Scowls, Ruger, and RAW Files

Scowl. That's what Shanna did to me last night. She scowled at me... Why? Galen was getting a shower/bath. We place the little man in a baby tub made by The First Years. I hold & direct the shower extension while Shanna scrubs him down. He enjoys (usually) getting rained upon. He makes funny faces while getting sprayed in the face. And he tries to keep his eyes open. SOOOO cute. Well, last night doused him with a bit too much water and he started coughing - and that's when I got the scowl. Man, did that face get red, Galen's face that is, I didn't notice the color of Shanna's face.

A minute later he was back to enjoying his shower. Afterwards he was a clean happy baby - and that's always a good thing.

Monday I met up with Spooky, and old friend from the Arizona Xterra Club, and his kid Ruger. Yes, just like the firearm. Ruger was born about a week prior to Galen so we had to compare babies. You could tell by the way the kids were watching each other, thrashing out with those tiny fists of death, that Galen was gonna be the bully, and Ruger the geeky computer programmer..... And then we went and enjoyed lunch. That was great, two dads, two babies. The waitresses appeared to see some humor and fun in this. Good. Galen got cranky at the end, it kinda hurried me along sooner than I had wished.

We've since decided to get together on Monday's. Any other new dad's wanna join us?

Do you keep your negatives from that film camera? What about from your digital camera? JPEGs aren't exactly a digital negative. The camera releases the shutter, captures the image, processes the image, and then compresses the image into a JPEG. During the JPEG compression some data are irretrievebly thrown out. This is called "lossy" data compression.

TIFFs are one "lossless" storage scheme - no data are discarded. Both formats, TIFF and JPEG, and after the camera has down it's image processing based upon how the mode switch is set, and how it's been programmed to inteprete the data.

Some cameras can store the image in "RAW" format. Basically it is no more than a TIFF prior to processing for mode setting and alike. The file will contain the mode settings, but these aren't applied to the image. This is as near to a true "negative" as you'll fnd in the digital world. And each manufacturer does it slighly different. And they change over time. And there is no gaurantee that the program they make in 5 years will read last week's RAW file. What a pain in the ass. Not pro-consumer.

There is an organisation trying to change that. Read more here: OpenRAW - Digital Image Preservation Through Open Documentation.