Today is Louis Daguerre’s birthday, and Google is helping to celebrate it by devoting their logo to him. Happy 224th, buddy!

Wait, are you really about to ask me who Louis Daguerre was? Hey, it’s OK, to be fair the guy has been dead for about 160 years… Even so, in this line of work I sort of expected more from you. Maybe you’ve heard the word Daguerreotype before? Even my browser spell-checker knows that word. That’s right, it’s a photographic process; that’s probably close enough for most tabletop trivia games.

Unfortunately, this blog is not interested in tidbits of trivia, so get ready for facts. Lots of facts. With historical context.

Returning to the topic at hand, Daguerre’s eponymous method was the first silver-based imaging process and one of the first techniques for creating a photographic image ever. So before you start wagging your tongue and making noises that sound like “why does this guy deserve a Google logo?”, remember that Louis has done more for photography than all of your hiking through the backwoods of Yosemite with a full-frame digital SLR has ever done. Or will ever do, because you are not an inventor. Seriously, assembling an IKEA coffee table is not the same thing as inventing something.

Poor, poor Louis Daguerre. He might have lived longer if making a Daguerreotype didn’t involve boiling mercury until its steam envelops a copper plate treated with iodine vapor. Yes, the Daguerreotype was the first commercially viable photographic process, but it was also a great way to accidentally poison yourself and die. Like that one popular song put it, “Shake it, shake it… Shake it like a poisonous picture…” No, hang on, that doesn’t sound right… Either way, iodine vapor and boiling mercury are among the worst things to get all over your hands and face, and this was the eighteen thirties. You think they had respirators and fume hoods back then? (For trivia buffs: they did not).

Anyway, flip the calendar back a bit and meet Nicephore Niepce (born Joseph Niepce), a French inventor with a totally unpronounceable name who had been fiddling with photographic reproduction since 1793. You see, Niepce liked to reproduce engravings, and the way you reproduced an image in the late 18th century was to point a camera obscura at it and trace the projected image. Niepce had an unsteady hand and couldn’t trace the images well, so he set about his search for a chemical process that might capture the light from the projection.

Ultimately, he was successful, and Niepce is acknowledged by historians as the creator of the first ever photographic image, but his lavender oil-based process (now called “heliography”) had plenty of issues. Like, you know, the eight-hour exposure time. “Please hold still, Madam. Just another six hours.” This is why he only made images of other art or of landscapes. Things that generally hold still all day long.

Niepce began collaborating with artist Louis Daguerre in 1829. After Niepce’s death in 1833, Daguerre continued their work and eventually created the Daguerreotype, a process hardly resembling heliography in method and which overcame many of its challenges. So good was this process that Daguerre was able to sell it to the French government in return for a stipend of 6,000 Francs each year for the rest of his life. Laughing all the way to the bank, Daguerre went down in history as the inventor of the first photographic method that produced results of any lasting value, and Daguerreotypes from that period remain intact to this day, even in spite of their fragility.

In fairness, Daguerre got the French government to give Niepce’s estate 4,000 Francs a year for his contribution to the development of the process, so it wasn’t as though he stole all the glory, although Niepce never got a Google logo dedicated to him. That, I feel, is the true measure of one’s significance within the larger tapestry of history; has Google recognized your contributions by commissioning a logo in your honor that will appear on their main page for one day? No? Then you are nothing.

In that respect, Louis Daguerre joins the ranks of such other consequential people as Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Earth Day. OK, so Earth Day isn’t a person, it’s my blog and I like Earth Day so sue me.

The next time you pick up your fancy shmancy digital camera to go out and take 4,000 photographs in an afternoon, I want you to remember M. Louis Daguerre and his iodine- and mercury-coated hands that labored for many hours to create a single image on a copper plate, and who couldn’t even share it on Flickr, because he didn’t have a computer.

It occurred to me back then that I had, indeed, seen videos of Canon lenses being assembled (specifically their “L” series; I am not sure if the non-L lenses are hand-assembled or not) but I didn’t have the presence of mind to go find them.

Because I’m still mostly a Canon devotee I thought it wise to catch up with that thought and post these behind-the-scenes videos of a Canon “L” lens being assembled, yes, by hand. Truly it is a marvel of engineering and of manual dexterity at some points. Hopefully if you, too, are a Canon shooter, these videos will give you even more respect for the product you likely hold in such high regard.

This is a three-part series and takes you all the way from “how do we make sand into a lens” to “this is how we put the barrel together.”

Check out Camera Technica for more about photographic technology.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m out here in the great American west—“big sky country,” if you want to call it that—and some of the sights I’ve seen were nothing less than demanding of a panoramic treatment. On top of that, I suffer from a devastating case of technolust and wanted to really put “AutoPano Giga” through the paces. Well, I sure did. I also probably melted the heat sink off my poor laptop’s CPU…

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the case of AutoPano Giga, I think he was wrong; I think it actually is magic. I have tried a few panorama tools out there; the free and open-source Panotools, a couple of Mac-exclusive ones, and so on. AutoPano Giga is so easy and so fast and so accurate, it blows them all out of the water. Of course it also costs an arm and a leg, but at least you know why.

After the break, actual panoramas!

One of the awesome things about AutoPano Giga is that it reads the EXIF data from your photos to figure out what kind of lens you used, and then adjusts for distortion based on that information. Essentially, this makes it totally kick ass at stitching together fisheye photographs, which normally do not directly overlap whatsoever. The edges have to be flanged out before two fisheye photos taken side-by-side will match up.

This one, taken at “Black Sand Basin” in Yellowstone, was stitched together from only two 15mm fisheye images (I wanted to limit the number in order to take them rapidly because the steam was moving quickly and when parts of the scene move a lot from one image to the next it can cause ghosting and stitching issues). Click for a larger view.

I think you get more of a sense of the vastness of a space from a good panoramic image. This place is as big as it looks.

While leaving the Grand Teton national Park earlier in the week, we stopped by the site of the “Cunningham Cabin,” which is exactly what it sounds like it is. The cabin itself, though, wasn’t much to look at. I was more intoxicated by the mountain range in the distance and the clarity of the sky and clouds. My New England brain, drunk on what is actually a somewhat average afternoon sky in Wyoming, required the capture of a panorama.

Of course, what you can’t tell by looking at it on this blog is that at actual size, it’s this big:

The total dimensions of this panorama are 11,154 by 3,186 pixels. I could make a very respectable five-foot-wide print of this image with perfect clarity!

Finally, on the last morning in Yellowstone, I wound up on this snow-covered road on the east side of the park and just had to try a crazy panorama. By “crazy” I mean that I didn’t just turn around, taking each photo beside the last. I tossed in a total of 53 images, some pointing up, some down, some tilted to the side a bit… Just to see what AutoPano Giga could do with them.

Click to embiggen!

I did this one on my laptop, so in order to make it possible I exported the original 53 images from Lightroom at about 800 pixels wide. If you look closely on the right side, you can see a little stitching error causing a notch in the far side of the road. I am convinced that this happened because of the limited detail in the smaller input files; when I get home to my big desktop I will attempt it again with 53 full-size 22-megapixel images.

Some of the things about AutoPano Giga that make creating these panoramas easier (or in some cases possible) include:

• The ability to augment the software’s automatic “control point” detection, which is how it links features in one photo to those in another (the core of the “stitching” process); for what it’s worth I’ve almost never had to use it, the SIFT key extraction of APG is extremely good,
• Center point, horizon detection, and vertical correction tools, which allow you to basically coach the software as to what you want the center point to be, or what feature(s) you ultimately want to be horizontal or vertical,
• Numeric yaw, pitch, and roll adjustment, which permits you to tweak the projection of the final image such that the perspective appears the way you want it to,
• Mercator, planar, spherical, and cylindrical projection models, which—although my understanding of projection is limited—essentially gives you a few basic effects to choose from when mapping the images into a flat environment.

With regard to the projection models, cylindrical tends to work best when you have one or more rows of images taken very evenly, whereas spherical and Mercator tend to work better when the images are somewhat more chaotic. I know that’s not an entirely accurate statement, but if you want to know more about projection models… Wikipedia is your friend.

The real challenge of panoramas is that once they’re stitched together, you inevitably wind up with a weird patchwork of images that needs to be cropped down. Here is what the Cunningham Cabin panorama looked like before cropping:

As you can see, you generally want to photograph beyond the edges of what the final panorama will include, because after distorting and stretching the images to fit together, you lose a lot of corners.

One other thing I should mention, although I haven’t yet tried it myself, is that if you bracket¹ each image in your panorama, AutoPano Giga will also “fuse” the exposures, preserving more highlight and shadow detail. Now, you don’t have a ton of control over that process; it’s very hands-off, unlike Photomatix Pro or some of the other actual “HDR” software out there, but it sure makes the whole panorama creation easy!

That’s all I have right now for panomania!, but if you folks have any questions or comments, there are a couple of boxes down there at the bottom that you can use to share them, and I continue to encourage it!

1. Bracketing means taking the same photo with different exposure settings, generally something like -1 EV, 0 EV, +1 EV

The Internet is all a-flutter about this announcement Greg Yaitanes made via Twitter that the House, M.D. season finale (airing next month on FOX) was shot entirely with a Canon EOS-5D Mark II. This makes the 5D Mark II the first video-capable digital SLR camera to ever have been used to film a “prime time” television episode.

Yaitanes, who is a co-executive producer and director of House, M.D., said that they chose the 5D Mark II because they wanted to be able to fit the camera into “tight spaces,” they used mostly Canon prime lenses as well as the 24-70 and 70-200 zooms, and that no brackets or stabilization tools were used. I can’t wait to see how the episode looks!

The video was recorded onto large CF cards (Yaitanes said “18gb,” but I think he meant 16 GB), which afforded only 22 minutes of shooting before tossing in a new card.

You can read PetaPixel’s summary of the Q&A that has taken place so far via Twitter for more luscious details, and read engadget’s coverage as well as Gizmodo’s coverage. If you ladies and gents who are technology-inclined don’t already check out those two blogs on a regular basis, you may want to add them to your news reader of choice.

That is the question.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to wrangle the proprietary formats of your camera manufacturer, or to take arms against a sea of sidecar files, and by opposing, end them…

But enough pseudo-Shakespeare for one post.

There has been some chatter on the Interwebs lately concerning the DNG format: there are quality and archival concerns, whether it’s worth converting one’s entire library to the format, what the benefits might be, and whether one ought to care. Today, I weigh in. For what it’s worth.

Coincidentally, I’ve used the same post title as Matt Kloskowski did in his take on the subject on Lightroom Killer Tips. Matt didn’t add a pseudo-Hamlet line, though, so I feel like I’ve done the headline proud.

After the break, a complete rundown on DNG; trust me, it’s going to be technical and editorial.

What Is DNG?

Skip this section if you already know what DNG is, or read it if you want to know what I think DNG is.

DNG is the “Digital Negative” format, spearheaded by Adobe. It is an “open” format, and a “standard” in some sense, though not an official ISO standard (yet). When we say that the format is “open,” we mean that the precise contents of a DNG file, its byte offsets, containers, methods of generating and reading the files, and so forth, are publicly available. This is not the case with any other RAW file format out there. The ability to read and write manufacturers’ RAW files (e.g. Canon, Nikon, et al.) is either licensed from the manufacturer or reverse-engineered.

Adobe created the standard out of, apparently, a desire to “universalize” (if you will) the ubiquitous RAW file formats that all manufacturers have created for themselves, and to introduce a truly interoperable format that any software or hardware maker could employ without 1) wrangling many different formats at once, or 2) singling out particular users of particular products¹.

The DNG format is based on many existing standards owned by prestigious “standards development organizations” (or SDOs), some of which you’ve probably heard of; they go by the names TIFF, JPEG, XMP, IPTC, ICC, CIE, and ZIP, to name a few. So, although the DNG format itself hasn’t been embraced by an SDO such as the International Standards Organization (ISO), it comprises previously standardized formats and is only a snippet of red tape away from being SDO-backed.

You can read a lot of nitty gritty on the format itself explained by Barry Pearson on his DNG Specification page.

Why Would You Want to Use DNG?

There are three main reasons that are generally cited:

• Archivability (future-proof-ness, if you want)
• Interoperability (openness, we like to say)
• Efficiency (YMMV, more on this later)

Archivability (which I’m pretty sure isn’t even a word) means that fifty years from now, when Canon owns the world and Nikon is completely extinct (har har), flying cars are a reality, and everyone has an army of robotic servants, your DNG files will still be supportable by manufacturers of hardware and software alike, because no secrets about it have been kept from the public.

“[I]f Nikon decides to not support my raw files one day, there’s some 15 year old in his room that’ll code up a raw conversion program in his sleep.”
—Matt Kloskowski

Does this claim hold water? I don’t know, you can download free software right now that can read the Photoshop version 3.0 format, which is already decades old, so it seems to me that if the ability to parse a format is out there (even if it was obtained semi-legally or with much effort by third-parties), it will be difficult to lose it. Moreover, a format such as Canon DNG or Nikon NEF will likely remain supported by anyone you care about, or, as Matt Kloskowski put it, “…there’s some 15 year old in his room that’ll code up a raw conversion program in his sleep.” So I am not worried about losing access to my RAW image data.

Interoperability means the ability for you to take the same file and use it in many different places. Of course whether this is an advantage to you or not depends on the places where you want to be able to use your RAW files. For me, Lightroom is the only program on my entire computer that ever sees a RAW file. I suppose if I round-trip through Photoshop, Lightroom is going to pass the CR2 through Camera Raw, but we’re talking about two closely-integrated Adobe applications there; whatever formats one supports, the other is sure to. Photomatix is going to see TIFFs, on the web you’ll see JPEGs, etc.

So why does interoperability matter? Adobe’s point in creating DNG is that it may matter in the future. If Great New Software X decides they can’t support your camera’s RAW format, and if you’ve converted it to DNG already, well, problem solved. Because Great New Software X will certainly support DNG given that the format is completely open and drop-dead simple (not to mention free) to implement, you have a much better chance of being able to drop your existing DNG images into any new, shiny tool.

“I actually tried ZIP compression in prototype versions of DNG, but the compression ratio was much better using lossless JPEG.”—Thomas Knoll

Okay, what about efficiency? This is where things get kind of cool. The Adobe DNG format stores the actual pixel image data in what is called Huffmann lossless JPEG format. What that means is that DNG files can sometimes be as much as 20% more efficient at storing image data on disk than a comparable RAW format, thus DNG files may be as much as 20% smaller. Lossless JPEG is completely pristine; there is no image-altering compression done, so the data is totally preserved, albeit compacted. The Huffmann algorithm for this compression happens to be more efficient than ZIP when there are more than 8 bits of data per channel (RAW is 12 or 16), so the Huffmann algorithm was used.

But here comes the kicker… Canon’s RAW (CR2) format already uses Huffmann lossless JPEG for its internal image data storage. So if you shoot Canon RAW, you will see no increase in data compression, since the data is stored in exactly the same way already. If you shoot in Nikon RAW (NEF), you will immediately see a 20% decrease in file size and no change in image quality.

For non-Canon shooters, that’s probably the most compelling reason to convert to DNG right now, which I should point out Lightroom can do automatically for you at import time. You’ve seen the option, right? There are a couple of ways to convert to DNG in Lightroom, and there are three of them explained on TheLightroomLab.com.

Sidecars Aren’t Just for Kids

No, seriously, most motorcycle sidecars could definitely seat an adult…

Joking aside, what we’re talking about are metadata “sidecar” files, typically named something like IMG_0195.xmp and so-called because they are saved alongside your original RAW image files, like the sidecar on a motorcycle. Sidecar files have been around since the invention of metadata and metadata libraries. The XMP format for storing image metadata in a sidecar file was developed by (guess who…) Adobe. XMP is necessary because the metadata support within RAW file formats and other imaging formats may comprise only a subset of what, for example, Lightroom is able to save and search.

Certain formats such as PSD, TIFF, and JPEG have pretty flexible metadata support in them already. DNG is no different. The “sidecar bonus” of the DNG format is that when you’re using DNG, you don’t need sidecars.

But who does, anyway? The fact is, Lightroom stores all of your image metadata in its own catalog. This is done 1) to make it quickly searchable and editable, and 2) to centralize it. If you want to write metadata to disk for certain files (or the whole catalog), then Lightroom will decide, based on the source format of each image, whether to save it directly into the file or to create an XMP sidecar file.

The purpose of XMP is to give your image metadata a place to live when the image file itself can’t accommodate it. So why would you need this ability? Two reasons. (Assuming your RAW files are in NEF, CR2, or similar; non-DNG).

1. If you share images with other people who use Lightroom and you want them to be able to see what you have done in the Develop module, as well as the IPTC tags, you will need to send them XMP sidecar files. This is preferable to sending your entire Lightroom catalog or creating a new one to house only the images you are sending.
2. In the event of a catastrophic disaster where your Lightroom catalog backups are corrupted, you can restore 95% of your data using the source RAW image files and associated XMP sidecar files. What you would lose is virtual copies, your history, and any collections. All edits and other settings are stored in the XMP files.

There are some major caveats here, though.

1. When you’re sharing images, you can always export them to DNG, which makes XMP unnecessary.
2. In the event of a catastrophic disaster, you’ll only have XMP files if you’ve previously selected batches of images within Lightroom and triggered the “Export Metadata to Files” function. Presumably you would carry out this procedure on images you have finished editing as part of your backup strategy. For the record, I do not do this.

Conclusions

So where does this leave us as far as DNG goes? Should we all run back to our computers right now and convert our whole libraries to DNG format? Once again, here are the major advertised benefits of the DNG format:

1. Archival (future-proof)
2. Interoperable (widely compatible)
3. Efficient (storage-wise, at least)
4. All-inclusive (obsoletes XMP sidecars)

It seems to me that the “archival” and “interoperable” characteristics of the format are bonuses, and as a supporter of free and open standards, I tip my hat to Adobe simply on principle. These characteristics don’t, however, increase the immediate convenience or reliability of my workflow, nor do I think the archival nature of the DNG format will have a measurable impact on my workflow in the coming years.

Since I am a Canon shooter, my Canon RAW (CR2) files already compress image data using the same Huffmann lossless JPEG system that DNG does, so I get no benefit there. If you use Nikon, et al., you may see an immediate storage benefit from converting your library to DNG.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to convert your library to DNG, or to start using DNG for your imports going forward, is the fact that DNG files are capable of storing all Lightroom-specific metadata directly within themselves, without the use of XMP sidecar files. If you are diligent in writing metadata to the files when you are through editing them, those files then fully encapsulate all the work that you’ve done, in one place, suitable for backup.

Even in the event that you lost your Lightroom catalog, you could still restore the final, edited versions of the images (which is where all of your hard work goes, after all), as well as tags and other helpful metadata. The only things you’d lose are virtual copies, history (of limited long-term utility, anyway), and collections (which can be rebuilt without nearly as much work as re-developing all your images).

To DNG or not to DNG? I think I will.

1. Like yours, for example.

Over on the right you see a photograph taken by Michael “Nick” Nichols (and his team) for National Geographic, which is on the cover (well, part of it is on the cover, it’s a huge photograph) of the October issue of the magazine.

The image was made by jigsawing 83 separate photographs together (which you can probably tell by the jagged edges), each of which was taken by one of three DSLR cameras mounted on a gyroscope-leveled, pulley-lowered rig that Nichols and his team designed for the purpose. You can check out the photo on Hack a Day of Nichols with his rig; it looks like they’ve got six Pocket Wizards on there (I don’t know what the other three are for) and maybe a couple of bicycle wheels. All in all, a very righteous hack.

This particular redwood is allegedly the “most architecturally interesting” tree in the world, with several forks and bends stretching 300 feet into the sky. It’s only been standing there for over 1,500 years(!!), but now it has been recorded in the annals of photographic history forever.

Via (one of my favorite blogs) Hack a Day, via National Geographic, via NPR

Chris Benton is a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. He also straps his digital SLR onto a kite string and takes some of the most amazing aerial photographs I have ever seen. Chris combines a truly gifted eye for composition with a an engineer’s savvy for mechanical problem solving.

Using kites and remote-controlled camera rigs built by hand in his basement, Chris captures the world top-down, photographing everything from people and buildings to the patterns of nature. Watch this video from Make Magazine and be stunned!

Kite Aerial Photography on MAKE: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

Chris is quick to humbly share his experience and tips for aerial kite photography on his website (graciously hosted by Berkeley!)

I was blown away by the evolution of Chris’s camera rigs, which grew from fixed harnesses with rudimentary mechanical timers based on elastic bands, Silly Putty, and disposable cameras, to what he now uses, a remote-controlled, servo motor-driven, three-axis robot.

It’s definitely not commonplace for someone to possess both a grasp of electronic and mechanical engineering and a hawk-eye for artistic composition. Chris Benton has both.

Part Two: Cars

Aside from being an avid photographer, I admit to a streak of BMW fanboyism. When it comes to sports cars that are still solid daily drivers that make you feel like you’ve personally discovered the center of the universe and you’re sitting directly within it, nobody does it better than BMW.

To hype the release of their latest creation, the Z4 Roadster, BMW hired artist Robin Rhode to dip the Z4’s tires in multi-colored paints and drive it around like a fingerpainting on a warehouse scale. This was one of the most indulgent marketing campaigns I could think of.

I realize this isn’t strictly photography-related, but it is certainly art-related. If you feel gypped, go look at these photographs from the event

And here is a pretty cool video of how they put this thing together:

The next time you’re out shooting, or sitting around the house thinking about how next to use that studio space you set up in the basement, or the garage, or the attic… Think about breaking out of the box and doing something completely different. Robin Rhode did, and I think it came out pretty well.

Though my question has little to do with your most recent article, I find that the expertise you�ve shared since I began following your site to be compelling and hope that you can provide me an answer that will serve my needs. I have seen many digital photos over the years, some pretty dismal and some pretty spectacular. My question was born out of seeing, for the first time, an exhibition comprised of 150 works by Ansel Adams, which were nearly all �Silver Gelatin� prints. My question is (setting aside for the moment the composition, line, form and majestic beauty of many of the locations) can any digital print be made in such a way that a knowledgeable observer would not be able to distinguish it from a print made using the silver gelatin method?

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably mention that the comment was posted by my father, who, having a degree in fine art and a gallery of his own, takes a vested interest in some of the topics I discuss. That said, I thought it was a very relevant question and one that many of you might have thought about, too, so here’s what I think.

First, it would depend on how knowledgeable the viewer was and how close they could get to their subject. Second, there are many technologies available, so the short answer is “probably,” but the long answer is more interesting.

So-called “lightjet,” which combines a digital (laser-based) exposure of photographic paper with traditional (chemical) development methods, produces very fine results, especially of full-color images. Upon very close inspection, however, it would be clear that there are many colorful dots making up the print. Still, these prints have fantastic longevity, are often quite lustrous, and are available for a lot less money, comparatively, than other methods. An added benefit is the ability to print on any brand and type of photographic paper available to photographers, from Kodak Endura to Fuji Crystal Archive. There is a certain je ne sais quoi surrounding real photographic papers that may be the strongest argument for lightjet.

Inkjet prints boast a longevity nearly comparable to traditional development and are capable of a much broader range of color than lightjet. The highest-end inkjet printers now deliver between seven and twelve physical inks in picoliter droplets that mix on the paper to create a continuous tone image. The ink droplets are dispensed by a piezoelectric system and can be either dye-based or pigment-based, each having their own archival and color properties. Inkjet printers, however, are much more expensive to run than ordering your prints from a third-party photofinisher (who probably uses lightjet), and if you need the highest quality available, you will have to buy, configure, and operate the setup yourself, which is no small task!

Giclee (zhee-clay or gee-clay) has also held its own against the influx of lower-cost inkjet solutions, boasting the ability to print on materials such as canvas and at resolutions beyond what inkjet or lightjet typically can achieve. Giclee (sometimes called Iris printing because one of the original models was called Iris) is essentially a CMYK inkjet system, meaning that only cyan, magenta, yellow, and black inks are used, though I have heard of giclee printers that use six inks. The ink is fired from glass nozzles at one million droplets per second and each drop is electrically charged so it can be directed toward or away from the paper by electromagnetism. The paper itself is affixed to a drum that spins at about 180 inches per second. Giclee is probably one of the most mechanically impressive printing methods around.

Artists have chosen giclee for years because of its faithful color reproduction and ability to print on “artistic” substrates such as canvas. A single giclee print, however, can cost $50, $100, or $200 to produce, not including the calibration and other services required to achieve the results you need. Giclee is more favored by painters than photographers.

Four-color offset lithography, which is how all print publications are produced nowadays, is actually capable of near-giclee quality, however American print shops tend to be too traditionalist to adopt the color management methods necessary to produce fine art prints to an exacting standard. Bill Atkinson, a man absolutely fanatical about color accuracy, collaborated with a Japanese print shop to implement color management methodologies for their four-color presses. In return, they printed his book of rock photographs. That book may be the only example of accurate color reproduction through offset lithography on any American bookshelf. The difference between the capabilities of high-end offset lithography and giclee is entirely due to the willingness of the technical staff involved to use modern digital color management methods.

At the end of the day, can any of these digital solutions deliver a result as austere and striking as a pure black and white gelatin silver print? Probably not, but they can come very close. I am convinced that Ansel Adams himself would be a dedicated and outspoken advocate of digital photography and all of its methods were he still alive today.

In the web development world (which I call home for about eight to ten hours a day), we have a few general “rules” we follow to make websites more usable, accessible, and effective. Photographers are a technically savvy crowd, especially since digital has gotten so popular, but they don’t always think about things the way web developers do. Here are some simple guidelines you can follow when promoting your work on the web.

For the most part, web standards are a great idea and those who follow them are probably benefiting their users. At the same time, some companies and organizations treat standards like a buffet, using what they want and ignoring the rest, leaving many people in the lurch. A standard is only as good as its adoption.

That said, you don’t have to be a pompous standards nerd to make your photography more accessible over the web. You just have to keep a few basic guidelines in mind and try to follow them whenever you can. This is by no means an exhaustive list, nor is it meant to be canon law.

Never, Ever Say “Click Here”

The most atomic element in vanilla web design is the link. Beneath all of the stylization, navigation, content, and so on, there are links binding everything together. The link was the original thesis of the Internet; its purpose for being was to create a cross-referenced volume of information. Each link that points to another place should indicate where it will take you when you click it. Links that say “click here” do not tell your users anything. Mobile devices may aggregate links on a page and when your page contains 12 links that all say “click here,” how will anyone know where they go? The World Wide Web Consortium calls this the “human test.” Machines don’t much care what your links say, but people do.

Use Stylesheets

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Though the use of Cascading Stylesheets (or CSS) has been fairly standard over the past few years (which is nice, considering the standard itself was finalized in the ’80s), I still find cases where this best practice is completely disregarded. The reasons for using CSS to design your page are manifold, but the top couple are internationalization, and accessibility. By separating the information on your page from the way the page looks (or the separation of style from content as we often say), you can make it much easier for people with disabilities to access your information, and for people using machine translation to do so as well. Here is a nice excerpt from Kynn Bartlett’s “Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours” that talks about CSS for accessibility and internationalization. (Notice how my link text describes exactly where it will take you? Nice, eh?)

I recognize that as a photographer you may or may not have control over the way your site is put together. Often, we rely on third parties to build and host our sites for us. This tip is meant to raise the overall understanding of these important issues so that you can ask the right questions of your designer or web host before spending time and money on a site that excludes the disabled.

Don’t Forget Alternate Text

Even though we primarily deal in visual imagery and you might wonder at first whether your website and its content would be interesting or useful to someone who can’t see, why not do what you can to accommodate everyone? To that end, try to make sure that every image on your site contains alternate text using the alt attribute. In HTML, it looks like this:

By applying the alt attribute to your image tags, you ensure that braille readers, text-based browsers, and other alternate methods of viewing your site can make sense of what would have been displayed there if images were available. It’s just a good practice.

Sharing Is Caring

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One of the most effective methods of advertising is friendship. When people see something interesting or entertaining on the Internet, they want to share it with their friends. Entire sites such as YouTube, digg, del.icio.us, and the brand new PhotographyVoter.com are based on this principle. So what can you do to make sure your content can be shared effectively?

The most important factor in “shareability” is whether a user can send the URL displayed in their browser to their friends and bring those friends directly to the exact same page of your site. In other words, if someone comes across a photograph they like and they want to show everyone they know, they ought to be able to copy and paste the address from their address bar and bring all of their friends to that exact same page.

There are two huge technical impediments to this ability: frames and Flash. Frames and Flash can cause the URL in the browser’s address bar never to change, which prevents people from sharing specific pieces of content with their friends, damaging that excellent free advertising you want to tap into. I am often asked for advice on creating or commissioning websites and I always discourage my friends from having their gallery sites built entirely in Flash for that exact reason.

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A real disappointment was when one of my photographer friends showed me the website she purchased from a company that specializes in hosting photographers’ gallery sites. The site was built using a template she chose from a selection of designs they had available and it used frames heavily, not only restricting how much of the browser window could be used by content, but by obscuring the direct links to her images. Nobody likes to have to write a whole message to someone like “I saw this great photo, go to somesite.com, click Gallery, then click Portraits, then scroll down a little, click on the guy with the guitar, then scroll down a bit more to the fourth row… Count in from the left…”

That company doesn’t understand their clientele!

Conclusions

As I said earlier, the majority of photographers I know don’t have the time or inclination to learn web design, so they are at the mercy of a third party to design and build their sites. Moreover, someone who specializes in building websites should probably be better at it than someone who moonlights building websites. That said, I hope these tips come in handy as you hone your web presence or search for someone to help you do it!

More Information

Someone criticized this article for excluding watermarking as part of the whole website package, which I suppose is a legitimate claim. I talked about watermarking previously in Protecting Your Digital Rights, and it’s kind of a novel, so click carefully.

Another person brought up the somewhat common act of linking to your photos from another site, potentially abusing your bandwidth. I shied away from that topic when writing this article because it covers more technical server administration stuff, but if anyone really wants me to write about it, I would be happy to explain how it can be prevented using server configuration settings.

The bottom line is that developing and hosting a website can be a career unto itself (I would know, I administer over 600 websites at work every day) and there is a lot to learn about and be aware of. I hope that these very simple items are helpful and if there is a general interest, perhaps I will do more technical articles in the future.