FollowupID: 438654 Submitted:
Friday, Jul 07, 2006 at 13:43
Member - Andrew W (SA) posted:
Hi extfilm or perhaps it should be "exy" film - I've got a lot of exy Velvia film taking up space in my
fridge ;-)
hmmm - not sure on the premise for your post.
Sure - asset management and protection takes time - but doesn't necessarily cost much though, especially for digital.
Looking after transparencies is quite distinctly harder than looking after your image files. My images are:
* catalogued (I use Cumulus) with meta data for everything, especially job numbers, dates, etc. - do you do that with all your transparencies?
* backed up and stored off site - most of my work is stored in two different brands of media, with one copy in the office and one off-site
* capable of being retrieved based on the thumbnails in Cumulus at a moment's notice.
Consumers can readily use something like Picasa2 from Google to catalogue their images easily too. There is no excuse for not doing it.
I have seen many professionals with boxes and boxes of transparencies with lots of information on the boxes, but stored in attics and all sorts of poor environments prone to dust, moisture and the natural deterioration of the media.
Their ability to retrieve the work is highly questionable, and often the transparencies have been poorly handled, need cleaning and are warped.
Duplicated media stored in geographically separated locations is a sure safer way of ensuring memories are protected over time ... and this is a lot easier to do with digital.
how many of your trustees of your estate are going to care enough about all your work to keep it for posterity - especially when there are filing cabinets or cupboards full of the stuff of unknown content as far as they are concerned? And if your trustees know the value, are their trustees going to know it one generation forn the track when they move on?
If people do have a lot of important family history on slides and negatives, I advocate getting them scanned - ideally professionally, then distribute copies of the image files to the people involved - then everyone has a copy, and they are less likely to get lost, or sent to the tip.
On your last paragraph, you say the sensor sizes of Nikon and Canon cameras are "very different". You are really emphasising how UNIMPORTANT sensor size is to most people, because if a pro doesn't know why it's important, they probably are unlikely to need to know, and if you think differences in sensor size are vendor specific you are smoking something.
The D200 you have has an APS-C size (approx 23x15mm) sensor just almost precisely like all the other cameras talked about above (D70, D50, 30D, 300D, 350D, 20D) ... except the Canon 5D (a 12.8-MPixel) and perhaps the Canon 12 MPixel camera you referred to above (perhaps a Canon 1Ds?), both of which has full 35mm sensors - 35.8x23.8mm. The size of sensor has no impact, however on the file size. Compact cameras can have much smaller sensors - say 7x5mm or smaller and still produce similar file sizes. There are consequences - sure, but not necessarily all bad.
The size of the file produced is dependent, however, on a lot of other things - mostly how the camera is set up.
For most people, the largest file size on a 12-MPixel camera is likely to be much more image informatin than they will ever need, so they just go with a reasonable JPEG compression and can easily create 2-MB files that are more than they need and thus put 400 odd, on a 1-GB CD.
Sure - professionals like you or I might want to use RAW file formats, but for most people, it is the equivalent of using a Pro-lab for their film developing.
I fit about 90 RAW files on a 1-GByte card. This is - for a 12.8MPixel Canon camera is the same amount of information that I would get from a 12.8MPixel Nikon NEFF file. If you are storing RAW+JPEG, this will reduce the number of files you can store.
So, your mate with his "whizz bang Canon" could readily have configured his camera to produce bigger files than your D200 - D200 is a no lessa camera than it's Canon equivalents, in my experience, and I've used both a lot.
Allmost all image formats have compression - some compression is "loss-less" and some is lossy, or even more lossy ... depending on how you are going to use an image, this may or may not be important to you.
I hope that helps,
Andrew who educates professionals transitioning to digital, especially helping them differentiate myth from reality.
 | Andrew Weller |
