Falling Back in Love with Older Images

6FPS V3#1 - Photography and More
A Newsletter by Chuq Von Rospach
January 11, 2021

Welcome to the new issue of 6FPS.

Welcome to the first issue of 2021. We're through the holidays, and while January 1 is in many ways a purely symbolic day, it is also a common signpost for people to reflect on what's been and consider what could be.

I had many plans for December. My body, it turned out, had other plans. I mentioned last issue I was taking a week off to recharge batteries and get some year-end birding in; I did take the week off but I started getting attacks of vertigo, and that caused me to cut out about half the planned birding.

The vertigo isn't a new thing -- a couple of years ago, I lost most of the hearing in one ear to a virus infection, and ever since, there has been some intermittent vertigo that we've managed quite well with Meclizine (a sea sickness pill). For some reason, it decided to kick into high gear, and my doctor and I spent a chunk of the month adjusting dosages and trying things to get it to behave. Unfortunately, inner ear things have a lot of "it'll do what it wants and stop when it feels like it" to it, but after a couple of weeks it started settling down, and now it's back to a minor annoyance that pops up intermittently.

One side effect of this, though, is that it can make it difficult to stare at the computer (a first sign it's acting up is discomfort working on the computer), and it also will distract my ability to focus; the end result is I got a lot less writing done last month than I planned or hoped, but I more or less seem to be back on track -- mostly.

I'm hoping January will continue to return to normal in good ways; both with this and with all those other things happening. it's all been quite distracting, but I don't think we need to spend time talking about them here.

Exiting 2020

A few highlights of 2020 as we happily leave it behind:

  • I did not catch Covid. I continue to be careful in trying to not catch Covid. I hope you all don't catch it, and I hope you all continue to try to be safe from it as well. (hint: wear a mask)

  • I lost weight in 2020, despite all of the distractions and the pandemic lockdown that kicked any hope of a fitness program in the knees. Not as much as 2019, but a two pound drop when almost everyone I know gained weight last year is a victory. I'm hoping I can leverage that into a bigger loss this year, but we'll see. I'm now under 15 pounds from my next unofficial goalpost (325) and under 80 from where I'll qualify for knee replacement surgery (260) if I then choose to undergo it.

  • We're trying something new with the knees: a topical NSAID called Voltaren. A couple of weeks in, it is definitely improving things enough I'm not considering a cortisone shot right now (the one I'd planned in December got cancelled due to the vertigo). it's definitely improved the right knee, and the left knee where I'm bone on bone is less annoying, but still has its moments.

  • In terms of birding, it was a good year. I ended up with 184 species total, my best year since 2013, with five birds added to my life list. Within Santa Clara county, I had 155 species, my second best year ever and best since 2009, and four of those new lifer birds were also county birds. Can't complain about those results.

  • In terms of photography I added 256 images to my library, not as good as 2019's 430 bu way better than 2018's 199. Of that, I added 101 images in January, 2 images in March, and then nothing until July, and it wasn't until November that I was adding new images on a regular basis. All in all those, I'm satisfied with the quality, and you can see some of my favorites below where I talk about my best of the year collection.

Entering 2021

When looking forward into 2021, while much is unknowable, in general I'm hoping to continue and do more of what I've been doing the last couple of months in terms of my birding, writing and photography. I need to make changes to get my exercise going again, and I've worked it with my boss to add Out of Office scheduled times to my calendar to make sure I have some structured times to remind me to take a break and go out walking (and probably birding). I have some other things I intend to explore, including Apple's Fitness program, but that got delayed by the (expletive deleted) vertigo. My eBike has been ignored all winter, and right now, I'm not sure getting on it is smart until I'm absolutely sure the vertigo isn't an issue. But I want to bring that back into the mix again.

It sure looks like it'll be summer or fall before the vaccine will be widely enough distributed that we can maybe start thinking about life getting back to whatever the new normal is. Right now, no overnight travel is planned and until the current surge is back under control, I'm being very wary of even doing a day trip out of county. I'm keeping it local and safe the best ways I know how.

I hope for all of you that your 2021 is an improvement over 2020, and that the new year finds you in a situation that, if it's not good, is at least improving. 2020 was a rough year and I expect we are all happy to see it receding into the distance.

Upgrading all the Apple Things

If it's fall and winter, it means that all of your Apple things get upgrades to their software. When the IOS releases came out, I upgraded those (and nothing bad happened), but I held off on Big Sur for a while until I was sure everything I depended on was upgrades. Eventually the only tool I was missing was SuperDuper (a disk backup tool), and I replaced it for now with a similar tool, Carbon Copy Cloner, that is usable with Big Sur.

With that, I started up the upgrade -- and it failed miserably. I ended up hung without a completed upgrade. That led to a long evening of figuring out how to get back to a working system, and ultimately after about 6 hours I had Catalina restored and running fine. I did get much more familiar with Internet Recovery system software than I ever hoped to be -- but it all worked as expected, once I stopped making stupid pilot errors along the way.

It also gave me time to analyze why it failed, and I finally decided there were two problems in my first attempt:

  • Complacency: I must ding myself for complacency. While I had backups (multiple), I didn't make a backup taht was unplugged and in a drawer where it was safe. While nothing bad happened, I was just one software glitch or piece of pilot error from losing all usable copies of my old system, because they were all hooked up and available to be overwriten or corrupted. That was stupid of me, but more, an indication I hadn't really taken the upgrade seriously, I just pushed buttons. I know better.

  • Not Keeping it Simple: I believe the root cause of the hang was that the I had left the computer hooked up to everything, which included a thunderbolt dock and two extra monitors and a few other things, and those things (I believe the multiple monitors) was the root cause of the update not finishing. By unplugging the computer from all that and into my travel charger, the upgrade went just fine.

I also, on my successful attempt, installed Big Sur on a new partition (I really like APFS for this capability) leaving me the Catalina partition for a fallback recovery if needed, and then migrating my content over after. I ended up not using Migration Assistant and just used the Catalina as a reference for what to install fresh. I think it's a good idea to do this every few releases or when there are major underlying system changes, and Big Sur definitely qualifies.

Once I had Big Sur running -- the upgrade was a no-brainer, painless one. The UI changes I got used to quickly, and the system's running fine for me.

So if you haven't upgraded yet, I can say it's fine for me. But.... give yourself options if something goes wrong. The easiest way to really hose yourself is by being complacent about the upgrade. I'm fortunate nothing really bad happened beyond losing a few hours to fixing problems I caused for myself.

And with that, on with the show!

What's New from Chuq?

Falling Back in Love with Older Images

Since part of my latest e-book project, I knew I needed to work with a lot of my older images to fill out the book. Each of those images was re-processed from scratch using modern tools and with my (I believe) much improved skills at using today's digital darkroom software. I have generally done this whenever I've wanted to re-use an image, although in a lot of cases I stopped using some images because I felt they simply weren't up to the quality I expected of my images today. This e-book forced my hand and made me see what I could do with some of those marginal images.

The results were rather amazing. Here are two examples. In each case, the newly processed images is on the left, my older, original processing on the right. The top image of the great egret is from 2007 and is the oldest image I used in the e-book and was shot on a canon 30D, which offered a whopping 8 megapixel sensor. The Lark sparrow is from 2009 and was shot on the Canon 30D as well.

There are two factors at work here: first is that the processing tools have gotten a lot better. The other is I've learned a lot about how to use those tools and I make different choices in how to apply them.

Those two go hand in hand. Besides growing past my "everything must be in a square crop" artistic phase (sigh), I'm a lot more willing to push contrast and a lot more aware of color balance. But the tools are doing a lot of the heavy lifting in these images, bringing out a lot more detail while supressing noise and allowing for better, more saturated colors that still look natural.

In the year 2020, when because of the pandemic most photographers were creating many fewer new images than normal, this e-book project gave me an unexpected benefit: It got me to update a lot of older images I'd written off because of their age and the relatively lower quality camera and sensor that they were shot with -- and I found myself time and again falling in love with these images all over again. I was, effectively adding a lot of great new images to my library by going back in time and revisiting old ones.

There is a lesson in here for many photographers: if you are not investing in your processing tools and updating them on a reasonable basis, and if you are not reserving time to study processing technique and improving how you use those tools, then you are leaving image quality on the digital darkroom floor. I know some of you reading this issue of 6FPS are people still using Lightroom 6 or even one of the old CS versions. Are you still using that old 30D, too?

If you're upgrading your camera gear, then you really should be upgrading your darkroom tools as well. They go hand in hand.

I realize a lot of people don't like to spend time on the computer and prefer to be out shooting -- I sympathize. The reality is, though, as important as the work done on camera is to get a good image, that's just the start of it. Go study the processing videos of some fo the master photographers on Youtube and you'll consistently find that what makes their images sing is the time spent perfecting them. Same with the classic masters like Ansel Adams and his generation where the complexity of the printing done against a negative was a huge part of what made their images great.

It's time to move past the "I want to be out with the camera" and learn to appreciate the entire process of creating a great images.

There's an added bonus to modern processing tools: efficiency. I have images that back in 2009 or 2010 I spent hours in Photoshop trying to make them better. Today, using "just" Lightroom, I can build much superior versions of them in 5-10 minutes. Today, the average time I spend on an image is around 5 minutes, and the few best that get special treatment are almost always complete in under an hour.

Everyone's processing goals and techniques are a bit different, of course, but if small investments in the tools and time spent improving those techniques lead to better images faster, it seems a silly choice to not do so.

If what you want is the best possible images in the shots you're creating, upgrading and studying the tools you use should be part of your ongoing time and budget. If you're using older, less capable tools, you're making it impossible for your images to be the best they can be.

Photos: 2020 Best of the Year

It's an annual tradition for me going back to 2007: at the end of the year, look back at the images taken and pick about 12 of the best to represent the year.

You can see all of this year's pick here. You can view all of the annual collections here.

In reality, defining these as best is probably inaccurate. They are my favorites, they are the ones that I have strongest feelings about, maybe. They certainly aren't my most popular with my outside audiences (although the Junco picture might be on the short list). But I've been calling these the best of for over a decade and I'm not changing that now -- but I do realize that's a weird word in a subjective situation where everyone will see things differently. So really -- favorites.

I'm showing two of the images here, because I won't pick between them for display. My photography really is two things: my birds, and my everything else, which has a strong landscape and strong wildlife slant but includes lots of subjects. So those two images well represent both sides of my photography interests.

The Junco is notable because it thrills me no end that a black and white image made my best of list. I've been slowly trying to improve my monochrome processing, and that was an image that worked perfectly to me eyes, and is pretty close to technically perfect.

The Junco shot was from the before time, and the Mule Deer comes from the after time, and I like that symmetry. The deer was nice enough to give me some time to set up a shot I wanted, and I really like how it turned out. I was trying to get the eye sharp and clear behind the brush (not always an easy task with camera focus) and this one really turned out just as I was hoping it would.

It also turned out that 11 of 12 images this year were bird images, and the 12th is the deer. No landscape images at all, which really sums up 2020 in a quiet way.

There was a point last year where I was convinced I wouldn't have enough images for a best of -- but once things got better and I started going out again, I decided to focus on what was fun (birds) and on trying less for epic images and more on common species, and I'm really happy with the results. I'm not sure how well the images might hold up in competitions -- but I'm happier shooting now that I realize thinking about that while taking images was in fact getting in the way of getting good shots. 2021 will be more about leveraging what I find and less about searching for the epic, and that's a mindset I recommend to all of you.

For Your Consideration

Photography

Birds, Birding, and the Outdoors

Health and Fitness

Technology Nerdery

Fun Stuff

See you Soon!

And with that, I'll see you in 2021 with the next issue. I'd love feedback on this, what you like, what you want more of, what you want less of. And if you have something interesting you think I might want to talk about, please pass it along. Until then, take care, and have fun.

Chuq (chuqui@mac.com)

About 6FPS and Chuq

6FPS (Six Frames Per Second) is a newsletter of interesting things and commentary from Chuq Von Rospach (chuqui@mac.com).

Coming out monthly on the 2nd Monday of the month, I will place in your inbox a few things I hope will inform and delight you. There is too much mediocre, forgettable stuff attacking your eyeballs every day you're online; this is my little way to help you cut through the noise to some interesting things you might otherwise not find.

Some links in this newsletter may point to products at Amazon; these are affiliate links and if you use them to buy a product, I get a small cut of the sale. This doesn't make me rich, but it does help pay my web site bills. If you use the link to buy something, thank you. If you prefer not to, that's perfectly okay, also.