SnapperTalk

What’s the longest exposure you’ve ever taken?
A few minutes maybe?

Well Gizmodo has an interview with a conceptual artist by the name of Jonathon Keats who is planning to take a 100 year exposure of a hotel room at the Hotel des Arts in San Francisco. Photographically the experiment is about as low tech as one can imagine - a handmade brass cylinder pinhole camera containing a sheet of “archivally-stable black paper, which will fade in the focused light of a pinhole projection over the next hundred years, producing a unique positive print”.

Conceptually, the purpose of the project is to explore time itself. It’s easy to forget how the invention of photography has enabled us to view slices of time in ways that were simply impossible to the generations before us. I’m thinking of both long-exposure and time-lapse photography that enables us to view the progress of time in a single image, and also of high-speed photography which essentially lets us view the world devoid of the dimension of time.

One thing’s for sure - in 2106 it’s going to create a few headaches for copyright lawyers in deciding when the photo was actually taken… if copyright still exists then.

Keats also has another strange experiment on the go - playing continuous tape loops of prayers from the three major monotheistic religions and a control loop of a talk radio station, to fruit flies and blue-green algae, in order to genetically classify God himself - but that’s… errr… for another time.

The story so far… When Apple released its new Intel-based machines - the Macbook Pro, iMac, and now Mac-Mini - it said it would not actively prevent users from running Windows on the machines. But that’s not the same as actually enabling people to do so - see previous post or here for details on some of the technical problems involved.

A contest seeking donations was started by Colin Nederkoorn that resulted in a $13,000 prize being offered to the person who could come up with a solution that fulfilled the following criteria:

1. It must boot Windows XP (at least), not Vista or any other version of Windows.
2. Windows must be able to coexist with Mac OS X and each system must not interfere with the operation of the other (basically a traditional dual boot system where one OS is running at a time).
3. The method, upon starting the computer, must offer the user to boot either OS X or Windows XP

Well now it appears that the contest has been won, and the solution will soon be posted on the contest website and will be turned into an open-source project. Good news for Intel-Mac owners, and an impressively-quick community response to a difficult problem.

Update 17/03/06: The bootloader software is now available for free download with detailed installation instructions and a FAQ page.

Wipe that “I’m slinging the latest Canon EOS1D MkIIN round my neck” look off your face as you smugly pass those cameraphone-toting punters in the street - they may just be shooting bigger files than you. As if the cameraphone market wasn’t ridiculous enough, Samsung comes out and unveils a 10-Megapixel cameraphone.

I know it’s not the same, but still…

I’ve just had two internal hard-drives fail on me which will be the fourth set of drives to fail in as many years, and I’m talking mechanically-dead failures, not formatting problems. Fortunately I have backups, but with every digital photo I’ve ever shot stored on hard-disk - now approaching the 100,000 mark - it’s made me think a lot more seriously about proper archiving of images, as that is a LOT to lose if things go wrong. Ideally one should have backups both on multiple hard-drives and on multiple DVDs, but for the moment I’ve been looking at hard-drive based RAID solutions. That’s not to discount the definite value of DVD backups, especially when stored well and offsite, just that they are pretty self-explanatory.

After encountering a lot of useful information on the subject I thought I’d write an in-depth look at the risks of data-loss for photographers and how to counter them using hard-disk-based RAID systems, examining the following areas:

1. The risks of data-loss for photographers
2. RAID - What it is, what it does do, what it doesn’t do, and why it is useful
3. Backup strategies and software
4. Hard-drive interfaces
5. Network Attached Storage (NAS)
6. Roll-your-own NAS/File-server
7. What hardware to choose

Click here for the full article

Keep in mind an old adage…
THERE ARE ONLY TWO TYPES OF HARD DRIVES:
THOSE THAT HAVE FAILED, AND THOSE THAT WILL FAIL

A recent post on Sion Touhig’s blog reminded me of days spent working as a photographer in London. For that first assignment of the morning, you’d have to leave the house at least two hours before - in case you got stuck in some nasty London morning traffic - but would usually end up at the location at least an hour before the event. How to fill that dead time?
Find the nearest, least healthy-looking “greasy-spoon cafe” and sit down with a full english breakfast, cup of tea, cigarette, The Guardian newspaper… and slowly but gently gear your mind up for the working day. I always relished those hours - a psychological pre-emptive strike on the day ahead.
Well as Sion has noted, a guy in London by the name of Russell Davies is thinking along those same lines and has created two blogs complete with photos that are pretty self-explanatory - eggbaconchipsandbeans and agoodplaceforacupofteaandathink. Whilst we’re at it, he also has a blog on another of my faves - the dulcit tones of BBC Radio 4.
Reader Jason Bye writes to point-out a photo-documentary book and website on “London’s greatest Twentieth Century vintage Formica caffs” - Classic Cafes - by photographer Adrian Maddox which looks to be interesting. The “Top-ten” page on the website has some great quotes describing these fading monuments to British culture that are slowly being cast away to a Starbucks-driven future - such as “This is hardcore: seeping bitterness, brooding desolation, simmering accidie, curdled sourness … The Corner Cafe just delivers!”. Nice.
Now I’m based in Cairo it’s a choice of modern Starbucks-style WiFi cafes, or the very seeped-in-character traditional Egyptian tea-houses… but neither are quite the same.

Got any assignment-breakfast stories?

As noted in Harts Big Picture, my good friend and colleague Michael Kamber has a nice multimedia piece on the New York Times website about the refugee situation in Chad caused by the Darfur conflict in Sudan. The NYT uses some extremely nice flash work to present their multimedia galleries, but those looking to create a similar (albeit not quite so sophisticated) effect might want to try the SoundSlides software I wrote about previously.

According to Sion Touhig’s blog, which I hadn’t come across before but is definitely worth a read, the Network Photographers photo-agency has closed shop, and their website is currently down. Anyone know more? If true this would be a real shame…