Amazon S3

An online data storage facility. I signed up to use it yesterday. I’m using a program called Jungle Disk to do the uploading / downloading. I’m using Time Warner Roadrunner, 500 kbps upstream, 7 mbps downstream (roughly). Uh - only problem is try uploading a 750 mb file. Jungle Disk will do it in the background, but uh - it does slow things down. I had the thing running all night and managed to upload two of my production files.

To give you an idea of file sizes I’m dealing with - the 16 x 20 production version of Promenade is 850 mb. It’s 16-bit, 300 dpi, rgb with a fair number of layers.

Now - on a related note. I was out taking pictures a few months ago when I ran into a guy with an m8. And we got into a conversation about digital, which lead me to broach the issue of backup. This is what he told me:

You can take a 16-bit photoshop file and save it as an 8-bit file without losing any information.

If you decide that you need to make changes, then just convert it back to 16-bit and make changes, then save it as 8-bit again.

I say - this cannot be. Maybe photoshop isn’t 16-bit anyway- maybe it’s 12 bit. I don’t remember. But whatever - my claim is that you simply cannot hold the same amount of information in 8 bits as you can with 16 bits. Further, he claimed that he spoke with the inventor and photoshop who confirmed that this was true.

Urban legend?

If true - then you could just change to 8-bit and upload those. Then when you needed to use them, download and convert back to 16 magic bits.

epson 7800, 4800 etc.

Timing: In case you care about such things, I just printed my first 16 x 24 inch print with 4800. Before this the largest print I did was 16 x 20.Settings: b&w driver, file @ 300 dpi, bi-directional is off, 2880 ppi, drying time per head pass is .15 secs, firewire connection.

Total print time = 25 minutes.

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So, I am looking seriously into replacing the 4800 with the 7800. There’s a bunch of things I need to figure out in terms of space. I guess any New Yorker would have that problem.

Also, I don’t even think they use the same cartridges. There’s no way I could keep sets of both cartridges. I’d better check that out.
Also, as far as the blog goes, I decided to use a different theme so that images wouldn’t be squished on pc’s with lower screen resolution.

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Anyway, I printed seven 16×20’s today. The silver rag paper is not as instant dry as say an Ilford pearl, so I usually let them dry out in the open, with an air-can handy to blow off any dust / cat hair that might settle on it while it’s wet, and then they go into various cabinets to finish drying and what I call curing. It’s not that the printing takes that long, but some of these had to be rescanned and then re-photoshopped.

Tomorrow I have about eight 16 x 24’s to get through and then I can get to develop film that’s been piling up.