I just figured out that Scott Loftesness and I have been friends for about 25 years, and during that time our respective careers and business paths have crossed many times: Aviation, online communities, venture-backed startups, financial services and general geekery. Scott is often a step ahead of me, as is the case with photography. I got re-started in photography about two years ago, only to discover — no surprise — that Scott was already there.

I snagged a copy of the above photo from Scott’s blog. Make sure you go there to see the full-sized version. But also check out his latest post in which he adroitly describes the serious amateur photographer’s plight spending a day trying to get The Shot. Scott has been getting The Shot more and more.

After 88 years, DuArt Film Labs in New York City recently announced they are abandoning motion-picture film processing for an all-digital business. It’s not only the end of an era for DuArt and for film, but also for those who have been part of the DuArt team over many decades. As a DuArt alumnus, I owe a great deal to Irwin Young, Paul Kaufman and Bob Smith who ran DuArt when I worked there in the 1970s, so I’ll take this opportunity to tell a bit of my own story in the DuArt context.

After working in motion picture sound in the San Francisco Bay area, I moved to New York in 1971 to attend the NYU Graduate Institute of Film and Television. My goal was to get beyond being just a “sound guy” and learn the other aspects of filmmaking: cinematography, editing, writing, etc. After grad school, producing and directing two quite forgettable documentaries and spending a year covering events like the U.S. Senate Watergate Hearings for NBC/Visnews (now Reuters), I went back into the motion-picture sound business with a full-time gig at DuArt. The company has always supported young, up-and-coming filmmakers on low budgets, offering discounts and terrific technical advice. Both of my own films were processed and mixed at DuArt, and I was very comfortable there. Not only did I get to spend hours at the mixing console, I also was exposed to every aspect of motion-picture post production. I was able to dabble in such esoteric fields as color correction, negative cutting and film chemistry. It was a tremendous learning experience.

When you’re an in-house sound guy, you take whatever jobs come in the door. And one day I found myself recording the English-language ADR (dialog-replacement “looping”) for a series of films by Lina Wertmüller including Swept Away and Seven Beauties. Well, it wasn’t just one day. It was weeks of 8-hour/day sessions in that darkened room with actors in the booth going over and over the same lines while on-screen were some of the most depressing images of World War II concentration camps, a favorite setting for Wertmüller’s films. It wasn’t a creative process. It was dreadful.

A year before – we’re talking maybe 1974 – I had taken a course in the PL/1 programming language at the New School on a whim. This was just before the MITS Altair 8800 came on the scene, and I had a sense the world was about to split into two groups: those who understood computers and those who didn’t. I wanted to be in the former group.

So in the middle of recording take 12 of some scene from Seven Beauties, we took a break. I bumped into Irwin Young, chairman of the board of DuArt in the hallway, and we struck up a brief conversation. He had started a project to computerize certain aspects of motion-picture color correction and duplication, and I asked him if there was any way to get involved. (I didn’t add, “and to get out of this studio where I’m going crazy!”) Irwin asked if I knew anything about computers, and I replied, “Well, I took this course…” To my great surprise, he decided to put me in charge of the project. Irwin was always like that. He gave young people (techies and filmmakers alike) opportunities for tremendous growth, and he supported them along the way. An amazing guy who makes DuArt the very unique place it is.

I was made Director of Computer Services at DuArt. Although I was the only in-house employee of the department, I was actually working under the tutelage of Fred Schlyter, an eccentric electronics engineer who until then had single-handedly designed the hardware and written the software for DuArt’s cutting-edge projects. Fred was a truly brilliant engineer, and his attitudes about the efficiency of software and hardware design shaped my own work for the rest of my career.

Over the next few years, Fred and I did some rather amazing things. We created a network of about six Data General Nova and perhaps a dozen PDP-8 clone minicomputers. This was before the days of Ethernet, and Fred designed a remarkable scheme based on twisted-pair optically isolated wiring. It proved to be fast, inexpensive and 100% reliable in a very noisy industrial environment. Fred designed the custom controllers for the Novas and PDP-8s, while I wrote the operating system, drivers and application software. (Fred wouldn’t dream of using the manufacturers’ operating systems!)

Fred invented frame count cueing, which was the basis for all of our work and which revolutionized – I’m not exaggerating! – motion-picture post production. In 1979, Fred was given a Technical Achievement Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (ie, the Oscar folks) for this work.

While Fred was crunching out state-of-the art hardware, I was doing my best to keep up with the software. Initially, everything was written in assembler language. Fred’s hardware was “sparse” to say the least. We didn’t even have hardware keyboard debouncing. Fred figured (correctly) that we could do that in software and thereby save a component or two. Likewise, we didn’t use chips to control seven-segment plasma displays. He gave me a seven-bit output device for each digit, and I turned each segment on and off in software. Not difficult, but certainly very low-level.

After a while we had built up quite a collection of code, and I was looking for a higher-level programming language for the Data General Novas. Not finding one to my liking, I decided to create my own process-control Algol and a complimentary real-time operating system. Together they ran all aspects of DuArt’s color correction, negative handling and film printing processes including the numerical-control programming of the Oxberry optical printer.

DuArt rolled out a vast array of similar projects such as the computerized transfer of Eastman Color Negative (ECN) directly to video using a Rank-Cintel flying-spot scanner. Prior to that, one had to first make a print or interpositive. Being able to get video directly from the original negative or internegative yielded a much higher-quality image.

Ultimately, I fell in love with the art and science of compiler writing. I found the challenges of compilers more exciting than the applications themselves, so I left DuArt to start my own compiler-writing company, Rational Data Systems (RDS). And when I did, who offered to rent me cheap office space and stay on as my first customer? Of course it was Irwin Young and DuArt Film Labs.

When RDS moved out of the West 55^th Street DuArt building around 1979, I lost touch with Irwin, but Fred and I worked on another project until 1984, when RDS relocated to California.

My memory of these times, 30+ years ago, remain clear as a bell. I still have source code listings of that first compiler and operating system, and I look at them every time I pretend I’ve done something cool since then. I owe a great deal to Irwin Young and the culture of opportunity he created at DuArt Film Labs. I don’t bemoan the passing of film at DuArt, as I know they’ve been advancing video and digital and supporting innovators ever since I left in the late 1970s.

Trey Ratcliff has been an inspiration to me and many others in the world of HDR photography. I often find his work to be way over the top, but I’d love to be able to do what he does and adapt it in my own style. Trey has released two eBooks (PDFs) about HDR and now has a series of either three ($197) or four ($397) DVDs entitled HDR Workshop. I really want to watch all 6 hours and 28 minutes of the premium set, but there’s just no way I’m going to spend more than $60/hour, even with his offer to join the online “clubhouse”. At $199 for the full set I might bite, but not at nearly $400.

So as I predict will happen frequently with these overpriced DVDs, I’m looking for partners. If I can find four others who will each chip in $75, I’ll buy the Premium Package and share them. Here’s how it will work:

• Four people commit and send me $75 each via PayPal.
• I’ll send the first DVD to the first partner who commits.
• When partner #1 is done with DVD #1, s/he sends it to partner #2.
• When partner #2 tells me s/he has received DVD #1, I’ll send DVD #2 to partner #1, etc.
• Each partner is expected to watch and send out each DVD within a week of receiving it.
• With tax and shipping, I’ll be paying nearly 2x what everyone else pays, so I get to keep the DVDs at the end.

You’ll get to view $400 worth (?) of DVDs for only $75. My theory is that by sending it out only one DVD at a time we can minimize hoarding along the way. No one gets a new DVD until the next partner along the way gets the previous DVD. The only disadvantage is that each partner will have to mail four separate DVDs to the next person, but that only adds a few dollars and a little effort. The first partner should get disc #1 quickly. (I’ll put myself at the end of the list.) Partner #4 won’t get DVD #1 until late September.

Want to join the partnership? Email me at doug@rds.com. Once we have four partners (plus me), I’ll place the order. (U.S. only, please.)

When I re-started my interest in photography a little less than two years ago, my friend Scott Loftesness was already experimenting with HDR (high dynamic range) imaging. Scott was in turn following the groundbreaking work of Trey Ratcliff and I jumped onto Trey’s bandwagon as well. But like anyone else who has ventured into the world of HDR, I’ve struggled to perfect a workflow that yields pictures with the benefits of HDR (able to render a wide range of luminosity) without the over-the-top color artifacts we’ve all seen from Photomatix and other HDR processors. My quest for a more realistic look recently took a new course when I integrated a new phase: color correction using the Lab color space in Photoshop based on what I learned from the on-line tutorials by Dan Margulis.

Getting deep into Lab color isn’t for the faint of heart. I have a decent background in this technology, and I’m still struggling with the concepts. (I studied cinematography at the NYU Graduate Institute of Film and TV with Beda Batka, then learned the fundamentals of color correction and wrote software for motion picture film processing at DuArt Film Labs in NYC in the early ’70s.) In an nutshell, the primary advantage of working in the Lab color space (instead of RGB or CMYK) is that luminosity (the ‘L’ channel) is entirely separate from color (the ‘a’ and ‘b’ channels). Furthermore, modifying the ‘a’ and ‘b’ curves combined with Photoshop’s ‘blend if’ feature of adjustment layers allows you to control the saturation of very specific portions of the color palette.

This weekend I took advantage of a special offer from BorrowLenses.com and rented a Nikon D3S body just to see what a $5,200 camera was all about. I also wanted to check out its ISO 12,800 sensor — yes, it’s amazing — and its ability to bracket for a wide dynamic range. I went looking for challenging locations and settled on Muir Woods, only 20 minutes from home.

I’ve been learning a lot about photography and Photoshop from Kelby Training’s online videos for the past two months. Most of the videos are quite good. But the video files have now failed to stream for two weekends in a row. I’m paying $24.95/month, and I really only have the weekends available to spend time watching this stuff. Last weekend I was told:

Our location was down due to extreme weather conditions this past weekend that disrupted our servers for the Online Training.

Okay, but what’s their excuse for this (three-day) weekend?

Kelby Training didn’t voluntarily credit their customers for the downtime, which seems remarkable for a time-based service. I had to ask for a partial-month credit, which I did receive. It also seems odd that in the 21st century there isn’t someone available, at least on-call, to solve infrastructure problems like this on weekends. Even ten years ago we all knew how important it was to have someone available 24×7 for such incidents, and that was true even for websites and companies far smaller than Kelby Training. They should also have a Twitter feed, or at least an RSS feed, to which they post information about outages and expected resolution timeframes. Maybe there is such a thing, but I couldn’t find it. Oh, and while we’re at it, how about some social-networking and community features? There’s not even a forum where students can learn from one another or interact with the instructors. Very 20th century if you ask me.