Epson R2400 – Swapping Matte to Glossy

The Epson R2400 is a great printer, but has two different main black inks – Photo (i.e. glossy) and Matte. I got my printer profile today, and wanted to try it out. Sadly I had just swapped on to the matte inks, so had to switch back.

Of course the printer driver didn’t spot I had swapped the ink cartridges so the list of papers was. Well internet to the rescue againg…. solution is here. Go into the Epson ink levels utility, click about a bit, and things work.

Really annoying!!

Blood Donation

Well I’ve just come back from my 5th Blood Donor session!  For many years I never did this, the mere thought of it was absolutely awful; my blood was very precious to me and didn’t really want to loose it.

But it’s very precious to somebody else as well. somebody quite probably in a far worse state than me. I can make more it; they might be alive to.

The worse part of donating yet hasn’t happened yet… later on this evening I need to take the plaster from my arm. Now that is going to hurt!!!

Some people can’t give blood, and for some it is quite a shock to the system. But if  you then I would really urge you to do so. If you look on the National Blood Donation website you can see the level of blood stocks.

For some types that is just a few days and at the best 11 days. That is hardly anything at all……

As it says in the adverts “Do something amazing today”.

The Circle, Bath

20070306-0037, originally uploaded by Calanais.

Camera: D100
Lens: Nikon 18-70mm @ 29mm
Exposure:f9 @ 1/640s ISO 200
Post Process: Capture One Raw Conversion, Photoshop Level correction
Location: The Circle, Bath, UK

This circle of houses in Bath is very striking architecturally, even more so as the frontage of all the properties have been kept the same.

This appealed to me purely from the symmetry, the challenge being that it was impossible to show the entire circle, so I need to communicate a sense of whole but only showing a very limited part.

(submitted to the Developing Vision and Style project)

CSS Image Maps

I recently wanted to produce a hyper-linked image map to help navigate a software architecture. HTML provides an image map tag to do just that. Not that flexable, but does the job. Recently though I’ve been interested to learn CSS, and how it relates to HTML. It seems that most if not all sites are using CSS.

So a bit of Googling, found that a few people had worked out the magic incantation. I found one tutorial that is pretty good and I think from one of the original author. This worked very well and let me produce a pretty good image map. Here’s an alternative solution.

I coupled this with leightbox; when a link is clicked in effect a small dialog is produced allowing the user to select between a couple of different links.   This did raise an interesting thought about having multiple different locations to get to from a different a single hyperlink.

Photographic Workflow: Tools

So what tools do I use for various photographic jobs:

• I take RAW images from the D100. These have been processed in Phase One’s Capture One LE. Pretty good and very reasonably priced. It does all I can ask of it for RAW processing. No library features, and is a straight RAW editor. Has a very good feature to do a rough conversion to jpg. Very useful when the wife wants to see what pictures I’ve taken.
• Recently though I have started to use the Adobe Lightroom, just coming out of beta now, this has a very good interface. Browsing images is very nice, and can work not just with RAW but other formats we well. Not quite got to grips with the curves here, and I think it needs some reasonably procesing power.Capture One seems better at doing bulk image handling. No difference in output quality as far as I can see.
• Image manipulation, and I only do very basic stuff realy was done in Photoshop Elements 2. Now that I use Lightroom/Capture One, all that Elments does is to crop, rotate, compression of JPGs for web use, and converting formats.Elements 2 is missing 16bit support, plus curves and the channel mixer. Something that is offered by Earthbound Light
• Recently I was given as a present PaintShopPro X. Not used this a lot, but is looking good. I need to adapt from the Photoshop terminology and interfaces.
• For output, I use QImage. A great little program for solely printing. It’s interface does take some getting used to, but after that it is great for getting things exactly where you want them, and the exact size. Please do work with this program and read the tutorials. Not be put off by the interface!
• For catloging images, and keeping a track of what I’ve got IMatch DB is great. Nothing else quite comes close; it has the ability to handle a massive collection of images. Plus it handles the ability to take a set of images, say from one shoot and move them to offline storage.
• I will confess that I am also now using Picasa to browse the images that are on my harddrive. It is set to only look at the RAW images, so it is great for looking at my recent work. It is fast and slick. Also it is great for other members of the family to browse the images I have recently taken.
• Some landscapes really do have to be taken with a panorama to do them justice. Not having a X-Pan to hand I use Panorama Factory – A great program that produces some stunning results
• To produce DVD images, ProShowGold is pretty good.Very easy to use, and work through. Have found a couple of defects in this, and it doesn’t have short-keys for the functions. Means a lot of mouse use for a large presentation, but the options within it are unrivaled.
• For web galleries JAlbum is brilliant. It has produce mh-white.com for example. It is very easy to use and has some great submitted skins for to generate some good sites.
• Flickr is now starting to appear in my list of tools (look up Calanais as a user and that’s me)

Any planned changes? Well Paint Shop Pro may well take over from Elements. I have tried to use GIMP, with the Photoshop look and feel. But it just not worked for me. Picutre Window Pro was looking promising, but never got the time to do it justice.

“An Inconvenient Truth”

“An Inconvenient Truth” – I admit that I had put of watching this… possibly thinking it might be more depressing than the state of the world already is. However it has left me thinking that we really can do something to stop this awful mess we are in.

So please go an watch it! Now!

Photographic Workflow: Output

When I started photography seriously, I was using a 35mm file camera (Praktica ML50). My typical film stock was Fuji-print film. With hinsight, that was the wrong thing to me using. It was though easy to expose for, and produced results that you could see easily – and put in an album. Plus at the time I had an Epson 1200U scanner that could produce reasonable results from the prints.

What I think I should have done though is taken slides.  Velvia or Provia would have been a better training ground with exposure, and generally quality.  Obtaining a projector wouldn’t have been a problem (have my father’s projector) and a screen cost me £15 second hand.

But I moved onto digital – missing out slide film. Although I do have a few roles around that I really want to try using!

One thing though I have found is MicroQuiz they can produce from a digital file some great slides. There are 3 reasons to do this

1. Digital projectors are still not quite there for quality, but this won’t last for long
2.  Slide competitions in local clubs are not now well entered. So you stand a better chance of wining based purely on numbers
3. Persistence. Perhaps the strongest reason of all. I reckon that a slide has a greater chance of lasting than a digital file.

So I am considering getting all of my main portfolio copied onto slide – just in case!

Eclipse 3.3 Milestone 5

Eclipse is one of the those software tools, that I now wonder how I ever managed without. OK it can be a bit slow, and cumbersome, ok I’m ending up with loads and loads of Eclipse installations on my machine. We’ve fallen for the same problem as with Java… no one producer wants to take risk of shipping with a version of the product they haven’t tested with…

any way…

Eclipse 3.3 Milestone 5 is now available, and I will be updating to that to see what is new and great. The ‘New and Noteworthy’ pages are good but simple innvoation to help you keep up to date with the project.

Some things I will be checking out

• Drag and drop in text editors
• Hyperlinking in text edtiros

Photographic Workflow: Managing file formats

An important part of the process of digital photography I think is establishing a ‘workflow’ that works for you (pardon the pun). Workflow may sound like it is something that is the domain solely of professionals, but even if you are amateur maybe only taking a handful of pictures it is, I would assert, very important.

I’m now posting to various different photosites, such as Photo.net, Flickr, Pixola, and various stock agenices. Each require a specific quality of image. Different resoultions, file formats, and maximum file size.

Whilst any photo tool can handle this type of transformation, I was looking for something more streamlined. So I’m currently investigating using ImageMagick

Some articles on using this are on developerWorks, an odd place for a photo article but never mind. With a great tutorial site on creating thumbnails.

More will be posted on this topic !

An alternative that I was considering pursuing is the use of Python and the Python Imaging Library 

Plank Patterns