The Beautiful People

Sometimes accidents are happy. I took this picture at a fashion show in a nightclub. The flash didn't go off so the camera held the shutter open. (Av mode.)



Disturbingly attractive.

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Honored to Be Mentioned, But A Seal? Seriously?

Remember that contest I told you I won a prize in back a ways? Well, they announced the winners Friday, so I can say it was for Hawai'i Magazine's Tenth Annual Photo Contest.

Click here for a link right to the contest entry on their site.

I won Second Place in the "Maui" category, which isn't bad out of 800 submissions. (Well, there were more than 800 total submissions. I have no idea how many were for Maui.)

The grand prize winner was a picture of a seal.

A seal.

Now, it's a really good picture. I'm not complaining that it's not "better" than mine. But a seal? For reals? For Hawai'i?

Oh, well. I guess people don't usually think "bamboo forest" when they think Hawai'i, either. Or "sledding." So I shouldn't complain, now should I?

Anyway, links to my stuff below.

Here's the picture that won second place:


Bamboo Grove Entrance, Pipiwai Trai, Kipahulu District, Haleakala National Forest, Maui, Hawai'i.

They also featured the sledding picture in the contest slideshow:


Children Sledding on Grass along the Kula Highway, Maui, Hawai'i.

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Surfin' on Snow Days

It's an icy nightmare outside and my boss closed the office before I even left for work, so I'm home today. While I'll probably do some work later, at the moment I'm reading blogs and so forth. Here's a fascinating story about equipment failure.

A Photographer, The White House, and a Smashed SD Card: A Data Salvaging Saga.

Now, I had a buddy who could have fixed that, although it would have been touch and go. I point it out not only because it's a funny story, but because it illustrates a profound lesson: Never assume something is hopeless.

I've fixed cardreaders with my Swiss Army knife. (Computers, too.) Kevin German has a nifty story about some guy with a tinker's cart in Cambodia fixing his Canon 5D when the local Canon shop told him it couldn't be done here: My Cambodian Adventure. I've saved "dead" hard drives and cards, or at least zombified them long enough to recover crucial data. There's almost always a way.

On the lighter-but-not-really side, those of you in the journalism business may enjoy this bit of gallows humor:



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My First Really Big Print.

So I decided to try making a Really Big Print today. (It's working already - the printer was sitting there silently laying a guilt trip on me.) I asked my wife if she thought my father-in-law would like a poster print of his race car for his garage, and she said yes. So I intrepidly set out to make one.

I was going to do this picture:



But my wife liked this one better:



since you can see him racing other cars, and you can see his face. Okay, good enough.

Since I had already spent considerable time retouching that image, I didn't have to do a lot with it. I cropped it to the right aspect ratio (16x20 is 4:5, whereas my camera shoots at 2:3.) 4:5 is the same aspect ratio as 8x10, so I printed an 8x10 test print and examined it to make sure I was satisfied with the contrast, exposure, etc.

Then I upsampled it with Photoshop's Bicubic Smoother algorithm so that it was a 360PPI file. (This increased it from roughly 18MB to roughly 120MB in size.) Finally, I applied a sharpening filter that was appropriate for its new PPI and a print file.

Then I printed it using the appropriate print settings: in my workflow, I use Photoshop's color profiling rather than the printer driver's. I had a custom profile from the people who make the paper, so I just had to select that along with "Photoshop manages colors" in the Photoshop print dialog, along with of course doing a "Page Setup" and setting the proper orientation and paper size. (17x22, the size of four sheets of standard letter paper put together.) Then in the OS print dialog, I made sure to select the right paper type, the right color management (i.e. none - color management OFF) and the right print settings.

After going to the Summary tab to review the settings, I just hit "Print." It took about two minutes to render the print file. and then the printer lit up and the file started to spool. I popped the top of the printer to look and make sure the image looked to be fairly centered on the paper and nothing weird was going on - after about an inch of print it looked good and I shut the top and waited for the print to come out.

After another two minutes printed area started to emerge (this printer is BIG and it takes a while for the printed area to be visible outside the enclosure.) Then it was just a matter of watching it come out.

Wow.

I can't show you - obviously it makes no sense to try to show the quality of huge printouts on a screen. But this looks fabulous. When you consider the lens I had (17-85mm IS, shot at 1/100s, f6.3 at 85mm) and what I was taking pictures of (race cars twenty feet away going forty miles an hour) it's ridiculously clear. You can read print on the car that is less than an inch high. You can see the tread cuts on the tires. You can clearly see, through his visor, that my father-in-law wears glasses. I was at max ISO (1600) and it's not even that noisy. (Some of that of course is post.)

So I'm pretty pleased with it. I went and bought a poster frame at Michael's (they were on sale pretty cheap) which I'll put it in tomorrow. I could probably put it in safely now, but I like to let prints outgas for a day or so before I put them behind glass or plastic. If I were going for maximum life/value, I'd mat it and put it in an actual frame, but this is just an acrylic frame. Since the print only cost me about eight bucks to make and it's going in a garage, it'll be fine. If I had paid forty or fifty bucks for it from a commercial printer, I probably couldn't be so blase about it. :)

M More after the jump - click here!

I'm Dumber than I Thought.

So since the bonus gods were kind to me, I bought myself a little present. (Most of it went into savings or bills. Really.) And I promptly got myself into one of my snits about it.

I don't make as many prints as I might. Mostly this is laziness but part of it was because my printer - my faithful Epson Stylus Photo 2200, which certainly owed me nothing - was getting a little temperamental and didn't like current MacOS very much. Endless driver problems. So I had been wanting a new one.

Lo and behold, Epson's website has refurbished Stylus Pro 3800's on sale for $995. (Normally $1295.) That's a lot of money, but on the other hand it costs less than half as much per print to operate. So if I got to making prints, it would save me money. Plus my wife is getting into photography and she can use it too. So I started thinking about it.

But wait! There's more!

December special, free shipping and $100 off instant rebate. Now the thing is $895, no tax, no shipping. And I can write it off. And I can print archival 17" wide prints. Oh, Hell. What's money for? Besides, more than half of that is ink. I think the actual printer cost me about $250. Unlike Canon and HP, Epson never ships printers with reduced-capacity starter cartriges. This thing came with over half a liter of ink all told. And I thought I might be able to get a little something for my old printer - they were still selling on eBay. (I ended up getting $100 cash for it, which means the net cash I had to come up with was only $795.)

So I bought one. Epson's shipping facility is in Indiana so even with the free ground shipping it only took three days to get here. After some lugwork getting it home (the box weighs about fifty pounds and is about 3' x 2') and setting it up, I was all set to test it. I put in some 4x6 paper for test prints... and it happened.

Paper didn't load properly. I fiddled and diddled and to make a long frustrating story short, couldn't get it to work right. Paper kept shifting.

So today I had to take a beef hindquarter to Oak Brook (long story) and after I dropped it off I went into Calumet Photo to look at their 3800 to see if mine was doing something wrong.

The nice man on the floor powered up their demo 3800 for me and fed a sheet of paper while I watched. It did the same thing.

After I stopped cursing and explained to him the problem, he asked me what size paper I'd been using.

"4x6 test sheets," I said.

"Everybody has problems with 4x6 sheets in this printer," he said. "They're very light and they tend to move a bit when the guides operate. The printer has to be able to handle big heavy 17" sheets and the tiny papers just get thrown around by the power of the mechanism."

So I ran through an 8.5x11 and did a targeted geometric figure to find the center.
Dead on. Perfect centering in both dimensions.

Okay, so I'm paranoid. I *did* run a few test sheets at 8.5x11 but they didn't look right last night (can you say confirmation bias?) Now they're fine.

This is the printer (courtesy of Calumet Photo:)



It's kinda big. But it should be fun. I also got some 17" x 22" (!) paper from Calumet's website when they were having a special sale the other day. The price I paid, it would actually be cheaper to print four pictures at once on them and cut them up than to use regular photo paper.

Another nice thing about it is that it has three stages of black and some fairly advanced black-and-white printing modes, which is something I'm looking forward to. It also holds both matte black ink and photo black ink at the same time (it has nine ink tanks.) That means that if I want to switch media I don't have to switch tanks, plus it saves a lot of time and ink because all it does is clear the line and then it's ready to print on the appropriate media. The other printer, which required a tank swap, used quite a bit of black ink to charge the line relative to the size of the tank, which meant that every three or four swaps cost me a $20 ink tank.

M More after the jump - click here!

Make a Little Difference

The amazing photographer Kevin German, who currently lives in the Far East, is doing a project in a Vietnamese mental hospital and is soliciting donations to try to help out the people who run it a little bit.

You can read about how little they run the hospital with, and make a donation, by reading this blog post:

400 Cookies.

Warning: Link contains amazing photography and very, very sad documentary work. If you just want to donate, you can click this link for his PayPal donation button:

Donate to Help Vietnamese Mental Patients.

Please help if you can, even a tiny bit of money makes a huge difference. (US$0.50 feeds a patient for a day.)

I sent him a little bit of my holiday bonus - probably not as much as I could, but more than some people who could spare more, so I guess I'm okay with that. "The poor you will always have with you."

M More after the jump - click here!

Oh, If Only.

While this isn't my actual goal, I set my HA account to "First Class Roundtrip" just to look at it for a minute. I'm weird.



Beautiful, isn't it? *sigh*

Also, note my extremely low membership number. Impressive, yes?

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Today's "Didn't See THAT Coming" Quote

In the always-entertaining Unqualified Reservations, we read a well-reasoned, sophisticated definition of "neocameralism," with a rather unexpected explanation of the ultimate source of a neocameralist government's sovereign authority:

Neocameralism informs the surrounding neural tissue that the best mechanism for producing responsibility in government is for governments to be administered as sovereign joint-stock corporations, controlled absolutely by their shareholders, who hold the master encryption keys for the government's invincible robot armies.

Whoa.

M More after the jump - click here!