Category Archives: Thoughts
Trixie comforts Mitzi
As I promised in my post about the birth of our six new kittens, here is a video that shows how close our two cats, Mitzi and Trixie, really are. They are sisters, from the same mother, and they’ve been together since birth, but even we were surprised by how caring Trixie could be toward Mitzi the night we recorded this video.
You see, both of them were near the end of their pregnancies, and Mitzi was feeling a little sick. She was scared, and came to us to be comforted. We began to pet her, and Trixie came as well, and began to comfort her in ways we didn’t even know cats were capable of. We just sat there, moved by the display of love between them. Honestly, sometimes I think cats are capable of more empathy than most people.
I remember one time our tomcat, Felix, was feeling a little under the weather. I was sitting at my desk and he asked to come into my office. I opened the door, and he plopped himself down on the floor, letting out the sort of meow that gave me to understand he was a bit ill. His demeanor also told me the same thing. Just for fun, I thought I’d imitate his meow. He immediately jumped to his feet and came bounding toward me, chirping, with a look of concern on his face. He began to rub his nose on my leg, looking toward my face and trying to cheer me up. My jaw dropped. I had faked it, but he honestly thought I was sick and needed to be comforted. Never mind he was ill, his first concern was for me.
Some people say cats are egotistical creatures… What fools!
Meet Trixie and Mitzi
I’ve said for some time that we have two kittens and a tomcat (actually, it’s three kittens and a tomcat now), but I’ve never really introduced them to you. So here are Mitzi and Trixie, our first kittens, as they were the night we brought them home, in late June, 2009.
They might look tame and playful here, but they were pretty much feral. They were born to a half-domesticated cat that had made its home in the barn of an old stove-maker in our town. The poor man got his arms and chest scratched pretty badly by the kittens and their mom when he pulled them out of the barn for us.
We’d seen the mother before she’d given birth, and she was adorable, so we begged him to give us two of the kittens when they were ready to be weaned. He was more than glad to do so — he didn’t want a colony of stray cats in his yard.
Here they are the second day, when we put them outside, in the sunlight. They would hiss at us whenever we got near, so it took a bit for us to gain their trust.
Trixie is the one on the left, and Mitzi is the one on the right. Mitzi is the one that looks like her mother, and the resemblance is even more striking now that she’s grown up and is also pregnant. I’ll show you those photos in a later post…
Here’s Trixie again.
Doesn’t she look like she’s laughing in this photo?
New, lower pricing on web use photo licenses
I’ve decided to try something different, and lowered the prices for the web-use photo licenses (the 1 megapixel sizes) to $3 for personal uses and $5 for commercial uses. These sizes are great for article illustrations, or for header images for your websites, or even for desktop wallpapers. A typical 1 megapixel image is a little larger than 1200×800 pixels.
This is essentially micro-stock pricing, but you get access to my premium image collection. I’m going to see how this works out in a few months’ time, and I may adjust the price back up if the economics don’t make sense.
If you’ve been on the fence about licensing a few of my images, now is the time to jump in and try things out. Have a go, browse my catalog and see what you like.
Make sure you read through my simplified licensing terms as well. Thanks!
Metadata: DNG vs RAW
Generally speaking, I prefer the Adobe DNG format over the proprietary RAW format given to me by a camera, because I like the fact that it’s more or less future-proof. With a DNG file, the meta-data resides inside the file — like with a JPG — but the format is lossless, same as a RAW file — and unlike a JPG.
In spite of the fact that it’s a “publicly available archive format”, I would like to see more camera manufacturers adopt it, so I can feel more comfortable using it. I realize companies like Hasselblad and Leica have already adopted it, and you can take photos directly in DNG format on some of their cameras, but until the big camera manufacturers like Canon and Nikon adopt it, it won’t have the mass acceptance it needs to ensure its long-term survivability.
Still, I have begun to convert the RAW files in my photo library to DNG. By my count, I have converted about 30% of my 77,000 photographs to DNG format, and I am converting more of them every day. Let’s hope Adobe sticks to its word in the future and I’m not left holding the bag, having locked my photos into a format that might become obsolete.
Long-term benefits and potential caveats aside, I should point out a more current disadvantage between DNG and RAW. It has to do with metadata.
Yes, it’s true that with a RAW file, you’re stuck working with your metadata in sidecar XMP file, and that file may get corrupted, or you may lose it, thus losing your metadata and the processing directives for Camera Raw or Lightroom or whatever you’re using to process your photos. With a DNG, everything resides inside the file. There’s no XMP file, which is a good thing, most of the time.
But when you’re backing up your library, and let’s say for the sake of the argument that you’ve got to back up 20,000 photos, which is what I’m doing right now, and you’ve made minute changes to the metadata of all those files — only changed one EXIF or IPTC field — the backup software won’t care. You’ll have to back up 20,000 DNG files, each (in my case) between 12-24 MB. That’s going to take a LOT longer than backing up 20,000 XMP sidecar files, each of which is only 15-25 KB, because those are the only files that will have been changed if I update the EXIF or IPTC data for a whole bunch of RAW files.
That’s one area where RAW trumps DNG. I’m willing to overlook it if DNG will indeed prove to be a future-proof format, but that remains to be seen.
Raoul Pop 