Finally, New Image Of The Month

With a reminder from Andrew, I finally changed the image of the month, and to simplify things, I have limited it to a single print, one size, 8.5X11 and as an experiment, dropped the price, including shipping to $25.

I'm going to do this print on Canon Photo Paper Plus Semi Gloss on the 5000.

We'll see how this flies.

From the image description:

From my recent Independent Machinery series of images, this shows a rack of perforated steel sheets used in the shop to assemble a variety of oilfield and other equipment. It really does look like an abstract painting to me. Shot with my Canon 1Ds2, Canon 17-40 mm. lens, three blended images with focus adjusted between and the images blended in Helicon Focus for increased depth of field. Not only can this increase depth of field, I can use the optimum f stop, in this case f9 at 1.6 seconds exposure, iso 100, lens at 31 mm.

Heat Exchanger

Interestingly this image is actually turned 909 degrees to the right. It just didn't work for me as a vertical, but cropped and rotated this way I quite like it. Given the lack of horizons and visual clues, it doesn't really matter that it's not in the 'right' position. In fact, being round, I could have rotated it to the right and shot it in this position, but it didn't occur to me at the time and it wasn't mine to rotate anyway, being a guest at Independent Machinery and wanting to maintain goodwill.


I like the repetitive curves from the stainless base to the grilles, complemented by the lines of tubing angled up and to the right.

Canon 1Ds3

Canon has put example images on their website from the new 1Ds3. There's lots of criticism on the web on the quality of the images but out of curiosity I downloaded the hillside town landscape image and loaded it into Photoshop. It was interesting. The image seems quite soft, yet has a tremendous amount of detail. When it came to sharpening though - my usual 300 .5 in smart sharpen for my 1Ds2 was way over the top for this image and in fact the best result was 300 .1, an amount smaller than I have ever used.

Not only that, while my normal routine is to use Photokit Output Sharpening for the appropriate DPI setting, in fact the best print made was when I didn't do a final output sharpening. I'm using a Canon 5000 printer which can sharpen output within the printer driver but this was set to zero.

We'll need to wait to see side by side comparisons between the II and the III cameras but there is at least the suggestion that while the pixel count isn't all that much more (21 vs. 16 MP), perhaps the AA filter has been weakened a bit and perhaps there will be a significant difference.

The times, they are interesting.

Is The View Camera Dead?

Clearly the answer is no, lots of people enjoy the pace and routine, the huge ground glass, dark cloth and having a negative the size of a dinner plate. In fact there are more manufacturers of large view cameras now than at any time in history. you can get ones of wood - teak, mahogany, cherry, ebony. You can get them metal (including titanium and magnesium, pvc and other plastics, even MDF.

There are 4X5's, 8X10's, even cameras up to 20X24 and panoramic formats like 4X10, 5X12, 7X17 and 8X20.

Oddly, film isn't an issue today. Ilford is selling all manner of odd sizes and out of Eastern Europe there are other options. You can still get rediloads in 4X5, though processing colour is getting more difficult and I suspect the future of view cameras is going to be almost exclusively the realm of black and white photography and in particular alternate processes requiring big negatives for contact printing - platinum and palladium, albumen and other types.

On a practical level, there aren't a lot of reasons to use a view camera - it's heavier, slower, less versatile, less reliable, bulkier, has inadequate depth of field, problems like windage and bellows factors, squinting into dark corners and carrying adequate film.

That said though, working with a good view camera is in itself a rewarding experience, regardless of the images that come out the other end. My first large format camera was a borrowed crown graphic from the local newspaper. It was rigid and light, the Optar lens was pretty sharp and quite tiny, everything folded up into a nice well protected box. Oh, sure, you didn't have back tilts and back rotation, bellows a mile long or geared controls, but it worked well and reliably and took good pictures.

Given that you can tray process 4X5 film and flat bed scanners are all you need for digitizing images, you might want to give it a try. Perhaps not for a football game, but for landscape, still life, architecture - it's a pretty potent tool and might just help you see differently too.

I still have two view cameras though it's been some months since I last used them. I have seriously considered getting a bigger view camera with which I could make contact prints, which many people maintain are still the ultimate in quality.

Of course, a $35,000 medium format kit could do almost as well, but few of us can afford that kind of equipment.

Do I recommend the view camera for normal work - well, I'd be a bit hypicritical if I did, given I'm shooting digitally, but not all photography is about practicality, some people drive antique cars, even though newer ones are safer, faster, more fuel efficient and so on - there is just something about the tools. Furniture makers love to use the hand plane they inherited from grand dad, sure a power planer could do a faster job, possibly even a more square one, but there's something about using your hands, and that's the feeling you have with a view camera.

Of course, there are lots of view cameras that are less than fun to use - ones that shake at the best of times, or slip their settings or bend when you lay the dark cloth on top to expose the film. There are cameras that take an instruction manual to set up or 10 minutes to assemble from a reasonably compact package.

The best view camera I used was a Linhof Color Kardan. This monorail was built like the proverbial brick outhouse yet quickly disasembled for back packing. It used a two part screw together monorail of huge dimensions and absolute rigidity. It had universal bellows (normal back with a big pleat at the front simulating bag bellows - a great combination). It was so rigid I could mount my 19 inch Artar on an apple sauce can on the front and know nothing was going to move.

In theory, digital can do everything large format can. If I stitch enough images, I can get the same resolution. If I use helicon focus and multiple images, I can get the depth of field that tilting can produce (and more since I don't have to rely on everything being in one plane). I can compensate for a smaller dynamic range in digital vs. black and white film by bracketing exposures. Of course, this could mean at an absolute minimum a 27 shot image - say three wide for stitching, three deep for changing focus and three along for changing exposure - now that's just plain silly.

One of these days, I'll haul out my 4X5 again, just for fun, and for a change, and just for the heck of it.

On Glossy Dried Matte (or the modern equiv.)

I have been a little less than happy with the depth to my new black and white prints from the Independent Machinery project so this morning I decided to try some Canon Semi gloss paper. I'd had trouble with other glossy dried matte wanabees because the canon 5000 printer uses a particularly glossy ink and so the white areas of all the papers I have tried showed significantly less gloss than the dark areas.

I had been noticing the incredible printing quality in Lenswork, thinking that these magazine reproductions were looking better than my matte prints - nice for Lenswork, frustrating for me. Oddly, Lenswork has gloss differential too -their ink is glossier than the paper - and I hadn't been complaining about that - so maybe I'm a bit too paranoid about the whole gloss differential business.

Anyway today I tried the semi-gloss Plus paper from Canon thinking that Canon's paper might better match Canon's ink. Sort of - there's still substantially more gloss in the dark areas so not a brilliant solution there. On the other hand, the depth of the blacks is wonderful, the prints don't make me look enviously at Lenswork. The gloss differential doesn't bother me on thse prints since they don't have large areas of very white - others might - time will tell.

I'm not thrilled with a plastic paper but that may be more bias than fact as the prints look darn nice. I think I'll check out that new Harman gloss Baryta paper.

I think I will continue to use the Canon Semi Gloss Plus for my own prints. One observation I have made is that with matte prints, there is a limit to the resolution of images which means that in general I don't like prints smaller than 13X19 with a generous border. With the canon paper, there seems to be higher resolution (perhaps less dot spread) and thus 8.5X11 prints look wonderful, and fit nicely in hand - I think that could become my standard size in the future - intereseting.

Print Prices

With the quality of inkjet prints approaching that of silver prints, and frankly already exceeding the quality of most platinum prints (yes, I know, heresy, but I'm convinced it's true none the less), it's time to rethink the whole business of how much a print is worth.

Some things to ponder:

1) Very little work is involved in making one more inkjet print.

2) Inkjet prints are innexpensive, even allowing for amortizing the cost of the printer, considering ink and paper, even factoring in spoiled prints (if my 7600 puts one more drop of black ink on the edge of a 24X26 inch print, I'll scream).

3) Assuming some detailed instructions, anyone can make another print - including your descendents, even your spouse, your assistant, lover, gardener or whoever you wish - since the quality is set in the file, barring any obvious printing flaws, every print is going to be perfect.

4) Inkjet prints don't need infinite protection - they are replaceable - especially if priced reasonably. As Jeff said, forget the glass, I can always make another print.

5) For the largest part of the world, photographs form decoration, not holy relics, not priceless masterpieces - when you are ready for a change - either throw away the print, or even better, pop it out of the frame, store it on a shelf and recycle the frame for the next photograph - thus ensuring an ongoing market for our photographs - if we price things reasonably.

6) Inexpensive prints is a concept incompatible with current gallery practice. It doesn't have to be, but it is, and getting the galleries to change the way they do business is going to be challenging, if not impossible. It may simply be better to do an end run around them - if they can't keep up, well, think Neanderthals. Of course, they could change - instead of catering to 2 - 3 clients a day and selling one print a day and not always making a profit, galleries could offer a choice of hundreds of prints at reasonable prices and have 30 customers a day buying 45 prints a day. That's not impossible, I was well on my way to that kind of sales at the Farmers Market.

So, with the above in mind, just how expensive should prints be? Do better photographers charge more, or simply sell more prints? A good car, TV, sofa, and just about any other product typically cost more than a poor one - but not that much more, not usually more than double the cost of a cheap one, and often because of labour and cost of materials is higher - I would argue that photographers of reputation shouldn't charge any more than the next fellow. Their reputation doesn't make their next image any better, only their skill can do that - let the consumer decide which is the better product. Odds are the better photographers will far outsell the lesser ones and reap a reward unprecedented in photography.

Quality inkjet paper costs up to $5 for 13X19 paper. Pigment ink to make an image on said paper with a generous white border, another $5. Depreciation on the printer, say $2. Allowance for damaged prints, say an overrun of 50%, which is probably quite high. Cost of getting the first perfect print - substantial, say 10X the cost already, but is it reasonable to expect the purchaser of one print to pay that entire cost, and for every subsequent purchaser to pay it all over - assume that this setup cost is spread over the first 10 prints sold, so basically doubling the cost of the print - after that - gravy for the photographer - anyone who can sell more than 10 prints deserves it.

O.K. so we have an individual print cost of $12, setup of another $12 for a total of $24. Don't forget packaging, - say mylar bags and backing of acid free foam core (that's how I sold my prints at the market). That adds another $3. We're now up to $27. Of course, we haven't paid the photographer, nor amortized his camera equipment or computers and so on. The retail trade is generally based on a 50% markup to survive - that is, whatever you buy the product for, you retail it for twice as much, give or take. With Walmart and other giant sores, I dare say that's no longer valid, but it will do for a start.

So, if someone phones and offers to buy a print, they can have a 13X19 bagged print for $54 give or take. I have been charging $69 so that's not too far off. Given that I have probably forgotten some costs - say business cards, shopping bags, advertising, back of print info sheets, and a myriad of other items, the $69 figure for a 13X19 print is probably pretty close to right and less than $50 is probably hobby pricing - ie. not meant for making any income. An 8.5X11 print would cost around $35.

In the current world - there are photographers selling inkjet prints through galleries (and therefore not anywhere else because the gallery wouldn't like it) for $500. I really can't see this lasting much longer. Sooner or later common sense will prevail.

Now, if we add matting, framing or other services, well that's a whole other story, but what if that imaginary gallery that decided to switch rather than fight, stocked some standard sized frames, easily loaded and reuseable, for modest prices - say $40-$100 instead of the usual $150-$300 they normally charge for a custom frame, well, I suspect they could attract a fair number of customers.


Food for thought.

New Web Gallery From Independent Machinery

I have uploaded all the photographs from Independent Machinery to a single gallery on my main site, including both black and white and colour images. I'm not sure that mixing colour and black and white makes sense but we'll see how it goes.

The Old Shop

As they say, the solution to this image was "non trivial". I shot three exposures, bracketing from full interior detail to windows not blown out, combined them in Photomatix HDR, then converting with the same software to tonemapped. I then went into Photoshop and corrected perspective (the lens had been tilted up to include roof). I decided the roof was too cluttered and cropped it.

The image still didn't look right so I used Michael Reichmann's unsharp mask (25/50/0) which has the effect of increasing local contrast. Now it was looking fairly natural. Several more masked curves adjustment layers and the image was better balanced.

There's still considerable flare around the windows but when you consider that those windows are the only light source and the room is "well lit", the camera did quite well to record it - I did have the sense to clean the lens just before the shot - any dust specks on the lens show up as white spots in the image. I think the lens did quite well for itself (17-40).

Monochrome Is Mighty Nice

Abstract In Steel

This afternoon was my fifth trip down to Independent Machinery and these perforated steel sheets were a wonderful find, perhaps the best yet. I know I was pretty excited as I was taking it. At times this excitement can get in the way of a good shot as all learned routines seems to fly out the window in the pressure of the moment - if I could leave the lens cap on by mistake, I probably would. Fortunately, after the first capture, things calm down and I start thinking about what I'm doing - f stop, depth of field, careful framing, any shadows, did I let the camera stop shaking before firing off the shutter.

It's terribly wasteful of memory, but memory's cheap and I usually get the shot, something that didn't always happen in the early days of 4X5. Even there, I always carried a lot of film and would fine tune over 4 or 5 shots, not 20 or more like I do now.

Truth is, I'm a pain to photograph with as I'm damn slow, methodical in my scatter brained way, you might say.

I'm not sure yet whether this will be better left in colour - there isn't a lot of course, but so far, what there is seems to be important to me.

Change Of Plans, Be Flexible

Went back this afternoon to Independent Machinery, only to find a truck parked next to the two scenes I wanted to rephotograph - oh well. That made me look round to see what could be salvaged, and I saw this rack of metal from a different angle. I quite like this one.

Three images blended for depth of field, using Helicon Focus, a small amount of Akvis Enhancer (that is, applied then faded back to about 15%) then the image darkened in places. Some subtle colour changes to make things balance better and that's about all I did to the image.

Unusually, didn't crop a single pixel.

More On Our Market And Pricing

I left my prev. entry on addressing who are our market for prints with the suggestion that I'd discuss pricing. In the mean time Scott Jones, another physician photographer, made the following commment which I felt needed more attention - he's saying some pretty important things here.

Scott Jones said...

Hi George,

Good thoughts. My reaction today on this is that if you take into account the major effort in marketing you discuss and take account of the hours doing so and then take into account the costs you have to produce the saleable images and then look at your income, you may find that your real hourly wage for these business efforts is incredibly small. Therfore this way of making a living is a very inefficient use of life energy of which we have a very limited supply. Unless one is a true 100% dedicated professional, it may be much more efficient to remain an amatuer in the true sense of the word and do our work for love and sell at reasonable prices to the public when the chance presents itself.

The day job probably presents a much better and easier way of putting food on our tables and then we can spend our free time doing our art. Also if one makes a living through a more efficient means, then we can sell our work at a much lower price and thus actually share our work with more people which is the point anyway, isn't it?

The great paradox is that once you substantially lower your prices, you unit volume goes way up and sometimes you end up making more money. I sell my matted prints at $60 and have sold 27 prints from my last show. That is much more than I have ever sold at higher prices and so many people have told me how pleased they are to have pieces of my work hanging in their homes. At a higher price they never would have bought one. I feel so much more fulfilled this way which again seems the point of doing art (at least for me).

It will be interesting to see what your latest thoughts ar about pricing since our last discussion. Also how refreshing to be able to not have to deal with the galleries anymore. Unless you are really a hot shot in demand photographer, that really seems a fool's game.

Thanks George...

Two More From Machine Shop

Back At The Machine Shop

The day off so I headed back to Independent Machine Shop, delivering a couple of prints, then carrying on to photograph. This was my fourth trip and I wasn't sure that I'd find much - it was every bit as rewarding as any of the previous trips. The two images here are just a start from today's shoot.

I went to convert the images into a lightroom web upload but several of the images are stitches and won't fit in lightroom. Hopefully that's a problem that will be fixed soon.

In the case of the second image, I could have used Helicon Focus to have the entire heat exchanger in focus, but actually preferred it blurred like this.

The first image looks a bit too well lit - think there is more editing to be done there. I'd actually spent an hour on the image (stitched with Photoshop CS3) before I realized that Photoshop had messed up the stitch and I had to do it with PTGui which rarely lets me down and did this stitch just fine. I used the flawed but edited image as a reference for editing the new stitch - they didn't come out identical, but the new one is as good and that's all that matters.

Just Who Are Our Market?

I've talked about who buys photographs before, all be it as part of other discussions. I think it deserves it's own hearing.

The other day I was flipping through the latest Black and White magazine, thinking that there are a hell of a lot of fine art photographers out there, probably 100 - 1000 for every collector that exists, and these are the serious ones, who produce good work and actually market their wares and have real expectations of sales.

With ratios like that, it's no wonder many of these fine art photographers, myself included, aren't exactly making big bucks from photography, and that even very established photographers have to teach workshops and do other things to provide a half ways decent income from photography.

The implication of this dysproportion of photographers to collectors is that many photographers won't sell even one photograph and very few will sell a modest number of images and absolutely none are going to do well.

That is pretty much the current state of the market.

Photographers put a lot of effort into marketing....to other photographers - boy is that a poor market. Getting cash out of the pocket of the average photographer makes safecracking look easy.

To be fair though, most of us tie up any free cash in travel or equipment, and if you do get a print, you have to turn round and frame it, which can cost a lot more than the print. Even wall space can be an issue.

So, who should we try to sell to? And How?

For every collector of photography, there are probably 100,000 people who like photographs and consider them art and are more than happy to have them on the wall as both art and decoration. There's an even bigger market for photographs of things - of grain elevators and trains and local beauty spots and famous locations.

I suspect that neither group are likely to happily drop $500 for an unframed print. Oh, there will be some, but not many. So price might well be important - but if the customer never knows we exist, price is the least of our problems.

In order for people to even consider our wares, they need to hear about us, even better, to see examples of our work. Truth is that we are going to have to become marketers. I suspect that a lot of you are like me and have neither the inclination or the time to become marketers. it might be best therefore if we didn't have unrealistic expectations of fortune, perhaps concentrating more on fame (if possible).

Should we decide that we really want or need to produce an income from our fine art photography, then we are going to have to become (at least to some degree) hard nosed businessmen.

It's no coincidence that one of the higher earning fine art photographers is Alain Briot - he puts more effort into marketing than just about anyone else - and it pays.
Even New York Fashion photographers spend a lot more time selling their ideas than they do making photographs. Read "On Being A Photographer" by Hurn and Jay (available from Lenswork).

Is it possible to find a middle ground? I think so. I think that a really good photographer can sell hundreds of prints, if at reasonable prices and if he spends several hours a week marketing them. It doesn't require giving up your day job, but it will take shoe leather, creativity, and just plain sweat equity. It means creating (and paying for) brochures. It means visiting dozens of restaurants and movie theatres, coffee shops and anywhere else you can think of that might just possibly hang your work. It means paying for framing and matting (so you do it yourself to keep costs down). It means following up with displays to be sure the prints look pristine and there are adequate business cards and brochures. It means having a good business sense and providing a good product - not just a pretty print, but the whole product, from packaging to included information.

None of this is trivial, and most of us aren't going to put the effort in, thus leaving the field all that much wider for those who are prepared to do so.

Oh, by the way, what does all this have to do with selling through galleries? Bugger all, that's what.

I'm going to tackle the issue of print prices next time, a very thorny issue.

Presentation

In reference to the new Harman gloss paper, someone wrote that since imaages sit behind glass it doesn't really matter whether you use glossy paper or not. I agree that a sheet of glass in front of a print almost completely removes the advantage of the gloss surface and its higher D-Max and richer tones.

That then raises the question of whether in fact we should have glass in front of our images. A number of galleries prefer to display photographs without glass in front. It's frankly a bit scary - a good sneeze and you could be facing a ruined print and possibly a dry mounting job too.

Still, there's nothing quite like looking at a print in hand,with nothing between you and the print, and perhaps it's worth the cost and risk to be able to do that in some situations.

Just An Old Photo Reworked

Looking round for something to show, found this old image, I'd liked it but never very popular, but in looking at it a couple of things bothered me so....

1) it looked a bit wishy washy so a few masked layers later I darkened parts of it considerably, increased contrast in a few spots.

2) that rock on the far left bothered me - sort of just stuck there - not enough of it for significance, just a distraction really. I cropped it.

3) that meant things were a bit unbalanced on the right, and did I really need all that dark gravel, it was the light reflecting off the water that was important - right trim the right too.

4) having actually uploaded the image to blogger, I noticed that there was a white wave in the bottom middle that looked a little out of place, and besides, wouldn't it be better to crop a bit closer to that rock near the bottom middle - kill to birds...

And that's how I ended up with this.

I can see further work being done - perhaps darkening the middle gray water on the left to balance the dark on the far right. I dare say other changes will occur to me with time - it's a never ending process of fine tuning.

The Value In New And Different

Unfortunately there is a lot of new and different photography out there, displaying only those attributes and missing out on content, composition, tonality, message and most other measures of great photography. I think I rely on this 'crap' work to justify not changing what I do and I'm not sure that's healthy.

Just because something is new and bad, doesn't necessarily mean that it's the newness which makes it bad.

For example:

Huntington Witherill (who's a painter as well as photographer) has been doing some incredible stuff with flowers, initially with painted backgrounds to simple flower arrangements in black and white and more recently colour work with images manipulated in Photoshop in artistic ways. Not everyone may like it, but I doubt many would think it crap.

Ryujie has been embedding flowers in blocks of ice and photographing them and has some absolutely lovely black and white images.

A friend showed me this morning a misty dark image of a dock, fishing boat, canoe and bicycle that was very nice, and I don't think it would have been nearly as nice in either colour or with an ordinary camera.

Billie of billiblog showed a portfolio of holga images from some famous garden in Mexico, black and white, very nicely done, and darned if I can find the link Billie so perhaps you can add it for us.

The most recent Lenswork # 72 has albumen prints and one of three pears, one sliced open, is exquisite.

Truth is, there are a lot of talented photographers out there doing quite different work of very high quality, and frankly it's a lot more interesting to look at than one more spectacular landscape picture taken in the traditional fashion. My friend of this morning's coffee was himself commenting about the sameness of John Sexton's work, no matter that he admires Sexton's work very much. After Quiet Light, Listen To The Trees, and his most recent retrospective, it's like, been there, done that. John Sexton himself tried I think very sucseessfully to break the mold when he did his series on powerhouses and the shuttle and so on, that was a breath of fresh air.

Perhaps those of us who worship at the alter of Saint Ansel and believing in the highest possible standards of print quality, also have to think a little more right brained and creatively and consider the possibilities of other processes and more particularly other styles and subjects.

Ideas for new take two basic forms. We could continue to photograph our traditional subject matter, but in a new way, from a new angle, via a different process, perhaps in different lighting or much closer up or using soft focus lenses or whatever. If your subject matter is landscape, coming up with new is going to be really really hard because just about everything has been tried. Still, keep in mind it may have been done before but was it done as well as you are about to do it? Perhaps 10 million photographers shoot straight landscapes in the world, maybe 10,000 shoot infrared, perhaps 250 of them do it really well. Would you rather be one of 250 competing for publication and fame, or one of 10 million?

Alternatively, you could change subject matter to create new and different. Choosing a subject which is seldom seen almost automatically has potential to create interest in the viewer - we have all seen Ansel's images but most of us haven't a clue about, say, the inside of a flour mill, or the inner workings of machinery, or say what goes on in a busy restaurant kitchen (well, perhaps we don't want to know about some of those).

Sure, many of the ideas will turn out dud, but one might not, and it might just be the idea that makes your name. Now, if only I could come up with some good ideas.

Immortality

Perhaps I'm just being morbid after my recent health issues thankfully doing much better but have you given any thought to what happens to your photographic work if (as the British put it)pop your clogs, go to that great darkroom in the sky, expire, breathe your last, move to another plane, or just plain die?

For all photographers of whatever skill and degree of professionalism (ie. making money in photography), there are the issues of accessing family snapshots. It's likely those will have far more interest for future generations than any of our lovely sports or landscape pictures. Does anyone else in the family have a clue where in your computer you keep said images and how they are organized so they could find something.

For those of you with some important images, have you made a durable archival portfolio that is likely to survive relatives cleaning up after you - or are your images (like mine) in just another printing paper box with no label and no system?

If you actually sell your work, is there a way for your relatives to access this work to sell prints already made or to make new prints. Perhaps they could use the money.

After all, what if you become famous the month after you pop off - how dumb would it be if no one could find your prints to put together a New York Retrospective. Sure you won't be around to enjoy it, but others will, and talk about leaving your mark.

Can I suggest that you and I do the following:

1) write up some simple instructions letting family know how and where you store your images and if they are digital, how to make more prints and on what paper at which settings. Even if, like my wife, your spouse is a luddite (completely computer illiterate), the instructions can always be passed on to someone else. If you have portfolios already made up, it wouldn't hurt in the same instructions to mention where. Does anyone know where you keep your backups? Today I brought a 500 gig external drive to work which has all the raw files from the last four years of work. I used a felt pen on the drive to label it. At home I have another unplugged drive backing up all my final images. It too has a label.

2) Make a master set of prints from your important images, the ones you'd save first in a fire, buy some portfolio boxes from Light Impressions Direct and Label the boxes so they don't need pawed over to find out approximately what's in there.

Wrench From Machine Shop