended if you are on an older version of OS X – I’m on High Sierra 10.13 – as it will not run and the latest version requires an OS update which many older Macs will not support. You can read the whole sad story here which provides an excellent alternative which works.

You don’t need to be a long dead Scottish poet to know that disk drives are like motorcyclists. There are those who have crashed, and those who will. And while those of the two wheeled persuasion can only hope for the best, users of the other population can do an awful lot to avoid serious injury by backing up. Onsite and offsite. On portable drives, flash drives, in the cloud, you name it. The choices have never been greater or the cost of this essential insurance lower.

Like all those who have learned the hard way, backing up is second nature to my use of computers. The thought of losing a lifetime’s pictures is not one I want to think about.

When it comes to movies on my large capacity fan cooled enclosures, each accommodates two 1tB hard drives, main and backup. These devices enjoy an easy life and after some five years’ use none of the 10 1tB Samsung HDDs has yet failed. Yet, the other day, I was nastily reminded of the dangers of complacency. As I turned one of the drive enclosures on it replied with an ominous clicking sound. The drives refused to mount (meaning they did not appear in Finder in OS Lion) and the drive head could be heard flying back and forth, hunting hopelessly. A moment later the box was apart and one of the drives mounted in that handy Aluratek external USB drive cradle. Same result, with the drive refusing to appear in Finder. So I fired up Disk Utility, and the drive was there, confirming what I suspected. The drive was fine, making no untoward sounds and not overheating, but the file directory on it was trashed. I went back to the enclosure and confirmed that other drives exhibited the same clicking symptoms, confirming that the circuitry in the enclosure was shot and had taken the directories on both movie drives with it.

Data storage on hard drives only seems like magic. A directory points to files just like an index in a book (remember books? Made from rain forests, they were an affectation of the last 600 years, now largely ended). Lose the directory and the files may still be there, but the operating system does not know where to look. Indeed, when you ‘erase’ a drive all you are doing is erasing the directory. To erase every sector takes ages and extra effort – just try that using ‘Securely erase trash” on your Mac someday.

If you go to the Paso Robles public library in lovely central coastal California’s wine country, you will find it exceptionally well stocked with classic movie DVDs. Those are the result of my gift after all were ripped and saved to hard drives. I have not owned a DVD in ages, and fail to understand how any DVD collection can be easily accessed with traditional physical storage. Plus, a bunch of drives takes up a lot less space. At an average uncompressed file size of 5gB that makes for 200 movies on a 1tB HDD, so the prospect of reacquiring 200 ‘lost’ movies and re-ripping them was not one I wanted to think about. I hunted around for disk recovery software and found myself in a mine field. Most of the applications out there come in a free download test version, allowing a disk scan to be performed but prohibiting saving of any files ‘discovered’ until you pony up for the app. Fair enough, but some of these vendors are asking $1,000 or more to capitalize on human misery. Reminds me of American health care. Worse, the level of English in many of these apps, which look suspiciously similar, suggests Eastern European provenance, a heritage more associated with software theft than file recovery. No thanks.

First I tried the Big Name file recovery app (I won’t name it here) and found yet again that it is useless. I cannot recall this app having ever done anything for me other than debiting my bank account. I looked at many other apps and settled on two to test, primarily judging on the strength of their user manuals. The more technical and detailed, the better I felt. I did the so called ‘deep scans’ on my disk, which typically take 8-10 hours (!) with the first app ($1,000) finding 40 movies, the second ($195) finding 35. Simply not good enough, and the UIs of these apps were shockingly bad – like using Windows. No meaningful progress indicators and one conked out after 8+ hours of grinding away. At least I didn’t get a blue screen. So I put the drive aside for a few weeks to allow me to do more research. Then, the other day, I was idling through the AppStore (as big and as poorly indexed a mess as iTunes) and came across Disk Drill in the Utilities section. It too offers a ‘deep scan’ option whereby the trashed directory is bypassed and the beginnings and ends of files are determined and temporarily indexed. That index then acts as a reference base for the recovery step.

Disk Drill has no detailed manual, nor is any needed, as there’s an excellent tutorial when you start the app and the maker has a fine site, written in clear grammatically correct English, complete with a forum and evidencing a very professional approach. Good English may not make for good apps, but I have rarely known bad English associated with good code. If you can’t spell, why should I think you can code?.

Well, guess what? On its 9 hour deep scan Disk Drill found all 202 files. The lot! The whole megillah. And the progress reporting is meaningful and outstanding, showing file by file detail as files are located and updating a running percentage and time remaining indicator.

The deep scan under way. VOB files are reported as ‘mpg’ which is what they really are. However, they are mercifully not Quicktime files!

Some of the file sizes looked awry, being way too large, but this looked encouraging. I decided to buy the app, which is discounted on the AppStore for $30 right now, but I went directly to the vendor’s site for the $90 Pro version. That puts more money in the developer’s pocket, requiring no payola to greedy Apple, and offers one additional key feature of which more below.

At the conclusion of the deep scan I formatted the backup drive and inserted it in a separate cradle – you don’t want to try writing recovered files back to the source drive! This is what I now saw – the funky large files had disappeared and all 202 movies were pointed to the backup drive to be retrieved and saved. Before starting the restore, I unchecked the original files found, the ones with the odd sizes under the ‘Video’ directory, leaving just the original movie files, as I knew them on my drive, checked. I suspect that the original scan is combining more than one movie file in arriving at the large file sizes, whereas the recovery choices do it right, segregating these into their component parts.

Ready to recover and save.

The scan results can be saved so that the recovery process, which can be time consuming, can be restarted later. If you have just the one Mac available that may be good idea. Run recovery at night when your machine is otherwise idle.

Amazingly, even the original directory structure had been recreated, suggesting that, as in a book, not only does the directory point to the files, but unlike in tomes of old, the files also have pointers to the directory. That’s significant as it obviates a large amount of labor in not having to recreate the original directory structure. Without this structure finding anything is virtually impossible.

I started the retrieval and save process and the app said it would take 17 hours. Heck, it would take weeks to re-rerip those movies to say nothing of the capital and opportunity costs, as I like to think that my time is still worth something! In the above snap you can see the results of the deep scan at the bottom of the screenshot where every file shows recovery possibilities as only ‘average’ – the list being Excellent, Good, Average and Poor. Not that encouraging, but I paid up, entered the registration information and started the recovery process, fingers crossed. This is what I saw a few hours later:

Well into the recovery process. The files are properly identified and broken into constituent parts.

Recovery completed.

I hopped into the restore drive, tried a few of the movies and each played perfectly, with no beginning or ending glitches. The movies were back in business. The faulty OWC dual drive enclosure was recycled, being well out of warranty, and as they only make empty enclosures now with RAID, and as I prefer simple dual drives as I do not understand RAID technology well enough to trust it, I switched to an inexpensive Vantec which has the two attributes I seek. Drives can be set up to be seen as individual disks by OS X and there’s a fan to keep things cool. And at half the price of the OWC drive, what’s not to like? Despite customer comments at Amazon, I have not found the fan noise objectionable. Then again, I don’t sit 2 feet from the enclosure.

Why the Pro version of the software? Because it comes with a feature named Recovery Vault and I’ll let Cleverfiles explain, quoting from their web site:

Why is Recovery Vault important?

To be short: recovery vault is the technology that helps you prevent data losses on HFS/HFS+ and FAT disks/partitions.

Why?

Unlike other file systems, HFS and HFS+ developed by Apple don’t have an effective way to restore deleted data. Once the data is gone, the only way to recover it is binary reading of hard drive sectors. While this is exactly what recovery algorithms in Disk Drill do, as a result you can only recover the file itself, but all its properties are gone: no original filename, no location, etc. However, the original names of the files you deleted may be the main criteria to identify your data without reading the contents. So losing this info may be crucial. Recovery vault addresses exactly this issue and helps you recover everything in HFS/HFS+ partitions exactly as it was there before.

How?

Recovery vault by CleverFiles is an integral part of Disk Drill. You may enable this technology on per-disk/per-partition basis. Disks and partitions protected with recovery vault will be monitored by the special background service of Disk Drill for data changes. When something’s deleted, recovery vault remembers all the original properties of the deleted items and makes it possible to easily recover this data later on.

Important!

Recovery vault is not a panacea, while it makes data recovery algorithms much more effective, it doesn’t provide you with 100% guarantee that ANYTHING can be recovered ANY TIME in future. Internal Mac OS algorithms extremely complex, and nobody knows or can predict when certain data is overwritten by the file system drivers.

Think of Recovery vault as a second file directory separate from the regular one, residing on the protected data disk.. It’s a nice feature and I’m installing it on all my drives.

In the following example, I have switched Recovery vault on for one of the two SSDs (SSD Bak) in my computer:

Disk drive SSD Bak in the process of being enabled for Recovery vault.

SSD Bak enabled for Recovery vault, denoted by the blue shield icon.
This took some 20 minutes on the 120gB 3gb/s SATA2 SSD.

The 170mB file created by Disk Drill resides – as a hidden file – in the root directory of the protected drive, thus:

Invisible file – exposed here – for Recovery vault on SSD Bak.

That’s a very modest overhead for the benefit gained.

I have not turned on Guaranteed Recovery as I also use a TimeMachine backup – not shown above – for versioned backups of all my drives.

Cleverfiles says that their app works for a broad variety of storage media, including flash drives, iPods, and so on. I have not tested that (and am in no hurry to do so!) but my excellent experience with this large recovery project described here makes be believe them. A great product and one to have in your armory to plan for that inevitable day all motorcyclists expect. Unlike everything else I tried it works and is reasonably priced.

Meanwhile, I’m pleased to report that my 200 ‘lost’ movie files are back online, and that I am celebrating with Frankenheimer’s 1966 classic ‘Grand Prix’ made when men died at the wheel, computers and aerodynamics were unknown and mechanical engineers ruled the world of motor racing. Great days. (OK, not the dying bit).

Update December 15, 2011:

In the spirit of full disclosure, after I paid for the app, used it and and wrote the above, the maker contacted me with a free offer of lifetime upgrades. As I wrote this well before that event, which accordingly could not color my assessment, I was pleased to accept their offer and reproduce the related email thread below: