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Don Johnston Photos - News

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Just Added -to the website

• Images from my trip to Seal River Lodge on Hudson Bay featuring Polar Bears!, as well as summer and autumn images from Manitoba and Ontario.


• Watch for details of a forthcoming coffee table book. It will contain images from the Backyard and Close to Home: my Natural favourites- Title to be decided upon at a future date. There will be approximately 150 images of my favourites from the Backyard and nearby, here in Lively . These will be collected into a book, available for order from the web site. Check in to the Shopping page or News page for details and updates which I will post once I know more about size and pricing.


Recent Publications

Agencies often play their cards ‘close to the vest’ when informing photographers about sales, although mine usually provide me enough information to give me a 'heads up' about notable publication credits.

Some recent publication highlights include:

• Two images have been chosen for a forthcoming book 'Canada's National Parks- A Celebration', edited by Dale Wilson.

• A Killarney Image has been chosen for a Comda Ontario calendar 2012

• A burrowing Owl image has been chosen for a National Geographic wall calendar for 2012!

• Two Canadian images to Firefly Calendars. Ontario and Prairie 2009.

• A two-page spread in the August issue of Harrowsmith Country Life.

• A cover for the children's and young adult's  book "Mona Lisa Blossoming" by Sunny

• A PEI image used in a Calendar in Japan.

• Monarch butterfly caterpillar metamorphosis images (from the backyard!) sold to a book publisher in South Korea.

• A cottontail rabbit image sold to a prominent children’s nature magazine.

• A monarch caterpillar image was used in a US advertisement.

• A Killarney image chosen for the cover for a Coldwater Creek catalogue.

• An impressionistic image of trees and goldenrod was used in a corporate report.


Recent Travels and Activities

Most of my time last summer has been devoted to choosing, formatting and uploading images to the new website, to say nothing of revising text and advising my web specialist about the development of this new site. I hope you like it!

Digital photography tends to make me shoot more. No digital photographer relishes the prospect of spending time at the computer processing the images, but it is a necessary part of the job. As such, many of us have a considerable backlog of material and I am no exception with four major trips from Fall 2008 to spring 2009. Each trip generated between 125 and 180 Gb of images (we used to boast of the number of rolls of film we shot on a trip). Happily the selects, now including the spring trip west, are now posted to the site.

Last November was exciting, as I travelled to the Seal River Heritage Lodge on Hudson Bay. Once there I was able to photograph polar bears at ground level from the safety of the Lodge compound, or outside the compound with the assistance of trained guides and bear guards. Nothing is more thrilling than being within camera range (albeit a 600 mm!) of the world's largest land carnivores. Watch the website’s Recent Work section for images from that most recent trip.

Future Plans

I'll be adding images from my excursion to Florida in March. While the primary goal was to view and photograph birds I was able to capture landscape and other 'non-bird' images too. While the winter and spring weather in Florida was unusually cool this year, the photo opportunities still were there for the taking, even though some of the veterans were grumbling about the conditions.


Equipment Purchases.

 

600 mm f4 VR from Nikon. Need I say more? Fantastic lens, first used in Churchill as a loaner from NPS Nikon. Many thanks to the pros at Nikon Canada and Photo Central in Winnipeg for assisting me in acquiring the loaner and, shortly after, my own lens in the face of short supply and back-orders.

Recently I purchased the Nikon D3X for landscapes and other similar subjects. The files are large and slow to process with Capture NX2, and while I love my D3, I always felt it was designed for the sports and wildlife photographers, even though it has the larger sensor.

The MacBook Pro laptop is faster and more powerful than my G5 in many ways, and will be a welcome addition to the travel gear. The low glare screen is excellent.

Musings and Ramblings.
Goodbye DNG. Thoughts on digital archiving.

I think the dng concept is laudable and has some important advantages. If a set of proprietary images (NEF or CRW for example) are archived as .dng then (so long as Adobe remains viable) we will always have a Raw converter at our disposal to enable us to re-visit those files should Nikon or Canon disappear (Unthinkable? Impossible?  Witness GM). In addition, the universal and homogenous .dng format produces a smaller file so it uses less archiving space.

In the old days slides were archived in plastic sheets hanging in filing cabinets, and my office space is still occupied by filing cabinets for my transparencies. I have no off site archive for slides and short of scanning the keepers and keeping the scans off site, I’m risking loss if a fire should ravage the house. Not likely but…

Today’s filing cabinets are hard drives and I’ve had two Western Digitals fail (under warranty) over the past three or four years. I don’t have 100% trust in HDs but they are convenient, and compact and so long as back-ups are created (Currently, everything exists twice on separate HDs),  I should be OK. In addition to HDs I back up and archive to Taiyo Yuden DVDs.

But, I’m less convinced and confident about the .dng format, especially after some recent experiences.

First, the dng format is not trustworthy (from what I have seen). I have re-visited dng files and found corrupted items. Most recently I found several Folders of dngs which were entirely corrupt. This after using Adobe’s latest dng converter engine to create these files. Obviously I will have to be more vigilant and less trustworthy in the future.

Second, Nikon’s Capture NX2 will not open a .dng file. This software with its wonderful Upoint technology and algorithms compatible with the NEF files has become my Raw converter of choice. It’s a love-hate relationship. The software is clunky and slow (although it does run faster on my new MacBook pro) but it does produce a superior conversion. Also, NX2 does not recognize metadata I added using Adobe Bridge- still my preferred way to go for metadata, so we have a compatability issue there. But for all these warts, I have grown to prefer NX2. So I am left wondering ‘what’s the point?’ with the .dng archive.

Therefore, while it will take some effort, I am going to can the .dng files and replace them with a back-up file of NEFs. To save space I am going to jettison the also-rans and near-misses I have been in the habit of retaining in my NEF folders. I rank my pictures 3stars through 5stars and the lower ranked images will be deleted for this second archive. A bit of work yes, but a tighter, more compact archive will be produced. I might even burn them to DVD and archive off-site, as I really should.

I guess I’m putting my digital eggs in Nikon’s basket, but I think I’ll still be able to sleep at night.

For more information about archiving, please see Peter Krogh’s excellent publication The DAM Book- Digital Asset Management for Photographers- recently updated.