Nine years ago when I purchased my first SLR I was anxious to learn about the technique and composition that makes great photos. One common advice was to shoot as much film as you could, taking notes with each shot, and learn from experience by comparing notes with the prints that would sometimes take days to process.

The adage “film is cheap” appeared everywhere from photography magazines to course books. The problem for me was, as we were entering the digital age, film wasn’t really cheap. Before they did digital transfers, you would easily pay $4 for a roll of decent 24 exposure film and an additional $8 at the drug store for development and 4×5 prints. That made each shot 50 cents a pop. When they started offering the photographs to be scanned on CD it rose to about 70 cents per picture.

The final insults came when I had a running streak of about a dozen developed rolls with CDs from various places – Wolf Photo / Ritz Photo, Walgreens, Walmart and Target – all come back with either scratches on the negatives, poorly developed film or hair and dust on the digital transfers. Surprisingly, the Walmart one-hour photo was the best of all the developers. Nevertheless most of the developers’ environments were dirty and they often didn’t bother to change their chemicals like they were supposed to.

There was a considerable amount of buzz about how photo development establishments were going under because of the digital age. In reality, they were cutting so many corners that their quality went down. Instead of meeting the lowered demand by raising their quality or lowering their prices they rose their prices and kept the same low quality. Although switching to digital was expensive at first, it has more than paid for itself in the lack of development costs alone. For those who are interested, the breakpoint was at around picture #2143.

Because of the high costs, slack treatment of the negatives and poor customer service received from one establishment after another, switching to digital photography wasn’t as much about convenience as it was about empowerment.

If celluloid film was “cheap”, digital film is downright dirt cheap. Shooting 6 MP RAW with low res JPEG only eats up 7 megabytes per picture. That’s over 140 pictures per Gigabyte card. A very fast 1-GB Compact Flash card today runs around $45 on Amazon. That’s the same as just 3 rolls of film with developing and digital transfer, but it holds as much as nearly 6 (24 exposure) rolls on one card. The card literally pays for itself half-way through being filled with RAW images.

RAW has many advantages over JPEG. It’s often likened to a digital negative. It is usually proprietary to the camera maker (E.G. Nikon, Cannon, etc) but RAW format readers such as Adobe Photoshop CS2, Apple iPhoto or the free Pixmantec Rawshooter Essentials can handle just about any RAW format you throw at it. Because a RAW file contains so much more data than its JPEG counterpart it can give the photographer more leniency when the settings aren’t just perfect and can provide some other surprising advantages. For example you can change settings in “Nikon Capture 4″ then tag certain settings you like and build on top of it with differently tagged settings. When you find certain settings that you like you can then export the RAW image into a more common JPEG format for distribution. You can also swap back and forth between tagged settings. Doing this neither removes nor changes the data in the file that was actually captured from the digital sensor. JPEGs, on the other hand, are said to degrade in quality each time they are re-saved.

The only problem I see with RAW is that because of its size, it slows down the camera by filling up the buffer more quickly; it can reduce your frames-per-second rate. It can also be slow to transfer to the computer. However, the advantages outweigh that inconvenience. When haven’t we accidentally left some goofy white-balance setting on the camera and taken some great shots only to find out later what happened? JPEG files would leave you spending hours in Photoshop trying to correct the color cast damage. RAW images can remove the white balance with a 2-second flip of a switch.

There’s also a gradual move into High Dynamic Range (HDR) monitors. When they become more accessible, who wouldn’t want to see their photographs in richer detail than before? In this case, the data being saved in RAW is more advanced than the displays and possibly more detailed than most high quality prints.

For those who aren’t quite as good at the technical aspects of photography as they are with the artistic composition, RAW could save their day. Programs such as Photoshop CS2 allow you to remove the white balance setting without losing any data. JPEGs lock the bad light temperature cast in the pixel data where it simply can’t be removed. RAW can arguably even help with bad exposure since it has a much higher dynamic range that can be pulled from the file; the higher dynamic range of RAW even allows you to create the popular multi-exposure high dynamic range (HDR) images seen throughout flickr.

Finally, looking into the technology of the near future, those who have locked themselves in the lower dynamic range of JPEGs may regret not going RAW as others who have are able to tout how much more amazing their [RAW] photo taken two years ago looks on the new HDR technology.

The nature of photography is similar to that of the medical profession – it’s a practice… it’s always a practice. Those who say “real pros” don’t need RAW since “real pros” get the shot right to begin with don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve asked numerous paid photographers to discover that they sit on either side of the RAW/JPEG fence just as much as we amateur hobbyists photographers do.

Additional Links:
More about using the RAW format.
Excellent Unbiased Reviews about digital cameras and equipment.
Flickr photo sharing community. Who could ask for more?
Learn to take great photos.
Free Pixmantec RawShooter | essentials 2006 (Windows Only).
Read more about HDR.
Tutorial to pulling HDR effects off of a single RAW image and off of multiple images in Photomax.
Various tutorials on building HDR images in Photoshop CS2.

While entering one of the airport gates in Washington D.C. I was pulled aside because I forgot there was an unopened bottle of water in my satchel. Although the person I spoke with was mildly polite, it was obvious that he was irritated. I asked him point blank why they didn’t allow unopened bottles of water into the airport gate while I reached out to touch the top of the bottle on the table to emphasize that it was unopened.

He quickly put his hand on the bottle, looked at me sternly and said “take your hand off the bottle.” It was as if he thought it were some crime for me to now touch what was once fully in my possession.

So I asked, “Why are you so strict about liquids.” His reply was that a terrorist tried to blow up a plane in the UK with liquid explosives. Suggesting that the event occurred months ago he then continued: “We are at code orange.”

Looking back at the aforementioned terrorist activity, 24 of the 25 arrests had Islam-based names and were primarily in their 20′s. (Statistics gathered from Wikipedia.)

Even the 9/11 attacks were performed by obvious Islam extremists. So the question arises: Why is TSA making deliberate attempts to molest 83-Year Old Caucasian Women with the last name of Bogart when it’s obvious that 20-something year old Islamic Men with last names like Moqed and Almihdhar from Saudi-Arabia are the correct profile to match?

On one hand it makes the TSA organization look like cowards. After all, an 83-Year old woman is much easier to mess around with than a strong 25 year old man. However, I think the actual root of the problem is the fear of being accused and sued for discrimination. In situations where one terrorist activity after another comes from the same group of people, it’s obvious that you focus your attention on them – however, certain groups like the ACLU won’t have it. As a result, most of the training, money and efforts position the TSA to making an ass out of itself when it could otherwise be more productive in reducing the terrorist threat through the use of racial and age profiling.

I would liken the behavior of the whole mess to that of DRMs that hurt the honest people while it does nothing to hinder the problems in mind when creating them. This just reasserts my claim before – being a TSA worker must royally suck. I would put the blame on the TSA company as an entity as a whole and not any one person in it. For the company to really focus on its job would jeopardize its business because a minority of Islam-extremists could simply lean on the ACLU to stop them.

As a result the minority has power over the majority and money has to be put towards reverse profiling; it’s a necessary means to prove that TSA can still exist within the confines of political correctness no matter what absurdities come of it.

Among the myriad of monuments and museums in Washington D.C. there is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Its message is begging to be understood but in a twist of irony the museum itself is a practice against civil liberties for the very same government-centralized and abusive-capitalizing concepts that were outlined in Mein Kampf itself.

Although there are pamphlets at the information desk and signs posted outside the building that emphasize the importance of spreading the knowledge, the museum refuses to empower you to do so. Copyright laws prohibit you from photographing any of the artifacts within the museum.

That’s right – I said artifacts. You can’t photograph the Nazi SS uniforms, the exhibit showing hundreds of victims’ shoes, the reproduction artwork from the Jewish kids while they waited in the ghettos. Although these artifacts in and of themselves are not copyrighted, large poster size photographs that hang throughout the museum are. The most notable one being from Time. So because a few large posters hang in the museum, by which the story could be told well enough without, nobody is allowed to take photographs of the artifacts. Not surprisingly, you can purchase a photo book of the artifacts in the museum store.

It’s insulting that our civil rights are stripped away from United States soil – not a privately operated museum, but one that our tax dollars pay for – in a museum that in itself is warning about the dangers that abound when similar liberties are forgone. You can’t photograph certain touching artifacts then blog about them or show them as proof to some ignorant nazi supremist nut who claims it never happened. All because Time Life magazine says so.

Another volunteer thought that photography might be forbidden because the artifacts are light sensitive, but every artifact I could find was either rock, metal, wood, clay, cloth or a replica of paper-based items.

Furthermore, it didn’t always used to be this way. Back in the summer of 2001, I remember visiting the museum and seeing many people wandering around taking flash photos. Flashes seemed to flow in a steady stream towards the replica of the “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate that once hovered over the entrance of Auschwitz-Birkenau and inside the small rail-car where as many as 100 people were coerced into a journey to their slaughter.

The clay sculpture of one of the five Auschwitz-Birkenau killing grounds was particularly moving. If you want to see it, you can come visit the museum or buy the book. There are a couple of photos on the USHMM web site (here and here), but other than that you’d be hard pressed to find any photos of it anywhere else. There are, however, some other very good exhibits that have been placed (in part) online for the public to research and learn from. Sadly, several of them appear to be geared more towards trying to sell prints than to educate the public of the atrocity that the museum claims to do.

Quite frankly, the exhibits were so poorly lit that it took twice as long to read the information cards and much of the detail in the artifacts became lost in the deep shadows. Taking a picture of anything would require a decent flash setup and a tripod.

Even photographing the outside of the building, guards came up to me and forced some to be erased. Inside the building, the people at the help desk were more generous and allowed me to take a few pictures of the hall and a few more of the children’s wall. Just not the exhibits.

I jokingly suggested to someone that the guards should dress up like SS men in full Nazi uniform to emphasize both the intentional unnerving and prison like Museum, as it’s designed to put you in the shoes of the desperate Jews, and their intentional unnerving prison like presence. However, the guards are neither brutal nor rude (I didn’t want to oppose them out of concern that they wouldn’t allow me to visit the museum). The uniforms would probably stir controversy and cause the security officers grief, so in hindsight the suggestion wasn’t appropriate.

Across the street I could take pictures of the entryway to my heart’s content. One of the guards mentioned that there wasn’t anything they could do about that, so I’m thinking the way they reacted couldn’t possibly be for security reasons. A 20x zoom easily focused in on their “top secret” conveyor belts, metal detectors and uniforms (sarcastic tone intended). Even one of the volunteers at the help desk suggested that the guards are over-reacting.

The architecture of the building is very deliberate. Beautiful on one hand, foreboding on the other.

As poor as the interior lighting was, it enhanced the surrounding metal beam and mortar factory architecture and gave a more solemn and ominous feel throughout the museum. It’s an amazing experience – but an experience that’s sadly constrained to those few people who are fortunate enough to visit the museum in person.

Here’s where I see some of the basis of the irony:

One of Hitler’s statements in Mein Kampf entailed how the bourgeoisie, the Jewish and the bought-off politicians fought for the centralization of all utilities and independent states into a singular German national power “in order to have in its hands the means and pledges for an unlimited policy of fulfillment”. He emphasizes that these Jewish influenced leaders and spokesmen wanted their own sense of liberty and comfort at the cost of creating one large Marxist Socialization of the people under one centralized overbearing government to maintain their oppressive “Jewish-Democratic” Reich.

That these same concepts of centralization and oppression that Hitler pinned on the Jews and political parties appear prevalent in the United States government today under the guise of protection from terrorists; Basic civil rights are being ignored and innocent civilians acting on right written in our Constitution are being pined and are undergoing prosecution while other obvious hateful crimes are being protected under the same civil laws. Through imposing copyright restrictions and invasive searches this museum mocks itself through the very same capitalist copyrights and security that Hitler proposed the third Reich should overpower (and to a greater extent imposed through brutality).

In another portion of Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote:

Th
e responsibility for this situation is to be attributed solely to those parties who preach unceasingly to the patient electoral masses on the necessity of maintaining the autonomy of the federal states, while at the same time they champion and demand of the Reich a policy which must necessarily lead to the suppression of even the very last of those so-called ‘sovereign’ rights.

Translation:
The government is saying that they are protecting your interest by suppressing your civil rights.

Hitler was very much for capitalistic power and used many capitalist ideas to jab at all Jews, including patents and copyrights.

V I C XI: [The Jew] begs for ‘patents’ and ‘privileges,’ which the lords, always in financial straits, are glad to give him for suitable payment. [...] A true blood-sucker that attaches himself to the body of the unhappy people and cannot be picked off.

Hitler also emphasized the importance and effectiveness of culture over politics. Once something becomes ingrained as part of a nation’s culture it’s accepted among the public, While something of political standpoint is more often refuted.

V II C X: It is certain that in the future the importance of the individual [states] will be transferred to the sphere of our cultural policy.

In this case our culture involves invasive and arguably ineffective searches and confiscation at airports, museums and even our homes without warrants or court orders. Horribly abusive capitalist powers use copyright laws to oppressed the public. In a true capitalist society, people would have the power to put down these organizations. America shifted focus some time back to where there are more laws, and stronger laws to protect the businesses than to protect the people.

While works should be protected and artists, inventors and creators should be rewarded, such witch hunts that the RIAA is notoriously known for and antics such as the Sony-BMG root-kit does more harm than good.

My overall desire and suggestion for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is to lift its photography restrictions – that all suppliers of artifacts and photographs within the museum sign a waver specific to the museum that allows for visitors to photograph freely – to truly promote the goodwill intent of the museum; Let the museum show the horrors that happen when basic human liberties are crushed in an environment that doesn’t degrade the very same basic liberties that our founding fathers already fought and died for.

One of those very founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin, is credited to saying “Those who would give up ESSENTIAL LIBERTY to purchase a little TEMPORARY SAFETY, deserve neither LIBERTY nor SAFETY.”