Digital Enabler

Apple Unveils New Product-Unveiling Product

2007-03-09T10:17:00.000-08:00

Here's some great humor for everyone; especially those of us who have watched Steve Jobs launch new products. He is truly a master showman. Now Apple has a new product that automates Steve's product launches.
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/apple_unveils_new_product

VRA 2007 national conference - Kansas City

2007-03-08T17:18:00.000-08:00

This is the silver anniversary of the Visual Resources Association. This year's conference takes place in Kansas City, Missouri, from March 27th through the 31st.

We have supported this fine organization for many years. We donate lots of gift certificates for the raffle each year and I often teach workshops. This year, in addition to four $250 gift certificates, we are supporting the conference by attending as vendors. I look forward to seeing many friends at the conference, and even meeting some clients for whom email and the phone have been our only contact.

I will also be doing some free consulting. If you are interested, please contact me by email or phone....or find me in Kansas City. I'm sure we'll have no trouble finding somewhere to sit quietly and talk (or have a beer!).

http://www.vraweb.org/

We love these external hard drives

2007-03-08T16:59:00.000-08:00

We generate a lot of data in our scanning business. Most is delivered to clients on archival gold optical media from MAM-A, but for many clients we also include an external hard drive. This really speeds up the client's process of cataloging the scans and transferring thousands of files to servers. Another copy is generally kept on our own file servers for some period of time.

Over the years we have purchased drives from many different companies. Recently we discovered "Newer Tech." This company mostly advertises in the Macintosh world, but their drives work fine on any platform. The one we like is the MiniStack v2. We are now filling up the third of ten 500gb drives with the 50,000 scans we're doing for the American Institute of Architects. These come in small but very well made cabinets. They match the Mac Mini. In addition to the usual external USB2 and/or Firewire ports, they also act as a hub. They're also available without drives for those who want to add their own. Only problem is the internal drive has to be the older ATA type; not the newer (and faster) SATA.

http://www.newertech.com/products/externalhd.php

Adobe Tackles Photo Forgeries

2007-03-08T13:11:00.000-08:00

These days we take for granted that most advertising photos, and many portraits, have been retouched. Adobe Photoshop is such a standard imaging tool that "photoshop" is even used as a verb. Well, when it comes to recording history, we need to be able to believe in the "accuracy" of a photo. And what better company to figure out a way to test for this than Adobe.

A recent Wired News article by Randy Dotinga talks about this new venture:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72883-0.html?tw=rss.index

Phoenix Art Museum

2007-02-20T18:14:00.000-08:00

Phoenix Art Museum is the latest cultural heritage institution to take advantage of our digital strategic planning services. I spent last week at their impressive facility, meeting the many stakeholders in this important transition and reviewing their existing analog and digital assets. We are now analyzing the many bushels of data and preparing our draft report.

If you find yourself in Phoenix, it is worth a day of your time to visit.

Irene Young photographer

2006-11-21T21:00:00.000-08:00

Irene Young is a very special, talented and loving person, who also happens to be a succesful photographer. I got to know Irene as one of my photographer clients at Custom Process. She was living part time in the Bay Area and the rest in New York, making portraits for musicians and record companies. In fact, Irene has done more than 500 CD covers.

Back then we were cross-processing Irene's film so she could get interesting color. What came through so clearly in her work was Irene's connection with her subjects.

When Marsha and I wanted our portrait done, we hired Irene. We still remember the day we spent with her in Sausalito. The prints are all over our house and offices; bringing smiles to our faces every time we look.

Irene moved to New York fulltime in 2001 and we've stayed in touch. This year Irene spent most of her energy fighting breast cancer, and she produced a CD of songs that comforted her during her recovery. I've been enjoying this lovely collection of music for the past few months.

Here's what Irene has to say about the CD: "These are special songs. They comforted me during my treatment for breast cancer, and I cherish each one like a dear friend. The musicians and songwriters on this compilation gave up their royalties to help me - and women like me. Their generosity inspires me to give what I am able. So, it is with love and pleasure that I have compiled these songs of comfort & strength for you."

The CD, called: "Glass Half Full: A Music Photographer's Vision of Hope" is available at: http://glasshalffullcd.homestead.com/

Irene's website: http://www.ireneyoungfoto.com/

MCN 2006 Conference - Pasadena, California

2006-11-21T20:50:00.000-08:00

Great conference this year. Hats off to everyone at MCN, including Marla Misunas from SFMOMA who did a fantastic job.

One of the most interesting vendors was Jean Penicaut, CEO of Lumiere Technology. This French company has a very high resolution scanning camera designed specifically for museums. The camera is capable of doing multiple scans of the same painting, each at a different wavelength. By combining just the right selection of scans, they can "see through" varnish and existing paint layers in an extraordinary way.

Although the scanner is quite impressive, the company's business strategy is to own the rights to the digitized images created with their camera. I think this will be a hard sell to museums in the United States.

http://www.lumiere-technology.com

Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail

2006-11-21T19:54:00.000-08:00

Bill Helsel and I spent a week in the eastern Sierras recently. It was great to be up in the mountains again. There's nothing so fine as fresh air, strenuous hiking and the opportunity to make photographs in the Ansel Adams Wilderness.

We started at Mammoth Lakes (California) and spent a full day hiking the Pacific Crest Trail to Thousand Island Lake. At 10,000 feet we were at the base of Banner Peak.
Although hiking in with heavy packs was difficult, we had three days to completely relax, fish, photograph, think, take naps....This is the life!

Some more photographs from the trip:

Photographs ©Howard Brainen 2006

University of California joins Google book scanning project

2006-08-09T16:56:00.000-07:00

UC libraries today officially announced their agreement with Google for large-scale digitization of their vast holdings. Under consideration for some time, this opportunity was presented to the regents at their July 19, 2006 meeting.

This is great news for everyone as the UC libraries contain tens of millions of volumes.

Here is the press release from the California Digital Library:
UC Libraries partner with Google...

Another successful Summer Educational Institute

2006-06-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

This was the second year I taught at SEI, the weeklong joint-venture of the VRA and ARLIS/NA. This year the host institution is Reed College in Portland, Oregon. What a beautiful campus! And a fantastic group of attendees (45 students and ~12 faculty). Most were from slide libraries with a few from archives and museums.

Wednesday was my "Imaging Day" and I covered digitization best practices, digital copystand (overhead scanning), project management, workflow optimzation and color management. Also demonstrated some useful Photoshop CS2 tips, use of Nikon Capture 4 and introduced everyone to Thumbs Plus Pro from Cerious Software. This fast, powerful image browser and batch processor is a favorite in our scanning operations and the only complaint we've heard is it isn't available for the Mac.

We moved ten big 16 bit TIFF files, created during my digital copystand demo, over the Reed network so the students could work on the files on the iMacs in the ETC. Seems like we could have used considerably more time for this hands-on segment.

Bow River - Banff, Alberta (ARLIS/NA conference)

2006-05-09T18:47:00.000-07:00

Spent three wonderful days in Banff at the ARLIS/NA annual conference over the weekend. Taught my "Digitization Strategies for Preservation and Access" workshop on Friday to a nicely balanced group from museums, libraries and archives.

This workshop was the first to explore my current thinking that we are at a convergence with better/faster/cheaper technology (Moore's Law); intelligent, automated workflows; and a tremendous demand for universal access over the internet. This convergence is making commercial mass digitization projects, like Google's, possible. I believe this mass digitization, at preservation quality levels, is now feasible for cultural institutions as well.

Greetings from Banff

2006-05-06T16:49:00.000-07:00

The ARLIS/NA conference is in Banff, Alberta Canada this year and what an inspiring location!

More to report in next post.