01. April 2015 · Comments Off on Photo Technology – Computational Photography · Categories: Photography · Tags: ,

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Thanks to evolving photo technology. Stitched panorama

Thanks to evolving photo technology. Stitched panorama

Where is photo technology going? Computational Photography is changing the nature of photography.  Instagram has made computational photography acceptable and brought it to the masses what was once limited to Photoshop.  Photoshop can compute what should be in a region through computation, it can bend, spindle and mutilate pixels beyond imagination of a decade ago.

Photo technology can warp pictures and calculate color blending to allow stitching of photos to generate large hi resolution composites.  Photo Technology can turn un usable pixels that were too dark or too light in pleasant images.  This is now all accepted photo technology, so much that if we it was missing we could comment on the lackluster nature of the photo.

3-D printing is now all the rage and the forefront of printing.  Imagine a photo technology that generates a 3-D color relief  (bas relief) of an image.   Cameras can now take holographic images, why not?  This is not really much of a leap as all the technology is here today.

I’m a Harry Potter fan.  One of the nifty things are the moving photos in newspapers and on walls.

Ready to print type of photo

The type of Photo I like – ready to print

Imagine this pre dawn image slowly or not so slowly changing and ending up at sunset.  Is this unrealistic? Maybe not… We already have picture in frames that are really LCD screens showing slide shows that sit on a desk.  How much more is really needed? Higher resolution, maybe different display technology so that the image is reflected light rather than transmitted, but we have the photo technology to do this today.

Today is April first, or April Fools, but where does the dreamer end and the fool begin?

19. February 2015 · Comments Off on Backup? – How much is it worth? · Categories: Philosophy, Photography, Preparation · Tags: ,

Chance favors only the prepared mind- Louis Pasteur

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.- C.S. Lewis

Eastern Sierra,Fall Colors,Sierra,Sierra Nevada,aspens,tree]

Eastern Sierra,Fall Colors,Sierra,Sierra Nevada,aspens,tree] – I would not want to lose this photo

As a photographer, my photos are important to me; they can’t be replaced !  So, I backup, or so I thought.  I also work in high tech and know that computers and storage fail.  I thought I was OK with having a RAID 6 was enough backup (requires 3 failures to lose information).  I was wrong, a computer crash killed the RAID 6.  It took 6 months and $4,700 to recover about 80% of the photos.  Lost were some incredible photos of dolphin jumping in the surf, right next to the shore.

After that incident, I acquired a Network Attached Storage (NAS) from Synology that is separate from the computer for backup.  The NAS is RAID 6, the files on the computer are on a RAID 5 (2 failures to lose information) with a backup from the computer to the NAS.  Is this enough backup?

But, what if there were a fire that took out the house? So, I now, also use Backblaze to back up the photos to the cloud.  It has taken 15 months to upload all the files to BackBlaze.  I sleep better.

Well I thought that I had backed up enough.  The website, Patrick Lynch Photography, was backed up as was the blog site on by the hosting company on a weekly and monthly basis.

Unfortunately an automatic WordPress update  played havoc and the blog could not be restored.   The backup plan at the hosting site did not work.  I have to recreate the whole blog site from scratch!

The moral of the story is that  not all backups are the same; just because the photos are backed up, doesn’t mean anything else is….

Because I am having to recreate the blog from scratch I will be republishing past blog articles.