Month: January 2007

Posted on

In the Raw

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.

Posted on

TSA Reverse Profiling

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.

Posted on

TSA Behavior Detection Officer

I found an interesting tidbit on the TSA site while waiting at the airport.

A rude response from one of the TSA officers prompted me to see what their motivation is. Usually they’re stiff, but still polite. But still, does TSA offer incentives to those who “contain” incidents even if the TSA officer is prompting the incident by frustrating or belittling passengers? Is the overall security process designed to build tension and frustration?

One of the positions is a “Behavior Detection Officer”, or “BDO”. This could be either a euphemism for “race profiler” (which sounds politically incorrect no matter how close the ties are between race and terrorism) or it could mean they are trying to use psychological tactics to weed out the prospecting terrorists. I can’t tell for sure since their site doesn’t explain the roles of that position.

I’m guessing that their logic behind the latter concept is as follows: a terrorist would likely already be at edge. Making a difficult and frustrating situation and causing confrontation during it may make him go berserk, revealing him out of the crowd. Unfortunately, those who are most tense are the ones who are late for their flight. Under this presumption that means they’re the most likely ones to be singled out and even detained.

Possibly, but I’ve found through personal experience with those who have successfully committed suicide and have read other reports that those committing suicide come to a point of euphoria before its execution. If you find someone abnormally happy and content through the TSA line – that’s likely the person to be afraid of.

From either point of view, with their statement on behavior profiling it appears that the entire TSA process is designed specifically to add tension, frustration and anxiety on travelers. In other words, if some security member starts barking at you or makes a rude comment, just politely grimace and go on.

One more word of advice with the security screenings – Don’t Bathe In Glycerol Soap. Don’t even touch anything with glycerol a day before you fly out!

I got put on a temporary grey list at an airport for doing so – it set off all sorts of alarms when their machines sniffed my luggage and my person. I was detained and it took us twenty minutes to figure out exactly what chemical I could have had that would set off the alarms. It wasn’t until one of the officers asked if I had used a glycerol based hand lotion that it dawned on me that the soap I had used that morning was glycerol based.

The event that prompted all this? They are now scanning for video camcorders. You have to remove the camcorders from their case in the same manner that you handle laptops. The security officer wasn’t clear on this and was just asking if people had video cameras and mumbled something about how they weren’t allowed. I had asked why video cameras weren’t allowed and if that includes the new MacBooks since they include a video camera on the case. He then gave me the third degree. After some effort I went to another TSA officer who explained things more clearly.

They didn’t detain me and the other officers were polite as usual. Chances are that one TSA officer was a victim of the very same stressful environment he was hired to impose on the travellers – from that, I’d gather that it must suck to work for TSA.