Andrew Niesen

My grandfather and I are celebrating milestone birthdays in August. He will turn 90; I will turn 30. It's a bittersweet occasion, though, as he and my grandmother pack up their house in order to move into a managed care residence.

So, our family has been helping Grandma and Granddad sort through the mementos they have collected over the years.
Their basement is a veritable treasure chest of 1950s-era toys. Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, and Brownie Cameras are arranged in a Teutonic order that would be expected of descendants of German immigrants.

On a recent trip to St. Louis, my sister and I pored over the basement shelves and made an important discovery: a vault of Niesen family photographs that chronicle my grandparents' lives.

As I sorted through boxes of brittle prints, I realized the worth of my find. The value of these images to our family is immense; they are priceless. — The photographs provide a portal for me to know my grandparents from a time well before I was born —. Someday, these photos will enable my children to know their great grandparents.

Everyday I tell prospective clients that there is great value in photography. Our clients' interaction with their wedding photographs will provide an experience that allows them to relive an important day in their lives —. Photographs will give their children a unique glimpse into their parents' lives. The work we produce for our clients will become a foundation for family legacy, and will increase in value over generations.

The print above bears the following inscription: "Eddie, 1929." My grandfather was 13 years old. This is the foundation of family legacy.

When we shot film, the million dollar question was, "Where do I put my archive of original film, so that it is at the least risk of being destroyed or lost by fire, theft, vandalism or a tornado?"

With the age of digital photography, we have the luxury of being able to make infinite perfect copies of our original digital files. With our current workflow, I can sleep at night knowing that if a fire or tornado struck that we could be up-and-running the next day without having lost any images or other digital assets.

It is a lot to manage, when our studio produces approximately one-quarter of a million RAW images (among 4 photographers) in a year. That's about 2,475 gigabytes of data per year.

Here is an abridged version of our digital workflow, in terms of how the images are backed up. We always keep one rule in mind: we ALWAYS have more than one copy of an image, except for when they are on the original CF/SD cards. Secondly, we always keep shot cards in secure pockets in our clothing during a shoot, and never keep them in camera bags. (Camera bags are much more likely to be stolen.) I never let the cards out of my sight and start our workflow as soon as the shoot is over, and before I go to bed that night.

Here is what we do:

1. After the shoot, I download our cards using our laptop onto one of our four "ShootQueue" (80GB Firewire 800 Firelite) Drives. We typically shoot 12-15 cards, for which I have 15 Lexar card readers that I plug into the computer simultaneously. The cards download overnight.

2. The next morning, I start burning a DVD set of the raw shoot. As soon as this is done, the DVDs are stored at Mark & Erin's house, so one backup of the shoot is off-site. It is then safe to reformat the cards.

3. The shoot is edited on the portable ShootQueue drive.

4. Once the edit is complete, we transfer the edited shoot to a server that is in our studio. The server has firewire 1000 gigabyte RAID hard drives. One copy of the shoot is permanently archived there.

5. The portable ShootQueue drive is taken to Mark & Erin's house and the edited shoot is copied onto another server we have there, with identical firewire drives, that are mirrors (exact duplicates) of the ones in the studio.

6. We burn a set of MAM-A DVDs of the edited shoot.

7. Once a month all DVD copies (both the initial set of DVDs, plus the MAM-A DVDs) are transferred for permanent storage in an undisclosed location that is not in our studio or houses. (But I'm not telling you where, for security reasons :)

QUESTION
How did the shot of the couple dancing in the doorway with the two lamps on each side happen? Was that staged? It doesn't look like it but it is perfect (it's towards the end of your slideshow).

ANSWER
The photo in the doorway at the end of the slideshow was a naturally occurring moment; the bride and groom weren't aware of my presence as I shot it. I had a White Lightning (inside the cottage) powered down to the minimum, bounced out of the far corner of the room triggered with a Pocket Wizard. I was shooting with one of my favorite lenses, the Canon 50mm f/1.4 (at f/1.4) on my Canon EOS 1D Mark II to pick up the ambient light from the two lights outside the building.

Many photographers ask about how to legally couple popular music with their slideshows on their websites.

We have an "ASCAP Experimental License Agreement for Internet Sites & Services" for music on our website. A "Non-interactive" license costs $288 will allow you to use any piece from their repertoire on your website, so long as you're not selling a product with the song itself, or allowing the user to select which piece of music is played. This covers 365,000 "user sessions" (which cannot be more than one hour in length) in a year. Practically applied, this means that our slideshows may be viewed 1,000 times per day on every day of the year. It doesn't matter how many songs you use, unless the total length of the slideshow is more than one hour. (That would be an epic slideshow!)

I called ASCAP to inquire if our specific use, including music with client slideshows on our website, is covered by the license. They told me that it absolutely was.

If you're TYPE-A like I am and want to be legal right now, check out an ASCAP license.

I was reminded yesterday that digital photography is far more reliable than film photography ever was. As you read this post, you may think I am crazy for saying this, but please, keep reading.

I was downloading some images from a wedding off my Lexar CF cards onto my FireLite hard drive yesterday when an odd thing happened. I had just plugged in the third card I was downloading when I noticed that the filenames of the images on this card were identical to the ones on the previous card. This is not possible, as each of our Canon 1D Mark II cameras produces its own unique filename prefix, and the image numbers are sequential.

I became curious about this oddity, and decided to open the files to check them. I was alarmed to be confronted with pink and purple static noise instead of stunning imagery of the outdoor wedding from the previous weekend. On further inspection of the card, I discovered that my file names were, one by one, being replaced with random characters and hieroglyphics.

If you've never had a card go corrupt on you, you should try it sometime; it's quite an adrenaline rush. I mean this sarcastically, of course. The lesson from my experience is this: always double check to make sure your CF card is unmounted properly from the computer before inserting the next card. Here's why...

After some Google research, we surmised that because Photo Mechanic had reported an error copying a non-image file from the card to the computer, it hadn't unmounted the CF card, as it would have if no error had been reported. I removed the CF card, not noticing that it hadn't been unmounted, and inserted the next card. What happened next caused the fireworks. But first some background...

The data on the CF card is organized using a file tree structure, which is summarized in an invisible file called a FAT file. The computer loads the FAT file structure off the CF card, and holds it in cache. When the disk is unmounted, the computer clears the cache file. But when the card is not unmounted, and the computer is presented with a second card with an identical name, it assumes that its cached version of the FAT file is more accurate than the one on the disk (which it recognizes is different) and overwrites the FAT file on the CF card.

This explains why the filenames from the previous disk were showing up on this one. The image data was still intact on the disk, but the FAT file, which acts like a roadmap for the computer to find the files, is completely corrupted. To the naked eye, this seems like a complete disaster, but thanks to a utility called PhotoRescue (available from DataRescue for Mac and that other platform) recovery is as easy as watching a progress bar creep across the screen for 4 hours.

Using the expert settings of PhotoRescue, I told the program to search the card for images while ignoring the FAT file structure. It scanned the card and found 251 images, a good sign, considering that my Canon EOS 5D will get about 250 images on a 4 GB Lexar card. The filenames it presented to me (which were names PhotoRescue generated) ended in .TIF. Because I'm a raw shooter, my filenames end in .CR2. The thumbnails it was presenting to me were static. I suspected the .TIF extension was the source of the problem. I saved one file, changed the extension to .CR2, double-clicked the file, and it opened up, intact, in Photoshop. I followed suit with the remaining files and recovered every image on the card.

I should also note that we've used this process to recover all the images off a CF card that was formatted by mistake as well. If you re-format a card by accident, make sure you don't shoot over the card. The FAT file structure has been deleted, but the images are still on the card, until they are overwritten by new files. Set the card aside until you can run PhotoRescue on the card.

After reading this post, you might ask, "why is digital photography more reliable than film photography?' After switching to Digital in January 2003, we've never lost an image. I remember that in 2002 alone our local pro-lab in Atlanta processed 6 rolls of slide film in color negative chemistry, ruining 216 images. A small mistake with film can ruin the whole batch. A small mistake with digital can be fixed with PhotoRescue, which we've only needed to use twice in the last 3.5 years.

All's well that ends well.