David_Cavan

<p>I'd be happy with my new stuff in a paper bag from the store - at least I can easily recycle that. The camera equipment goes straight into a bag, or onto a shelf where the equipment sits so it is easy to grab. Any packaging material goes into the garbage the next week - it's clutter, in the way.</p>

<p>Conversational clutter?</p>

I have to respond, was holding off but feel the need to give my opinion. The new version was piloted/tested for well over a year - lots of opportunities for input. Change is necessary - this is a competitive environment, change or die. Simple as that. Having rolled out a few major systems and websites over the past decades I saw some things that should be fixed before relaunching. But please, for the sake of this website, learn from those errors, fix things and relaunch. More than a few of us who used to be regular visitors have wandered off to sites where a 21st century look matched with a passion for photographs. If we want p.net to survive, that combo is going to be necessary. P.net 1 is too old and tired to evolve, and it requires a complete makeover. My renewal comes up in January - I hope there's something new to make it worthwhile.

<p>The thread in the beginner's forum was the first thing I saw this morning, and I commented on there about the difficulty of uploading quantities of large RAW files in National Parks, and I suspect this is true in a lot of the world as well. I have carried the lightest laptop I can find, and keep the original cards loaded and separated for security reasons for several years now.</p> <p>One thing I used to do in the days before RAW became a great idea was to copy the JPGs to dvd's and snail-mail them home from where ever I was. I hadn't thought of this until now, but that might work for camera cards as well. Something to think about.</p>

<p>In many of the national parks web access is limited, and often non-existent. With modern cameras shooting 25MB+ raw files cloud storage is not a viable option. I still bring the lightest laptop I can find, and of course that's only a "carry" thing when I'm on airplanes. Otherwise it's in a hotel room or rental car. I keep the laptop separate from the cards as much as possible and work to mitigate the risk of something disappearing. Cards are cheap compared to the rest of your vacation - you can't have too many.</p> <p>I've used a Toshiba laptop for many years that weighed just over 1.5 lbs; and have recently switched to a MS Surface which weighs a little less. Not cheap solutions, but still worth it to me for some peace of mind.</p>

<p>Having had houses full of kids (4), and now grandkids (9), I can sympathize with the idea of not having time to do this. But my experience is that it is a long-term project that's well worth the personal effort. It took me nearly 10 years of organizing not just our photos, but the photos of most of our direct family once they knew this was going on. That resulted in a couple of family books of our history back to the 1500's in Scotland; a major dig into genealogy websites, and being the on-call person for any celebration that requires photos. I will never regret the time it took away from bad tv shows to get this done. It made me closer to my family, and that was all worth it.</p>

A long time ago I realized that I don't care if no one else cares about my photographs. I care and that's why I make them, and that is enough for me. All the angst about wanting to make a difference and change the world and be noticed - life is way too short.

<p>Because we can. Because as a human being I can like whatever I like and no one has the ability to make me like what they like. That's good enough for me.</p>

<p>No. They are chunks of cardboard that get in the way.</p>

<p>Some years ago there was a similar discussion on P.Net about photos at funerals, and I remember sharing that I had recently been to my younger sister's funeral, and although I felt that I should not carry a camera I came to regret that decision. Not because of an open casket situation - my sister had been cremated and our family does not do the open casket service as a rule. But the gathering was of people who have since dispersed for the most part, and in two cases they have passed on. I believe we should have taken the opportunity to take some photos of - document if you will - those gathered at that time. That group never got together again, and that is a loss.</p> <p>There was one time I remember that I put the camera down because I felt it was wrong. We shoot a lot of photos trackside at various auto race events, and we were in Montreal when a driver coming at us started into a horrendous accident. Most of the crowd thought he'd killed himself, but somehow he managed to survive with only a twisted ankle. I remember consciously making the split-second decision to put the camera down because it looked bad and contrary to some opinion most people don't attend to watch drivers die. I don't regret that decision at all.</p>

<div></div>

<p>I think the biggest misconception is "truth in photography" as is often been discussed in these threads. There is no truth other than what the photographer decided to keep in the frame at whatever settings are used, and what the viewer decides they want to see in the photograph. </p>

<p>I have a western digital 2TB drive sitting on top the tower with an image of the separate internal drive, recording any file as it changes. That gives us an up-to-date image of data, and if there's a hard crash of some kind inside the tower we can get restarted with a new machine, or with an installation of software.</p> <p>Externally I have three Toshiba hard drives that are rotated through a weekly backup routine, and kept off site. Worst case scenario is one week's files lost, and that is covered by keeping any important stuff on dropbox, and for photographs on the camera cards until the external offsite backup is done.</p> <p>This keeps the backups/archives on current technology, and easily available.</p>

<p>We spent 10 days in Paris last June - mostly around the center of the city this time. We walked (a lot), used the metro, carried camera equipment and stayed out until all hours. Not even a hint of an issue. As the previous poster pointed out there are more police and military than we're used to seeing, but that was in the background as far as we could see. Never had an issue in Paris, although we keep our wallets as securely as possible (BTW never react to the inevitable announcement in a metro station about pickpockets by touching the pocket with your wallet - hard to control that urge). As usual I'd recommend getting out and enjoying, and back off on the paranoia.</p>

<p>It's likely this will be the most ignored piece of legislation in a long time - there's no way without an enormous increase in bureaucracy to do anything with this information. The chance of anyone reading a tail number on a 9-oz drone is near zero. It will come into play if/when someone gets hurt and the machine can be identified. Perhaps the smart insurance companies will use this as an opportunity to add a rider to my home policy so that I'm covered if I break someone's window. It's all rather humorous, costly, and way over-the-top paranoid. </p> <p>Interestingly, to bring this back to photography, this may provide an approach to allow commercial photographers to use drones under some set of rules. That's not clear to me, but it would be good if that is true. If it still requires additional FAA certification and approval for each flight it solves nothing in what should be a real burgeoning business.</p> <p> </p>

<p>I think that's the point, Fred. The photographs tell a story, based on what the photographer believes and as you've pointed out many time, what the viewer sees. I'm not at all bothered that the photographers were lied to - I'm interested in how that story influenced their take on the subject. And my point about "truth" in photographs is that it's ephemeral, at best. I have come to realize that photography does not express an immutable truth - it expresses whatever the photographer wants to show, and what the viewer wants to see.</p>

<p>Perhaps this has been posted already - and if so I will defer to that thread. I found this particularly fascinating as a study of how photographers can layer their perception on portraits. Perhaps a little contrived but an interesting outcome. It is a Canon sponsored project that gave photographers a camera, a subject and a back-story. But for the six photographers the back-story was different in each case.</p> <p>http://www.shutterbug.com/content/lab-pushes-boundaries-photography-decoy#5T0o6dlUwaJwHoyY.97</p> <p>I suppose it does raise, for me, the issue of photographs not being "truth", other than what the photographer and viewer consider that to be.</p>

<p>We had a neighbour who went to the extremes of keeping anything that went into his yard because of his perspective on the privacy of his domain, and my sons lost a couple of Frisbees and a football because of that over a few months. He was a jerk, quite frankly, and it took a midnight raid to get my sons stuff back (not that I'd admit that ever actually happened, but you can see the kind of escalation that this behaviour engenders). Both sides in this court case need to step back and consider their actions. No way ever that someone should be firing a gun at a moving object when other houses are nearby, and there is a very uncomfortable fuzzy line that drones cross that is not paralleled by other flying devices, or by sports equipment. This problem is not going away because there are federal regulations in place, or because someone could go to jail, but clear public clarification of what is acceptable wouldn't hurt.</p> <p>Having said that, I have two drones now, I'm a pilot, and I'm waiting to understand what is required for me to fly these around going forward, other than, as Matt points out, the existing legislation. I wanted them for photography, and I'm willing to work within the rules to get what I need. I think the potential for photography is worth working through the process.</p>

<p>Just wondering - does anyone else shoot RAW + jpeg on their camera? We do, and when we download from the camera the Canon jpeg shows up as a bonus to the RAW file. It's about as easy a way to get that initial jpeg as I could think of.</p>

<p>There's some seriously interesting photos here. Great point of view - a <em><strong>dog as a photographer</strong></em>. Is this the beginning of strapping cameras to all sort of animals? <br> http://www.boredpanda.com/dog-takes-photos-heart-rate-monitor-phodographer-heartography-nikon/</p>

<p>I just realized I posted incorrectly a few hours ago (must have been the wine with lunch). I meant to say that French specifically, and European date format generally is dd-mm-yy. Of course the rest of the discourse doesn't change, but it does prove my wife's assertion that I don't know what i'm talking about frequently.</p>

French specifically, and European generally is yy-mm-did. Causes endless problem at our home where my wife is French and we get into arguments ( discussions ) about a particular occurrence of a date on a form.

<p>When renewing our auto insurance I buy an additional insurance package for less than $50 every year that covers zero-deductible coverage on all rentals (including motorhomes) in the US and Canada. Since we rent a half-dozen times per year on personal travel that's an ease-of-mind investment that's well worth it. Anywhere else in the world I just go ahead and pay the additional insurance in advance - there's too many ways for someone to decide to scam me without it. We had an experience with that in France in June where the guy was coming after me for a trivial nick on the car (which was there when we started) until he realized we had full insurance, and then he just walked away. I don't need that kind of thing to ruin the end of an otherwise perfectly-good travel experience.</p> <p>We do what the OP suggests when we're in a large city - we use public transportation and taxis and drop the car at the nearest airport. That includes NYC by the way - I lived and worked there for two years, and never drove there. Too many ways for that to go wrong.</p> <p> </p>

<p>Thanks for that insight, Glenn. When you see the same names repeatedly it certainly appears to be a small group. I'm glad there are larger numbers, and I'm especially glad that much of the interaction is about actual, posted images and explanations. That's really where the rest of the net has gone, and that's where the competition lies - if p.net doesn't attract someone, they will go elsewhere. Again, I'm happy with the redesign, and find most of the non-technical issues to be relatively unimportant - we'll get over the look-and-feel change pretty quickly once we figure out which clicks get us to what we want to see.</p>

<p>If photo.net is going to attract anyone except the few hundred old guys (I'm not sure the number is that large, but let's assume it is) that currently hang around a dramatic difference has to be created. The new site does that, and as I emailed Glenn, I think it does it well. I've been involved in a few major website design changes as part of the design team, and I've obviously experienced it myself many times over the past 15 or so years as websites have evolved. Many of them I hated to start with, but I've never abandoned a website because of the look-and-feel changes. We get used to the new look much more quickly than people want to admit, and quite frankly this new site should not be aimed at us old-timers. If it is not aimed at new users, then perhaps we should just fold the tent and quietly steal away - this site can not continue as-is, where-is, in my opinion.</p>