Over the last few weeks I have been producing more prints than I have in years. Some of them little 4x6 inch prints on generic photo paper. Some of them a little larger at 6x9 inches on all sort of fantastic paper produced by a lot of the high-end ink jet paper manufactuers. Most of the prints are not my images. They are for a couple of different projects I am helping a photographer buddy out with. I wanted to publish a couple of notes on the projects and printing in general. I will cover a lot of this in more detail soon.

Over the last couple of weeks I have posted a number of thoughts on color and color management. I have mentioned a couple of times that these are not to be interpreted as somehow prescirptive. I am not a some sort of color fascist that demands a particular regimen of color charts and dogmatic adherence to accuracy from start to finish as a goal above all others.

As I have already demonstrated tiny little adjustments not normally associated with changes to color in post can shift color around all over the map. Additionally, you may have deduced from the discussion on device profiles that in many ways reproducing “accurate” color can be an impossibility. We’ll get more into that a little down the road. The whole point of this series of post is to give some of you a pragmatic approach to controlling color and hopefully remove some anxiety that a lot of photographers have with digital color reproduction. This is all in the name of de-mystification of the techno-crap and helping you to achieve what you yourself consider pleasing and beautiful from start to finish.

Remember I went off on some sort of Olympus OM buying binge while I was at PhotoExpo in NYC? A reaction to the same-ole-same-ole depressing state of affairs with a lot of digital camera stuff at the show. Not one of them could be considered spot on 100% prime fucntional condition. They all work to a degree but the meters are generally off or not working at all. I actually use these things. I actually like them a lot. Maybe not quite as much as my Nikon 35mm film cameras but I do like them.

This is the next installment on color and color management. Last time I discussed color charts and ACR camera profiles. I may have given the impression that any old profile will do. Not the case but I wanted to focus more on how you might evaluate different profiles. I hope that you took away the message that evaluating them purely by looking at your screen is not a great idea. I also wanted to convey that that startig point is not the end all be all in the color in your image files.

This time I will focus a little more on some other variables affecting color in your images. Let’s start with exposure, brightness, contrast, and ajustments to these without messing with “color stuff”. These variables can and do have a huge effect on how you perceive color as well as on the actual image files both at the time of capture as well as tweaks in post processing.

I am not going to go into a disertation on exposure and ajustments and how they might actually impact the colors that come out of your RAW processor in the sence of twisted camera profiles. If you are intrested there are plenty of more scientificly oriented discussion on that. By and large I am going to discuss things that have a major impact where those kinds of effects are secondary from my point of view.

I am not a big twitter person. Every once in a while I log in and checkout a couple of the people I follow. Mostly but not limited to photography related people and institutions. The big “news” for the last two days has been Kodak’s filing for bankruptcy. This is not really big news from my point of view. Who didn’t see this coming for a while now?

This is not the end of Kodak, in fact I am enthusiastic about Kodak and especially Kodak film. Maybe this is exactly what they needed to do to get some focus. As you know I still buy and use Kodak products almost exclusively when I shoot film. If you are a photographer you should try some. Even if you don’t shoot film on a regular basis I urge you to shoot a couple rolls a year. Not just to keep the products I love alive but also to enjoy the medium in a way that you may never have or just forgot about.

Today one of the trending twitter topics picked up by some major media outlets has been #KodakMoments. Extremely popular with thousands of tweets. I hope that a lot of the over-hyped death of Kodak stories actually bing some much needed awareness and promotion to some of their still great products.

Even if your livelyhood is made on digital. Even if you never see yourself becoming a film enthusiast, there is much to be said for casting off the shackles of computerized digi-cams and all that go with them - just for a day now and agian. Load up a really great old film camera - buy one - they are cheap. Shoot a roll of film. Have it developed, scanned, and printed. Get the prints back - experience the magic and the thrill of not seeing what you shot immediately, seeing them on paper.

I will leave you with this video I slapped together from really quick scans of film or prints for my daughter’s baby shower. Every single shot except for the two obvious cell phone pictures and a couple fuji instants near the end were shot on kodak film of one type or the other. I picked shots that were more casual snaps for the most part for the intended feel on purpose. Enjoy.

RB

I mentioned yesterday that I still like my LX5 but was thinking about the X10 as a possible successor to it as my pocket camera. This must have been a little confusing as someone asked me if I thought it was “better”. You see they were considering either the LX5 or the X10 as an upgrade to their aging P&S. Honestly I do not think it is better. Not for a moment. I think it is different - and I think it is overpriced as compared to the LX5 or the Canon S100. You may have noticed that I casually mentioned that I hoped the price would come down. It will but I don’t know if it will before it is obsoleted with the X11 or whatever comes next.

I still like my Panasonic LX5. This is strange, usually my initial excitement wears off with all of my digital cameras and I come to realize that they are not that much better than my old digital cameras. In fact I usually realize that I really like my film cameras better. Here is a brief summary of why I still like it. Will probably buy a Fuji X10 soon for a couple of reasons. Namely the viewfinder and the manual zoom combo off/on switch. I don’t really expect the images to chage much but we’ll see. I just want the hype to die down a little so it will come down to normal P&S prices.

Done, Well Not Quite

Okay so I have not posted anything remotely photo related since my new grand daughter was born. My excuse has been busy-ness, new years technology resolutions, etc. As I only spend time on this in my spare time, it could be years before I am done tweaking CSS visuals, Javascript nonsense, html, perfecting the hand-built conversion script, on and on.

The major infrastructure has been done since the last time I posted all that techno-babble. Since then I have been fooling around as just described. It’s not perfect. There are probably more than one or two glitches. To be candid I have been diddling with little stuff and keep adding it to my list. Time to just go live. The priorities will sort themselves at that point.

Here Is What I Have Done For Readers

Please let me know how this all works for you in the real world. Maybe I will hold a contest and give something cool away for the reader that finds the biggest issue in February. Here goes:

• Tag cloud and category list are gone. They just clutter up the place. Looking at stats, nobody uses that stuff. Here is what is actually used - post tags in the actual post - the stuff at the bottom that is a pretty good indicator of related topics. So tags stay and I have built a pretty good system going foward. I will clean up the existig tags imported from the Wordcrappress incrementally.
• The old Wordpress search sucks. The new one is regular old google awesomeness. Try it - it works - it’s always there even when scrolling down a long winded post. Cool. I can actually find things on my own blog now. So can you.
• If for whatever reason you made links anywhere in the universe to old posts they all still work.
• FAST, really really really fast. For readers in the US response time should be immediate. Let me know elsewhere but I couldn’t stand using the WP admin interface on my own site. Not just because it sucks but because it was sloooooow and choked up errors frequently if there was any other traffic hitting the site. The site being broadcast via one of the most robust and fastest infrastructures in the known universe. If you are somewhere that it’s still slow - let me know and I may even cloudfront it. All setup, ready to go and tested.
• Hopefully far far better on iPads, iPhones, etc. Check it out - narrow your browser window a bit and see how the content stays and the sidbar fluff goes. Zooming should also work better and more consistently. Cannot believe it but I am seeing a significant portion of traffic from mobile now.
• Better, faster, stronger RSS feeds. Nuff said.
• A brand new store. You asked for it - you got it. Yep a shopping cart. You can buy more than one thing at a time now. Check it out - it is the ‘eBooks’ link up top. Yes yes I know the styling does not match the site - yet. I built a tiny little store for electronic product delivery for someone else and it works great. I just chucked it in. I will get around to styling it. See now that is going to be an automatic priority because it’s bothering me. Oh, it even delivers an email to you with the download links. Much easier based on the number of people that send me an email saying… where’s my eBooks.
• All the comments are still there, will all the right posts. Just where they were before. Well at least all of them since the last Worpress database/hack/comment disaster.

Starting Next Post - Photography Again

Thank you for your patience. Now back to our regularly scheduled program. I have so much built up that I want to share I don’t know where to start but here is what is comming up this month.

• Color management. Lot’s of color management from capture to output. Remember my ongoing calibration frustrations? And months later same song and dance from Datacolor, my $600 color management system still deoesn’t work. There I named names. In any case I am through with it and have evaluated and selected a new solution. The results of my endeavors should be interesting to all. I have some product reviews and practical real world advice depending on what you want to achieve coming up after messing with things six ways from sunday.
• You do I know I like my photographs on paper right? Lot’s of stuff on printing. Paper reiviews, color, printing services, printers, and special output. If you like prints you will love a lot of my agenda.
• A little film stuff. I know I am one of the few but I love the stuff so I have to talk about it.
• I do live in the real world so of course digital capture as well. Very much tied into the color management and printing topics that I just covered. Along with some of my love/hate relationships, at least the parts of them that might be relevant to all of you. I do still like my Panasonic LX5

RB

My apologies for keeping away for so so very long. I guess it’s been about two weeks, that is like centuries in internet time. I do have a very good excuse. My oldest daughter gave birth to her very first child and my very first grandchild. Yes - I am a grandfather.

The new addition to the family is a 22 3/4” 8lb 10oz baby girl named Leela Andreyevna Khlistunova. Think she might have a tough time writing that in Kindergarden? Needless to say I have been a bit busy at the hospital, visits, etc. etc.

During the course of the last week and a half I did have a chance to make a few observations while taking photos of my new granddaughter - most of them related the Nikon D7000 and TTL flash. Not all of them good. While I do strive to use available light as my preference there are times when that just will not work out and flash is just a hair less ugly.

Here are a couple of things off the top of my head that I will be discussing at length in upcoming posts:

• With all the vunder-computing, color-matrix-metering, hoop-de-do bullcrap it’s unbelievable that the Nikon TTL flash control consistently and hopelessly underexposes scenes with a lot of white in the frame. I kinda remember this is kinda what the whole automated, evaluative thing was for in the first place. Wasn’t it? Well after extensive in the field testing I’ll give some my guidelines for the D7000 depending on how you have the 300,000 parameters set. Hmmmm 300,000 parameters and compensation vs incident flash meter? Yes we will have to discuss that again.
• Despite all of the things I have read from all of the on-line “experts” as well as Nikon that there is not really a difference between “TTL” and “TTL-BL” exposure in circumstances were ambient light does not contribute to the main subject’s exposure, that is complete and utter hogwash. At least it is with my particular D7000 and both my SB800’s. Maybe mine are somehow different - yeah right.
• Digital skin tones continue to be horrible. At least they are “out of the can” on most JPEG settings and definitely on all the default RAW conversions in both Lightroom, ACR, and Aperture. I have mentioned this just a couple of times in the past right? Well I guess now that I am shooting people with the D7000 and digital vs film only for the first time in a while I will have to discuss some options for dealing with that in Aperture and if anyone cares ACR as well.
• My current favored lighting gear is WAY too big and cumbersome for use in my daughter’s small apartment. I just ordered some gear that should alleviate that - cheap simple gear. I share some of that as well as how I am using it as well. Why do I need lighting gear? Because sometimes the light is just crappy and there just isn’t a decent bounce surface to be found. I spent less than a hundred bucks and should be able to get the results I am after. My order should get here any day now.

More Later

RB

I have been a tad hard on digital imaging lately. I wanted to put that into context. The context is that I am a photographer and image maker first and foremost. For better or for worse we photographers are married to our tools and the people that make them. The reason I have been a little down on digital lately is because I am a heavy user of digital. I don’t sit away in my little corner of the universe isolated from all things digital - obviously. Not only am I a heavy user of digital capture devices and digital imaging processing software. I am a customer. Yes I have spent huge sums of money on digital imaging gear and post processing software and all that goes with it.

I consider it a right and a duty to point out the flaws and shortcomings of products I invest my money and more importantly my time and my images into. It is in that spirt that I cast dispersions on software and image capture devices that I use. The reason I choose film as a medium to compare it with is that happens to be the only other photographic medium out there with it’s own set of qualities, processes and procedures that are quickly being forgotten. Not all of those qualities, processes, and procedures are bad - a lot of them were very very good. I want my cake and I want to eat it to. I still use film where I feel it is appropriate. I use digital as well and want to see it become as refined as some of the things I have experienced with film.

You see I don’t want just more of the same with digital. I don’t want a continual improvement in ONLY the speed and “convenience” features. There are still terrible shortcomings that we all pretend are not there or become distracted from due to the next new thing that we didn’t want in the first place. Man the way highlights are rendered blow - they look like absolute shit - I guess I will have to either underexpose for the highlights and make it sorta look okay - or use fill flash - or do that goofy HDR crap until it gets more like film - I can live with it but it really sucks. Hey man look at the new camera - it shoots like 12 frames a second at like 25 bazillion pixels - I guess I can live with crappy ass highlight rendition for a bit longer…. On and on and on more of the same.

I have also been hard on Apple Aperture 3 for more than a month - no love. Understand that I am also one of it’s biggest proponents. Just because I think ACR has come into it’s own in the last year or two doesn’t have me shouting Lightroom from the rooftops (I know Lightroom very very well - most of my images are cataloged   in both via referenced images). In the spirit of Thanksgiving - here in the US I am going to write only positive posts regarding digital and specifically Aperture 3 over the next week or so. Starting with Aperture 3 RAW processing that I have taken more than a few pot shots at over the last month. I will also chuck in some quick and dirty tutorials on the finer points of Aperture 3 adjustments along the way…

Happy Thanksgiving.

RB