Re: Wore out my D200 shutter, apparently

"Dudley Hanks" <hanks.dudley@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Floyd L. Davidson" <floyd@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Oops, sorry, Floyd, my bad. I'm so used to taking notes with my DVR I
thought that was what was being discussed.

Hee hee, I did think it was funny that you drifted in a
different direction, mostly because I'm sure that a
voice recorder is a very essential part of your daily
life. Which also means you'll quickly catch the
significance of using photographic notes, even if they
wouldn't do you much good.

Just curious, but isn't it tough to search / retrieve graphical data?

Yes! (In much the same way that your voice recordings
are going to be difficult to search.) It's not great
for anything that cannot be categorized in some way
_other_ than the visual data itself. Hence, keywords in
a database, or the filenames, have to be what triggers
retrieval from a database.

Of course, not everything goes into a database...

While
it might be quicker to take a picture of a part number, it seems like it's a
bit wasteful of storage capacity and would take a rather expensive / cpu
intensive application to search this type of data.

Bah humbug! I know a local guy who does techie type
work on everything from refrigeration to electronics
(all across the North Slope, so he may be 300 miles from
home doing this). He carries around a little digital
camera to take notes! He needs to order a new
compressor? Take a picture of the name plate, and of
anything unusual about it. Then when he gets back to
the shop, whether he does it immediately or puts it off
for a day or two, when he looks at the images he gets
far more in the way of a memory refresh than he would
from written notes (which he used to lose often enough)
or even a voice recorder! Sometimes he sees things in
the pictures that he had not noticed on site...

I guess I'm a bit behind the times in this area...

Well, my best example is from years ago, when the idea
was a bit revolutionary. We started using digital
cameras, supplied by the company (as were laptops and
GPS units), for digital notes in the late 1990's, as
described in a previous article. When I suggested
taking massive numbers of photographs of each remote
site, putting it all onto a CDROM and distributing those
to everyone and anyone who might ever need to look...
well, as you might expect there were believers, but
there were Luddites too!

Back in those days there was no such thing as easily
available software for a photo archive; hence in order
to do this on the scale I was suggesting, somebody in
the IT department was going to have to implement such a
database. IT didn't like that idea at all! The
operations and maintenance people all thought it was a
great idea. But the guy who went into fits of euphoria
was the Chief Draftsman. he had to produce drawings
from written and/or verbal descriptions, and he knew
exactly where most of the mistakes in As-Built drawings
came from, and he could envision a ten times improvement
in his work product!

But still, the big problem 10 years ago was how to
simplify the whole thing so that anyone could generate
several copies of a CDROM with thousands of images from
a dozen or so locations... and get them into some kind
of order where anyone who wanted to know what was at a
given site, in Row 1 Bay 3, slots CD and CE, could find
it. For that particular use, names that indicated the
site and the location of the photos in a given
directory, was a simple and very usable method.

Incidentally, AT&T has a *massive* database for exactly
that information, in text form, for every rack of
equipment they own in the entire country. They even
make somewhat of an effort to generate visual graphics
from that data, though IMHO it is exceedingly poor in
quality at this time. They can generate, for example, a
diagram of a circuit based on that data. (At one time I
worked for a couple of years drawing Auto-CAD diagrams
of telecom circuits for Circuit Layout Cards, so I am
very seriously pedantic about how such information can
and should be presented graphically to maintenance
personnel.)

Whatever, as a photographer I am today very much
influenced by the history that I have in the industrial
application of imaging. Often if I photograph some kind
of "event", part of what I do is simply take at least
one picture of virtually everyone who is there, if I
can. It's just a way to document who, what, where,
when, and a high quality image is nice, but unnecessary.
Sometimes that turns out to be very useful a few years
later... we've generated lists of who was there, and
we've discovered that the only known photograph of
someone who passed away came from such documentation.

Being "snap happy" just because with digital it doesn't
cost money, is sometimes a very valuable commodity.

--
Floyd L. Davidson <http://www.apaflo.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@xxxxxxxxxx
.

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