Tomorrow’s photo gallery realized

Photographs

Prints are dying.

Almost five years ago I wrote of The photo gallery of the future, which would use a large screen display to show changing art work.

A while back, wanting to add a stock quote display to my office without using precious real estate on the three Dell displays attached to the HackPro, I pulled an old MSI Barebone computer out of storage and added an inexpensive (Hyundai!) 21.5″ LCD display. More of an art work thing than anything else – it’s not like I stare at a ticker all day. The MSI had proved too slow for its intended role as a movie server and had been replaced by a MacMini. But for streaming stock quotes, a low data volume application, it proves ideal. The display, which is 1920 x 1080 and includes a pair of (awful) speakers ran me all of $150. Adding a $15 VESA mounting plate and a few minutes with a stud finder and drill and the display was up on the wall.

On the sofaback, the cheap Hyundai display.

A few moments in iPhoto and I had my collection of Renaissance art pictures converted to a slide show and moved over to the Barebone. Now, at weekends, when it’s resting, it displays Caravaggio, Raphael and Titian. What could be nicer?

The 21.5″ display on the wall.

The next one will have to be 42″, just as I expected five years ago.

200 megapixels

Cameras

Innovation from Hasselblad.

The newly introduced Hasselblad H4D-200MS digital camera body is not for everyone at almost $50,000. However, for the working professional who needs to make barn-sized prints for a living, the price of entry is easily recovered.

Click the picture for more.

The body is a modified variant of the existing H4D-50 which makes six consecutive pictures of a subject, shifting the sensor in between, thus exposing all photosites (digital receptors) to equal amounts of light. The camera then merges these six images into a 200 megapixel whole. Commendably, the regular camera ($31,000) can be upgraded by the maker. The loss of some 100 megapixels (6 x 50 = 300) presumably arises from the process deleting duplicated data points.

A 200 megapixel file size (200 megabytes) is nothing to laugh about. You will need high speed data processing power to manipulate such files and a lot of storage to back them up. Further, the technology can only be used with stationary subjects, but for the contemplated billboard-sized results, subjects will likely include product advertisements, food shots for the sides of trucks and so on. These are largely static so that hardly seems a limitation.

Fuji, the owner of Hasselblad, deserves congratulations on this innovative camera.

London’s Tate Gallery uses this technology, and you can see more by clicking the picture below. The difference is readily visible in the small reproduction below, but on their site you can really zoom in to see what this is all about.

Click the picture to go to Hasselblad’s comparison page.

CrashPlan – Part III

Software

Alternatives.

Cloud backups are not for everyone and, as I explained earlier, should never be your first line of defense against loss of your photographs. No one foresaw Fukushima happening. The power supplies ended up below the water line, useless. If it can go wrong it will and one of the great disasters to befall the world in the twenty-first century will likely be a massive failure of the ‘cloud’ through human error or enemy action.

What prompts this thought is an email from a friend of the blog who points out the futility of adopting CrashPlan for his very large photo library. A picture being worth a few words, here is his problem:

A reader’s problem.

I am a patient man but, even so, waiting for the best part of a year for your initial upload to complete is unrealistic. While CrashPlan does offer to provide you with a ‘seed drive’ by mail where you copy your pictures and which you mail back to them, this particular reader is in the UK where no such service exists. Eventually, this reader decided to upload smaller JPGs and not RAW files, so he will have a credible recovery source, albeit not of the highest quality afforded by RAW originals.

So here are some ideas, in addition to the JPG one, where your upload broadband speeed is slow and your picture catalog large:

  • Identify the best pictures and upload first. In Lightroom the ‘star rating’ system makes it easy to create a separate catalog with just the highest rated pictures.
  • Use the CrashPlan software to populate a friend’s computer if you can get comfortable with all the issues of trust, integrity and competence this approach raises.
  • Adopt my CarBak approach, meaning offsite storage, and encrypt the data in case of theft.
  • Don’t waste time backing up applications, movies (unless they are home movies) and music. You can always buy those again. And with Apple shortly migrating to cloud storage of all your movies and tunes, recovery will be easy as long as no one rains on their cloud. The problem with Apple’s cloud storage, unlike with CrashPlan’s, is that everyone knows where it is in North Carolina, open to attack. CrashPlan wisely keeps mum on the location(s) of its drive farms.