Missing from most of the journalistic free-for-all that has been aimed at the NSA recently is any discussion as to what spy organizations should be doing as compared to what they are doing while intercepting our electronic communications.

Economic crime is a form of terrorism in my opinion. When groups of criminals use technology to steal from the citizens of any country, they are committing economic terrorism. The U.S. is a victim of this form of terrorism, and all of it is occurring right under the nose of the NSA.

In addition to searching for “foreign terrorists” who might be using the telephone networks to perpetrate crime, and in addition to watching the traffic of e-mail and text messages, how about shutting down e-mail spam? The NSA could do this in an afternoon, sparing the world trillions of dollars in losses to fraud, and ridding us of this pestilence forever.

According to Wikipedia, about 75 percent of all e-mails sent are fraudulent. Three out of four. I feel like I get them all.

The economic cost of this, again referring to the Wikipedia article on the topic, is over $20 billion in the U.S. alone. All of us know someone who has been scammed by the e-mail predators out there posing as lost grandchildren, heirs to absconded riches, or poor Nigerian widows with cancer.

I found it most interesting that Nigeria doesn’t even make the list of places from which fraudulent e-mails are sent. They come mostly from the U.S. and Asia, with Russia coming in a distant third (come on, Russia, get your fraudulent act together!). I say this because Nigeria is famous in popular culture as the source of these e-mail scams. The reality is that Los Angeles is more likely to be the source than Lagos, according to the statistics.

I use Apple Mail as my mail application, and it’s a boat-load of work to keep up with the scammers on my part. I use Mail’s very effective Rules filters to weed-out annoying e-mails. So far, I have written 154 filters, some containing as many as 35 search criteria, to kill incoming spam. I give them cute names like Russian Rulette for my incoming Russian scams, Thai Spring Rule for the Thai scams, and Las Spammas Mexicanas for those coming (ostensibly) from across the border (they are more likely coming from New Jersey).

Five (5)* additional IP filters on my e-mail server are targeting incoming e-mails from specific senders, specifically an “organization” that pretends to be called F Media. All of the physical addresses of this group are fake, and they send millions of spam e-mails daily (maybe billions). They also use my e-mail address in fraudulent e-mails sent to recipients in Italy. My Internet provider allows me to blacklist specific IP addresses, so when I can identify an IP address of a malicious sender, I can kill all incoming mail from them. This is very difficult, as the clever fraudulent e-mail perpetrators almost never use the same IP address more than a few times.

The reason that I know the spammers are using my e-mail address is that I get all their bounced attempts to send spam to Italy. It’s really annoying.

You might argue that the NSA is not in the law enforcement business. That’s true, but I know that they know some people who are in law enforcement, and those guys are keen to stop economic terrorism. At least they claim that they are working on it all the time.

Let’s give them this challenge: rid the world of economic terrorism by e-mail fraud.

We’ll all be better off. I promise.

*This is here to entertain my readers who don’t approve of the practice of putting numbers in parentheses after they appear in text.

I’ve not blogged in quite a while, for which I apologize to my faithful readers. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything going on. It was that I had writer’s blog. I couldn’t come up with anything to say about what I was doing.

What’s been going on?

I rewired the Model 31 Linotype in Cal Poly’s Shaksepeare Press Museum. It’s a 1931 unit that was provided to us on a very long-term loan from History San Jose. I drove to San Jose and retrieved it last June, and I moved it into the museum in January after taking an older – 1905 – Linotype machine out (among other adjustments). The museum is small – about 2000 square feet, and we have too many presses, too many drawers of type, and too many things biting at our ankles – an old mimeograph machine, small presses, slug cutters, and a variety of stuff that we just can’t find a home for.

This is the “new” Linotype Model 31 in Cal Poly’s Shakespeare Press Museum. The machine was built in 1931, and was running just one year ago in San Jose. Power is being brought in to run the machine, something I hope to announce soon.

The Linotype was running in San Jose, and I trucked it here with the intention of making it run here. On that front I have made some progress. Electricity is not easy to find in the museum, so I’m paying several thousand dollars to the Cal Poly electricians to bring 120 amps of power to the ceiling above the machine. So far, the conduit is in, but there are no wires in the conduit.

This is my wiring schematic for the Model 31 Linotype. I added ground wires where possible (the machine was built before grounding was required). Those components which are not separately grounded are solidly connected to the steel frame of the machine, which is.

On the Linotype end of the project, I realized that I would have to completely rewire the machine. It had a beat-up 3-phase electric box mounted to the back of the machine, and there was no cover, allowing exposed conductors to be within reach of people. That, of course, is dangerous. I bought a Square-D 125 Amp Load Center and wired it as a subpanel with brand new breakers and a proper ground bus, and then I replaced the motor switch and wiring, and the rest of the machine is now wired to-code (mostly).

This is the fully-wired subpanel. The breakers control power to each of the circuits of the machine including the pot, the motor, and the Star Quadder, an add-on electro-hydraulic device that was added to the machine to control flush justification of lines of type.

When it’s finished, there will be a cover on the subpanel, and all of the wires will be inside a cabinet or a conduit. This will be much better. Now all I need is the electric service, and a little help from one or more of my Lino-centric friends to get the machine running again. I found a 1940 edition of the Linotype manual, and I have been reading that. It’s surprisingly clear and extraordinarily well illustrated. I have learned a lot in reading that manual.

I remember reading the same book when I was an undergrad at Cal Poly in the early 1970s. It was a textbook for a series of classes that we were required to take: Linotype Maintenance 1, 2 and 3. I wish I remembered more of this, but it has been a while since I have operated – or maintained – a Linotype machine.

I am very proud of my electrical work on the machine. I hope that Ottmar Mergenthaler approves of my “modernization” of his machine.

As I get closer to getting it running, I will report about that on this blog. In the meantime, I’ll be studying my Linotype manual.

I’ve been scanning a lot of old transparencies this week. The majority of those are 35mm Ektachrome, or equivalent, transparencies. Some are Kodachrome transparencies.

Some are really dirty. And, for those I am implementing Digital ICE, the technology that was developed in Austin, Texas at a company called Applied Science Fiction, a scientific think-tank of photographers and inventors. Eventually the company was bought by Eastman Kodak, and the technology was licensed by a number of scanner manufacturers.

First to adopt Digital ICE (ICE stands for Image Correction and Enhancement) was Nikon, whose CoolScan series had the technology for about a year before anyone else entered the fray.

This is the Skyline High School 1968 varsity football team. The photo was taken with an 7.5 mm Nikkor fisheye lens. Dust and crud accumulated over the years in storage has damaged the images. But, Digital ICE technology in the scanner can fix this, and the results are spectacular.

Digital ICE requires a scanner to have an extra light emitter and sensor, one that uses infra-red light. This sensor scans the film (or print) being captured, and the resulting signal is used to create a defect map, an image of all surface imperfections like dust, fingerprints, and bubbles in the emulsion.

This is the same image scanned with ICE turned on (VUEscan calls it “infrared cleaning.” The result is dramatically better. This means lots less time in retouching and image correction.

The defect map is then used to subtract those flaws from the scan, resulting in a near-perfect image.

When I first saw Digital ICE, I was given a “tour” of its features by my friend Mike Rubin at Nikon in Hauppauge, New York. Mike took his finger, and, while explaining the technology to me, rubbed the side of his nose. He then took the same finger and planted a big fingerprint on the 35mm film we were about to scan.

This is the companion cheerleader photo, after cleaning with Digital ICE. Looking back to 1968, I wish I had added a flash to the camera to illuminate the faces of the cheerleaders, or perhaps I could have spread aluminum foil under the camera to reflect light back upward into their faces.

He then raised the bar by taking a piece of fine sandpaper and making a glancing stroke across base of the film, creating a row of surface defects that would have ruined any chance of making a good photographic reproduction of the film.

Then Mike put the film into the Nikon CoolScan scanner and demonstrated Digital ICE to me. He scanned once with ICE turned off, then again with ICE turned on. In the first case we got the whole thing – fingerprint and sandpaper marks. In the second it was like nothing had happened to the film. I was dazzled.

Years later, I am still dazzled.

I still use my Nikon CoolScan scanners (I have two, a large one and a small one). Several years back the Nikon software checked out, being incompatible with the new Mac OS, and so I switched to VUEscan, which is reasonably priced, and takes full advantage of the features of Digital ICE, ROC and GEM the trio of scanning correction and repair tools originally provided by Nikon’s software.

The images that got my attention this past week were some that I took in 1967 and 1968. I was the high school yearbook photographer at the time, and I had a new Nikon F camera that I had bought with money I made with my little printing business (more on that in another blog).

I had an idea for a photo of the football team (and eventually the cheerleaders) to have them huddle around a circular fisheye lens and take a photo. The image would be a complete circle with the football players all around the circumference of the image, heads in the center. I borrowed the lens from a friend who was a photographer for the Oakland Tribune. It came in a brown leather case with a velvet lining, and it was a huge, heavy convex lens that managed to bend the entire world into a circular image on a 24 x 36 mm frame.

This is the kind of lens I borrowed for the shots above. I have “borrowed” the photo from the web site of Ken Rockwell, who has a nice description of the lenses made by Nikon and others in the 1960s.

I shot on Ektachrome film, something I did rarely in my early years as a photographer because I couldn’t afford the film or processing; I usually shot black and white because I could buy the film in bulk and roll it myself into cartridges, then process it myself and make black and white enlargements.

The photos of the football players and the cheerleaders were exceptional – and I think one or both appeared in the yearbook. Over the years I have stored these in a binder in evil clear plastic sleeves. The fact that these are mounted transparencies is probably the reason that the film is still intact. The reason I call them evil is that these plastic pages proved over time to be damaging to film stored in them.

But, my film has accumulated dust, and has some physical damage from its times being wrapped around the drum of a color scanner (perhaps).

When I scan them without Digital ICE, I can see all the dust and crud. And, when I enable to Digital ICE tools, I can enhance the quality of these images to make them look as good as they did in 1968. It’s really amazing.

I use a Canon T2i camera and a variety of lenses to make time-lapse movies. From time to time I take thousands of photos, and for that I need a special power supply. The standard battery for the camera is a Canon 1200 mAh battery which usually lasts for at least 1,500 frames.But in January I went out on (of course) the coldest night of the year to photograph the night sky. I was taking star trail images at 26 second exposure every 30 seconds.

I was controlling the camera with an intervalometer that I bought from a vendor on eBay. It was made in China, and shipped from China for about $18, and after I ordered it, it arrived by U.S. Postal Service in two days (I can’t get domestic mail delivered outside my own county that fast).

In the cold dark of January 12 I was running my T2i and my Canon 1ds Mark III, each taking similar star trail photos of the night sky. The T2i worked for several hours, then the battery – suffering from the extreme cold – gave up and the camera stopped taking photos.

My other camera continued to shoot long into the night, and had it not been for a cloud cover that arrived in the early hours, I would have a very successful time-lapse movie of the night sky. In a word, the night photography effort was a bust – mostly. I did get one post-sunset panorama against the distant mountains that is really lovely.

This is my just-past-sunset photo taken on the Carrizo Plain of eastern San Luis Obispo County, California. If you click on the image, you can see it at twice this size.

So my efforts at time-lapse were not terribly successful that night. Part of the reason was that I was too cold to make clear decisions, and my hands didn’t work well. It was 16 degrees Fahrenheit that night, and that’s too cold for this California boy.

When I got home the next day and got warmed up, I started working on two solutions to the shooting all night problem. One was that I discovered a way to turn off the control screen of the T2i. On the back of that camera, just below the viewfinder, are two tiny windows covering an IR emitter and an IR sensor. These detect the presence of your face when you put your eye on the viewfinder. By covering those with tape, I can get the camera not to illuminate the LCD screen on the back of the camera at all. This saves a considerable amount of battery power, and also reduces the irritation that one causes to other astronomers when that LCD panel flashes on and off.

The second thing I did was to build a replacement battery that is outside the camera, and which has about three times the power of the internal battery.

I thought about building this myself out of a small block of wood, but then I found exactly what I needed on eBay, again from a Chinese supplier. The product is a 110 volt AC power supply for the Canon T2i (and several other Canon cameras). It included a 110 volt power supply, a battery “cheater,” a cord that sneaks out of the body through a little rubber gasket, and a long wire. Buying the Chinese battery substitute cost me about $18 and it took, again, two days to get here from Hong Kong. I couldn’t have built one for $18.

I didn’t want a power supply for 110 volts AC; I wanted a field capable battery pack that will run far from household current. I cut the wire from the 110 volt adapter, and I put it in e-waste. Then I looked on Amazon for a large 7.2 volt battery to replace the power supply. This turned out to be easy because model airplane and boat hobbyists use batteries like the one I needed. I bought the most powerful model I could find, and I bought a charger, and I spent another $30.

This is the battery “cheater” which is the same size as an internal battery. The cable winds out of the camera to a Molex connector on the other end, which connects to my large battery pack for the camera.

When this stuff arrived in my mailbox, I soldered the ends of the wire from the camera to a Molex connector provided by the battery manufacturer, and I was in business in a matter of minutes. One caution: most electrical cables have the positive conductor marked with a printed white stripe (on a black cable). The power adapter I bought from China had its wires reversed, so that the striped conductor was negative. I discovered this before I wired it, and put the device into my camera, savong it from having 7.2 volts run backward through it.

This is the 7.2 V battery pack for the camera. Made for model airplanes and boats, this powerful battery will run my Canon T2i camera for over 4,000 photos. The Velcro strips are to secure the battery to my tripod.

With a fully charged 7.2 volt battery, I can run the camera now for more than 4,000 frames without the battery dying. And in cold weather I can insulate the battery in a wool wrap inside a nylon carrying bag to protect it from freezing.

Here the battery power cable exits the camera body through a small rubber door that is provided for the purpose. The wire to the battery is about one meter in length.

Charging takes under an hour, and the whole thing is a great success. I also have rigged a parallel plug so that I can plug two of these 7.2 volt batteries in at the same time, giving me almost 7,000 mAh, which would allow me to shoot for days.

I would need to change memory cards in that circumstance, and I would have to do it quickly. I’ll try that some night while I am out shooting the night sky. I plan to do this at least once in the next month, but I am waiting for the right night when there is no moon, and that happens only once every 28 days.

This blog merits a Mr. Curmudgeon heading because I am angry at Apple for changing a function in iPhoto for the worse.

I have the occasion to make slide shows from time to time using iPhoto. Why? It’s simply because iPhoto does it better, sharper, cleaner and faster than any other software. Final Cut Pro, and iMovie won’t produce the high resolution files that I need, and I don’t know of any other software that will do what I need.

The QuickTime tab at the top of the Export palette in iPhoto was a convenient and powerful tool. It’s gone now.

One example of this is that I want to take a bitmap image (JPEG, Photoshop, PNG, etc.) and convert it into a QuickTime movie of a specific resolution and of a certain duration. This used to be simple. I would import the bitmap image into iPhoto, then Export that image (or a group of images) to a QuickTime movie of a specific resolution and with a precise duration. It took seconds. And, QuickTime seems to be able to make a movie of any resolution (there may be a limit, but I have never discovered it).

Four times each year I prepare high-resolution image shows (I will refrain from calling them “slideshows”) for an event called Pecha Kucha. These shows consist of 20 images arranged in order, and exported to QuickTime at a resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels and at an interval of 20 seconds each. They must be exactly six minutes and 40 seconds in duration, finished. I choose this resolution because it is the maximum native resolution that can be projected by the fabulous Epson projector that we use. These shows are simply stunning in quality. Bright, clear images that gently dissolve from one frame to the next

In the new iPhoto menu there is only a Slideshow menu. This has been enhanced, but the process is convoluted and confusing. It’s also much slower than it used to be.

The only weakness of this method is that the only transition possible is the dissolve. But, I like that, and can easily live with that.

I have been teaching time-lapse photography to my students for over a year, and we use this technique to create title and credits sequences to paste at the front and back of the student time-lapse projects, and it has worked perfectly.

That was until last week when my students went to iPhoto to make these little movie clips only to discover that Apple took the QuickTime feature out of the Export menu, making it about 12.23 times more difficult to make a QuickTime movie from a still frame in iPhoto. It’s still possible, but it’s harder, and it takes a boat load of steps to get it done where it used to be one step. And, it’s about 17.23 times slower now – I don’t know why.

It is now necessary to enter the Slideshow mode, then click on the gear (settings) that is in the control badge. Once in that palette, one must set (or reset) the controls for the style of the slideshow (it wants to default to the Ken Burns effect), the sound settings, and the duration and transition effects.

This is the first of three panels where changes must be made to the Slideshow settings in iPhoto. Here I enter the duration of the image in the final movie – 5.0 seconds, and here I turn everything else off except the Transition. Here it is set to Dissolve.

I like the ability to define a different transition than dissolve – which used to be the only choice – so this story is not all curmudgeonly. Apple gets some style points for this change.

In the music panel I turn off the Play music during slideshow setting so it doesn’t insert Bach’s Air on a G String into my title sequence.

Once you have made the changes to the Slideshow settings, you select your image – and there can be only one image in the Album – and choose Export from the File menu. If you have more that one image in the Album, even if not selected, all images will be exported into the movie you make. As a result of this dumb change, I am now forced to make a separate Album for each individual image I want to export. That’s not a big deal, but it’s not like it used to be.

As charmed as I am by Ken Burns, I don’t like the effect for my simple movies. I use the Classic setting, which means: leave it alone.

In the Export palette you choose Slideshow, then you uncheck the checkbox that automatically exports your work to iTunes, and then you click on the Custom Export button at the bottom.

After changing the Slideshow settings, I choose Export, then click on the Slideshow tab, and choose Custom Export. I also turn off the default Automatically send slideshow to iTunes setting.

In the Custom Export palette, you choose a new name for your movie, and choose Custom Settings, which takes you to the QuickTime palette. Here you uncheck the Sound checkbox (unless you want sound, which forces you to go back a few steps and include sound in your Slideshow settings), and you uncheck the Internet streaming checkbox (unless there is a reason you want that).

The next palette that comes up is this one, where you add a title for your movie, and you can select the Options for exporting to QuickTime – which are critical to success.

In the Video settings, you can choose from a huge list of standard codecs for various types of output. Mine is a custom size, so I choose the Size button, and then pull-down from the next palette to Custom and enter my custom dimensions. Once that’s done I click OK, and OK, and Save, and then I go make a cup of tea because it takes so long. Making a five-second title sequence took about six minutes this morning, which is about 50 times longer (really) than it used to take. Again, I don’t understand why except that I can see that they are using Compressor to make the movie, where I don’t think that was the case in the previous version.

In the Movie settings, I uncheck the Sound and Prepare for Internet Streaming checkboxes, and I set the size of my movie to a custom dimension that matches the original images (or the projector). Once I have done that, I click OK, and then Save the movie to QuickTime.

In the end, the results are gorgeous, so I shouldn’t be complaining so loudly.

But I hate change when it makes my life more difficult, or when it doesn’t make sense to me. This makes no sense to me.

Why did they make it so hard when it used to be so easy?

I organize an annual hot-air ballooning event, one that has been running for pretty close to 40 years.

The event was founded by my friends Gordon Bennett and Jon Ackerman in 1974. It was conveniently located in the eastern part of San Luis Obispo County on property that was technically public open space, a greenbelt in a subdivision in a city that was never built. It’s a strange story that involves land speculators, E-Z loans, lots of open land, and unfortunately, not a drop of water nor a watt of electricity for many miles.

This is the inflation of Peggy Watson-Meinke’s 90,000 cu. ft. hot-air balloon Starlite. I was manning the crown line, a rope that is attached to the very top of the balloon. The job is simple: hold on as well as you can, then carefully allow the balloon to rise as it is inflated.

My friends Jim and Stacy and I took over the event from Gordon a few years back, and we continue to run it as an annual fun and non-commercial balloon rally for our friends in California who fly balloons.

A couple of years ago two behemoth solar companies moved into the very same valley, acquiring a big part of that open space, and began to build two of the largest solar farms in the world. When they are finished, the two plants will have covered about 18 square miles of land with aluminum and glass. They have erected huge electrical towers and transmission lines, and they are planning to generate enough electricity to keep California out of darkness for many years to come. And, the land not used for solar panels has been purchased and designated “mitigation land” – meaning that it can’t be used for anything at all. No camping, no hiking, no ballooning, no nothing.

I am a fan of solar-generated electricity, and I understand why they would choose the best ballooning spot in three counties (big, open, mostly uninhabited space) for their plants. BUT WHY DID THEY TAKE MY PERSONAL VALLEY AWAY FROM ME?

I was there first.

This photo was taken from the balloon basket at about 750 feet altitude. In the distance are the beautiful mountains called The Caliente Range.

As a result of this minor tragedy, I have been looking for a new place to hold my annual balloon rally. I didn’t have to look very far. At the southern end of the same valley and over a mountain range, just about 25 miles away is another lightly populated valley, one with a state highway running through the middle, and with acres and acres of beautiful farms that seem to go on forever. This valley is called the Cuyama Valley. In the valley are two small towns, Cuyama and New Cuyama. There is an elementary school and a high school, both run by the County of Santa Barbara. Half of the valley is in San Luis Obispo County, and the other half in Santa Barbara County, divided by the Cuyama River which only flows when it rains (and when it rains, get out of the way!).

There is a lot of sagebrush and even more tumbleweeds, and there is a fabulously beautiful mountain range that separates this valley from the one to the north where we have been ballooning since the 1970s. That range is called the Caliente, and I’ll bet I know why.

This is Pilot Peggy Watson-Meinke in the basket. We were discussing the options for landing her balloon on the northern edge of the Cuyama Valley.

On Saturday morning at the crack of dawn, I drove to the Cuyama Valley, about 90 minutes from my home. I arrived at sunrise and met a couple of balloonists who were preparing to inflate their craft. I also met the proprietor of Vosburgh Field, a genuine, FAA-authorized airfield. It’s not paved, but it is adequately long for powered planes, and it is the perfect spot for our next ballooning rally.

I assisted in two inflations, then suddenly found myself a passenger in the balloon of Ms. Peggy Watson-Meinke, a pilot from Camarillo, California. The balloon is a beautiful 90,000 cu. ft. Lindstrand, in very nice condition, and well-maintained. We took off from the field and flew northwest over some lovely farm fields and over the Cuyama River which meanders diagonally across the valley. It was a perfectly clear morning with very light winds, a perfect day for this.

This is a tractor trail through a farm field. Sometimes just a little altitude gives one an unmatched point of view. Scenes like this present themselves to the balloonist on every flight.

I snapped a passel of photos, enjoying my ride as passenger – which is very different than being the pilot – and I behaved myself. I didn’t kibitz, as pilots tend to do when riding in another’s aircraft. I simply enjoyed the ride and Peggy’s company. She is an excellent pilot, and she managed the flight perfectly, landing at the edge of an organic potato farm – landowner permission granted. I walked the balloon to the edge of the field where we deflated it and packed it up.

Back at the field, we ate breakfast and told stories, and I soon headed back home along the state highway that bisects the valley. It was on that road, just fifteen miles west where I made a U-turn and parked the car to make a panoramic image of the Caliente Range, and the Whiterock Bluff along the Cuyama River.

As you can see, the town of Cuyama is not a very big place. Just a few miles west is the town of New Cuyama, whose population is probably close to 1,000. Typographers take note: be sure to kern the A after the Y!

This range of mountains is pleated with alluvial fans, crenelations that took millennia to make, and it’s obvious that a geologist would have a great time just admiring the vast range from this vantage point. I set up my tripod just at the edge of the highway, and snapped a few images – 715 – to make a GigaPan image of the beautiful hills and the bluff. I have driven past these hills scores of times on various road trips, and I have always wanted to stop to admire and photograph them. This was the perfect day to do that because I wasn’t in a hurry to get home.

This is a low-resolution version of my Whiterock Bluff GigaPan photo, taken Saturday midday in the Cuyama Valley. It is a beautiful area, and the photo shows a lot of that beauty. Click on the image to go to the GigaPan site to see the ultra-high resolution version (15GB).

The resulting photo is delightful, and it captures both the rich geological qualities of the bluffs and the feel of this valley. Some might call it desolate, others might call it boring. I call it beautiful beyond imagination.

_____

You may be aware that in early December I built a Network Attached Storage server, loaded an operating system on it (FreeNAS), and began the process of copying my large collection of CDs and DVDs to the NAS server.

In the process I discovered the infidelity of optical discs (I had no idea they were dating other men!!), and I discovered how lucky I am to be moving my materials off of the optical discs to the more reliable magnetic disk storage of a RAID array. Let’s face facts here: optical discs are really flaky.

This is me with my stacks of CDs and DVDs. The two stacks on the right are those I have successfully copied to my NAS server. In the stack on the left are the discs I cannot read at all; I guess the information on them is lost forever.

Back in 1996, when I started putting my documents onto CDs and later onto DVDs, I thought I was doing the right thing. What could possibly go wrong? The discs were stable, or at least we were told they were stable, and they would last until kingdom come. I guess I chose a short-lived kingdom.

(As I am writing this, another disc has failed to read.)

Another curious thing is that in about half of the cases where an optical disc won’t read on my computer, it will read on my wife’s computer. This has saved me from a lot of grief; I just take any disc that fails to her machine, and in many cases I can read and copy the disc on hers. This is weird. The machines are the same, the internal DVD/CD drive is the same brand, but not the same model. One must have a slightly different reading laser than the other, making it possible to read while mine cannot.

My discs are named with city names and other frivolous titles I thought up when I was making them. One is named The Beav, another is named Mr. Peanut. There are about 350 total, and I have now made it through the letter M. What excitement!

I put a disc into my machine, create a folder on the NAS server with the same name, and then copy the contents to the folder. In cases where there is software that will not run on modern Macintosh computers, I leave those files behind. There is no sense copying anything I can’t use onto the new server, and in the process I am saving a little bit of space.

This morning I was taking a portrait of a banker, and I had the lights set up and ready, so I stacked all the discs I have successfully copied to the NAS into three stacks (I couldn’t get them to stand up in just one stack, though it would have been more dramatic). The discs I have copied successfully I put into two stacks. I stacked those discs I have been unable to read in the third stack.

What is most frustrating is when a single file is corrupt and cannot be copied. It stops the whole process, and then I have to search for the file that failed, and try again. (I’m doing this right now). It’s not really very hard, but I am getting really tired of the whole thing.

When I began the process 18 years ago, hard drives were relatively small and moderately expensive. I looked for a method to archive my documents and chose optical discs. I had used SyQuest, ZIP, Bernoulli, Panasonic rewritable optical and a few other technologies, but they all suffered from the same problems: expensive removable cartridges, cartridges that didn’t give me much space, etc. Optical seemed the way to go, and it has served me reasonably well. But I may have been better off with hundreds of ZIP disks.

Am I worried that my magnetic disk drives will fail? Not really. I have created the server as a RAIDz device, meaning that one drive can fail completely, and be replaced without losing any data. And, the drive can be swapped out while the power in running (I don’t think I would try that). I think that the array will be more reliable than my collection of optical discs has been.

I just got to the N’s, and I am making real headway here! If I hurry, I will be done by April.

At Cal Poly we recently dedicated the Raymond J. Prince Shakespeare Press Museum Resource Room. It’s a library of printing-related books and magazines, and it’s a study room for our students with desks, computers, a scanner, and comfy chairs. The room was upgraded in the last year with about $30,000 from donations for construction, and contributions of books from numerous people in our industry.

This is the page from my notebook for the Raymond J. Prince sign. The final signs turned out to be very much like these sketches.

Most notable of those donors was Raymond Prince, a longtime graphic arts professional with ties to GATF, PIA, NAPL and other industry associations. Mr. Prince has been a consultant, writer, troubleshooter, philosopher and advocate of the graphic arts industry. Mr. Prince contributed to the collection of graphic arts books, and he encouraged his many friends and acquaintances to contribute also. As a result the university received many books for the Resource Room.

The result is that we now have over 1,000 books on printing, typography, bookbinding, design, and graphic arts processes. The books are as old as the mid 18th century, and as new as current-day publications. Inland Printer magazine (later called American Printer) contributed a complete collection of their magazines, from the first issue.

These two wooden signs now adorn the wall of the Raymond J. Prince Shakespeare Press Museum Resource Room at Cal Poly. I’m letting the wood dry for a couple of months, then I will take them down, retouch the gold leaf, add a coating of oil to the wood, and put them up again.

Graphic Arts Monthly sent their entire collection, a set of bound volumes dating back to the very early 1900s.

To honor Mr. Prince, we printed a large banner and hung it on the wall, and we added a framed portrait of him. I decided to add a carved wooden sign to finish the job. This began as a sketch in my notebook, then I translated that into an illustration in Adobe Illustrator. I used a font named Brioso Pro, and then converted the letters into outlines in Illustrator.

This is the Illustrator file for the elliptical sign. I drew this at finished size: 29 x 15 inches in size, then exported a file in DXF format for the milling machine software. The letters on this sign were cut to a 0.5 inch relief above the background of the wood. 

Once the letters were outlined, I modified them slightly to add big swashes, and to thicken some of the thinnest parts to prevent them breaking off in the machining process. From the final illustration I made a DXF file, commonly used to control computer-aided machines. This sign would be cut on a Bridgeport CNC four-axis milling machine located in the shop of my friend Phil Schack. Phil usually machines exotic parts for aerospace applications and precisely-made metal parts for racing cars and motorcycles. Carving a wood sign was not his usual fare.

This is the Bridgeport mill with my elliptical sign mounted on its working surface. When the mill runs, the material moves and the cutter remains stationary. The cutter is raised and lowered into the material by the milling machine in precise increments. Its precision is said to be 0.0001 inch.

Curiously, the wooden sign turned out to be significantly more difficult than Phil or I expected. It challenged his equipment because wood is so delicate compared to metal, and that required Phil to reduce the depth of his cuts, and ensure that the chips were ejected efficiently so that they didn’t bind, and break the delicate letters as they were cut. Slowing the process caused the primary sign to take several hours to cut.

Here the large redwood board is moving against the cutter to make the perimeter cut. You can see two levels of wood against the lettering. The whole process took several hours to complete as it was cutting only a few hundredths of an inch on each pass.

I started with a visit to Pacific Coast Lumber in San Luis Obispo. This firm is owned by my friend Don Seawater, who runs the “urban lumber mill” making finished lumber from locally cut or fallen trees. Don showed me some clear redwood he had recently cut. The section of the log we were admiring was clear wood, almost two feet thick, two feet across, and four feet long. I needed only 29 inches by 15 inches for my elliptical sign (defined by the size limits of the Bridgeport mill). Don’s large lumber-cutting bandsaw sliced a plank about four inches thick off this redwood log, and then he put it in the dry kiln. His kiln is a converted box trailer with heaters and blowers installed to dry lumber over a long period of time – usually weeks.

This is the dry kiln at Pacific Coast lumber with my sign parts within. On the right is the heater, at the ceiling is a row of fans used to dehumidify lumber.

My board was supposed to spend a whole week in the kiln, but my schedule forced us to take it out a bit sooner. When it went on the milling machine, it was still damp, and that worried Phil. Damp wood might have caused the cutter to work inefficiently, or the chips to clog in the kerfs, but it worked pretty well in its damp condition. With just a week to go to the dedication day, Phil cut the basic shape of the ellipse, and surfaced the plank to precise flatness. Then, using my Illustrator-created DXF file, he began the process of cutting the sign.

Normally, the milling machine cuts at a startling speed, with metal chips flying, a spray of liquid coolant blasting at the cutter head, and a slurry of metal chips and coolant collecting in the base of the machine. For wood carving, though, Phil used only a blast of air to remove sawdust from the cutter head. He ran at normal cutting speeds, but reduced the depth of each cut in some areas to just a few hundredths of an inch to prevent chipping. This went long into the night. I joined him for the best part of it while the letters were being formed.

Phil Schack holds the machined elliptical sign. From here I took it to sand it and add the gold leaf.

He cut the elliptical sign first, then followed that with the rectangular sign. That wood was considerably dryer than the ellipse, so he had to cut shallower letters to prevent chipping; this took longer than the ellipse, but he was able to cut all the delicate letters without a mishap.

When the cutting was complete, I took the wooden signs to my woodshop, and very carefully sanded the surfaces to eliminate small residuals and “holidays” which were left behind by the mill. I had to do this with extreme care because the letters could break off with the slightest incorrect pressure. I treated the process like a surgical procedure.

Sanding proved to be a delicate process. I hand-sanded it with 220-grit paper on a hard sanding board, and I was really careful not to damage any of the letters.

Once I had that done, and just 12 hours before the signs had to be up on the wall in the new Resource Room, I took the signs home to apply the gold leaf. It had been many years since the last time I applied gold leaf to anything, and that anything was not redwood – it was vellum, which is a smooth and reliable surface.

I prepared a traditional gelatin size, used by gilders throughout history, and I began the process of putting the gold leaf onto the relief surface of the sign. Since the wood was still quite damp, this didn’t go as planned. The wood wouldn’t accept my size, and the gold would not stick to the size. But, I persevered, and using a steam iron (don’t tell my wife!), I managed to dry the surface of the letters adequately so that the size would adhere, and the gold would stick. In the end, it looked great, even with a few places where I simply couldn’t get the gold leaf to adhere to the surface. I decided to call this an “antique” finish, and I declared victory.

In this photo my department head, Harvey Levenson, presents a plaque to Raymond Prince, honoring him for his contributions to the new Resource Room. On the wall behind them are the two signs described in this article.

My able helpers Bob Pinkin and Eric Johnson at Cal Poly inserted sturdy wall anchors, and hung the signs in the new room. Just minutes later the audience arrived, accolades were spoken, and Mr. Prince addressed the students and faculty. One would never have known that just 24 hours earlier the ellipse was a slab of redwood, and the gold leafing was not even started.

Oh, I love a deadline!

Last year I wrote about using the iPad as an instantaneous proofing device when shooting digital portraits. It turned out to be the most popular blog I have ever written. Months later, I still get many hits a day on the article.

This is the 8GB EyeFi card. The company now makes a 16GB version of the card, which includes a WiFi transceiver. Insert it into your camera, and it can send images to a viewing device instantly – actually closer to three seconds. This device is amazing.

The process involves an EyeFi card, an SD memory card that doubles as a WiFi transceiver. I have a 16GB EyeFi card plugged into the SD card slot on my Canon 1ds Mark III camera. That camera has two card slots; I put a Compact Flash card in the other. I have the camera set to record Raw onto the Compact Flash card, and JPEG images to the SD card. This works well because the JPEGs are smaller files, and they transmit to the iPad faster. Transmitting Raw files to the iPad is painfully slow, and I avoid it.

EyeFi comes with its own iPad app, a photo browser that is part of the EyeFi package. It works well. At least one other photo browser app works with EyeFi, specifically Shutter Snitch. I use the EyeFi browser.

Rusty Watson, Marketing Director for Heritage Oaks Bank, my wife Ashala, the Art Director, and I are admiring a portrait on the screen of the iPad. This process is empowering – the two decision-makers were able to review and approve the photos as I shot them. We knew before we left that every portrait was a success. Photo by Eric Johnson.

With the EyeFi card in the camera, and with the iPad “paired” to the card (you do this in the Settings menu under Wireless), the EyeFi browser will start receiving photos from the camera in a few seconds after you start shooting. Once it’s working, the delay between taking the photo and an image showing up on the iPad is about three seconds. This is adequately fast for me and my art director and assistant.

When shooting portraits, it’s a particularly valuable tool because the subject can see their image on the iPad almost instantly. I use a Tether Tools case on the iPad, and a Tether Tools light stand clamp on the back of the iPad when I am shooting portraits.

I promise – this photo was not posed. Rusty and Ashala are smiling at the results of one of our portraits during the photo session. Whatever it cost, it was worth the investment to put this package together!

In a recent portrait session, I had about a dozen subjects who filed in front of the camera on 15 minute intervals. The art director and marketing director stood to the side looking at the images as they appeared on the iPad. They were looking for a certain smile on each of the subjects’ faces, and I kept shooting until I heard them say, “Yes! We got it!” when we would invite the next subject in.

It took a while for me to integrate the iPad into my portrait sessions, but once I did, I declared it a success. Having the iPad as an instant proofer is simply magical. It gives me the freedom to shoot, knowing that the subject, the art director and the marketing director will all have given their approval of the portraits before anyone leaves the studio set-up.

Here is the thumbnail view of some of the portraits we took that day. By tapping on any of them, a full-screen version pops-up on the screen, making the iPad the perfect photo proofing device.

For the most recent job I was shooting in a hallway at a bank in the northern part of our county. I set up there because it was immediately adjacent to the board room where the bank’s leaders were holding a meeting. They only had to walk about 20 feet to get to our temporary studio, and that made the process swift. I shot only as many photos as I needed to get the right smile on each person being photographed.

My photo assistant for the day exclaimed that the iPad was “magical.” I agree. It frees the me to shoot, while it empowers decision-makers to see the images and be completely confident that we have each shot before moving on.

And, the iPad is several diameters larger than the LCD screen on the back of my camera. It’s so much easier to admire a portrait on the iPad than it is to have two or three people hovering around the back of the camera, trying to see if a person is smiling nicely.

The EyeFi card costs about $100 from most camera stores, the accompanying app is free on the iTunes Store. I think it’s possible to shoot with a camera that has only one card slot, best done by writing both Raw and JPEG images simultaneously (if your camera allows this). If you instruct the EyeFi card to send only the JPEG, then the files will be sent quickly enough to be practical. The Raw files are untouched, and can be processed after the shoot in the normal manner.

The EyeFi people suggest that you can also download video from a video camera that uses an SD card for its storage. I have not tried this, but I worry that it’s pretty slow. Judging from my experiments, the time needed to send multi-gigabyte files from the EyeFi card to any receiving device might be prohibitively slow, but I will leave that to those who want to try this.

As for me, I am extremely happy with the magical EyeFi card and its companion iPad app. The combination is a must-have accessory for any photographer who uses digital photography in a studio or field setting where the art director is able to participate in the assignment. This combination of tools is invaluable in situations where the photographer is up on a ladder, and the art director is on the ground organizing people into a photogenic grouping.

EyeFi changes everything!

Last Friday I ventured out into the world and visited the headquarters of GigaPan, the maker of the motorized camera mount that I have been using for a half-year. GigaPan is based in Portland, Oregon.

At the GigaPan HQ are the marketing, engineering, manufacturing and web site GigaPeople. The software GigaPeople are in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and parts come from a variety of suppliers around the world.

This is my GigaPan image of the Portland waterfront. The image is made up of 715 individual images, each 60.2 MB in size. You can view the 26 GB version of the image at the GigaPan web site.

I was in Portland for the 65th annual conference of the Technical Association of the Graphic Arts, a scientific and technical trade association. I am on the board of the organization, and I was also acting advisor to the student chapter of TAGA from Cal Poly.

I took my GigaPan head and my Really RIght Stuff carbon fiber tripod with me to Portland, and while there I made one GigaPan image from the east side of the Willamette River looking back to downtown Portland. This is a 715-frame image that covers slightly more than 180 degrees. Behind me was a freeway fly-over which is not very attractive, so I limited the range of my panorama to leave that out of the photo.

Portland has eight bridges over the WIllamette River. My photo includes two: the Morrison and the SW Hawthorne. My photo also includes the Portland Fire Department’s waterfront facility and a small boat tied to a public (?) float adjacent to the east shore of the river.

My plan was to take a nighttime panorama from the same location, but the weather did not cooperate, so I didn’t make that one, preferring to stay indoors for the rest of my evenings in town.

GigaPan makes three models of their camera mounts, each designed to hold a camera of a certain weight and size. Mine is the biggest of them, the Epic Pro. I have written several blogs about my work with that device; my GigaPan images can be viewed at the company’s web site.

I was nicely received by the GigaPeople. They hosted my arrival with Elgar’s GigaTrumpet Fanfare (not really) and a welcome mat that said “Welcome GigaBrian!” (not really). I did get a chance to meet most of the GigaPeople, and had a tour of their manufacturing operation (photos not allowed).

I enjoyed my visit, and look forward to extending my friendship with the folks who make these wonderful camera mounts.

The Portland waterfront GigaPan image turned out very nicely, and so did the TAGA Conference.