Just in case you haven’t caught it via my Facebook updates:
Chasing the Bethlehem Star from Dale Tan on Vimeo.
Douglas Nelson produces Our Hopes and Our Fears, a Christmas album. This slideshow features his original track : Chasing the Bethlehem Star.
More about Douglas and the album here : www.dpnelson.com
All photographs copyright Dale Tan 2011.
“Chasing the Bethlehem Star” copyright Douglas Nelson 2011.
One of the issues about being in photography full-time is the huge amount of data you generate and consequently, have to plough through.
Consider the average shoot – say, 300 frames taken during an event-shoot, at 15.5MB per RAW file (the average for my Nikon D700). That’s about 4.7GB of data right there. I average about that much data twice a month, which works out to about 112GB a year or so.
Considering the price of an external hard disk these days, this may not seem much. But if one looks at the much larger costs, this would quickly become quite a problem. Consider:
To that end, the engineer in me quickly reviewed my storage plan – it involves some external disks, laid out in simple scheme, marked out with arrows denoting flow of data. My options look like this:
I won’t bore you with the details (unless you ask), because my point isn’t this engineering solution. Was an engineer, so that’s my thing.
My real conclusion, is that keeping all this stuff in check is a b*tch. In the spirit of New Year’s, my resolution this year would therefore be, to keep be vicious with my culling of imagery. I should keep no more than 2X the published images. Everything else must go.
Check back again next year to find out if I kept it. Happy New Year, all you ‘togs.
(if you must know : I generated over 200GB of imagery this year. This tops my last 2 years, combined. I have about 450GB of imagery amassed since 2003. And yes, I’m paranoid about keeping it all, safely. I picked the first option because space considerations on portable drives made option 2 impossible.)
Went up to Twin Peaks today to photograph sunrise for assignment. Here are some of the prettier out-takes: on Flickr
From here on, this site will have a new focus on photography and technology. For starters, I’ve deleted all blog entries other than those concerning the above two topics, and removed the links to the photos page.
When I view a website, I don’t want to have to plough through distraction to figure out what the site is about. You, as my special guests, shouldn’t have to as well.
My images from the Nature of Photography Class (PH 612 with Jim Sienkiewicz). The original specification called for 10 images, but since class is over, I’ve re-edited it a bit for the “extended remix” version.
Over the last 6 weeks, I’ve been photographing at the Marin Headlands, as part of my summer semester class, the Photography Intensive.
The Marin Headlands is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, just on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
My focus for the class there has been that of the interactions between nature and abandoned military equipment at the Historic Nike Missile Site.
Embrace – July 2011
Piles of discarded military equipment lie abandoned on the Historic Nike Missile Site, left behind and rendered obsolete when the site was decommissioned in 1972.
40 years of sun and rain have peeled the paintwork away from the large silent silhouettes, giving way to necklaces of ivy, blossoms of rust, and fields of gold.
Forgotten by men, these giants exist in harmony with the peaceful landscape that surrounds and embraces them.
I was drawn by the contrast between former weapons of war and the gentle beauty of the environment in which they sat in. The juxtaposition of hard strong lines against organic forms emphasize the unexpected relationship between once intimidating machines that have since been welcomed by nature.
The pictures were photographed on a medium format camera to paint the wealth of detail in the rich relationship, where object and setting are slowly becoming one. The plants have flourished around, under and over the structures, which in turn have begun to resemble the landscape themselves.
The production process involved capture on slide film and printing on C-print (chromogenic print), yielding soft lines that hint at the gentle harmony, and vibrant colors that allude to the new life bestowed upon the embraced.
Naturally, I would sometimes digress, and photograph other interesting subjects as well. Here are some 50 images from around the other parts of the Missile Site, Rodeo Beach, and other bits of the Headlands.
More about the Historic Nike Missile Site : http://www.nps.gov/goga/nike-missile-site.htm
More about the Marin Headlands : http://www.nps.gov/goga/marin-headlands.htm
I would also like to acknowledge the generous hospitality of the rangers (John, Charles, Nora) and volunteers, who let me run loose every day it was open, and on Saturdays when the volunteers came by for restoration work : http://nikemissile.org/nike.shtml
John Porter and I at the opening reception
Postcard from Seven Half exhibition
I’ll be exhibiting a few select images from my Photo Intensive summer classes, starting tonight. The theme is “Embrace”, and the premise is that it was produced at the Marin Headlands over the the 7.5 weeks of summer school.
The full complete set of images will be posted online after the exhibition opens.
More information here : http://www.sevenhalfaau.com
and Facebook event page is here : http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=236308723070690
Do drop by if you’re in the City.
As you might have noticed, I’ve gone back to the default WordPress theme. This site is quite overdue for an upgrade, so I’ve decided to do something about it over the next couple of weeks.
In the meantime, do follow me on Twitter if you’re interested in the more day-to-day updates : @dtkm on twitter
credit : John Biehler
The motivations for buying a new camera tend to lean towards either good snapshots, or to learning photography. Sometimes, however, people want both – they want to learn photography and be able to take the same camera to dinners with friends.
If that is your case, then maybe you should get an EVIL camera (that is, Electronic Viewfinder, Interchangeable Lens). I spotted a few of these on Wired’s June 2011 issue (“Happy Mediums”, p64), and also in use.
The great thing is that these things are lighter and smaller, but yet retain their full controls, and have interchangeable lenses. Admittedly, you don’t get the full DSLR feature set, but honestly, I don’t think most people use all the features anyway. I’m not sure how the sensors actually perform, though from pics on Flickr, I do think that they’re good enough for all practical purposes.
Personally, I’d probably get one myself if I wasn’t going into it full-time. But I like my fast glass, so there.
edit : Spotted this Wired article on more of the same – http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/01/five-reasons-you-should-ditch-your-dslr/
From time to time, I’ve had problems uploading images using Flickr’s official Uploadr application : http://www.flickr.com/tools/uploadr. It used to work well previously, but somewhere between then and now, something changed and it would turn up some bugs. Maybe because I use a Mac now, or maybe I moved up to Snow Leopard.
In my particular case, the issue was that halfway through uploading, it would get stuck on an image, and not proceed. The bar for that image would show it to be completing, but the application would not proceed to upload the next image and the app would hang.
This is kinda irritating, since I’d get stuck about 10-12 images into a 60-image set, without real recourse because the web uploaders were pretty buggy and limited as well.
To compound to the issue, Yahoo has actually stopped development work on the desktop uploading client. I don’t know the rationale behind this, and IMHO, it’s not terribly smart to have stopped it, seeing that options for mass-uploading aren’t very many. It also appears that I’m not the only one : http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72157624115511986/
Anyway, the solution for me is the Uploadr 3.3 Preview. It’s kinda rough, and things aren’t all the polished, but it seems to be a whole lot more reliable than the public version.
Mac users get it here : http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/72157619108149732/
PC brethren here : http://www.flickr.com/services/apps/72157620182196244/
Hope this helps your next big upload!
