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Image Science September 2006 Update
In this update, we have several exciting new products
available, and an article on the important issue of digital asset
management - basically a quick review of the options available, and their
pros and cons. We're all concerned with the archival integrity of our
images in print form, which is why we're using the brilliant archival papers
from Hahnemuhle and Crane etc, but perhaps equally important is the archival
integrity of our digital media - especially since it often takes a while to
getting around to printing our images! If you're like me, you're excited by the possibilities of
digital capture and the easy chances for experimentation it brings. I've
got a new D200 and I'm very quickly developing (pardon the pun) a backlog of RAW
files that are crying out for some love and attention. But there's only so
many hours in the day, so in the short term I want to burn those RAW files to
safe media for safe and easy retrieval at a later date when I find the time to
work on and print the images...so I've been looking into options for storing
lots of large files, safely. More on this in the article below but in the
meantime, here are the latest news snippets from Image Science!
I had
hoped to get another article done in time on appropriate print sizing, the glory
of fine detail in big prints, and ways to really improve local contrast, but
that will have to make for the next update. Amy and I are having our
wedding in less than 3 weeks and time is pretty tight at the moment!
NB Please take note that due to the wedding we will
be having a short break from the 5th of October, re-opening on the
12th of October. Please factor that into your plans, especially if you
have a looming deadline like a final assessment coming
up!
New! Beautiful Conservation Folios
We've finally got our hands on some
beautiful new fully archival conservation folio and album products. They
come from two French fine art brands - Prat and Panodia - and are made from
only the finest materials, including some lovely soft
leathers. If you've been to the Melbourne store Zetta Florence,
these are similar to some of their nicest products, just much more reasonably
priced.
Specifically designed to meet stringent archival standards, these
folios are very beautiful and very easy to use. We've got versions with
acid free pages for mounting your images, as well as versions with mylar/polypro
pockets. They're available in popular sizes like A4, 11 by 14 and A3, and
we can order larger versions of some of the styles if you need them.
If
you're a student and about to present your final folio, consider these as an
affordable and flexible alternative to very expensive custom binding.
They're very attractive and easy to use! We have samples available here at
the office so if you want to come and have a look, just give us a bell on (03)
9348 9808 to make a time to pop over for a look.
Full
details on our new range of Conservation Folios and Albums
Crane Museo Fine Art Cards - Beautiful double sided cards - Pre-scored and now much cheaper!
We recently made our wedding invitations using Crane Museo Artist's Cards - and have already received many compliments on how good they looked! They're just a beautiful product in every way - attractive, archival cotton rag paper, laser scored in the neatest possible way, matching envelopes, and available in a number of useful sizes including square and panoramic.
The big news is they're now available in boxes of 50, making the per card price much cheaper, and therefore much more viable for commercial uses. All the details are available using the link below, but to give you an idea you can get cards as low as $1.40 each for a beautiful, 100% cotton double sided card with matching envelope. That means developing your own range of cards without mucking about with cutting and scoring is now definitely economically viable. The results are far more professional than DIY efforts because the laser scoring is so perfect - way beyond what can be achieved with scoring tools or the old 'empty biro & ruler' trick.
Full
details on Crane Museo Cards
Archival CD and DVD Media from Taiyo Yuden
We're now carrying the best name in burnable media - Taiyo Yuden. These guys invented a lot of the technology and have about 60% of the market share in Japan. They're generally regarded as the best burnable discs in the world (technically, their discs measure as having the lowest PI error rates in the industry). We've cherry picked the two best products from their range and are now offering them at great prices. Our prices include a proper spindle box as well, so no more messy piles of discs (Taiyo Yudens normally come just tightly shrink wrapped, so when you open the package you've suddenly got 50 loose discs on your hands!). This media is the media we've been using ourselves here for several years now, and we've never used media with less issues - they are extremely reliable and highly cross compatible.
Taiyo Yudens are specifically designed to offer very long lifetimes - so they're perfect for storing your images in the longer term. You can read more about them in the Digital Asset Management article below.
Full details on archival Taiyo Yuden CDs and
DVDs
A Quick Correction
In the last update, I said that Hahenmuehle Fine Art Pearl was made from 100% cotton rag - this is because I have a spec sheet from Hahenmuehle stating this. It seems they changed their minds though, as the final version is in fact alpha cellulose wood pulp. So I'd say that's another vote overall in the direction of Crane Silver Rag which is definitely 100% cotton rag. That said FAP is a lovely, punchy paper that suits really bold, saturated images very well, because it's so very white. Always good to have options!A new Tips section
We've got a new section on the website for miscellaneous tips -
and we'd love to add some more tips if you have them - any little trick to
do with digital imaging you think might be handy, just email it through to me
and I'll add it to the tips page (with a credit of course). You can find
it on the website under Knowledge & Training -> Tips, or using the link
below:http://www.imagescience.com.au/Knowledge/tips.html
Sponsorship
We're currently sponsoring several awards and exhibitions, including an upcoming exhibition on the Mercy hospital by Charlie Sublet (website link coming in the next newsletter!), a recent exhibition for Hands of Help ( http://www.handsofhelp.org/ ), and we're also sponsoring the NMIT award for Best Print from the graduating class this year. While we're not a big business, we are happy to help where we can so if you have an upcoming exhibition or similar, let us know what you need in the way of printing/scanning etc. and we'll see what we can do for you.
New Bank Details & ABN
Please note we're now officially trading as Image Science Pty Ltd and have a new bank account and ABN to go with it - so if you pay us by direct deposit, please update your details for us. You can find the bank details using the following link:
http://www.imagescience.com.au/paymentDetails.html#DD
Hahnemuhle Pricing Going Up
Hahnemuhle recently contacted us and informed us of a price rise
coming very soon. Australia has enjoyed easily the best pricing for
Hahnemuhle papers in the world (we get complaints from European dealers who
can't compete with our pricing!), and while this will still be the case, the
papers will become slightly more expensive in the near future, to bring the
pricing more in line with the European market. It won't be a dramatic
rise, but right now is the time to stock up if you're a Hahnemuhle fan as the
prices will probably never be this low again!
Updates to Eye One Match (to 3.6.1) and Huey Software (to 1.03)
Updates to Eye One Match and the Huey software have recently been released. In particular, version 3.6.1 of Eye One Match has a number of interesting new features you won't have seen if you're still using 3.2 or 3.4 - including before and after views of your profiling results, and a monitor validator tool which assess your calibration (and tracks your monitor's changes over time). The monitor validator is hidden in the help menu, if you're looking for it.
Jeremy's Corner - Thoughts on Digital Asset Management
Digital Asset Management is a major issue for the modern photographer - and one I am asked about almost every day. Whether you're a full time professional or a complete amateur, the images we make have real value, whether it be financial or sentimental. Anyone serious about protecting their investment in images should be burning each of their images to at least two discs, with the second disc stored in a completely separate location. Don't say it won't happen to you - learn from the example of Olgas Truchanas, one of Australia's most famous 20th century photographers, who lost the bulk of his images - a lifetime of work - to bushfire in 1967.
Given any luck, bushfire won't be an issue in your life - but almost everyone these day will be effected by media failure at some point - whether it's the all too common dead hard drive, a virus infection, or simply cheap burned CDs that start to rot away after just a few years, it will almost certainly happen to you at some point. So if you value your images, a sensible backup strategy is imperative.
Backup strategies for digital images - a quick discussion
At the moment, their are 5 basic, commonly used backup strategies - each with their own pros and cons.
The three major needs of a backup system are cost-effectiveness, data safety, and easy retrieval of data if the backup is actually required. Here's a quick summary of the major options:
Tape Drives - The classic corporate approach to data backup is to use tape drives. Old, slow, and notoriously unreliable over time, this is generally a bad idea these days. It can take ages - hours and hours of tape spooling - to retrieve a specific file you have lost.
Removable Hard Drives - These are fast, and can actually be a surprisingly cheap option in the long term. However, they're based on moving parts, and MTBFs (Mean Time Between Failure) for hard drives is measured in years, not decades. Leaving hard drives unused for long periods of time tends to increase the unreliability. Combined with an indexing system, their major advantage is speed - image retrieval can be very fast. But you've sacrificed reliability for speed, which overall is a bad backup strategy in the long term.
RAID based servers - That is, computers with a lot of disks in them, with multiple copies of each file stored. Can be effective, fast and relatively cheap. But unless you have several, stored in several different locations, RAID isn't really a safe backup strategy as it still has a single point of failure. If you do have several, it's a very expensive strategy.
Online Storage - This is in many ways an ideal solution to the problem of backup. Keep a local copy, and upload another copy to the other side of the world, for storage on a massively backed up, highly redundant disk farm. Problem is, it's *very* expensive - the bandwidth and storage costs are fine if you're just backing up a few word documents, but hundreds of megabytes of image data just costs too much.
Burnable Media - Probably still the best option. Very cheap, and easy. Burn multiple copies and store in multiple locations. The major issue here is media quality. Cheap CD and DVD media will often only last for a year or two (much like cheap inkjet paper!). However, high quality media should last upwards of 100 years. Select a good brand of media that uses metallic dyes (eg Taiyo Yudens), and be a bit disciplined with your processes, and it should be easy to implement a highly safe, inexpensive, easy to use back up system. Perhaps combined with a RAID-5 based server, you would have the best of all worlds - speed, convenience, and very high levels of safety.
The Backup Strategy Here at Image Science
We use a Raid-5 server (an Infrant ReadyNAS) for short term storage of images. Because RAID-5 uses redundancy, if any one of the 4 hard drives this machine has in it fails, we can just swap it out and there will be no loss of files. Setting up about 1 terabyte of storage cost around $2000. It's reasonably fast and very convenient - but of course, if there was a fire here, or we were unlucky enough to have two hard drives fail at the same time, we'd be in trouble. So in the longer term, images files are burnt to two discs, one of which is sent down to another location in Rye for offsite storage.
As soon as I take important RAW files off my camera, they are burned to two separate discs. They are then copied to the RAID server as well. Then, when I eventually work on the images, I burn off two TIF or PSD files, which I refer to as 'master files', as well as leaving them on the server. This means, 99% of the time, I can retrieve the image directly from the server and make a print straight away. If for some reason I have trouble with the file, or I've accidentally deleted it (user error being a very common point of failure) I can retrieve the image from one of our trusty Taiyo Yuden discs stored safely in a folder here. If that disc has failed (hasn't happened yet), then I still have another disc with the master file on it I can retrieve from Rye. If that fails (seriously unlikely!) - I still have two discs left to try that have the raw image on them! So it's pretty much impossible to imagine that an image will be permanently lost - to date I have never lost an image, and it has never taken me more than about 3 minutes to retrieve a specific image. I *have* occasionally deleted an image from the server in error...but my first set of discs live about 3 meters from my desk (in archival polypropylene folders, not in PVC based folders!) - so it's very easy to recover in those situations...and should anything more drastic occur, it will take a little time to retrieve the offsite backups, and load them back onto the server, but overall we're well protected.
This may sound like a lot of work and investment, but in reality it's not very hard to do at all, and it's all about implementing a basic system that just becomes routine. With modern burners the process is very fast, and with modern media the whole process is remarkably sound in archival terms for very little investment.
That's it!
Well, that's all I've got time for at the moment - catch you
next time, should be around mid to late October. Apologies to the less
technically inclined that the above article is so tech focussed - next time I'll
be back on issues of print quality and beauty!
In the mean time, I hope
the sun is shining in your corner of the world, and we look forward to hearing
from you
Cheers,
Jeremy Daalder (and Amy Breen-soon-to-be-Daalder)
Directors,
Image
Science
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Image Science
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Fine Art Inkjet Paper - Crane, Hahnemuehle, Canson and
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Ph: (03) 9348 9808
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