The Pervasive Data Center

A little while back, a friend IM'd me with a problem. Their digital camera wouldn't read from its SD flash memory card. Naturally it was almost full of photos that hadn't been copied off to a computer yet. Bottom line is that I was able to recover just about everything. Here's how I did it.

First of all, I had her take the card out of the camera and mail it to me. I think that's generally good advice. (The taking it out of the camera part--not the mailing to me part.) If you have a problem with a card, stop using it right away. For this reason, it's a good idea to carry a spare card even if you don't need it for capacity.

I plugged the card into a reader attached to my computer (running Windows Vista). No luck; Windows said the card wasn't formatted. Nor would my camera recognize it as a usable memory card. Time for something heavier duty.

What I ended up trying was ZAR, Zero Assumption Recovery. ZAR 8.3 is a suite of data recovery tools for Windows. What was really nice for my purposes is that it includes a mode to recover digital images and that mode is "freeware." (Other functions require the full $49.95 version.)

What was even nicer was that it worked great. A few of the images were apparently corrupt but it recovered about 95 percent of them in a largely automated operation.

Some cards come with their own data recovery software from the manufacturer and I would probably try that first if I had a problem. But ZAR worked well and you can't beat the price.

One of the side effects of HDTVs becoming prevalent is that you can now show a DVD-based video "slide show" on the TV with pretty good quality. It's not something I do a lot, but it's often just easier to burn a disk that can be popped into a standard consumer DVD player than it is to hook up a laptop or access photos through some other device attached to the TV.

Given that I recently built a new Windows Vista-based computer, I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a look at some of the options out there for putting photos onto DVDs. There are a lot of them so I certainly don't claim that this is a comprehensive survey--but these three programs cover a pretty wide range of capabilities.

Before getting into the programs, just a short level-setting interlude for readers who may not be familiar with making this sort of DVD. Normally, when you look at photos on your computer, you're looking at each digital image as a separate file--typically in a format called JPEG. However, the typical DVD player attached to a TV doesn't know anything about files. It only knows about video--and, specifically, video (along with associated audio) that has been laid down in a well-defined format. There's a lot more to it but, for our purposes here, if you want to use the DVD player in your living room to give a slide show, you have to essentially create a video using you photos as raw material; you can't just copy them to a DVD as data.

Programs designed for this purpose are often called "authoring" software; most can do at least some degree of editing and authoring of video files (such as from a camcorder) as well as still images. Which is logical considering that each still image is effectively converted to a short video clip as part of the process.

The first program I took a look at was the Windows DVD Maker that is included with Vista Home Premium and Ultimate editions. Like some of the other software included with Vista, it's pretty bare-bones. You import images (and videos), load some music tracks if you like, pick the length of time each slide will be displayed, choose from a few menu and transition options--and then burn it. Not a lot of options or control.

But that's not necessarily a knock. If all you want is to get some pictures on a DVD, the process is fast and intuitive. And, if you have the right Vista edition, it's free.

At the other end of the spectrum is Pinnacle Studio Plus version 12 ($100). (The company also sells $50 Studio and $130 Studio Ultimate editions.) Pinnacle is a division of Avid Technology, long known for its gear and software used by professional video editors and other broadcast professionals. Pinnacle was acquired by Avid in 2005.

Studio Plus is a powerful program that gives enormous control over timing, transitions, menus, output, and so forth. It includes video effects and color correction. It offers several different views of your editing job. If I wanted to get into some serious video editing, I would definitely consider giving Studio Plus a whirl. Although I'm not much of a video editor, it seemed to offer the most bells and whistles of these three programs.

But to create a fairly straightforward photo slide show? Not so much. I had to repeatedly consult the 320 page manual to figure out some of the basic tasks. And, even then, I found the whole process required a lot of manual operations. There may be a simple workflow buried in there somewhere, but it certainly wasn't obvious. My take is that, for most people, Studio Plus will just be too much if all they're interested in creating is a photo slide show.

Adobe Premiere Elements 4 ($100--also available as a bundle with Photoshop Elements for $150) is the "little brother" to Adobe's $800 Premiere Pro CS3. Over the past few years, this company, which was mostly known for pricey pro-oriented software, has evolved some very respectable programs that are primarily intended for consumers.

Premiere Elements is one of these. It's a nice compromise between power and usability and I found the user interface to be generally intuitive. That's not to say that creating a photo slide show was as wizard-driven drop dead simple as in the case of Windows DVD Maker. This is a video editing package after all; you are therefore exposed to the fact that you are "making a movie."

But it also lets you easily treat a bunch of images as a group with a common set of timing and transitions--so, effectively, you can treat your movie as having just one element--a grouped slide show. You can also tweak things considerably, if you like, but the program does a nice job of keeping a lot of the customization options and more advanced features (such as animations and audio mixing) out of the way until you want to use them.

These three programs strike me as a case of horses for courses. Have Vista Home Premium or Ultimate and want drop dead simple? Just use Windows DVD Maker. Want lots of power and control in a consumer-priced package? Take a look at Pinnacle Studio Plus or Studio Ultimate. Want solid video editing and authoring that goes well beyond simple slide shows but is still quite approachable for even casual users? Consider Adobe Premier Elements.

I've been on a bit of a de-cluttering jag over the past year or so. Too much paper, too much "stuff" around the house. So I've been slowly dumping the junk and selling or donating the rest.

ScanCafe Bangalore office

(Credit: ScanCafe)

This includes photographs. I had stacks of snapshots of family, friends, places, and so forth sitting around in various drawers and boxes. I had made a half-hearted effort to digitize some of the old slides previously, but scanning is really tedious work. Scanning the hundreds of photos involved here was just more than I realistically felt like tackling.

Over the past couple of years, I'd had some slide scans done locally by a small photo store and a large one. I wasn't impressed in either case. I paid about $1 per scan and the results were pretty mediocre. I don't doubt that I could have eventually tracked down someone in the Boston area who could do a better job for a reasonable cost, but we're still talking pretty big bucks for a mass scan-athon.

That's when, after reading some reviews and surfing some forums on photo sites, I decided over Christmas to box the whole lot up and send them to ScanCafe.

I recently received the results. Bottom line? Good quality and, at $0.24 per slide and $0.27 per print, the price is hard to beat.

I'll dig into my experience in a bit more detail, but let's get one thing out of the way first. The reason the prices can be so good is that the Burlingame, CA-based company does the scans at its facility in Bangalore, India. The way it works is that you ship your box of photos to Burlingame (you print out a UPS label when you place your order online), where they are batched up in a palletized air freight container and shipped to India.

Unsurprisingly, the "ship to India" part causes some intake of breath in a lot of people. However, having gone through the process and thought about it some, I think the incremental risk is pretty small. If you have a handful of photos that you would be especially heartbroken to lose, it's perfectly understandable that you might not want to trust them to a shipping company at all to send them out and get them returned. But once stuff is being shipped around anyway, the international air transport step wouldn't seem to make a big difference. In fact, given that ScanCafe is understandably sensitive to this issue, they seem to have put particular thought into both the whole logistics process and its transparency to customers.

(For what it's worth, for many years I've had slide film processed by Kodak using prepaid mailers. I had one batch of several rolls lost; I'm pretty sure it was the local Postal Service's fault on the return leg. And a couple of years ago, Kodak made such a hash of closing down its Fair Lawn processing facility that I had film missing for months. In other words, staying domestic is no guarantee.)

With that out of the way, how about the rest of the experience?

Quality. I ordered basic 3000 dpi JPEG scans of my slides and 600 dpi scans of my prints. For $0.09 more you can get higher-resolution TIFF scans. I didn't bother given that these are really "memory shots" and I'm not planning on making big prints. The overall quality was quite good. Many of the photos were old. Slides dating back to about 1960 were faded and dirty in many cases. I found the corrected color balance to be spot-on, and the general cleanup to be well done--especially for the price.

A minor caveat is that the JPEG files are relatively highly processed. This means that they look pretty good "out of the box" with relatively high saturation and dark blacks and bright whites. That's great if you want to look at and share the photos more or less as-is. It's not so ideal if you want to process them further yourself. (For $0.14 per slide you can get a TIFF scan with no processing plus a fully-processed JPEG.)

Turnaround time. This was not a particularly speedy process. In fact, it took close to three months door-to-door. As I noted earlier, there's a nice portal that lets you see where your order is, so I wasn't concerned or anything; I just wanted my scans. However, the company has recently significantly expanded their scanning facility (now 20,000 square feet) with the goal of getting turnaround down--although the nature of their operation means that's it's never going to be an especially fast option.

Customer service. I had one slight billing problem (my 8"x10" prints were charged at the rate for larger pieces of paper). I received a prompt reply to my e-mail to customer service, and the matter was resolved within a day.

Pricing. This is one of the real strengths of the service so long as you're sticking to "standard" media. This includes 35mm color negatives, 35mm color slides, and paper photos up to 8"x10". They'll do other types of scans (such as newspaper clippings and black & white negatives), but those are $0.99 each. I note that they've actually increased the price for newspaper clipping/letter/paper artwork from $0.37; they've obviously decided to focus on a specific set of high-volume media types. You get to review the scans before they're shipped back to you. You can delete up to 50 percent and not pay for them. In practice, this is probably most useful if you're having negative strips done, given that you can't specify that only specific frames be scanned. (Standard color negative scans cost $.19 per frame.)

Overall, I give ScanCafe high marks. I combined the photos on the DVD I received with other scans and digital images and was able to give my brother a nice selection of family photos. Who knows when I would have gotten to it were I doing the scans on my own?

The Richter Scales have reposted their "Here Comes Another Bubble" video sans the much-disputed Lane Hartwell photograph of Owen Thomas that they used in the original video without permission and without attribution. Lane has also made a statement:

As the Richter Scales stated in their blog, the video that used my image--without my permission--was viewed just under one million times on YouTube. In the end, the band opted not to work with me toward a fair resolution of the issue. I have to say that I'm very disappointed with the members of the band I negotiated with in good faith.

Lane goes on to say:

I will be sending the band an invoice for their use of my image in the first version of the video. I hope they pay it as I'll use the money to pay my lawyer and donate the rest to KidsWithCameras.org. Kids with Cameras is a nonprofit organization that teaches the art of photography to marginalized children in communities around the world. This was the offer I proposed to the Richter Scales that they chose to disregard.

Thus, it doesn't appear that, in this particular case, attribution in the original video would have put a stop to this controversy before it began. Perhaps if the band had asked in advance. I don't know. When people have requested to use my photographs in a book and, in one case, a PBS documentary I've always said yes for the price of a photo credit. But that's me. And I'm not a professional photographer with a history of having her photos and those of her friends ripped off.

Jonathan at Plagiarism Today has a great recap of the entire imbroglio. Among his lessons learned:

Attribute obsessively: If you use other people's content in any way, attribute, attribute well, and attribute graciously. It is best to follow industry standards here and to start out with the intention of doing so rather than having to go back and do it later, when it is much harder.

And:

Remain calm: When emotions get involved, as they often do with content theft and plagiarism issues, it is easy to lose sight of how important a case really is. Some are more important than they seem, others are less. This case was the latter. It is important to focus less on feelings and more on legal issues and how a case of plagiarism can potentially help or hurt you.

As I noted yesterday, my own feelings were pretty conflicted about this tempest. Lane's DMCA takedown notice that bumped the original video off YouTube seemed somewhat disproportionate to me. On the other hand, the Richter Scales largely hid behind a Fair Use copyright defense. Leaving aside whether Fair Use applied here (it's at best a borderline case); it's just bad manners and bad practice to not give attribution to all the people whose work the group used--as they have now done in the revised video. This case--and many others like it--is far more about proper societal behavior than it is about the nuances of copyright law.

As "Miss Rogue" writes in "Tragedy of the Commons: Lane Hartwell vs Richter Scales:

Since the video was viewed hundreds of thousands of times (prior to takedown), there was a missed opportunity there for the many photographers whose photos were used to make this group famous. In a post titled Credit and "Here Comes Another Bubble", the author explains:

"We did make an effort to credit those people we actively worked with on the video, as well as Billy Joel, which we listed in the comments on YouTube and on our blog. But, given the large number of sources we used, the task of assigning credit for each source seemed impractical."

He goes on to mention Lane Hartwell...without linking to her photos or her Web site. As one commenter said, "Basically if I am reading your post correct, what I hear you saying is, 'Mea Culpa, but we're lazy.'" In actuality, the time one can take to list the photo credits is a fraction of the time it would take to go out and duplicate the work of those artists to make the same presentation.

I'm unsure what good will come out of this whole incident. The problem is that when emotions run high, as they did here, people tend to spend more time fortifying their own positions rather than exploring new ones. However, I can at least hope that it's at least raised a little bit the general awareness around giving proper credit for images and other material from the Web.

Use a Nikon?

Or at least that appears to be the message.

I opened my copy of Outside Magazine's companion piece of fluff, Go, this morning and was greeted by an ad for Sony's A700 DSLR with the tagline "In Photography, Timing is Everything." The accompanying photograph was spectacular and showed a leopard about to dispatch a baboon. Dust is flying and, clearly, timing has a lot to do with the impact of this photo.

It was also very familiar.

In fact, it's a 1965 photograph taken by John Dominis for the late, lamented Life Magazine. You can see a version of the originally published photo at Getty Images. In the Sony ad photo, there are some slight differences in the position of the dust and the baboon's mouth but they're clearly part of the same sequence. Perhaps a quarter of a second separated them as Dominis' motor drive clicked away.

Sony ad for DSLR-A700.

(Credit: Sony)

I certainly have no reason to believe that the photo isn't properly licensed and all that. And it is a great photo. (Which is why I recognized it.)

But companies have to be sensitive to how bad it looks when they don't use their own products. That's why Ford execs drive Fords rather than GMs. And HP folks deliver presentations to us on HP notebooks rather than Dells. In this case it's Sony that looks bad. I imagine Sony and their agency justified it to themselves by the fact that the newness of their single lens reflex line meant that they didn't have much in the way of stock photography on which to draw. Still, bad call.

In business, perception is everything.

(I don't know for an absolute fact that the photograph in question was taken with a Nikon, but it was almost certainly shot using an SLR with telephoto lens and was taken at a time when Nikons were the predominant pro SLR. Dominis also did, in fact, use Nikon gear for at least some of his photographs. In any case, Sony wouldn't have a camera line until many years in the future.)

Those of us who have actually read through many of the Open Source licenses and have spent a fair bit of time mulling and discussing their consequences take a lot of things for granted.

One of those things is that once a program, or anything else, is released under an Open Source license you can't just take it back. Maybe this seems obvious to you, or maybe not, but it isn't to everyone. Perhaps especially as we depart the realm of software where most developers involved with Open Source have given at least passing thought to the implications of the GPL and other such licenses.

This was brought home to me the other week in this comment on Flickr by Lane Hartwell (username "fetching"). (The context isn't especially relevant to this discussion; I suggest reading the whole heated thread if you're really interested.) "[this discussion] has brought attention to some issues and may help change things on both ends. Who knew that CC Licenses were permanent? Flickr sure doesn't tell you when you choose that option."

There are a variety of of issues raised in this case, but the one I want to focus on is that a photographer initially posted a picture on Flickr under a Creative Commons license and subsequently changed its license to the default "All rights reserved" (i.e., any use beyond that allowed by Fair Use requires the explicit permission of the photographer). There is a family of Creative Commons licenses. They vary, essentially, in whether the licensed work can be altered and whether it can be used for commercial purposes. However, for our purposes here, we can just think of all of them as "Open Source licenses."

Physical world intuition might suggest that of course the copyright holder, the owner of the property in a sense, can unshare a work anytime he or she chooses. If I give you permission to borrow my car, I can certainly give you permission on a one-time basis or can withdraw that permission at any time (subject to any contractual agreements).

But Open Source licenses are different. Once I put a photograph, a novel, or a program out in the world under an Open Source license, it's out there. I can't go "never mind" and withdraw whatever rights the license granted in the first place.

I'm not saying that the copyright owner can't change the license. In the case of works to which multiple people have contributed, there are a variety of complications and legal theories around changing licenses, but that's a separate issue. The bits or the words or the arrangement of ink droplets that have already been released into the world remain covered by the Open Source license they were originally released under.

A Mattel court case involving their CyberPatrol software and a program by Eddy Jahnsson and Matthew Skala called cphack raised the issue of whether a GPL license could be withdrawn. However, the case was such that no definitive legal conclusion came about. In addition, there were questions over whether cphack was even properly licensed under the GPL.

In any case, the widespread opinion among those who work with Open Source licenses is that what's been released into the world can't be subsequently withdrawn. As stated in this FreeBSD document:

No license can guarantee future software availability. Although a copyright holder can traditionally change the terms of a copyright at anytime, the presumption in the BSD community is that such an attempt simply causes the source to fork.

In other words, if the license is changed to an "unfree" license, you don't get the right to enjoy any downstream changes--whether enhancements to a software program or touchups to a photograph. But the specific work that's been released to the world can't be withdrawn.

Hewlett-Packard has never done as much as it could to use its servers, PCs, printers, software, and the like to cross-leverage and complement each other.

One need only look to Apple to see how this sort of thing can work. The iPod would arguably not have succeeded without the Mac home base to build from, and the Mac has clearly piggybacked on the iPod's success. With even more assets, such as servers and services, HP had still more opportunities. But it largely paid lip service to connecting them. Indeed, at present, HP seems to be headed back to a more decentralized organization reminiscent of former CEO Lew Platt's tenure than the more centralized, top-down structure it adopted under Carly Fiorina.

However, at least outside its strictly business-oriented Technology and Solutions Group (where ProLiant and Integrity servers live, alongside HP's software and services businesses), there have been some cross-fertilization and synergies. HP combined its Imaging and Printing Group (cameras, printers, scanners) with the Personal Systems Group (PCs) in 2005. Although HP clearly favored the printing side of the equation, it also had products like cameras, scanners, and tablets that covered multiple points of digitization from image creation to hard-copy output.

Now comes the announcement that HP will stop designing its own cameras. Among the reasons given is enabling "HP to accelerate its investment in Print 2.0 initiatives," according to the company statement.

My initial reaction was that HP had become a bit too enamored of the margins associated with ink. And, as a result, it was backing away from products and technologies that are not, in themselves, as lucrative as printing but that clearly cross-support and leverage it in the same manner as the Mac and the iPod.

Print 2.0 relates, in no small part, to the mass Web 2.0 digitization of content. But HP sometimes seems too anxious to skip over anything that doesn't involve printing something out right now. For example, HP was actually fairly early to the online photo storage thing with Cartogra (now called Snapfish). But it was largely usurped by the more social-oriented sites such as Flickr. The difference can be striking; Snapfish periodically sends me e-mails threatening to delete my account unless I get something printed soon. Flickr is now augmenting its own printing services and can leverage a user base that dwarfs that of Snapfish.

To be sure, HP profits from many online services. HP Indigo printers are the output device of choice for many of the online book publishers such as Blurb. But by essentially taking on the role of arms merchant, rather than something more customer-facing, it cedes a lot of visibility and control of its destiny.

That said, it's hard to argue with HP's exit from the camera business.

For one thing, it largely reflects current reality. HP is already outsourcing much of its camera design work. Past digital camera-related R&D in HP Labs and its product groups notwithstanding, HP was already largely out of the camera business. Maybe HP coulda', woulda', shoulda' done better by its early digicam development, but it didn't--and there's not a lot of point wishing things were different.

Cameras are also a special class of device with their own long history and well-entrenched suppliers. Canon, for example, has been in the photo business since 1933 and has managed to not just maintain a presence in the camera market, but to actually accelerate its relative stature as a camera maker in the Digital Age.

Nikon hasn’t done badly either, although its greatest strengths are arguably in more traditional camera technologies such as optical design, whereas Canon has a clear lead in electronics design and manufacturing. Other manufacturers, such as Sony, Olympus, and Pentax are also in a better position than HP.

In short, HP is in such a laggardly position when it comes to cameras that it has effectively no hope of coming close to market leadership. Better to fold the tent and perhaps seek partnerships with companies that might be more amenable to such than if HP were an aggressive competitor.