THE VIEW FROM HERE
Digital Archives and Archiving the Real World
Two thoughts came to mind this month, as they were both issues which I had to sort through, some missing files and sunlit springtime images riding the edge of black and life.
A Missing Archive
As I was curating my exhibition Exquisite Earth last fall, I ran into a wall on a photograph I wanted to use for the exhibition, the full res edited version and the RAW file was missing. As I looked further, it became clear that my entire Antarctica trip from 2009 was missing. Few hard drive files, no DVDs, no index, other than some jpeg excerpts, no evidence that the archive ever existed.
For years my normal offload and back-up process was to offload to two hard drives on initial downloading of my photographs from the camera memory card, re-naming the files and imposing my normal metadata simultaneously. On return home one of those drives is then back-up to two gold DVDs.
In this instance, this procedure seems to have gone awry.
It soon became clear to me what must have happened. When I went to mount one of my terabyte hard drives, it wouldn't mount, nor could Apple's Disk Repair Utility fix the drive and mount it. As it happened, it was a drive I had carried with me on the Antarctica trip which I had also been using for Apple's Time Machine back-ups. The 500gb portable drive I had used simultaneously for offloading the photographs in the field had long since been cleared and overwritten with new data. It didn't make sense to me that the only copy could possibly be the files that must be on that now problematic Time Machine drive.
As I investigated the matter, it did seem that some people were reporting errors with Time Machine leading to directories getting corrupted and drives not mounting. I knew at the time that putting precious data and back-ups on the same drive was problematic, but as they were my secondary back up, I didn't worry too much about it.
On my return from Antarctica, with catching up from weeks away, inattention to detail of file management and archiving led me to end up with only one copy, on what now seemed to be a corrupted drive. I was devastated, but had to move on and print the show, keeping faith in the back of my mind that the data was there, and I would manage to get it off. It wasn't until March that I had a window of time to try a disk recover.
A good friend recommended Alsoft's Disk Warrior as the software to try for disk recovery, and as I had used it successfully in the past, I ordered an update. Disk Warrior rebuilt the directory and the files suddenly appeared in a temporary "preview" directory that I could mount and copy from, but could not repair as the drive was now also reporting a hardware error, which may have been the problem all along.
I now have two duplicate hard drives of the trip, that are indexed with a little disk indexing utilitiy I've been using for years, Disk Tracker, and I will start writing the Blu-ray disks tomorrow. Even at the standard 25 gigabytes, it will take 9 disks for the 2009 Antarctica trip. The sheer volume of data it is now possible to produce is one of the challenges facing us. It can contribute to what happened to me here, where the task of good backup simply requires a lot of time and effort.
San Joaquin River. 2011.
Bright Sun, Deep Shadows, Light Everywhere
The rain of the last few months have swelled the rivers here. The sun is out and California seems draped in spring. I am itching to wander this month, and believe I will. Meanwhile, I use every chance I get knocking around to see what's going on with the water and life bursting out.
In this abundance of light and life, the photographs can often seem contrasty, harsh and dead of that very life. I work hard on the RAW processing files and with careful edits in Photoshop to preserve the luminously and delicacy I see. It is not easy to do or to translate onto paper.
San Joaquin River. 2011.
I remember working so hard to get my beginning black and white students to print so that blacks were possible in their silver prints. Adequate exposure under the enlarger, long development time in the paper developer and appropriate contrast of paper–were all ingredients to a rich print result.
This very chasing of black has imposed a world view pervasive in photography. And that very blackness and darkness at the bottom end of the tonal scale is exactly what I try to very carefully watch for in processing these light-filled spring flood photographs of the San Joaquin River.
It is also a challenging area as there were no blacks present, but there were very dark values. We tend to truncate those into blacks in most photography, and in these cases it is very easy for anything less than a black at the bottom end to make the image look flat.
San Joaquin River. 2011.
A combination of very restrained contrast in the RAW processor, being careful to keep detail in the shadows by not imposing black, using the shadow Fill slider, the curve editor, and then in Photoshop carefully editing the curve again to keep shadows open and contrast sill not noticeably flat and dull. It is a difficult edge to ride. An additional tool now in our palette of options is the HDR Toning Editor in Photoshop CS5 Adjustments menu. Careful use of HDR Toning was explained in our September 2010 Newsletter Tutorial.
Of course this all fits in nicely with my general contention that most photographs unduly truncate the delicate nuance of the real world into over-simplified exaggerations that result in contrasty saturated hyperbole. And now that you know what I really think.... It is also riding an edge where it is not at all clear what do, even with plently of attitiude and a subtle aganda. It is new tonal territory, and every image has its own potential and challenges, which I will somtimes rise to, often struggle with, and occasionally move on as I won't know what to do. Sometimes it just needs to be black and white.
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