One of my boring old urban fragment photos was taken by one of my supremely talented Flickr friends and turned into an actual scene. I’m glowing with pride. It’s a stunning transformation that creates a new world in between the ones we know and the ones we imagine. I love it.

Couple years ago I took some pics at Harvelle’s of a man named Leroy Powell.  He’s a great performer, and I was lucky to see him in a small place where I could take photos.

Leroy chatted with me afterwards, and I sent him my photos which he liked. He still likes them — one of them just got used to make a sharp poster for one of his gigs.

I hope I’m getting creative karma from this. I just found the poster by accident — or was it a mystic occurrence? I wish he’d told me. Oh well.

And now for your foot-stompin’ pleasure, here’s some Leroy Powell gettin’ down:

[blipfm 25440788]

1. lone surfer on return, 2. level the playing field, 3. we’re not the only ones with problems, 4. fender, the gods, 5. Sinkhole!, 6. reflexive negation (happy birthday, henri), 7. Bicycle-Mounted Ringlight? [31/52], 8. Rocket Car,

9. Eye R Flickr [27/52], 10. MyNmIs, 11. Rubber Meets Road II (Anarchy), 12. can i bum a smoke?, 13. indecision, echoes, 14. precariovs, 15. Skooby’s Hot Dogs in Hollywood, CA, 16. Los Angeles, from Chavez Ravine,

17. Untitled, 18. so many birds, they never agree, 19. les nombreux visages de montréal, 20. spin cycle, 21. Harry Fleenor, Rollei Wizard, 22. M.I.A.’s Neon Swagger @ Coachella 2009, 23. t.v. dinner, 24. Untitled,

25. places i’m not, 26. feel like dancing, 27. Untitled, 28. Untitled, 29. school’s out for ever, 30. why do celebrities only date other celebrities?, 31. we break easy, 32. future bright,

33. put down roots (skylark in a tree), 34. bridge to better days, 35. coming and going, 36. printer paper ain’t opaque (the goggles do nothing!), 37. Peri/Dogpark, 38. Photophlow Drinking Game, 39. only the dog nose, 40. i don’t think i’m gonna go to l.a. anymore,

41. you could walk it, take some five six hours, 42. the forgotten, 43. SMC Punk, 44. a place to sleep, 45. not you again, 46. Untitled, 47. what’s down there?, 48. shall.we.dance?,

49. Dodger Fans Tried To Rally Their Team, But the Clouds Turned Philadelphia Crimson and Foretold the Outcome as the Phillies Were Ultimately Victorious, 50. Dunny Strobist Mischief!, 51. Meet Me Here, 52. The Last Pier On Earth, 53. She Delivers, 54. you_in_or_out?, 55. Chinbeard Gambit, 56. Street Media,

57. On the Other Hand, 58. Robert Plays to the Sea, 59. Farewell, My Friend, 60. Love Dem Big Choons!, 61. Huge Fan of the Grunion, 62. Your Last $50 Is Riding On This, 63. Santa Monica Pier, 64. Moving Electrons,

65. So, I Was Hanging Out By the Tree of Knowledge…, 66. At My Fingertips, 67. There Stood a Legend, 68. My New Kicks, 69. Sunset Snack at Coachella 2008, 70. Fatboy Slim 2 @ Coachella 2008, 71. Dan Deacon @ Coachella 2008, 72. I Claim Your DIY Strip Light For Vega!, 73. Oh, Fork Me, 74. One Against Many, 75. Maturity, 76. Sayce is Guitar 04, 77. RTFM, 78. What’s Pink and Hides a Chihuahua?, 79. Moleskine 2008 Decoupage, 80. Colbie Caillat 2 @ Yahoo! Music,

81. See me. Heel me., 82. Lunar Eclipse, Aug 28, 2007, 83. Chrisette Michele (27) @ Yahoo! Music, 84. The Clientele #2 @ Yahoo! Music, 85. Feist 4 @ Yahoo! Music, 86. Amy Winehouse: Coachella 07, 87. Testify! Rage Against The Machine @ Coachella 07, 88. Coachella 07: An Unearthly Visitor,

89. Coachella 07: The Saharan Sea, 90. Johnny Marr Guitar Pedals, 91. The Shins @ Yahoo! Music, 92. Shiny Toy Guns @ Yahoo! Music, 93. Shiny Toy Guns @ Yahoo! Music, 94. RBD @ Yahoo! Music, 95. Stefy 3 @ Yahoo! Music, 96. Sigur Rós (JonThor) at Coachella Festival 2006,

97. Peeping Tom @ Lollapalooza: Mike Patton, 98. Warning, 99. Back To The Future, 100. Microphone

Thanks to BigHugeLabs: http://bighugelabs.com/scout.php

Why pay M.S.R.P. when you can pay M.S.R.P?!?

I picked the early nineties to really dive into baseball cards. You know, the biggest explosion of overproduction in the hobby’s long history? Nothing from those days is worth anything monetarily, but I have a lot of great memories of collecting, from mammoth card shows to card shops on every other block to stopping at every K-Mart on road trips. I didn’t own a camera at the time, and never dreamed I’d become interested in photography, but the allure of sports cards is all about that timely image on the front, sometimes capturing some amazing moment or an iconic visage in a timeless photo. The ninety-three Upper Deck set featured an insert set of cards of special images by Walter Iooss, Jr., and that was my introduction to the name. Knowing the photographer for the image in the card was unheard of in the hobby, but for this small set of twenty-seven cards, I could see why. His imagery was a cut above. It wasn’t the best card in the set, but I keep his beat-up portrait (seen above) of Phillies great Darren Daulton handy to this day.

Iooss made his name in sports, principally for Sports Illustrated, but he’s done more. Here’s a small, but must-see gallery of his work for SI — complete with commentary from the man. (I love the shot of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus in sixty-seven. Dig the cigarettes on the table!) And yes, he got to shoot some swimsuit models along the way. He’s even photographed Hendrix! And he’s still going strong today at age sixty-six.

Walter Iooss, Jr. is going to be featured at the Annenberg Space for Photography next month along with Neil Leifer. I’ll be there. I also want to check out his book of Classic Baseball Photographs sometime.

Bonus video link: Charlie Rose interviews Iooss in 1999. I love what he says about how he would shoot sporting events and not know the score because he was so zeroed in on images. I know what he means from my own concert shoots. Sometimes I don’t even hear the music. I was awestruck at Iooss’ Michael Jordan anecdote, too.

(Updated 1/23/2011) My backup procedures are not perfect, but they work for me. They can be improved, so if you have comments please leave them. I’d also be happy to answer questions, too. I hope that someone finds this useful. This is really not as complicated as it seems. I’ve just tried to be as explicit as I can be.

I use a Macbook Pro laptop. My external drive is a Drobo HD enclosure with four 2TB drives. I use Lightroom and Photoshop.

First let’s recap how Lightroom works: Lightroom never edits your files! If you make a change to a photo in Lightroom, all it does is record that step in a single Catalog file that handles all the photos in that Catalog. The original photo files remain unchanged. So to backup photos from Lightroom, you just need to copy the original files, plus the one Catalog file which records all your edits. If you ever lose the Catalog file, you still have original unedited source files.

I have three main sources for image files, but all of them end up in Lightroom: 1) Digital camera, 2) scanned negatives, and other 3) miscellaneous projects like files downloaded off the Web.

1) At the end of a digital shoot, I import all the files off my memory card right into Lightroom.

2) After I develop a roll of negatives, I scan them with Scangear and save the scanned files as TIFFs. I use exiftool to tag them with EXIF data. Then I import those TIFFs into Lightroom.  Note that Lightroom reads the EXIF from the TIFFs as keywords, so I don’t need to retag files when I import them. (I have Lightroom copy the files into the same folders as my digital files. This means I delete the scanned TIFF files from where Scangear puts them periodically)

3) Miscellaneous files, even if I’m just working on them in Photoshop, I still import them into Lightroom first so that it’s copied into the catalog.

So from there everything is in Lightroom, which keeps all the files in handy folders organized by date. I tag anything I import with keywords to help make it easy to find.

I keep the current Lightroom Catalog and about a months worth of working files stored right on my laptop.   I do my editing from there to keep things snappy.  Every month or so I send everything older than a month to a backup external drive; That’s my Drobo.

That means I need to backup two things: The Lightroom catalog file, as well as all the original image files.  I do this with a powerful command line utility called rsync that is already part of OSX’s utilities.

Again, I’ve set Lightroom to organize all my files by Date. This is extremely handy.  I plug in my external drive. Then I open up Terminal and navigate to where I’ve told Lightroom to keep all my original files. Easily for me  that’s Pictures/2009/ and then Lightroom creates folders for each day.  rsync will navigate down into all the subfolders for me.  So this is what I type into Terminal:

rsync -avru Pictures/2009/ /Volumes/Main/Lightroom/main_catalog/2009/

(The trailing slash can be important to tell rsync that both places are folders) What does this line do?

rsync is the command

-avru is a list of flags.
•    ‘a’ means it’s in archive mode.
•    ‘v’ means it will tell me what its doing (verbose)
•    ‘r’ means it will go down into subfolders (recurse)
•    ‘u’ means it will only update with new files

Pictures/2009/ = where my photos are now.

/Volumes/Main/Lightroom/main_catalog/2009/ is the location of the backup folder on my external drive. In this case it’s named “Main”

rsync compares the the folder on my external drive and the folder on my Macbook and sends any files that aren’t backed up to the external.  I could have rsync delete the local files once they are copied, but I’m paranoid. So after rsync is done, I take a peek at the external; drive in Finder. Once I confirm the files are on the backup, I delete them from my Macbook.

I also copy the Catalog file itself to the External drive.  I continue working from that same Catalog file after the backup. If I need to get to a photo that’s on the external drive, I connect the drive. Then I have Lightroom re-link that file to the current working Catalog.  (Here is a page on how to do that) Working on a file on an external drive is somewhat slower than working on a local file, but it’s definitely useable.  Note: I can even open an old file in Photoshop, and Lightroom creates the PSD right on the external. So, that is slower too, but it has the advantage of being already backed up on the external.

Eventually, the local Catalog file will get too big on my local Macbook drive. Then I just close out that Catalog and start a new one. As of right now, I can basically keep one Catalog per calendar year.  I could develop a more sophisticated Catalog flow at some point, but for now this works for me.
So to recap my basic steps:

1.    Keep the current month’s files and catalog on my Macbook.
2.    Use rsync to send original files older than a month to an external drive.
3.    Keep the working Catalog on the Macbook, but copy it periodically.
4.    Access archived files through my working local Lightroom catalog.

If you have any followups or questions, lemme know and I will do my best to help you.

This would be the poster for it. With some dates and times and place. Free admission.

Someday.

From tineye.com :

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks.

I tried it with a small thumbnail of my most popular Flickr photo.

And it found some (4) posts in RBD message boards that had used the image without notifying me. Big deal. I suspect there are more. I really am fine with that.

I searched for this image, too:

And there were no results — even though we can see that The New Yorker is using it in their blogs. (With proper credit this time)

So, it ain’t perfect. But for people who are paranoid about their images getting used in blogs, TinEye eventually could provide hours of vengeful fun.