One of my bright ideas…

I know it must be bedtime when I catch myself falling asleep over the keyboard. Literally. As in head touching keys sort of thing. And so it was… er… this morning. At about half-six in fact. After having spent a whole night messing with pics… offloading from camera; importing to Lightroom; editing; processing; outputting; uploading to Flickr etc.

Ah yes… uploading to Flickr. All thirty of them.

What?

Yep. You read that right. Thirty. Not a lot to show for a mammoth night’s work really… given that I’d started just after half-nine yesterday evening. And finally crawled into my festering pit about half-six this morning. (That was after being up since about seven yesterday morning!)

In fairness, the total take was rather more than thirty. Quite considerably more in fact. And no doubt there’ll be a few others from the session coming sometime later today (fingers crossed). But it was this initial batch (of thirty, don’t forget) that had taken me all night to produce.

It’s all mate’s fault really. Had he not started me on this damned stupid black and white caper I wouldn’t have had my bright idea.

Ah yes… one of my “bright ideas”. And we all know about them, don’t we? Life would be so much simpler (and less stressful… and cheaper!) were it not for my bright ideas.

Well, this particular bright idea involved the GX20. That rather super camera that I haven’t actually used for, oh, nearly a year or so. Cos I’d had “issues” with it. One of which was its somewhat questionable rendition of colour. That had provided me with something to chat about in at least two or three blog posts.

Now I seem to recollect that during the last of my forays with this camera I’d just about resolved the colour issue… come up with a reasonably satisfactory workaround or something. But I still wasn’t entirely satisfied. Not 110% confident as you might say.
What was really needed of course was another couple of sessions to restore my confidence in it. But by that time I’d had enough of the whole damn affair and so virtually mothballed the camera.

All of which has loitered in the back of my mind ever since, like the tattered remnants of some half-recollected bad dream. And, almost in a subliminal sort of way, its been niggling a bit. Cos the camera really is rather too good to simply not use.

Which is where my bright idea comes in. Ho hum.

Y’see, for all my black and white stuff I’ve been using the Lumix so far. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking it. It’s a nifty little camera and real enjoyable to use. But, at the end of the day, its still only a glorified point’n'shoot. Albeit with a dead handy zoom range. I think they’re actually called “bridge cameras”, or “ultrazooms” or something. Whatever.

The whole point being though that the file quality isn’t quite up to the mark for certain uses. And, shooting in JPEG, one’s rather limited in terms of the amount of effective processing that can be done to them.
Only to be expected. And that’s not a complaint. Simply an objective recognition and acceptance of the truth. In fact, I’m sort of planning on doing a blog post about this very issue. Somewhen. When I’ve nothing better to do.

However, the whole relevance here is that, having messed around with black and white for some time now (which, incidentally, the Lumix has lent itself to admirably… or at least the sort of b&w I like) I’ve been increasingly feeling the urge to try doing some similar stuff but shooting in RAW rather than JPEG.

Now of course the Lumix can produce RAW files… but its a weird format that my (rather ageing) version of Lightroom won’t read. And the RAW app that came with the camera… well, let’s just say I don’t care for it very much. And the RAW files, quality-wise, aren’t much better than the JPEGs. Thus, with the Lumix, I’ve been shooting in JPEG exclusively.

Now realistically there’s nothing to stop me using either the GX10 or the Canon for this type of photography… shooting in RAW and processing to b&w in Lightroom. Nothing whatsoever. Apart from the rather weird way my mind works. Let’s not get into that at the moment though… just accept it as a given. Cos the way my mind works, weird though it may be, dictates pretty much everything I do… and how I do it.

So I’m thinking to myself, “Well, if I still have some residual qualms about the colour coming off the GX20, why not use this rather super-duper camera to shoot black and white? Sort of dedicated to that?”
At least it’ll be getting put to good use. That’s what I’m thinking to myself, sorta thing.

What a spiffing idea!

So I used the little session mate and I had yesterday as a sort of “trial run”. Added bonus of this being that it didn’t really matter where we went… didn’t have to tackle the almost permanent problem (when time’s limited) of “Where can we go today that we haven’t already been a thousand times before?” Cos wherever we’ve been, I’ll not have done much b&w there. Well, not in most of our favourite haunts anyway.

And, or so it seems to me, shooting intentionally in b&w (rather than just a spontaneous switching to that mode prompted by, possibly, a scene encountered by chance) presents its own unique challenges inasmuch as some subjects seem to lend themselves to it much more than others. Whereas that doesn’t seem to matter too much when shooting in colour.
So that in itself would be a bit of a challenge… experimenting with various sorts of subjects; actively looking for them. The river then. Plus the route there. And the walk back of course.

Ended up with something like 250+ pics in total. That I finally whittled down to thirty (what I regard as) acceptable shots! Hmm. A bit different from what I’ve become accustomed to in terms of “keeper percentage”. A lot different in fact. A bit crap really.

(Plus there’s a handful that I can’t resist keeping… but the colour versions thereof. And those are they that, with a bit of luck, may get uploaded today. If I haven’t killed the infernal machine first!)

However, the point being that to get to those thirty I had to wade through the whole batch of 250+. Hence the time it took. All night in fact.

Well, not entirely down to the number of pics. That, in the context of an average day’s shoot, is not particularly excessive for me.

Y’see, there’s one other little issue with the GX20 that, seized by enthusiasm for my bright idea, I’d kind of forgotten all about. Typical me really. And the main reason why I mothballed the camera for the time being.

The files it produces are absolutely massive compared to what I’ve been used to… 16/17Mb from the GX10 (pretty much on a par with mate’s Pentax), 10/12Mb from the Canon (both shooting in RAW of course), and 6/7Mb JPEGs from the Lumix. Whereas the GX20 knocks out RAW files at about 23/24Mb! Each! Minimum!

Now I had problems processing these when I used the camera before… cos the infernal machine I use for pic-work really is a tad, um, “under-resourced”. Like missing about a couple of Gig of RAM for starters!
But its graphics display and rendering of images is superb, which is why I use it as my dedicated pic machine.

Whereas I have another laptop that’s possessed of all the power and resources I’d likely ever need… yet its graphics display is crap. No good for pic-processing at all. Sod’s law that, really.

So as I say, it was struggling with these GX20 files last time I used the camera. Now here we are, a year or so down the road. The intervening period having seen apps installed; uninstalled; numerous Microsucks “updates”; ever-increasing bloat in the already resource-hungry antivirus/firewall combo I use; and so on and so forth. You know… normal computer stuff.

All of which has, inevitably, impacted system performance. And last night I was having to deal with a couple of hundred massive image files that even caused problems when the infernal machine was significantly faster.
To put this in some sort of context, Adobe recommends a minimum of 1Gb of RAM just for running Lightroom. And what I have is 512Mb!

Thus, the whole night slaving over the keyboard. Well, to be more accurate, waiting for things to happen. And waiting. And waiting. And getting increasingly irate by the minute. Oh, the stress of it!
And there was one particularly bad patch of a couple of hours or so when I came close to chucking the whole caboodle out of the window. Caused, as I later discovered, by a “behind the scenes” download of yet another Microsucks bloody update… a jobbie that always seems to slow the machine down anyway, even when I’m not doing anything resource-intensive.

And for all my effort, what do I end up with? Thirty sodding pics! Of which, random ones are scattered throughout this post.

And the GX20? Back into mothballs until either I get a more powerful machine or bung some extra RAM in this present pitiful excuse for one!

Oh yeah, one final thing… cos the camera hasn’t been used for ages the date/time gubbins was all messed up. When I first bunged a battery back into it I know I set it to the current date/time, but somewhen during yesterday’s little jaunt (maybe when I changed the battery, cos the first one I put in was already half-depleted) that somehow reverted to manufacturer’s default or something (1st January 2008), so now the date/time embedded in nearly half the files is a load of old cobblers. And who said photos don’t lie? Not a big issue with this sort of stuff, but bad news if I were on one of my photojourno stunts.

[Edit 27.05.2010 - Him#1's version of the sortie, relatively and curiously undistorted this time, and even more strangely not casting me in the role of something really ’orrible, is here! Must say though, I'm a tad suspicious.]