Most of my time in Yellowstone was spent on the west side of the park with my friends Mike and Nicole Clark. Leaving the park, I decided to head out the Northeast route on US-212 through the Lamar Valley where the trees were showing fall color. This small stand of trees is right on the edge of the Yellowstone Association Institute.

The restaurant in my hotel in West Yellowstone has a painting of a distinctive mountain that nobody in our party recognized. We wondered where it was as we had become fairly familiar with the features of the lanscape on the west side of the park—at least the easily accessible areas. The next day, as I drove out the northeast entrance to the park, I spotted a stand of trees that I wanted to photograph and stopped the car. As soon as I got my camera out of the back seat and turned around, I saw the same mountain to the east. Mystery solved.

While photographing the view, another car pulled up and out stepped local photographer Sandra Nykerk. We talked about the view, the aspen, and the distinctive mountain. As she taught me a bit about the history of the place, she mentioned that the original name for the mountain was Dog Turd Peak. It was later changed to Pilot Peak, a much more palatable name for visitors to the park.

In a blog post yesterday, Tim Bray talks about how he licensed a photograph he made of the interior of Sagrada Família for a book cover. The gist of the story is that he contributed a small version of the photograph to Wikipedia. The Oxford Press found it and then contacted him to license it. Tim got paid and everyone’s happy. He goes on to argue that his experience might serve as a template for some professional photographers to follow.

In his argument, Tim mentions me by name and the fact that I’ve been reluctant to contribute to Wikipedia. It’s true. I backed off from Wikipedia and using Creative Commons licenses four years ago after some unfortunate discussions that needed the kind of thought that I didn’t have time or the mental bandwidth for. I punted thinking through the various issues until later.

Later recently became now thanks to an incident where I was represented as being against Creative Commons licenses. I’ve spent the week or so since then putting a lot of thought into the intersection of permissive licensing and professional photography business models while finishing up my recent road trip. Coincidentally, some of that thinking has revolved around possibly using permissive licenses for lower resolution images while reserving higher resolution files. Tim’s argument meshes in with those thoughts quite nicely.

Tim, congratulations on having your image used for a book cover, and thanks for the nudge. It couldn’t have come at a better time. It’s great food for thought.

The Beartooth Highway east of Yellowstone National Park

Based on the recommendations of more than a few people, I drove the Beartooth Highway on my way out of Yellowstone National Park last week. Climbing above the treeline to an elevation of 10,947 feet, it’s a spectacular road that provides a high OMG/mile ratio. It’s easily one of the five most awesome stretches of road I’ve ever driven.

The invitation to tomorrow’s Apple event might say ”Let’s talk iPhone”, but I think iCloud is really the big pivotal release from Apple this time around. Sure, we’ll get to see shiny new hardware sporting a faster and more capable processor. Maybe there will be a new case design. Maybe not. Maybe you’ll be able to get more memory than ever before. No matter how you slice it, however, the new hardware will be simply a more refined embodiment of what makes an iPhone what it is. Multitouch, Retina Display, A5 processor, and a practically permanent always-on network connection. Maybe it’ll look the same as today’s iPhone 4. Maybe not.

Whatever it looks like, the hardware released tomorrow is tactical. Every improvement is designed to address the needs of the next 12-18 months. iCloud, on the other hand, is strategic. It’s going to be the lynchpin of Apple’s entire ecosystem for the next ten years, just as the core of Mac OS X was for the last ten years. It’ll be more than a way to share documents or iMessage your pals. It’s going to be the center of your relationship with Apple in ways that won’t be immediately apparent or which will take years to fully realize.

As far as any hidden messages in the announcement graphic, an interpretative read is: On Tuesday the 4th at 10AM at 1 Infinite Loop, there will be one phone. If I were a betting man, I’d take that number 1 as literally as possible and guess that Apple’s penchant for reducing SKUs means that there will be one model of phone. One that somehow combines GSM/HSPDA and CDMA capabilities into a single unit. One iPhone to rule them all, if you will.

That’s just my wild-ass guess, though. We’ll see tomorrow.

Update: Yep, one phone that can work with both GSM and CDMA networks was announced. +1

I just ran across a page on Michael Arrington’s blog that features a photograph of Vinod Kholsa that I took at the Web 2.0 Conference in 2005. It’s likely Michael picked it up from Vinod’s Wikipedia page where it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution license. The same license, by the way, that Michael uses on his Flickr stream.

Screenshot of Micheal Arrington’s webpost about Vinod Kholsa. Click to go to his site.

I wish I could say I was surprised. I’m not. This sort of stuff happens all the time. I’ve documented it in the past and I’m sure I’ll document it in the future. The only real question is: How hard is it to attribute something when that’s the only restriction?

Update: A few hours after I posted this and left a note on Michael’s post, he removed the image saying: “sorry about that, i should have taken more time researching the ownership of the image. I’ve removed it from the post.” Interesting. In my original comment on his post, I didn’t make any particular demand. I simply pointed out the lack of attribution. I’m quite curious as to why he didn’t simply attribute and be done with it.

Update Two: Several hours later, Michael responded again with a couple of comments. The first of which is basically: ”Attribute it where? http://duncandavidson.com/? I have no idea where I even found the photo in the first place. Seemed easier to just remove it since you seem to be the owner and aren’t happy. If you want to send me a link to the photo I’ll add a link and an apology. Then, hopefully, we can move on with our lives. Ok?”

The second comment is: ” I apologize for using your image without your permission and without attribution. I should have spent way more time researching where the image came from. Unless you have some further complaint now that the image has been removed, I think this exchange is over.” And with that, it appears that he closed comments on the post.

I won’t hold closing comments on his blog against Michael. After all, I don’t provide for comments on this blog. Here are the responses, however, I would have left to these two comments:

1. The photo came from Wikipedia. Type in Vinod Khosla into Google and it’s the second image that pops up. Now, I understand Wikipedia doesn’t make credit immediately obvious. You have to click the image to find the metadata for the image. Still, it’s not a mystery where this photo came from.
2. Because the image on Wikipedia is CC-BY and I was clear that attribution was the only issue in my comment on your blog as well as in this post, it follows that there’s no permission needed from me to use it. Permission has already been granted. The only requirement for attribution.
3. Attribution is credit, not a location. Sure, an HTML attribution can be linked to a URL—and there are conditions in the CC licenses that can trigger the requirement to link—but at heart, attribution is acknowledgement and provenance. Anybody who has been in media should know this unless they really don’t give a shit.
4. I didn’t ask for for the removal of the image. In fact, I simply noted that the license requires attribution. I made no specific demand. I was curious to see what the reaction would be. I had hoped that the result would be the simple addition of attribution.
5. As to the comment about moving on with our lives, well, considering I could have opened the discussion with a letter from my lawyer, I thought I was actually being pretty nice about it all.
6. Removing the image doesn’t automatically close the matter.

I’ll close by noting that there isn’t a single image on Uncrunched—at least as of 2011/10/05 01:23 PDT—that appears to be attributed in any manner.

Tomorrow will be the last day that a new Daily Shoot assignment will be posted. After that, the site will be mothballed. It’ll eventually disappear into the depths of the bit-bucket.

Mike and I sincerely hope that everyone that participated—some 2700+ photographers in all—had a fun time, learned a few things about their own photography, and keep at it on a regular basis going forward. It’s a rewarding art and one that rewards consistent practice.

Why are we shutting the Daily Shoot down now? The primary reason is time, or the relative lack of it for a non-commercial site like this. When we started the Daily Shoot, we tried to keep things as lightweight as possible, both in terms of code and the impact on our daily schedules. After all, both Mike and I have businesses that we have to attend to. We leveraged the Twitter and Flickr APIs and had something decent going in no time at all.

It worked out well enough to start with and we were able to add some photo sharing services and make a few other improvements. Since then, the overall landscape of the where photographers communicate and share their photos has evolved quickly. For example, Google+ has exploded as a place to post and talk about photos. Flickr, on the other hand, seems to be a place that people are less and less interested in. 500px is picking up steam. And with the explosion of new services has come both new APIs. Even the APIs we already integrated with have been slowly evolving.

At this point, in order to integrate with all of the ways that photographers communicate and share photos, the site needs a total rewrite. And not a small one. A codebase that takes the Daily Shoot where it would have to go is easily several times larger than what we have currently. It’s straightforward enough and there’s little technical risk to it. But, it would take a non-trivial amount of time to execute.

For a site that runs for free and doesn’t attract enough eyeballs to monetize in any obvious way, neither Mike nor I can afford to spend the time to take the Daily Shoot into the future.

What about user’s data? Luckily, we made the decision early on not to store photographs on this site. That means that everyone’s photographs will still be where they are now even after we pull the plug on our server.

Why don’t we just let the site run for a while more? It’s true that we could let the site continue to spit out assignments and people could use it. But things are continually getting more brittle. The number of people writing in asking questions about why their images aren’t showing up or can we fix something is going up over time. At this point, we’ve decided that it’s better to shut it down cleanly at this point than to lumber on and rot away into a useless lump of bits that people get more and more aggravated with.

Will we donate the code to somebody to take on? Mike and I talked about this and decided that it probably wouldn’t be of much use to pass the code onto somebody else. As I said above, it’s way out of date and needs a total rewrite. Furthermore, with the emergence of Google+, 500px, and other sites, a total re-imagining of the concept is in order.

What about making it Open Source? I’ve participated in making taking codebases into the Open Source realm. It’s a lot of work to do well and isn’t worth it in this case.

Are Mike and I done with the idea of daily practice? Most certainly not. This is just one possible way to promote the idea of daily practice. There are others. Inspiration is everywhere and there are lots of possible ways to encourage people to find it. Hopefully, the next one I try will be a bit more sustainable.

Finally, if you’ve ever used the Daily Shoot, thank you. Keep at your craft. Get out there and make some more photographs and share ’em with the world.

The final stop on my road trip last month was Port Townsend, Washington for the Close to Home Photography Workshop with Stuart Sipahigil and Ray Ketcham. This was the first workshop that Luma Labs sponsored and not only did I want to meet Stuart and Ray, I was also wanted to get a feel for what it was like being a sponsor of a workshop like this.

Judges in costume lead the Port Townsend Kinetic Parade 2011

Far from relegating me to the back of the room to simply observe, Stuart and Ray pulled me into the workshop as a full participant from the start. During the first hour or so, Stuart asked me to share some of my experiences from going down to the Gulf of Mexico to document the oil spill last year and why I was so compelled to do it. Obviously, I had very personal reasons for it, but I was happy to share them with the everyone.

It’s easy for workshops to spend too much time in a lecture format and not get enough hands on practice. Ray and Stuart avoided this handily. They started with a few hours of lecture on the first night and then the next two days were spent working the streets of Port Townsend during the morning and then talking about our work in the afternoon. The second day of the workshop conveniently coincided with the Port Townsend Kinetic Sculpture Race Parade, a crazy event full of color and fun. Of course, we took advantage of it.

The Wolf and Red Riding Hood in the Port Townsend Kinetic Parade 2011

The three photos here are from my workshop assignment to create an interpretation of the parade. It was quite the challenge at first. Everyone was dressed up in very bright and colorful costumes. The parade vehicles were of crazy homemade designs that would be perfectly at home serving as mutant vehicles at Burning Man. Taken all together, it was almost too much. Too much color. Too much action. But as I watched and stripped away the noise, I started to observe all of the characters. Everyone that was participating and dressed up was in their own particular character. They weren’t just dressing the part, they were performing it.

A dancer participating in the Port Townsend Kinetic Parade 2011

With that observation, I was off and clicking like mad in both the parade staging area as well as on Water street when the parade was in full swing. As soon as the parade was done, it was time to make a cut to present to the group and I had to do it fast. The decision to drop to black and white to remove the chaos of color and focus in on the expression of the people was almost instinctual. I’m pretty happy with the way they came out, especially under deadline pressure.

All in all, a great workshop. Spending a couple of days focusing in on the skill of observation and the craft of making photos is always a pleasure and Stuart and Ray were great guides. I know that they are looking at doing more workshops and I can highly recommend this one, especially if you’re just starting to sort out how to explore story telling in your photography. And, I’m pretty sure that Luma Labs will be interested in being a sponsor again.

Update: For some other views, read Camellia’s impressions as a participant and Stuart’s thoughts as an instructor.

It’s pretty amazing that the first computer that I used as a child—an Apple ][+ with 48K of RAM and two floppy drives—and the computing devices I use every day today thirty-some odd years later were made under the watch of the same man. Well, he didn’t so much watch over them as he willed them into being by challenging everyone who worked on them to make something amazing. Sure, he built on the shoulders of giants and a lot of other people worked with him—and against him—during his years to shape our computing world. But his legacy is unique. Thank you, Steve, for pushing on the world in your own way.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

In my book, Steve’s best keynote was the one he gave at Macworld 2007 to introduce the iPhone. I remember clearly thinking to myself as I sat in the audience that it would probably be his best ever. Then he prank called Starbucks asking for 4000 lattes to go and there was no more question. And the iPhone, man, it was like something right out of the future—because it was. I still think it’s pretty amazing every time I use it.

The original iPhone on display at Macworld on the day it was announced in 2007. ©James Duncan Davidson

After the keynote, there was a prototype phone in a display case in the exhibit hall. That’s as close as you could get to the magic. I watched person after person go up to that case and make a photograph of the phone. I did the same, to be honest. After just a minute or so, however, what really struck me about the scene around the display case wasn’t the phone. It was the people bathed in light. I spent a minute or two more making a few photos, and then hurried off to have dinner with friends.

My photos from that day—especially the first one above—were used without permission and with attribution in hundreds of places. In fact, quite a few gadget blogs claimed it as their own. Meh.

The original iPhone on display at Macworld on the day it was announced in 2007. ©James Duncan Davidson

I haven’t looked at these photos in quite some time. When I pulled them up two nights ago, I immediately pushed them to black and white. Something about the scene just speaks to me more loudly in black and white now. Maybe it’s the treatment of history. Maybe it’s a reflection of how I feel now. In any case, I think it puts more emphasis on the light in the scene and the expressions.

Update: I offered prints of the first image for a limited time. The edition closed on Friday, October 14th 2011.

Responding to demand, I’m making available museum-quality prints of the original iPhone launch photograph I made at Macworld 2007 and which was used on websites across the Internet. Due to the special nature of this offer, these prints will only be available for order until the end of the day on Friday, October 14th.

If you’re interested, check out the order page for more information as well as to purchase.

I’ve been asked a few questions about my iPhone print offer. I’ve addressed a few of them on the offer page directly, but I do want to answer some of them in a bit more depth here.

Why a time-limited offer instead of a numbered edition? By far, the most common way to limit the number of reproductions of a photograph (or many other kinds of art) is to do so based on number. It’s a time-honored practice and is effective for selling prints, especially in a gallery situation where there’s a middleman that’s handling the transaction.

Numbering isn’t the only way to go, however. Recently, some photographers have been experimenting with different ways to offer a limited set of prints. For example, Ctein and Mike Johnston have made several time-limited offers to good effect.

Conceptually, I find the time-limited approach to be appealing for many reasons. First of all, it means that the artist can focus attention on the offer at hand and, when it’s done, she can move on to the next thing. Second, it provides for a limit, but it’s a softer limit than a firm number of prints. Basing the limit on time seems to be a good fit for our digital world where the real scarce resources is attention.

Finally, by making the offer this way, I can set pricing at a lower level than I would for a numbered edition. That makes these prints more accessible than they otherwise would be.

Why October 14th as an end date? It’s the day the new iPhone 4S ships. If there’s going to be a time-limit to the offer, the day the latest version of the iPhone comes out of the display case and into the public’s hands isn’t a bad one to use, is it? It’s also a day that works out extremely well with my near term schedule.

Why black and white instead of color? The original photograph was published in color, but this offer is for a black and white version. I have heard from a few people that prefer a color version instead. The color version has its merits, but in the end, its the black and white version that speaks most to me, therefore it’s the one that I’m making available.

What are my motivations here? I posted the black and white version of this image on my blog last week in a post remembering the Macworld 2007 launch of the iPhone. Obviously, it’s impossible to untangle the twin events of Steve’s death and the iPhone 4S announcement last week. One of the most surprising things to me that week, however, was the fact that some found the announcement of the iPhone 4S to be lacking in features. Personally, I think the 4S is an amazing instance of the promise that we all saw when we looked at that first iPhone in its display case.

After posting the photograph on my blog, a few people immediately wrote me and asked if I would make some prints. I followed up by asking the question on my blog and on Twitter and got a unanimous answer to go forward, including some encouragement from people who work in Cupertino. Now, I’ve long planned on offering limited sets of prints that I make in my own studio. This photograph has always been on my list of prints to offer. The fact that people were asking for this print dovetailed with my nascent plans. I plan on learning a lot from it and applying that knowledge to future print offers that will happen in the very near future.

I’m a big believer that when the universe tells you to do something you already want to do, it’s past time to get going. All I had to do was get my act together and execute, so I did.

Is this print a tribute to the iPhone? An emphatic yes. By definition, it can also be seen as a tribute to Steve—although I have to say that if that were my primary intent, I have many other images that would do a better job of that. More than anything else, however, I see it as a tribute to the many people who designed, built, and shipped the first iPhone as well as to everyone who has worked on it and its ecosystem since. May they continue to work on things that amaze and delight us and realize that our future is right now.

The computers I first used as a kid were the Apple][, a Commodore PET, a TRS-80, a Commodore 64, and a string of MS-DOS machines. Of course my first programming language was BASIC. My second was Pascal. Then there were others that went by in a blur. College took me on a slight detour into VMS land before dropping me off at the doorstep of UNIX and the mysterious land of C and pointers. My guide was a tattered copy of this book, co-written by the man who created the language—and who was a key developer of UNIX.

A lot has happened since then, but both C and UNIX have remained both as a cornerstone of the modern computing world. Most of the programming languages I’ve learned since then bear the influence of C in one way or another. None of the languages that came since, however, has had the same mix of raw power, portability, and just useful enough abstraction that makes C the language of choice for operating systems.

Java is safe. Python is clear. Ruby is expressive. Perl is the complex master of strings. Nothing beats C at its core game, however. It’s one of the reasons why I am quite fond of Objective-C (a superset of C). And, it’s why there has been a copy of this book on my bookshelf since I was in college. Other books have come and gone, but this one has remained.

The machines and the software you use everyday—from the smartphone in your hand all the way up to the complex servers that make up the World Wide Web—bear the mark and influence of Dennis Ritchie. It’s impossible to overstate that. Thank you Dennis.

Now that I’m back from a quick trip to photograph the Android Open conference, I’m getting everything ready to do the big print run of the iPhone at Macworld 2007 photo. That means tabulating spreadsheets, finalizing the print dimensions, and buying supplies. I’m also iterating through test prints to fine tune the image—tweaking contrast, sharpening, and more—for the paper I’ll be using until I’m happy with the result.

There’s nothing like hanging a print on the wall to judge it. From left to right, these are the 8½"×11", 13"×19", and 17"×22" prints hanging over my print area. That big beast, by the way, is the Epson Stylus Pro 3880 I’ll be using for this set of prints. The image sizes I’ve settled on are 6"×9", 10"×15", and 12"×18", respectively. This provides a generous margin for matting as well as allows display of the photograph in a frame without a mat.

I’ve probably got a few more rounds of test prints to go before everything is ready to go, but it’s close. Speaking of close, Friday—tomorrow here on the west coast, but today for those of you on the east coast and in Europe and Asia—is the last day to place an order.

It appears that the NYPD—or at least some of their officers—are using strobing flashlights to purposefully interfere with cameras recording them during Occupy Wall Street protests. Here are two examples that Lucy Kafanov tweeted earlier this evening:

This is really disappointing. I’d go so far as to say it’s reprehensible. It joins the list of bad things we’ve seen the police do in New York—such as beating up protesters, beating them up some more, and running them over. It doesn’t really matter if you are aligned with the Occupy Wall Street protesters or not, you need to be aware of how our public servants are acting and what that says about our nominally free and open society.

Last night, while inspecting a print off my Epson 3880, my eyes met something very bad. At first, I didn’t believe what I saw. On second and third look, however the problem was still there. Staring me in the face. Ruining the print I was looking at.

OK. I’ll make another print. Hrm. Crap. Still there. No problem… I’ll check all the settings and make sure that I didn’t bump something. Nope. Everything looks good. Let’s try again. Shit. There it is again. Another print ruined. Here’s the problem looks like:

Can you see it? Magenta stripes across a black and white image?

Needless to say, that’s not good. After twenty or so more test prints, interspersed with head cleanings and alignment runs, I gave up and went to bed. This morning, Elizabeth—who just spent the last few years in college taking care of a fleet of high-end printers—came in and her immediate reaction was a simple and understated: “Oh dear…”

Eventually, after more troubleshooting and more test prints than I care to think about on expensive paper—the problem is less pronounced on papers with a smaller gamut and range than Epson Exhibition Fiber—we borrowed my friend Rick LePage’s 3880. The print from his printer was perfect. That firmly pointed to a hardware issue with my printer. The next stop was Pro Photo Supply to ask George—their printer guru—what he thought. He took a look at it and in less than five minutes was on the phone with somebody high up in Epson’s support organization. Lots of discussion ensued. Loupes came out. Scans were made and sent by email.

The short summary is that it seems to be a fascinating problem. It’s something that they’ve not seen before. There are a few theories, but nothing has been nailed down yet. Hey, if you’re going to have a problem, you might as well have a good one, right? Still, the fact that it’s a humdinger of a problem doesn’t change the fact that I’m only half way through a large print job.

Luckily, I have really great friends. This edition will get printed this week.

When Lytro made their announcement on Wednesday to unveil the design and price of their new camera, I didn’t think I had more to say than I said in June. In a nutshell: Hello computational computing! It’s very cool technology. It demos well. I’m not sure, however, that posting Flash-based do-dads on Facebook allowing anybody to refocus the images after the fact is all that interesting in the long term. It feels kind of faddish. Still, impressive technology.

After a few more days of thinking about it, however, I have to say it’s very interesting that Lytro is going after the consumer market instead of trying to cater to professionals or enthusiasts. Perhaps part of their rationale for this is driven by the fact that Lytro is ventured funded and the consumer market is where the big returns are likely to be. I don’t think it’s that simple, however. I think that Lytro is making a very smart decision based on the benefits that their technology offers and the tradeoffs needed to make the technology work.

The first of these tradeoffs is resolution. The Lytro specifications talk about capturing 11 mega rays of light, but the resulting images look to provide about megapixel of detail. Maybe less. If you’ve slogged through the background material about how the tech works, this makes sense. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Lytro probably has a standard consumer 10-12 megapixel sensor behind an array of a somewhat less than a million micro lenses. Maybe fewer. There’s no free lunch here. The process of using multiple photo sites on a sensor to capture the additional data necessarily cuts down resolving ability.

The second tradeoff seems to be absolute sharpness. After working my way through the Lytro sample images again, it seems to me that while any point can be brought into acceptable focus, very few of the resulting views are really super sharp. This makes sense if you think about what Lytro is doing as stacking a bunch of focus zones. You get to take advantage of lots of depth of field, but as you know, even when you have lots of depth of field, you only get one super thin plane of tack-sharp focus in each focus zone.

The third tradeoff looks to be in low-light performance. While the f/2 lens is nice and bright—and a real luxury at the price point—you’ll notice that most of the samples are taken in fairly bright light conditions. The few that are in somewhat lower light, such as the one of the rocket sculpture on the Embarcadero in SF, show quite a bit of noise, especially in the shadows. My guess is that the photo sites on the sensor aren’t all that big. After all, you need lots of them behind each micro lens to capture all those rays of light in the light field.

Like many choices in technology, these tradeoffs aren’t inherently good or bad. Furthermore, the first and third tradeoffs will be minimized over time by the rapid progress in both the ability to squish more pixels on sensor and make them less noisy. The second tradeoff can probably be addressed over time as well with more refined implementations of the basic approach. This is the first almost-shipping version, after all. Give it 5 or 10 years and lets see what happens.

Right now, for the kinds of things I use a camera for, the tradeoffs are a net negative. They may be a net negative for you as well, at least if you were to use this as your only camera. Here’s the thing that’s so easy for avid photographers to forget: Your average Jane or Joe on the street doesn’t want to fiddle with camera controls and—thanks to modern exposure systems that take care of aperture and shutter speed—lag and error in camera focusing is the number one barrier to getting a decent photo that captures the memory they want to make.

The Lytro takes care of that and the tradeoffs needed to do it don’t even matter to the average person that wants to use a camera. Just enough resolution to put online or make a 4" print? That’s fine. That’s the only way the photo was going to be used anyway. Sharpness that’s not super tack sharp, but only acceptable? Sure! It’s all worth it to never have to worry about focus again. In fact, I can’t help but think that the beautiful and non-camera like design of the Lytro with its emphasis on the shutter release might just be the ultimate implementation of George Eastman’s 1888 promise: “You push the button, we do the rest”.

It’s brilliant. I’m not going to rush out and get one, but I think that they’ll do well with it. I hope so. After all, one of the most noble things we do with cameras is capture memories and I think the Lytro will help more people do that.

I still think, however, that the embedded Flash-based living pictures thing is a gimmick.

John McCarthy on March 5th, 2008 at ETech 2008.

John McCarthy was the inventor of the Lisp language and coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” in the 1950’s. In the sixties, his thoughts on treating time-shared computers as a utility predicted the current use of cloud computing. He is another one of those people that left a huge mark on the world as we know it. Thank you John.

Earlier today, I dropped off the complete set of packages at the post office to fulfill orders from my recent iPhone at Macworld 2007 print offer. The production process took a lot longer than I ever thought possible and it seemed that most things that could go wrong did. It’s been a very long and tiring two weeks. Yet, at the end of of it all, I’m more inspired than ever to do this again and build on what I’ve learned—so much so that I’ve been thinking of this as “Edition Zero” and have been sorting out the lessons it has taught me.

The first lesson that there’s potential here. It might even be sustainable. The evidence of it is in the photo above showing all the packages I dropped off this morning sitting on the post office dock ready to go to destinations around the world—Australia, Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, Spain, and Lithuania off the top of my head—as well as all over the United States. That’s pretty awesome. Considering that every print sold was a result of people who either, like you, read this blog or see my tweets, I’m humbled. Thank you.

Now, I’m very aware of the fact that the particular image I chose for this edition has a particular significance. Did that skew the numbers? It’s hard to say. Yes, maybe it did. On the other hand, some of the people that were most vocal about encouraging me to put this print up for sale have been, and continue to be, vocal about their desire to see other photographs offered as prints. Furthermore, I’ve heard from more than a few people that while they appreciated the image I offered, they’d really rather have something else up on their wall.

The only way to find out if there’s really something sustainable here is to do it again and iterate. It certainly is a promising start, tho.

The second lesson is more cautionary. I made this offer as a time-limited one. I’ve watched other photographers, such as Ctein and Mike Johnston at the Online Photographer, do similar time-limited offers and have been intrigued by the notion. I touched on this in the Q&A for the offer but in a nutshell, I find the time-limited approach to be a nice conceptual fit for the digital world. It lets the artist focus their attention on producing the edition in whatever size the market demands and then moving on to their next project.

The devil in the details of this kind of offer, however, is fulfilling your part of the bargain by producing the full edition in a short enough period of time to be acceptable to customers. If you get a nice big slate of orders, you can celebrate good fortune, but then you’ve got to deliver. And deliver quickly and efficiently at the level of quality that you promised.

Now, I’ve made a bunch of prints over the years. It’s not like this was my first rodeo. But, it was my first at this kind of scale where a set of over a hundred high-quality prints needed to be produced in a limited timeframe. It’s like knowing how to cook a meal for four and then sorting out how to do it for a group of a hundred. Minor details that are irrelevant and complications that are easily worked around at a smaller scale become very relevant and even devastating at a larger scale.

This became brutally apparent when my Epson 3880 became as useful as a boat anchor in a grass field. It’s like having the shutter on your primary camera break during a major event. Without a backup, you’re in trouble. Luckily, my friend Rick LePage was more than happy to let me use his printers, including another 3880. Perfect! Just move the job over and keep going, right?

Not so quick. There are printers and then there are printers. The Epson 3880 is a damn fine machine and I’m quite happy with the prints that mine made—at least before things went south. But the same image and paper combination didn’t print so well on Rick’s 3880. Something about the way the star wheels on Rick’s printer is different than on mine and they were marking up the paper I was using. To be fair to the 3880, the image is a challenging one to print with big areas of very dark ink coverage. Furthermore, the paper I was using—Epson Exhibition Fiber—is not the most forgiving to use. No matter what we tried, however, the prints just weren’t up to snuff.

The plan B that looked so promising fizzled. Luckily, there was a plan C.

We pulled Rick’s big Epson 7900 out of storage and put it to work. The good news is that the Epson 7900 is one hell of a machine. If the Epson 3880 is like a Nikon D7000 or Canon 60D, the 7900 is like a Nikon D3S or Canon 1D. It’s a serious tool that has the oomph to get things done. Unfortunately, even the best tools get dusty in storage. Printers and dust don’t like each other very much and it took a while to get the beast’s paper path cleaned up. Along the way, I also changed papers to Hahnemühle FineArt Pearl. It has a more tolerant surface that made for an easier to produce print. As a bonus, the result ended up looking just a bit nicer to my eye.

Once things were going smoothly the prints that came off the 7900 are beautiful. Amazing. I can easily see the differences between how the 3880 and 7900 print, especially in the shadows and highlights. Even better, the 7900 is the kind of machine that you can push a zillion prints through in short order without a problem. It’s a thoroughbred that likes to run.

To go back to the camera analogy, the reason I shoot with a D3S is both how it handles situations on the edge—especially in low light—as well as its uncompromising ability to get the job done on the longest and most challenging days. It’s clear to me that a similar thought process is going to play a role in the near future as I consider doing more print editions. Do I need to step up to an Epson 4900 or a 7900? What’s my backup plan if something goes south again? The bigger printers have next-business day on-site service packages available. That could be very useful, indeed, if I’m in a similar situation in the future.

The third lesson I learned is how awesome customers can be. When it became obvious that I was going to miss the delivery expectation I had set during the offer, I sat down and composed an apology then emailed it out to everyone who purchased a print. I agonized over it. I was filled with trepidation as I sent it. I wondered if anybody was going to be disappointed enough to cancel their order or, even worse, would be pissed off. It turns out that my anxieties were unfounded. I heard back from many customers and while it was clear that they were looking forward to their prints arriving, they also had many kind words of encouragement and understanding.

Every line of business has a different feel to the customer-vendor relationship. I like the way this feels so far. Of course, it’ll take more iterations to really see how this plays out, but I like awesome customers. They are the type of people I want to make more things for.

Which brings me to the fourth and final lesson that I’ll share for now: I really like love doing this. Crafting something that goes from my hands directly into my customer’s hands is a wonderful feeling. Not only were my previous efforts at making prints available through a third party printer not as promising from a business standpoint, they also didn’t have the same awesome feeling.

Let’s do this again, shall we? Soon. Next time, however, I’m putting a color photograph up for sale. I need some chroma again in my life after looking at so many black and white prints.

On Twitter this evening, I talked a little bit about how to handle twenty bajillion photographs and stay afloat. My thinking on this has been shifting quite a bit over the last year and has been greatly influenced by conversations with others about the shoeboxes (or filing cabinets if we were a bit more sophisticated) we used to keep our archives in. Those thoughts aren’t yet complete and I’m not ready to write the big treatise on how my workflow really works, but I’m far enough along to at least give a sneaky peek on one aspect of it.

What’s become obvious is that there’s a point at which you don’t want all of your photographs staring you in the face. You don’t even want them to surface in your catalog nor do you want them slowing you down when you search or browse. Yet, you don’t really want them totally out of your life. For any number of reasons—some of which make sense, and others which sound like the things a hoarder might say—you want to be able to dig back through those photos at a later date and maybe promote a photo that’s become more meaningful.

Aperture and Lightroom—both of which want to be the one true solution—don’t really help you with this on their own, at least not after some tens or hundreds of thousands of images stack up. As the photos continue to pour in, both Aperture and Lightroom start to loose their grace and can get downright unwieldy. But who’s to say that you have to let Aperture or Lightroom be the master of all your photos? The answer is that when it doesn’t make sense for you to let them run the full show, you don’t.

Here’s a very simplified illustration of my current catalog strategy:

The archive is, in effect, my shoebox. Everything goes in there. Every image that I take and import goes there. The images I’m currently interested in are referenced in Aperture where I group them into projects and albums. If I decide that an image isn’t working for me anymore, I kick it out of Aperture pronto. It just becomes an unreferenced file in the shoebox again. On the other hand, if I want to go digging for an image to add to a collection I’m making, I fire up Bridge or Photo Mechanic and go poking about.

As I’ve implemented this strategy, I’ve found it easier to start focusing on what I want to do: make groupings of images that go together that I can present as albums or portfolios. I can quickly toss aside everything I don’t want slowing me or Aperture down knowing that it’s all there to get back to later. Hey, isn’t that what these tools were supposed to be about in the first place?

Now, if you read this and think “Hey, just keeping everything in Aperture or Lightroom is working just fine for me”, then great! You’re not running into the same issues as I have and you should keep doing what works for you.

Follow up: I know this is just a glimpse and there are tons of possible follow on questions. I think it might take a book to answer ’em all. Also, please note that this is what works for me at the scale of my image archive. It’s not something I’d recommend at a level where your catalog weighs in at tens of GB. Finally, this is all in the service of the high order bit of image cataloging.

In response to my post about how Aperture or Lightroom doesn’t have to hold ’em all, several people asked about the strategy of using separate libraries. I’ve tried it in the past and I have a two big problems with this approach.

First, you have to come up with a way to partition your work. You could do it by year or event. Any way you do it, however, you’re adding the mental overhead of “Which catalog did I put that image from?” At first, it seems easy, but it didn’t take long before it drove me batshit nuts. I think that three years into it, you’d just give up on any images in those early catalogs.

Second, while separating libraries addresses an immediate problem of getting through a particular set of images, the partitioning interferes with being able to make collections or portfolios that span across the boundaries. For example, that album that has all your best photos of your daughter over the years. Or the one that has the ten best cloud photos you’ve ever made that you want to keep refining over time as you make more of ’em. Sure, you can make an über-library or three to contain these collections, but now you’ve got multiple ways of slicing and dicing your dataset. Good luck keeping everything straight.

In a nutshell, the multiple catalog approach emphasisizes dealing with the minutia of particular sets of your images at the expense of making it hard to work across the span of your collection. I think it’s a tactical solution that works against a long term strategy of refining a body of work.

In any discussion about catalogs and libraries, it’s easy to delve into the details. Which application? Referenced or managed files? How do you star rate? How much metadata do you need to add? How many keywords are enough? How do you back things up?

All of these are important questions, but all of them should be subservient to the reason you work with a catalog in the first place: to find and present your best or most cherished work. Every other detail should line up behind that goal. Anything that doesn’t help you do that is something you should promptly ignore.

How many images fall into that category of being your best or most cherished work? Not many, really. Dozens if you’re starting off. Hundreds, maybe, if you’ve been at it for a while. Getting too caught up in the details of the tens or hundreds of thousands of photographs you’ll make along the way is counter productive, in my opinion. You want to do enough to make sure that they are a good resource to refine your best photos out of and no more.

Whatever set up you use, it needs to let you find and organize the good stuff and let everything else fade back into the background. How far back into the background should it fade? As far back as you’re comfortable with. For some, this might just be an unorganized set in Aperture or Lightroom. For others, like myself, it can be just an image archive on disk that can be referenced when desired. Braver souls might want to use the trash can.

However you do it, make sure that the effort you’re putting into it is in the service of the best and most cherished work. That’s the high order bit. Don’t put any more cycles than needed into dealing with the rest. The simplest of organizational schemes is enough for the times when you want to dive back in and re-evaluate what you might have passed up earlier.