Tintree

Got a new lens so had to go photograph something to see if it worked. I’m such a kid sometimes.
[It does work tho but its going to take some getting used to]

I have lots of monochrome negatives. Most are 35mm but amongst then are a few 2×2 from the days of the box Brownies. This one I found the other day. It was taken on a Sunday in June when I was either eleven or twelve. I’m the one in the striped top – it was red and white and made of nylon and I hated it but mother liked it. We are all sat on the beach at Hayling Island (east of Portsmouth, Hampshire)  The lad with the ‘kiss me quick’ hat is my cousin and my brother is just visible in the background. Father is taking the photo.
What is weird is that I can remember lots of silly details about this day. The hats were a result of my cousin throwing a tantrum because he had no money. Mother felt sorry for him so we all got one – just to be fair. It was windy but not cold and I think it was mandatory then to have a windbreak for everyone to hide behind. This is a habit that seems to have died out now. Perhaps windbreak construction is a lost art? After this photo, and a couple of others had been taken it was sandwich time. In those days sandwiches had real sand in them. My cousin got the ham ones, and my brother a ham and a cheese one. I got a cheese and a salmon one. I hated pink salmon and gave it to the dog (you can just see it between my cousins knees). That got me a telling off, but the dog was happy.

A day out over 47 years ago and I remember the sandwiches and sitting on the sand looking at my father taking a picture. This picture. Priceless.

This image has been knocking around in my bits folder for ages. Its not particularly stunning, but it has a very specific feeling attached to it. Excitement. We were on our way to Florence via Paris on Eurostar, and as we emerged from the Channel Tunnel it started to rain. France is not very interesting around this area – it looks identical to the UK in fact – but it was not the UK and that’s the exciting part. We both peered out of the window trying to see something ‘French’. After 10 mins we decided that the cows looked Frenchish, because wet British cows were different somehow.

Well, a day to go at least. Christmas has come and gone, leaving us with lots of very nice prezzies and about 5lb in extra body mass. Which is how it should be.
All that remains now is several bottles of very good whisky, a load of cake, chocolate, beer and the inevitable bowl of untouched nuts. We will need another six months to recover.

Which brings us to the issue of ‘New Years Resolutions’. Do you make some or not? After much thought (about 3 sec in the shower this morning) I personally have decided to resolve the following:

1. Be nice to my dear sweet elderly mother.
2. Sort out the Euro crisis before the Euro’s I brought back from my holidays are worthless.
3. Repair the hole in the ozone layer and rebalance the worlds ecology
4. Buy a new camera, two new lenses and a host of other related necessities.

I have ranked these in order of difficulty and I have every hope that I shall be successful in the coming year.

It’s 11:20pm on the 23rd Dec. All the shopping has been done, the cards sent and prezzies brought. If it has not been done by now it’s basically not going to happen.

Famous last words perhaps.

Anyhow, if you are one of the three readers of this blog  then have a wonderful Christmas.

For all the rest of you the jam website is Tiptree , not Tintree.

I have been having a tidy up. Lots of people tidy all the time, some of them actually like doing it too, but for me its a bit of a chore. The target of my ‘tidying’ on this occasion is the vast output from my various cameras. I have been using a camera for over thirty years, the last ten of which have been digital. This generates a vast collection of pictures and, if we leave aside the film based non-digital efforts I have about ten years worth of output. Its amazing just how many ‘pictures’ that amounts to.

53,634 unique pictures

I know this exact number because I don’t think I have ever thrown one away. Why? well there has never been a need to. With old fashion film you often had one good picture flanked by several crap ones. The section of film typically had 6 x 35mm exposures on it because that’s what fitted in the paper slips that you stored them in. One might discard whole rolls, or perhaps a couple of exposures here and there, but there were only usually 36 exposures on a full roll and that filled a single page in the binder. Because you only had 36 shots, and however you developed it it was not cheap, one tended to make each shot count. Fewer clicks, more attention to what you were doing, and so fewer rejects.

Then came digital. One card could hold 100′s if not 1000′s of exposures. All effectively free. Whilst you could review them on the spot on the back of the camera – and you did because it was the single most useful thing on a digital camera whatever the type – nobody actually deleted a bad picture there and then – they just took another one, or another 10 or 20.

Then there is storage. Its invisible and for all practical purposes infinite. Even a smartphone can hold 10000 pictures, and if your computer hard disc isn’t big enough (mine could hold, if full, over a two and a quarter million pictures) there is always ‘on-line’ storage on Facebook or Flickr and the like. So there is no ‘need’ to throw any away.

That is the trap. There is no ‘need’ to throw any away. At least not until you have to find a particular picture, or you realise that one day your single hard disc will fail or your laptop gets nicked. Then the true horror hits you. It will take hours if not days to sort through all your pictures (how?). Then you will have to copy them to make a backup to something else – an external HD or the web (eh?). Whatever it is it will cost time (lots) and money to do.  Then you have to keep the copy up-to-date as you take more photos. ArrrrrrGGG!!!. This is assuming that you know how to do all this in the first place. Most people don’t or just don’t think its really a problem.

Fortunately I do know how to do all these things. Sadly I didn’t do all of them.
I have kept all the pictures I have ever taken from the moment I owned a digital camera. Why? Because I could.
I do have backup copies of ALL of them on other external drives and media, so despite three drive failures I have so far never lost any of them. Good?…not really because I have an impressive array of external hard drives that have never been introduced to the idea of synchronization, and which makes finding an old picture almost impossible.
I have lost the ability to tell the difference between a ‘good’ picture and a crap one, because for the past ten years I haven’t had to!

Basically I have been lazy, disorganized and dishonest in thinking that every picture I took had some sort of merit.

So, what is to be done!!!

Well… My first task was to come up with some proper way of organizing things so that I could find stuff easily and ALSO add stuff in a logical and consistent way. I shan’t go into detail but this involves ‘metadata’. Metadata is information about information. Think how books are organised in a library, or how the contents of an encyclopedia is indexed. Metadata in pictures is written into the code of the actual picture so that every picture has its own history, description and provenance. Very useful but it has to be done to EVERY picture in a consistent way. Thankfully there is software that can do this quickly and easily. You just have to decide what to put in. That is the hard bit, and it took all of a week to design something that might work.

Next is removing the crap. There isn’t a quick way of doing this – or if there is I have not found it – so I looked at over 70000 pictures [53,634 unique ones plus lots of copies and altered or resized ones]. It takes ages and ages and ages. To start with I deleted (yes deleted – once I decided it was crap my decision was not revokable.) everything that was fuzzy, badly exposed, duplicated or just plain boring. That got rid of lots and lots – around 40,000 pictures.
The second pass was more critical. The criteria varied but in essence if I couldn’t think of a good (or any) reason to keep the image in the first 3 seconds it was gone. This may sound a bit harsh but it was surprisingly easy and consistent. In the process I began to recognize just what sort of picture I  a) liked and b) was good at taking.  The fact that (a) and (b) rarely applied to the same picture is something I am going to have to work on. Around 15000 pictures vanished in that pass.

By the end of last week I was down to around 15000 pictures that I wanted to keep, and I am in the process of adding the metadata. Its taken about a month.

Want to know how many pictures I have that I would feel proud to print, sign my name to and hang in public at the end of all this?

450

Thats about 0.8% of all the pictures I’ve taken in ten years. I have no idea if this is a normal ‘success’ rate. Perhaps I’m too harsh with myself, or perhaps I am really crap – after all I must get some good shots if only by chance. Either way I have only myself to please, and now I have a big list of things I must really learn how to do properly.

…oh and I also have a vast amount of empty hard disc space to.

Before you read the rest of this post open this link in another tab/window  Rebecca Martinez and flick carefully through ALL the images. Open the ‘portfolio’ menu and look at both the ‘preTenders’ links.

I have come across these before and my instant reaction was a deep deep cold chill down the spine. While these are by far the most realistic (which they are meant to be) they are thankfully, in my opinion, too expensive to be seen out on the streets. At least I think they are because I’m not sure I could spot one without a real close look.

I just hope, really hope, that I never, ever find myself on a bus or train with one of these in the seat next to me.

Grave in the crypt of St Agatha, Malta. This was one of many in what was a surprisingly large underground catacomb . Normally I don’t think the public are allowed into this part, because there was very little lighting and it was a bit creepy – lots of bones and such. We had been given the keys and told to have a look round, don’t touch anything, and bring the keys back when we had finished. The guy on the ticket booth, who was also the guide, had his foot in plaster. We spent a happy hour exploring ( I always carry a torch).

Occasionally I find an image on my drive that I have never really looked at before. Generally that’s because its boring, badly done (even by my generous standards) or just uninteresting. Well this is a combination of three such images in an ‘HDR’. Its still an empty back alley in Malta somewhere but it has extra dynamic range!!!