Hi,

Glad you are liking the high def pics! From our end there are a few factors limiting what fraction of sets can go up in HD.

1) The monthly bandwidth usage bill. We’ll just have to monitor this. In principle these sets are a factor 10 bigger (or more) in HD, we can’t afford to go from our current 3 TB a month to 30 TB a month unless we get 10x as many members, so we’ll see how it goes.

2) The quality of the original shots. Much like paper prints of old, the constraints on the technical quality of what makes an acceptable shot depend very much on what sort of enlargement you’re doing. Viewing these shots at 100% on a huge monitor is like having a wall-sized print made, and not every shot will quite be up to scratch. Tiny bits of subject movement or camera shake, unnoticeable at web size enlargements become important at 100%… and if I feel the technical quality is little too low, I won’t put up the set in HD.

Obviously we’re aiming for the best shots we can do but some conditions are easier to shoot in than others. A set shot in the studio at 1/400th of a second at f/16 with tons of flash light with a Hasselblad will hopefully have very good technical quality. A set shot at sunset in changing light conditions on a wind-blown coast at 1/125th of a second at f/3.5 with a middling quality zoom lens on a Canon 5D is likely to have more shots on the edge.

3) The delicate subject of photoshop. I’ll write a blog post about this, but the basic fact is that we want the models to look good, and a Hasselblad shot from a few feet away shows EVERYTHING… including things that the human eye is simply not good enough to see unless you are an inch away. Editing is more time consuming if you know every shot is going to be seen at 100%.

4) Storage space on the server. Currently physically limited by the size of the high speed disk array, we will fill the array in a couple of months if we put up HD for everything right now. We are getting a new server with bigger disks and changing our backup strategy to make it easier to manage (if a little less robust- basically we’re going back up the full data less often, because most of that data is stored in multiple backups on my system at home too. The frequently changed data we will back up just as often, and the membership database will stay on the bank-grade separate secure system it is on already).

5) Reprocessing. It is a full time job for me to keep up with the one update a day schedule. Reprocessing archives is simply not feasible unless the site membership doubles and I can hire a lackey to do nothing but that. I do have archived full res versions of more recent sets which could potentially be added when sets come around in the archive, once the server storage space is expanded and assuming the bandwidth demands do not prove impossible. But older stuff (anything edited with Photoshop/Corel Photopaint as opposed to Aperture/Lightroom) would not be cost effective to reprocess at full size I suspect.

Sooo… expect about 1/3 of the sets to have HD versions at first, with the intention being to move towards 100% in time if we can!! 🙂 🙂 But I hope you’ll not be too disappointed if some sets are only presented in web resolution for technical reasons. We’ll try our best to make sure as many of the sets as we can get HD versions as soon as we can.

cheers, Hywel.

Hi,

Sorry for not getting back to this sooner, been away shooting.

As Merlin says, it isn’t just the size of an individual update that counts, it is the frequency of updates. Hundreds of megabytes a day is quite different from hundreds of megabytes a week. We already grow the site at several Gigabytes every month, which is increasing to around 10-12 GB a month with full-sized images and 720p video. I don’t think there are many sites offering 10 GB of material a month.

Our web hosts are not necessarily the cheapest in pure $ per TB but they also provide many services to a high standard, not least of which is the billing service, which we had no end of trouble with with previous providers. They regularly renew our hardware and review our provision without us having to buy the new machines ourselves, so overall I’m reasonably happy to stay with them for the moment. For example, they are not charging us any extra to move the site onto a brand new server with substantially larger arrayed disks in order to keep up with the demand imposed by the full sized images. Otherwise we’d physically fill the disks soon, and these aren’t cheap-as-chips SATA, they are much higher speed disks in arrays to keep the site running at something like a decent speed even on Friday nights. There’s also stuff you don’t see, like a proper regular backup strategy in place in case the server were to die horribly. Not having to do that all myself is worth a lot.

As for the technical quality stuff, as Merlin says most of our photos are now shot on a medium format digital Hasselblad, which has leaf shutters in the lens and can therefore sync at any speed, up to and including 1/800th of a second. We usually run at 1/400th of a second in the studio- at 1/800th you do have to account for the duration of the flash somewhat (you lose about a third of a stop because although the flash supposedly has a t(0.5) of about 1/1500th of a second, the tail of the light reaches out a bit longer… I don’t have the t(0.1) time but I suspect from my own tests that it is more like 1/600th of a second). Anyway, 1/400th is enough to freeze most things and make sure we get the whole of the flash.

There probably are drawbacks to fast shutter speeds, but I can’t think of any for people photography either. (One might want slow sync for flowing water for landscape photos for example).

Maybe if you want to convey a sense of motion, but then it is easy to just turn the dial down and shoot at 1/200th or 1/125th or whatever! Being able to sync anywhere up to 1/800th gives great flexibility… it would be even better with slightly faster flashes, so if I buy more flash heads for the battery powered unit we use outside, I will probably go for the more expensive version which a has a quicker flash time… t(0.5) 1/2500th and hopefully a correspondingly short t(0.1) to REALLY freeze the action if we need it. Although shots like Sophia’s hair flick in the pool are pretty damn good as it is.

For lens performance, most 35 mm lenses perform best at f/8. Although naively looking at the physics one would expect the diffraction limit to be reached at f/8 pretty much independent of format, the common consensus and observation in practice is that the sweet spot for medium format lenses is more like f/11, and are perfectly usable at f/16.

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm

We have pixel area around 46 square microns, in between the Canon 1DsMkII and 20D on their table. If you look at f/16 you can see that yes, the Airy disk is spreading over adjactent pixels, but given that the sensor is really using 4 pixels per point because of the Bayer pattern filter, that’s not enough to cause disturbing softening or lack of crispness in the images seen at 100%, especially not after a little capture sharpening is applied. (Whilst this cannot restore detail that wasn’t captured, it can restore the local sharpness and acutance which gives the impression of crispness… and few of the details we are looking at on the shots are really at the one or two pixel scale).

So, strictly speaking the system gets diffraction limited somewhere around f/10 but the effects are not drastic at f/16 by any means.

I really noticed the effect stopping down to f/45 for some macro shots, though!

I chose f/16 for the example because that’s the smallest usable aperture giving maxiumum depth of field without encountering substantial softening from diffraction. We can shoot anywhere from f/4 to f/22 with reasonable strobe control, and at f/2.8 using continuous light or with an ND filter. But at f/2.8 there may not be so much point showing those sets in full size anyway because the depth of field is so shallow that only a small part will be in sharp focus- a great artistic choice, but not one that necessarily benefits from being seen at 31 megapixels. You’d get very sharp eyelashes, but nicely soft out of focus feet… which you can probably see just as nicely at 1-and-a-bit megapixels as at 31 megapixels.

The lenses perform best around f/11, with extremely good f/5.6 to f/16, and indeed pretty damn good results even wide open (which is why the lenses cost best part of three thousand pounds each- performance wide open is limited by aberrations, which are a function of lens design, rather than by diffraction which is a physical limitation at smalll apertured).

We tend to shoot around f/8 to f/11 in the studio, but often shoot at f/16 for maximum depth of field.

So no, we don’t need to shoot with ND filters normally. We can just turn the lights down if we want. If we wanted f/2.8 on the infinity cove we’d probably need to as even on minimum power there’s so much light bouncing around that tends to come out at f/8 but on the black background or on location we can usually shoot anywhere from f/2.8 to f/22 just by turning the lights up and down.

Cheers, Hywel.

Hi,

We initially decided only to make the normal-sized ZIP files available direct from the the updates page for various reasons, the main one being that it meant people wouldn’t idly click and get a 150 MB file instead of a 15 MB file, and that auto downloaders wouldn’t just hoover up multiple versions of the galleries and eat our bandwidth.

I totally agree that a “HQ available” flag is a really good idea, given that not every set will have HQ (old archives may never have it, for example).

So at the very least we should implement that, assuming that there’s not some ghastly technical issue (which I don’t believe there is).

But if we are doing that, why shouldn’t the HQ available flag be a link to the ZIP file? It would really make more sense if it were. So really we should bite the bullet and put links to both ZIP files on the updates page.

I’m running it by Ian and hopefully we can implement this for you soon, it does make more sense to do it this way.

Cheers, Hywel.

… HiDef ZIP file icon added to the updates pages, needs adding to the main index page as well, will be there soon too (I forgot to mention to Ian that it needed changing there too, my fault).

Full sized ZIP file having the subdirectory in it is done, not all files will have this immediately but all will have from the next batch of updates.

Cheers, Hywel.

HI,

I’m not sure how easy that is to achieve- I think the facilities for manipulating the ZIP files inside the scripts are limited. However, the ZIP files come with their hierarchy, I think, so if you unzip both into the same directory, you should get a directory of the form

galleryname1
containing the standard size images, and also containing a subdirectory called full which contains the large size images. That echoes the organisation of the files on the server.

Cheers, Hywel.