Physical Security For Photography

A recent column that dealt with stolen cameras seems to have garnered a great deal of interest - so I've decided to add some thoughts on the matter of further security for photography.

The original column mentioned stolen cameras and suggested increased security measures for equipment inside cars. Now it is the turn for the same security inside the home.

A. Equipment safety. You may have anywhere from $ 400 to $ 40,000 invested in cameras and lenses. If you put them into camera bags and cases and then put those cases inside the wardrobe your security level is that of the MDF board on that wardrobe. About 3mm of pressed wood pulp. Perfectly adequate to protect your 1980 safari suit against moths but no help if a burglar with a habit breaks in and looks for saleable items.

Look up locksmiths and safes. If you have space in your home for the wardrobe, you have room in the wardrobe for a safe or storage cabinet. It doesn't need to be Fort Knox - it just needs to deter the casual criminal. I've got one that bolts onto the floor and the wall and has two mutually exclusive locks on the face. It would require far more time and trouble than the average home breaker cares to expend to breach...and this means that the cameras and lenses inside are safe enough.

B. Image safety. My digital images are safe enough as well on a Drobo multiple drive unit - the shop sells them and they are a good technical answer to the failing hard drive. The drives in the Drobo will fail, granted, but never at the same time and always with enough time to save the data. The Drobo also lives in a steel box - vented to let heat dissipate - but again secure enough to stop casual theft. The computer is Kensington-locked to a massive steel shelving system. Cheap, cheerful, awkward, and effective.

C. Computer safety. I'm fine. Every week people with Scandinavian names ring me up from Microsoft in India to tell me that I need to perform safety procedures on the desktop computer. I just press the buttons they say to press and then tell them my password. It all seems so civilised.

D. Photographer safety. Manfrotto make a fabulous monopod. Metal or carbon fibre, it has metal leg locks and a metal head. If you add a Manfrotto 234 metal tilt top it is about the size and weight of an Anglo-Saxon war mace. The thing to do is not try to use it with a downward cut as this requires you to rear back an hold it over your head prior to striking. Hold it with both hands and hit up or sideways like a baseball bat. It is also very useful for holding cameras steady in low light.

E. Moral safety. If you are at all unsure whether taking a photo might be sinful, tasteless, or harmful, it will be, and you can proceed accordingly - your conscience as your guide. Be prepared to accept the consequences later.

F. Financial safety. Never walk into a camera store with a bag of $20 notes and nothing to do for an hour. The staff know plenty to do.

The Indelible Watermark

A while ago Fujifilm Australia sent out an email message to tell people how to share their images responsibly. I was frightened to read it as I was worried that they were going to ask me to be responsible for something - and I have managed to avoid it for so many aspects of modern life. I pay taxes and have stopped counterfeiting government documents and rarely run people down on the road, so what more do they want?

Well, it turns out that they are just advocating watermarking your images so that they cannot be stolen. This may be a problem for some photographers, but I have noticed that mine are rarely taken. Even when they are, they are returned in better condition than when they went and one kind soul even pinned a five-dollar note to my collar and said that he hoped my eyesight would recover.

Putting the watermark in the dead centre of the image and making it complex and intrusive seems to be the key advice. This is to make it hard to remove. It is also the key to making people looking away in disgust in the first place - if something looks ugly, it looks ugly, and unless your intention is to make tee shirts for the adolescent market, you are probably better not going down that road.

You can't watermark an idea, and you can be darned sure that there are photographers out there who would be better than you at realising your vision once you give them a hint. It's happened with innumerable television and motion picture plots - even the supposed geniuses of the Monty Python crew were not above pinching things out of books that they probably thought would never be seen. They were wrong.

I have been told that there are computer programs that make it impossible to steal an image from the internet and do so with a simple 13,000 line HTML text that anyone can learn to type. What could possibly go wrongggggg@j^ VV 2 gtkksw,mswp[-cvoe.

In the end, I would merely publish and damn the thieves. Put your name on the thing if you dare and hope that at some stage of the game someone will see it. Keep the raw file with all the data on it in your own records - never send that out. You can always refer to it when the person who steals your image gets a lawyer to write a threatening letter to you.

On a related note - isn't it interesting these days when we get a request or demand from clients for raw files in addition to other formats? Or the final working file that is used to produce a custom print? I cannot remember ever being asked for the negative, transparency, or darkroom printing notes and.or masks in the analog printing days. One sent in transparencies for block making but that was on the basis that someone paid you for the transparency and they could go make blocks and you could go buy groceries - a very good exchange.

I've had the ask a couple of times in relation to studio shoots and once after doing computer work for an image that the client submitted. The studio shoots were paid for and I judged that the use of them was such that there was never going to be any likelihood of further sale of images from them - and in spirit of friendliness relinquished some of the files. If they show up in any altered form I will show the originals and let the viewers make their own judgement. In the case of the computer work I flatly refused - it was asking for work unpaid and I stopped picking cotton for Ol' Massa when Lincoln freed the slaves.

It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses An iPhone

I noted recently that there are services that let you track your iPhone when it is stolen. You are not allowed to go round to the druggies gaff with a fire axe and get it back and the police are far too busy to do it for you, but at least you have the satisfaction of being able to bleat about it on Facebook. With a bit of luck you will get an emoticon.

There are more practical ways of dealing with this -amongst which is making arrangements not to have it stolen in the first place. And while you are at it, not to have the rest of your gear stolen.

My house is no more secure than any other - it has fly screens, door locks, deadlocks, and window locks, which deter moths and me, but would present no barrier at all to thieves. What does present a barrier is a large metal safe bolted to the wall and floor - a relic from the days when I kept firearms in the place - legally, I might add* Now it keeps family papers, cameras, old broken watches (sentiment...) and the occasional memory card for a job that is under way. It could be broken into but that would take time and machinery and noise - so currently it is secure.

Also secure is the Drobo hard drive array that holds my pictures - buried deep a cavernous drawer of a large metal desk, it gets enough air to stay cool and enough protection to avoid thieves. The monitor that sits above it is secured with a steel cable Kensington lock - enough trouble to deter the casual juvenile. I have no fear of thieves stealing my books - Plato or Michael de Montaigne rarely attract the sort of people who ransack houses. Indeed, I would welcome them taking some of the stuff on the shelves as I hate it but cannot bear to part with it.

Moral of this tale? There is no moral, other than lock up your hard drive and computer. Let them have the iPhone - then you can live free of the damn ring tone and will not spend the rest of your life looking at it in shops. Your thumbs will thank you.

* Found something better...

Uncle Dick

Hand Of Cards - Two More Possibilities For The Digital Shooter

We have a lot of options presented to us in photography - cameras, lenses, lights and flashes. The range of accessories is mind-boggling, and once your mind has been boggled sufficiently you are generally only fit for light duties or election to the local council...

What we tend to forget is that there are options also in the memory cards we use. Of course we sell SanDisk cards here - they have always been good and reliable in the major cameras. We have been selling Hoodman cards, and Promaster, and in each case the ratio between card success or shutdown has been wonderfully high.

I have also been testing two brands of card and can report 100% success so far - I've got Lexar and Panasonic cards in my Fujifilm cameras right now. They are fast enough for any still work I do, and would probably be fine for small videos.

The prices are sensational - cheap as chips when you think of the comparable film stowage. and as they are proof against all the x-rays and magnetic fields that I might encounter on an air trip, I can feel confident that whatever images i put on them will come safely home.

Spray And Pray With Hahnehuhle

Those of you who print out your images on inkjet paper for inclusion in physical albums are probably acutely aware of the need to select those albums with care. We all remember the toxic photo albums of the 70's and 80's that engulfed and digested our postcard colour prints. Sticky pages...if they were not sticky then, they are sticky now...the kind of precious family memories that you like to look through on a quiet Sunday when you are dressed in a HAZMAT suit. Talk about bombing out!

Well, before you fly to the closet and drag them out with iron hooks, consider that your current album may be better, but you are still subject to whatever he paper is going to do to the paper. And if you print large-size images for wall mounting you are exposing the surface of the inked paper to all the atmosphere can send - acids, smokes, cooking oils emulsified in the air, etc. Those prints need protection.

Well for years we have been selling cans of spray protection to very prestigious fine art printers here in Perth. They select the Hahnemuhle Protective Spray in standard cans. We don't keep the cans locked up because you can't really graffiti anything with them...

The spray will make an inkjet print highly water resistant, scratch resistant, and greatly enhance the UV resistance.

In stock all the time. Start spraying.

Photo Storage - A Cautionary Tale For You

Images - paintings, photographs, drawings - have always presented a challenge for the preservationist. They are subject to fire, flood, mould, rodent and insect attack, as well as theft. Sometimes the best pictures only last a short period of time.

Witness these poor relics that were found in a shoebox yesterday. Coffee cups, physical damage. fading, fugitive colour dyes...well, it is lucky that we can see anything on these.

The same can happen with your digital images, whether they are files on a computer or finished prints. Hard drives crash, computers fail to start up, files mysteriously corrupt. You might have put the images n a disc but discs go missing or fail to read.

The real answer is the Drobo system. Imagine an electronic box storing 5 industrial-grade hard drives that share the information constantly and monitor themselves. If one starts to look dodgy you get early warning and can replace the drives and the machine just repairs itself in a week.

I have mine locked in a ventilated steel box so even if thieves ransack the house they can't get my pictures of kittens and sunsets. The price is reasonable and the sense of security is priceless.

Note: I am going to try to restore the three examples in the future. It'll be a lot of work, but worth it. Those cars aren't made any more.