Ari's Planet

After several hours picking out the latest photos and writing short descriptions, followed by much wrangling with OpenOffice Calc (a spreadsheet program with some missing features), Exiftool (which chokes on single quotes and parentheses), Bash shell, and too much (re)uploading of files, I have severly wounded the Beast of No Description or Titles, at least for the new photos. My last major batch of photos from New Zealand is now online, including:

Auckland
Awanui
Cape Reinga
Kerikeri
Northland
Piha
Tongariro

I posted some photos from New Zealand that hadn't made it up yet:

Auckland
Coromandel
Okarito
Rangitoto
Rotorua
Thames

More pictures from New Zealand are online, from all sorts of places--everything up to yesterday. I'm heading up to Abel Tasman NP area, but found a decent Internet shop in a video store of all places. Makes me want to watch movies, too bad my van doesn't have a DVD player.

Curio Bay A few more pictures of fossil trees and penguins.
Fiordland Amazing place of rain and mountains and green.

I've uploaded pictures from Singapore and Australia, including from the Overland Track.

This post describes my workflow to handle digital images and how I publish them on my web site while on the road. My camera has shot about 35,000 images, nearly all of which have been taken on my trip which started in August of 2007 (it is now May 2008).

Equipment and software needed

Digital camera, flash memory, spare batteries
External USB disk, 2.5", and USB cable
Portable 2.5" disk drive that can copy cards directly
Good card reader with USB cable
USB flash stick with portable software (see below) and notes

New Zealand photos up to yesterday are online. The photos are not perfectly categorized by location at the moment. Some of the photos look a bit out of focus, but I can't tell if that's because of this Internet cafe monitor, lack of sharpening in the jpeg, or because my lens is dying and making it ever harder to get sharp pictures. There are a few photos with spots of gunk on them because the sensor needs another cleaning.

Browsing the visitor's center at Lake St. Clair were postcards by local photographers Peter Dombrovskis and Rob Blakers. They both have done fine work, which is also available in shops in Hobart, online, etc. Along Elizabeth street in Hobart, a bit north of the pedestrian mall, there's a neat little map shop with maps from all over the world, travel books, and some great pictures in the back room.

My do-it-all lens, the Nikon 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 AF-G VR II lens (isn't that a mouthful!) went kaput in Kampot, Cambodia. The autofocus motor started making a sickly sound and it would no longer lock on focus. In continuous-focus mode it will get close and then focus continuously around the correct focus point. In single-focus mode it just has lots of problems, focuses all the way in and out and then gives up after a while.

Last week I was in Bangkok at a camera show and played with a Canon 40D. It got me thinking about the full 35 mm frame Canon 5D. The 5D is down from $3000 to $2000 at B+H. The Nikon D200 is around $1300 and the D300 $1700. I prefer the Nikon interface and have Nikon lenses, but the Canon has a better sensor meaning lower noise at higher-ISO. Nikon is behind in this range of cameras. When Canon updates the 5D it will be even better.

This is a nice idea.

Here's my current digital workflow for on the road shooting without a computer:

- Take pictures in RAW+Basic JPEG. I shoot compressed RAW (~10MB/image), unless there is a highlight problem in which case I use straight RAW (~16mb/image). I have been using GMT as the timezone so I don't have to remember to switch timezones when moving about (may be a bad idea, but it seemed sensible at the time).
- Backup CF card to Portable Hard Drive (PHD).
- Split folders on CF card to ~4GB to fit on DVD.
- Rename CF card folders to date-time range.

My original plan was to backup my photos to a portable hard drive (PHD), burn 2 sets of DVDs, mail one set home, then trash the second set when the first set was safely on a disk at home. To this end, I carried a PHD, the HyperDrive Space with a 120GB Seagate disk and the Plextor 608CU portable DVD burner. The PHD still works great. The DVD burner stopped working sometime in China. Now it comes up as a "Cypress AT2LP RC58". According to online info, this is a controller chip for the USB enclosure. I emailed Plextor, they got back right away and said it needs to be sent in for service. Great.

Using the data from my images (http://arihalberstadt.com/drupal/node/37), I wanted to see how often VR* and a tripod would have been useful. Image stabilization of some sort is useful, as a rule of thumb, when the shutter speed is slower than the reciprocal of the focal length. For the Nikon D70 and D200, the crop factor is 1.5, so I adjusted this rule to be 1.5 times the shutter speed [need reference for this modification]. Nikon's second-generation VR is supposed to be good for compensation of 2 to 4 stops.

To help decide what lenses to get, I thought it would be useful to find out what focal lengths I actually use. I ran the following on my digital images to get the lens, focal length, f-stop, shutter speed, ISO, and whether the flash fired from the EXIF data embedded in the image files:
find . -name '*.[nN][eE][fF]' -exec exiftool -m -t -S -Lens -FocalLength -FNumber -ShutterSpeed -ISO -Flash -CreateDate \{\} \; > data.txt
Then, to get a list of my lenses (all Nikons):
sed -e 's/ .*//' data.txt | sort -u