Green Light of Death

Well, it finally happened.

I turned on my D70 on Christmas Day and it was unresponsive, with the green memory card access LED blinking steadily. My camera had succumbed to the dreaded Blinking Green Light Of Death (BGLOD).

Nikon D70 and D2H BGLOD

This, of course, is a giant pain in the ass. This is a documented issue with the early production runs of the D70. Nikon issued a service advisory to fix or replace any affected cameras. So, I sent my camera in to Nikon per the advisory. Nikon fixed the issue free of charge (except for the cost of shipping my camera to their repair facility in Melville, NY) and shipped my camera back to me.

B2
Service Repair Rank B2
Write Up
Repair SC 201759
RPL METERING FPC
ADJ AUTO FOCUS OPERATION
CLEAN CCD
GENERAL CHECK AND CLEAN
25212 SERIAL NO xxxxxxx
D70 DIGITAL SLR CAMERA SET

Repair Charges 0.00
Complimentary 0.00
Shipping and Handling 0.00
Total Amount 0.00

In addition to repairing the flaw in the circuit board (which causes the BGLOD), they adjusted the autofocus and cleaned the CCD and the exterior of the camera.

Cool.

I'd rather not have had my camera die on Christmas morning, but I'm happy it was fixed (for free) and sent back so quickly. Total turn-around from the day I shipped it to Nikon was about 8 days.

New photos

Added a few new D70 photos the other day.

I've changed the way I process the images, for no particular reason. ImageMagick works fine, and my scripts seem to do a decent job processing tifs into appropriately sized jpegs for the web. But I use Nikon Capture and Photoshop to adjust contrast and tone prior to printing, and have batch jobs set up for both. So, it seemed reasonable to use those same batch jobs to produce web-ready jpegs. It does appear I need to tone down the sharpening a bit when I resize them down to 800 pixels for the web site, they look a tad over-sharpened to me. And I decided not to add borders to the images, Linda thinks they look better without borders.

We picked up 200 4" x 6" prints that were made from the D70 images, and I have to say I'm fairly impressed. They were printed with a Fuji Frontier 370 digital printer, and most of them look great. The ones that don't look great are the result of operator error (camera operator, not printer operator... ie, ME).

Only thing left to figure out is how to store all those images. We have a good system for storing negatives, but digital images are going to take some thought.

More D70 stuff

Gotta love Google. I put up my D70 Gallery all of 5 days ago, and already a Google search for "D70 photos" has my site on the first page of results. Ahead of a lot of other, better web galleries.

At any rate, I've gotten some questions about what settings I've been using, so here they are. I have been shooting in RAW mode, so these settings can be altered after the fact, with the best results coming if the exposure is correct.

auto white balance -1 (helps with color cast)

sRGB / mode I color space

in-camera sharpening none (sharpening done in Nikon Capture)

provia custom curve (from Fotogenetic's web site)

For minimal post-processing, tinkering with the in-camera settings (sharpening, saturation, and custom curves) will yield good results in most situations. I like shooting in RAW, because it gives me the flexibility to muck around with things like white balance after the fact. Certain lighting conditions don't lend themselves well to auto white balance, like the shot shown here.

This shot was taken around sunset, the light had a very warm feel to it. The auto white balance setting pretty much obliterated the warmth, resulting in an image that was flat and boring. Changing the white balance to "cloudy -2" in Nikon Capture yielded a more accurate image.

I use Nikon Capture to batch process multiple images at a time, applying the same settings to all images in a folder, for example, and saving the output as tiffs in a new directory. The "auto-contrast" operation adjusts the histogram of each image, setting black and white points. This is helpful if the image is slightly under or over-exposed. I can quickly review the resulting files using an image viewer like iView Multimedia to verfiy that I'm happy with the output, and sort the images according to vertical or horizontal orientation.

Once I sort the images by orientation, I then run my ImageMagick scripts (I'll add a link to those soon) to create jpegs for posting to my photo gallery. The whole process from beginning to end (posting the resized images on my site) can take less than an hour for several dozen images, even if I have to go back and edit a few by hand in Nikon Capture.

Which gives me more time to practice and learn to take better pictures.

new photos

I resisted for years, but I finally bought a digital camera. I didn't want a cheap point and shoot (although I'm certain the next P&S we buy will be digital), and I'm not rich. Which meant that I had to wait long enough for digital SLRs to become, if not actually inexpensive, less expensive than the $3000 to $6000 they have cost for the last couple of years.

I have lots of Nikon gear, so rather than dump it all and start over with Canon, I've been waiting for Nikon to release a digital SLR that I could afford that would provide a feature set that appealed to me. I had been planning on purchasing a D100, but last fall Nikon announced the development of the D70. This is a similarly capable dSLR to the D100, same resolution, etc. There are some feature differences between the two, but ultimately I decided the differences weren't enough to justify spending an extra $500 for the D100.

For now I'm putting the D70 images in their own gallery, which you can see here. I have been shooting in RAW mode, and then tweaking the images in Nikon Capture. I'm still working on my technique, so hopefully my images will improve with practice.

Gallery's up...

Upgraded the Gallery software and re-installed all the albums and photos. Not too big a pain in the ass, but I'm glad it's done.

I'm sure I missed some things, but I think for the most part everything significant is there.

Reusable digital camera??

Looks like Ritz is going to start selling reusable digital cameras; here is a summary from dpreview.com.

Have to say I agree with Phil's assessment: I can't imagine who Ritz's target demographic is, except for technophobes and people who aren't paying attention.

$10.99 for a cheaply built digital camera with no LCD and a crappy lens that I have to take to Ritz to get the photos off of?

I'd rather spend $200 and get a slightly less-cheaply built digital camera with a crappy lens and an LCD that I can connect to my home computer and not have to take to Ritz.

Well, actually, I'd really rather spend $3000 on a Nikon D2x when it's released, or $1500 on a Nikon D100. But that's just me...

Done, done, done...

I've gotten the Photo Gallery up and running.

Finally. Have to admit I like the software a lot. Works as advertised, and fairly straightforward to customize. Lots of files to edit, though. Glad that's done.

New photos

I've uploaded new scans of pretty much every photo on the site, plus some new ones. The new photos are being loaded into the random image script on every page, but it'll take some time to replace all the hard-coded images on each of the photo pages.

It took a long time to scan all the negatives and slides, and then go through some attempt at color correction and removing dust and scratches, so I wasn't too thrilled with the idea of resizing each one individually, or even going through recording a Photoshop action to do it. So, the logical thing was to use Imagemagick and perl.

Imagemagick is a free command-line image processing utility that runs on unix and linux boxes. And Mac OS X! The advantage of using it over Photoshop is that since it is command-line, it can be incorporated into scripts. It's nowhere near as functional as Photoshop, but for resizing a large number of TIFFS, it's ideal.

The Imagemagick command is embedded in a perl script that reads the contents of a directory (TIFF files sorted by horizontal or vertical aspect) and plugs each one into the command. The script gets the name of each file (eg, 94fb10.tif) and saves the output as a correctly-named jpeg (eg, 94fb10.jpg).

I have four separate scripts, two each (one for large, one for thumbnails) for horizontal and vertical. If I was a half-decent perl scripter, I'd just have one script that would detect the aspect and resize accordingly. But...

Anyway, here's the script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# resize.pl sourcedir destdir "options"
#

$targetExtension = "(jpg)|(tif)|(bmp)";
$thumbnailExtension = "jpg";
$thumbnailSize = "194x";
$mediumSize = "780x";
$thumbnailName = "-sm";
$mediumName = "-lg";
$pathToIm = "/usr/local/bin/";

($startDir, $destDir, $options) = @ARGV;

opendir (START, $startDir) || die "Couldn't Open Start dir: $startDir";

@files = readdir(START);

closedir (START);

if (not -d $destDir) {
mkdir ($destDir, 0775);
}

foreach $file (@files) {
($fname,$extension) = split(/\./,$file);
if ($extension =~ /$targetExtension/i) {
`$pathToIm/convert $options -interlace NONE -filter Lanczos -geometry $mediumSize -unsharp 1x2+1.2+.08 -border 10x10 -bordercolor black -quality 75 "$startDir/$file" "$destDir/$fname$mediumName.$thumbnailExtension"`;

}
}

The script takes three arguments, source directory, target directory, and imagemagick options that aren't already specified. I cropped all the images to a 3:2 (or 2:3) aspect ratio, so they should all be the same dimension after resizing. The -filter option specifies which resampling method to use when down-sampling during the resize. The -unsharp option is an unsharp mask filter with radius x std dev + amount + threshold. The -quality option specifies the jpeg compression level.

It took about an hour to generate a pair of images (large and thumbnail) for all the source images. Much faster than doing it either manually or via actions in Photoshop.

Why I don't give my money to Ritz...

So I go to the local "Pro" camera shop, which has been around for probably 30 years. It used to be a pretty good camera store, and was the only place in town to buy pro or medium format gear. About 8 years ago, they were taken over by Ritz Camera. They still advertise themselves as a "Pro" camera shop, but they're still just another Ritz Camera. Every time I go in there, I just get pissed off and leave.

This last time I should have known better. I went in three days before Christmas to see if they had a Nikon D100 I could check out. I'm in the store about 5 minutes and the girl asks if there's anything they can show me.

Me: "Do you have a Nikon D100 I can see?"

Salesgirl: (Looks at pretentious salesguy) "Are we showing THE D100? Or is it, like, give me your credit card and I'll give it to you?"

Pretentious salesguy shakes head and mumbles: "Credit card."

Salesgirl: (to me) "Sorry, we're not showing it unless you're buying it."

Me: (not quite believing what I heard) "You're serious."

Salesgirl: "Yeah, it's our last one, and we figure whoever buys it will want one that hasn't been demo'ed."

Me: "I've spent my last nickel in your store. You guys could care less about the people who come in here. All I ever get here is attitude and misinformation. Seeya."

One time I was in there, the pretentious salesguy told me mail-order companies like B&H only sell gray-market camera equipment. Another time he told me the mail-order places only sell imported film as well. Both statements are false.

Another time I was looking for a bubble-level that fits in the camera's hotshoe; it makes it easier to level the camera with the horizon, since I have a ballhead. The Ritz guy didn't know what I was talking about, and tried to sell me a cheap Bogen ballhead with a level on the mount.

So I go to the real camera store in town, which sells mostly used camera gear and darkroom equipment. I sold my dad's darkroom stuff to them a few months ago, and they were great to deal with.

The guy tells me they have two D100s, one new and one slightly used (the owner returned it for a D1X). Did I want to see the new one? No, the used one is fine. So he takes it down, slaps a 28-70 f/2.8 AFS on it and a CompactFlash card in the slot and tells me to take some test shots.

So, there I am wandering around the store with a $2000 camera body and a $1400 lens, and my guy goes off to help another customer. I could have walked out the front door. Never again will I spend money at a Ritz.

The D100 is a pretty neat camera. The guy at Southeastern told me they sold 6 the Saturday before Christmas.

Photo Gallery

I'm looking for a web-based photo gallery, and the two most likely candidates are Alex King's Gallery, and, obviously, Gallery.

I used to name image files descriptively, but that just got too confusing. All of the images currently referenced on this site use those old image files. I've gone through the exercise of re-scanning most of the photos that don't completely suck, and have gone so far as to label them all with a unique ID. So, what I'd like is a database that I can use to reference all these images by key word, location, emulsion, etc.

There are lots of tools that will do this. I use IView Media Pro on my home computer, but that doesn't help the website out. Two potential solutions are using mySQL, like this guy, or going with the php-style web gallery. Haven't really had time to investigate either possibility yet, but it does look as if either would do fine.