peter_nelson1

<i>So, what you want is managed storage, such as is provided by Amazon's S3. </i><br><br>

I don't have enough bandwidth for that. I do a lot of video, audio, and Photoshop editing. Currently I'm getting rid of the last of my film gear so I'm scanning in my favorite slides and negatives and this generates big TIFF files. So a typical day's work for me is in the gigabyte range, which would take too long to upload to S3 over my DSL connection on a daily basis.<br><br>

I run a backup automatically every night. My current backup set is about 140GB. This is just data - I don't back up OS or application sw. Granted, not all of that represents changes, but I want to be able to do a complete restore from every backup set so I don't have to worry about keeping two copies of everything - an original reference and a delta. This is also why DVD's don't represent a good option - it would take dozens of them and there's no easy way to automate backups onto multiple DVD's.<br><br>

Tape would be a possibility but tape drives are not readily available or well-standardized, whereas any portable USB HD can be read right out of the box by any PC without special drivers or software. With an offsite portable HD, in the event of a house fire or other disaster, I could plug it into any PC and immediately be data-recovered. The only way to do this with tape would be to offsite the media <b>AND</b> the drive (and whatever software the drive needed), since I can't just walk in to the average Best Buy or Staples and be sure of buying a tape drive that can read my tape media. But offsiting the tape drive introduces the same mechanical shelf life issues as offsiting a HD.(not to mention that I can't fit a tape drive in my safe-deposit box) <br><br>

So I don't see any practical alternative to HD's for both recent and deep backup ("deep backup" = going back several rev's, e.g., from several months ago). I've heard a lot of comments here along the same lines as I've heard elsewhere about drive hardware freezing up on the shelf, etc, "I had two drives freeze in a month" "I had a drive on the shelf for 10 years that didn't freeze" and all kinds of FOAF stories and personal experiences. But there's no way to guess how representative these are. For example, is the Hollywood practice of spinning up the drives every week an extreme precaution or a reasonable one? And does it work or are they still have extensive failures? <br><br>

<b>So</b> ... From this am I correct in assuming that even though companies all over the world use HD's for backups, including deep backups, of their valuable data, no one, as far as we know, has attempted to study the reliability of this systematically?

<i>You can't expect an answer that one can rely on from anecdotal internet postings.</i><br><br>

No kidding. But maybe someone knows about some actual research. Ask about printing paper and someone will quote from Wilhelm Imaging Research, for example. <br><br>

<i>Some head to media interfaces get stuck with time. Thus the heads tend to stick to the media when as time grows.</i><br><br>

I was under the impression that the heads never touch the media. Could someone clarify this?

<i>And therein lies your problem.</i>

<p>

Yes, I'm familiar with the theoretical problems involving decaying dipoles and lack of adequate error correction. And to those I would add that many anecdotal reports suggest the bearings and other drive mechanics degrade even faster than the data.<br><br>

What I'm looking for is something more concrete than anecdotal and theoretical discussions. Has anyone actually attempted to study the shelf life of hard drives?

In other words, if I had 10 WD 250G Passports and put them all in my safe-deposit box, how many would be readable in 6 months? All 10? Two? How about after a year?

<i>OK<br>

I'll try again, gotta click html!<br>

Hard drive Life Info<br><br></i>

Thanks for the link, but I'm not sure how it addresses my shelf-life question.

I used to do all my backup and archiving on writable DVD's but they're taking

up too much space. I've already had to jump one size in my bank safe-deposit

box and my current one is nearly full. Last year I started doing HD video

and my still-photos are also getting bigger as I buy newer cameras. I'll

probably be buying a D300 soon - 12MP at 14 bits/pixel. <br><br>

My current frequent backup scheme involves external USB hard drives - a pair

of 320 GB Maxtor One-Touch drives that I swap between work and home, so one is

always offsite, and a pair of 250 GB WD Passports that I swap between my safe-

deposit box and home so one is always offsite. But I'd like to extend this so

I keep older backups for a deeper recovery - e.g., keep some HD backups for

several years or send one to my sister for safekeeping. I realize this is

going from "backup" to "archive", though it's a matter of opinion where the

line is drawn. But there's no denying that HD's are way more convenient than

DVD's because mine run automatically overnight. <br><br>

So my question is, is there any <b>NON-ANECDOTAL</b> data out there about

the "shelf life" of hard drives? There's a zillion posting on Photo.net or

the web with anecdotal experiences - "I stored _this or that brand_ of hard

drive for 6 months and it wouldn't spin-up/couldn't read the data/made a

burning smell/etc. Any consideration of "shelf life" should consider both

the mechanics as well as the data integrity.

Thanks in advance.

<i>Dismissing on hands evaluations from seasoned photographers demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of how to appropriately evaluate equipment.</i><br><br>

When it comes to subjective qualities like "handling" or UI that might be true, but noise is an objective attribute that can be measured and compared. In any case, "Dismissing on hands evaluations from seasoned photographers" on this topic is the <b>only</b> option because they're entirely contradictory so they cancel themselves out as a useful metric. For every photog who likes the D300's noise characteristics I can find <b>at least</b> one other photog who thinks it's terrible. <br><br>

So all we're left with is the images people have posted on the web, and based on those my impression is that the in-camera noise reduction Nikon uses on the D300 is outrageously aggressive and creates soft, fuzzy images.<br><br>

I guess my original point was that up until the 20D it looked like every new generation of DSLR had lower noise than the previous one <b>despite</b> the fact that the pixel count was going up (=photosite size was going down)! But the 20D came out years ago yet that progress seemed to stop.

<i>Peter - are you shooting at f/2.8-f/4 because of lens limitations or because of desired DoF? If the former, have you considered adding some primes? That could buy you 1-3 stops right there.</i><p>

I like the flexibility of a zoom for figure and dance work, and also that means I can clean my sensor before shoot and not introduce dust while changing lenses. I hate stopping in the middle of a model shoot to clean the sensor.<p>

But the 28-70 f/2.8 benefits from a little stopping-down - it's hard to make a zoom that is optimimum wide open. I wish Canon or Nikon would come out with a 28-70 f/2.

<i>Why not go for a 5D full frame and better noise performance.</i><p>

In DPReview's tests the 5D wasn't significantly better - see http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos5d/page21.asp.<p>

I mentioned that in my original comments - most of the full-frame cameras seem, at best, only marginally better. The D3 may prove to be an exception to this - I've seen conflicting reports and I'm waiting for a strict DPReview-style comparison.

<i>Many noise artifacts are gone entirely when you down-sample a D300's image to the size the 20D is producing</i><p>

The D300 is 12 MP; the 20D is 8 MP. That's less than a 2:1 downsampling so I don't think that's going to result in much noise reduction. I agree that if the D300 were something like 32 MP, so you could average 4 pixels down to 1 then your theory might be valid. Can you point to any formal tests that confirm that when you take your theory into account it's any better?

<i>Don't confuse noise as an absolute across a given 100-pixel chunk of the image, and noise as a factor in the finished piece at a workable display size. And, higher resolution allows software to make a better distinction between per-pixel noise and multi-pixel objects in the image.</i><p>

I'm not sure what your point is.<p>

<b>My point</b> is that as good as the 20D is, I'd like my next camera to be lower noise. For the kind of shooting and printing I do I find that the 20D good up to ISO 400-600-ish but if I go higher, say to ISO 800, it's too noisy.<p>

A typical late-afternoon interior exposure is 1/8th-1/15th of a second at f2.8-4 (tripod mounted of course). When it gets any darker than that I have to stop shooting, so if I can go to ISO 800-1600 I get extra shooting time. And even before it gets that dark, I'd like to be able to put the model or her clothes in motion which means I'd like to use a higher shutter speed.<p>

I shoot dancers in better (available) light, but I also have to use a high shutter speed, which means I have to shoot at a high ISO (typically 1600), and that produces a noisy image.

<i>having shot fairly extensively with all of the cameras you mention, I feel obliged to say that you are sadly misinformed about the D300.</i><p>

Many people on the web have posted side-by side images of identical subjects with D300 and competing cameras and none of them showed the D300 being lower noise than any of the Canons. Most of the images I've seen of the D300 showed that without its built-in noise-reduction it lokks very noisy at ISO 800 and up, and with it enabled it looks very soft. It also seems to use excessive supression of chrominance noise, creating a blotchy luminance noise pattern and reduced saturation.<p>

I'm glad you've had a better personal experience with it, but plenty of other people have reported the opposite in <b>their</b> personal experience, so I'm inclined to look at actual image comparisons people have posted for the tie-breaker. Can you point us to some objective tests that suggest that the D300 is better than (or even as good as) an old 20D?

<i>It really wouldn't be noticeably worse than any DSLR under $3k</i><p>

As a photographer AND a painter I disagree.<P>

Where a P+S will fail in this work is that the lens is poor-quality, especially WRT distortion. Paintings are rectangular and flat. You need a lens that is <b>absolutely free</b> from barrel and pincushion distortion, and has a flat field of focus. That's why having a good prime helps.<p>

I also second the need for a polarizers.</p>

Also shooting a 3 ft painting no farther than 10 ft away introduces the risk of perspective distortion. You want to get as far from the painting as feasible, and use a ball-head on the tripod to align the camera with the painting. Basically you want the lens of the camera to be closest to the center of the painting and equidistant from all the corners, and you don't want any of the edges of the painting to be far enough away to produce a smaller angular size than a line drawn through the center of the painting.

My old D100 has finally bitten the dust so I need a new DSLR. My other DSLR

is a 20D so I have both Nikon and Canon lenses.

The biggest thing I'd like to improve is noise. I mostly do figure, fashion,

dance,and portrait photography. I shoot available light even though I have a

full studio because I like the atmospherics of natural light filtered through

cloth, or in old buildings with old, dirty windows. An extra stop or so of

ISO would buy me lots longer shooting time during the day.

The 20D is legendary for its low noise. The 30D is about the same and,

according to most of the tests I've seen, the 40D isn't even quite as good!

In fact, according to DPReview the full-format 1D's are only a teensy bit

better than the 20D. Meanwhile the Nikon D200 is significantly worse, and

according to recent reports, the D300 is marginally worse than the 40D.

So what's up with this? Have they decided that the current noise levels of

DSLR's are "good enough" and they can concentrate on other things like screen

size, Live View, or have they just hit a technical wall? Why is the 40D not

quite as good as the 20D/30D? I know it has more pixels (=smaller

photosites) but I assumed the technology should be better by now.

<i>http://dvinfo.net/conf/</i><p>

I signed up for an account there a couple of weeks ago and their account-bot sent me a logon and password but it didn't work so I sent an email to them and they never got back to me.<p>

Are there any other sites/forums that are any good?<p>

Thanks in advance.

I'm interested in getting into video at a pretty sophisticated level with good

equipment that I can grow into. I've been doing still photography for about 35

years - mostly studio and nature with a 35mm, medium format and DSLR bodies (see

my website: pnArt.com ) and that's the level I want to play with video.

I'm having a hard time finding discussion forums on the web with people as

technically knowledgable as photo.net or review sites as in-depth as dpreview or

Steve's. Can anyone suggest some good active, in depth camcorder/video forums?

Thanks in advance!

<i>As I see it, there's little to be gained considering the increased risk of more problems.</i><p>

I don't see any basis for this statement.<p>

I described above how it would certainly benefit me <b>if it worked</b>.<p>

And while I grant that it might increase the risk of problems, we have no way to assess the magnitude of that risk, nor any reason to assume that it's outside the level of statistical noise.

<i>I can't completely agree with the statement that it's a complete obsolete tool (if it would work). Sometimes you have no time to clean the sensor or you have no access to the right equipment. </i><p>

I agree - if you're shooting in the field or on location where you're changing lenses a lot you don't have time or <b>the right conditions</b> to do a proper manual cleaning. A built-in system <i><b>if it worked</i></b> would be something you could just run for a minute or two while the model was getting her hair or makeup adjusted, or if you were covering a sports story you could run it during timeouts or when the team is walking back to a huddle, etc.<p>

I shoot models and if I'm in the middle of a 5-hour model shoot and I get a dust spot on my sensor during hour 2 I'm going to have hundreds of frames with that dust spot which I'm not even going to see in the viewfinder so I might not notice it until the shoot is over when I'm reviewing the images! It would be great to have a built-in cleaning system I could just run pro-actively during my shoot.

Neither printer has a checkbox for "borderless" but the Epson 2200 has one to "minimize margins" (whatever <i>that</i> means). Epson's website claims that the 2200 can do borderless printing but I see no evidence for it in the driver's UI.<P>

Still, the <b>size</b> of the margins is enormous - .25 inches left and right, .06 top and .506 bottom, for example. If they are doing this to avoid spritzing ink off the paper these values are way overkill. But they are grayed-out in "Page Setup" and I don't see any place to set them in the driver UI's. Where are these values actually set and controlled? Is there a Registry entry that controls the margin size? I did a search with Regedt32 but didn't come up with anything promising. (I'm using XP Pro SP2)

Recently my wife bought some 4x6" paper to print pics from a recent vacation

using PS Elements and an HP970 printer. She wanted to print borderless but

she could NOT get the white borders to disappear! Print Preview showed a fat

border on the right and thin borders on the other edges and that's exactly what

she got. The borders could not be moved and they matched exactly the margins

listed in Page Setup, which are grayed-out and could not be edited.

I use PC CS and an Epson 2200 and I'd never encountered this because I always

cut my prints on a paper cutter before matting them. But when I tried to print

borderless on my 2200 or on her HP970 I had the same problem! The default

margins for the Epson are different from the HP but they are just as grayed-out

and just as un-editable.

How do you turn off margins to get borderless prints with Photoshop?

Thanks in advance!

In Photoshop how to do I adjust the perspective in one layer without affecting

the other ones?

I have an image in one layer that I want to adjust the perspective on so the

edges line up with the edges of an image in another layer. That's why I want to

do it in layers, so I can have it semi-transparent so I can see when I have them

lined up. (otherwise I would just do the perspective adjustment in a whole

separate image and combine the layers afterwards)

But Phostoshop does its perspective adjustment as part of the cropping tool and

that affects ALL layers. Is there another way to do this? FWIW I'm using PS CS

(version .

Thanks in advance.

Most ad-supported websites I go to don't have this problem (one or two others

do) so why do I have this problem on Photo.net? . . . <P>

As I'm navigating through the site I sometimes have to stare at a blank page for

a long time because an ADVERTISER'S server was slow. Just now I had to wait 30

seconds looking at a blank page where my browser said it was waiting for

"google-analytics.com". Most of the time it's "ad.doubleclick".<P>

Photo.Net itself loads fast (I have a broadband connection), but your ads are

killing your performance.<P>

PLENTY of advertising-supported websites seem to get around this problem, so I

assume it has something to do with the design of the site.

<I>Understanding exposure, light, metering, reflections, and probably how to use a polarizing filter would be far more important than a "better camera." There's nothing wrong with your camera. The problem is, as always, the photographer using the camera. </I><P>

No, I suspect Todd is right that the real culprit here is dynamic range. Specular highlights are often dramatically brighter than the surfaces they are reflected off of.<P>

Exposure doesn't help in that situation - correct exposure for the highlight underexposes the surface; correct exposure for the surface blows out the highlight. A polarizer MIGHT help if the light source is at an appropriate angle, and the surface is not curved in such a way as to change the polarization angle in a way that would prevent all the reflected light from being attenuated by the same amount, and there were not other elements in the scene that were not adversely affected by using a polarizer, but that would be a matter of sheer luck.

<I>You might be having 'contrast range' problems. Your eye can see a broader contrast range than the digital sensor can record. Put a different way, if you expose for the shadows, the highlights get blown out as pure white; expose for the highlights and the shadows are inky pools. Some folks with digital create two different exposures (using a tripod) and merge them in post-production to get around this.</I><P>

Right.<P>

So where were you a couple of weeks ago when I started a thread here asking if we might someday start to see cameras with more dynamic range? And everyone here was like, "Oh, my <B>no</B>! Taking pictures of what something actually LOOKS like is so <B>plebian</B>! We're all <I>artistes</I> here and we believe the Zone System was handed down by God, so if our eyes perceive a 15 stops range of light in a scene, but our cameras can only record nine, we go to the eye doctor to find out what's wrong with our eyes! Someday digital will achieve the pinacle of artistic truth-telling and have a response curve just like Kodalith, but until then we have to tolerate all these shades of gray and suffer like the true artists we are."

The widespread use of photography in journalism and court evidence is very recent. Even as recently as the Spanish American War most of the pictures people saw in the newspaper were hand-drawn (that war was where Frederick Remington got his start)<P>

The period where a photo was as good as the word of God was just a little blip in history - civilization existed before it, and civilization will continue afterwards. No big deal.

<I>the 'look' of an ir image is due to the extended/alternate sensitivity of the emulsion vs. normal film </I><P>

Not entirely true.<P>

A major part of the IR "look" is due to the lack of an anti-halation layer on IR film. That's why you get that "glow". You can simulate that in PS by having a second layer, identical except for a slight gaussian blur, and blending it with the original.