I discovered that the latch on my fantastic plastic Canon EOS Elan 7E had deteriorated, and the door had sprung open, exposing that roll of film (grumble, grumble.) Repair was an easy process, after acquiring a replacement latch off eBay. There’s a full howto write up on J. David Buerk’s website. Essentially you have to remove the latch cover (2 screws) and the front faceplate (5 screws), pop the old latch out and the new one in. I had to move the electrical contacts to the new latch as well, as those weren’t included on the new latch. The metal piece was welded on to the latch, so I used a couple dots of superglue to keep the contacts in place. Reassembled, and now everything seems fine. For reference, the Elan 7E is cross marketed as the EOS Elan 7 and EOS 33.
In Capture One 23, a number of the built-in tool tabs are no longer selectable when you try to perform an Add Tool Tab command. These include the Black and White, Composition, and Local Adjustments tabs. Although you can add and assign icons to custom tool tabs, the icons associated with the built-in tool tabs are not available for selection when creating a custom tool tab. So, if you want to utilize the icons associated with those tool tabs, then you need to re-enable them. Fortunately, this is not difficult, and simply requires some manual editing of the workspace .plist file. Once they are visible (and in the desired order) it’s just a matter of customizing the tools on each tab to your liking.
The workspace .plist file is organized into various dictionaries, defined by the <dict> key. The one which controls the visibility of tool tabs is identified by <key>com.phaseone.captureone.sessionwindow.tools</key>. Near the end of that section is an array identified as <key>tabConfiguration</key>. Adding members to this array will control their visibility within the workspace. It also controls their order.
The following procedure are the steps I took:
I just deleted over 1200 photos from my recent trip to Japan, which is the most aggressive culling of photographs I have ever done. This is in addition to the initial elimination of some 300 or so photographs which were outrightly out of focus or poorly exposed. Clicking “Empty Trash” is not an easy decision, and I’m glad that I’m not a professional photographer. That would be like being the guy who has to put puppies down at the animal shelter.
Of course, some might argue that deleting photos isn’t necessary, given the ginormous size and relative cheapness of digital storage these days. I can get a terabyte hard drive for under $100, which is just ridiculous. Back when I was a kid, my father bought our first external hard drive for our overflowing Macintosh LC II. We got a LaCie 320 MB (yes, that’s megabytes, folks) for $350, which was a good deal at the time. “A dollar per megabyte, that’s a good deal,” I remember Dad saying. Yep. It was. In 1994.
Anyway, if data storage is so cheap, why bother getting rid of photos? For one, cheap is not the same thing as free. Secondly, if I just dump everything onto a bunch of hard drives, I’ve got to then manage those drives. I’d be stuck moving physical things around instead of more liquid data, so the problem isn’t really solved at all, but in fact exacerbated.
Ultimately, though, the problem is that it’s all just stuff. Granted, it’s stuff that I created, but that doesn’t change the fact that I do not need or want more things in my life. Certainly not things that are of little value, and the photos that I culled were all low-value. Many didn’t have high artistic or technical quality. Others were duplicates of ones I decided to keep. I think that if you’re going to to surround yourself with stuff (and let’s face it, we’re going to do just that) it should be stuff worth having around.
Having decided to keep a few things around, the task of managing those things arises. Even 500 photos is too many for a coherent story, so organizing them becomes necessary. Using Aperture, I’ve geotagged and added faces to all the photographs as per usual. Additionally, I finally devised a keyword (what Aperture calls a tag) system that I think I can use and more importantly, sustain. I borrowed from Scott Davenport who borrows from William Beem, and they offer decent examples of their own keyword systems. The point is to decide what is important and then make appropriate keywords for those things. Then, organize those keywords. Finally, apply the keywords. Voila! Organized photos. It takes a bit of forethought to set things up the right way, but the results are fantastic.
In the end, the extra work allows me to do things with the stuff, like tell stories.
Advice from A Lesser Photographer:
Once a year, put your best images (stories) in a book. It’s not for you. It’s for anyone who enjoys a good story, even long after you’re gone.
