Man of many talents

Last week Ed Warner dropped by to collect some old tools and iron artifacts my dad had collected over the years. Like my dad, Ed is a member of the Tool Group (and currently the editor of its newsletter). As we finished loading his van, I showed him an old Atwater Kent model L horn speaker. The instrument was in two parts due to the failure of a white metal casting some years ago through carelessness on my part. In a matter of minutes Ed had analyzed the break and figured out how to make a repair using a small piece of pipe flanged and threaded to size on his lathe.

Two days later, Ed phoned and asked me to listen to a sound - it was my repaired c1924 horn speaker connected to a modern 20 watt amplifier. Ed returned the horn to me yesterday, no sign at all that it had been repaired. It came with a warning that the horn would be damaged more if it suffered another mishap as the metal cover holding the flange of the new connecting pipe to the base of the horn would be torn open.

Others have mentioned Ed’s skill at repairing small mechanical devices creating any missing metal parts as needed. And we have all seen his skills put to use to restore old wooden view cameras, bellows and all. A true craftsman in this age of automation and throwaway. Thanks, Ed.

Distant Suns

In the 1980s a program came out for my beloved Amiga that was a serious package for amateur astronomers. Mike Smithwick’s Distant Suns offered an interactive galaxy and close-ups of interesting objects. Before the Amiga stumbled into oblivion, the program was ported to Windows where incantation 6.0 lives today.

More recently, last fall Distant Suns was ported to Apple’s fabulously successful iPhone/iPod Touch duo. If you own one of these little pocket marvels, a copy will cost you just under $4 US at the Apps Store. If you use Windows 95 through XP (or run the various emulations that bring the charms of Windows to the Mac) you can buy a desktop version on-line from the author. Check out www.distantsuns.com (or the App Store) for more information.

NB. Pardon my tone on Windows, my daughter was over yesterday with her Vista laptop which has been struggling since the Microsoft patch fiasco on June 6th. She was trying to write a paper. Since the “security auto update” mentioned, many keystrokes in Word, including a space, have a slight delay that throws off even a mediocre typist like me. I had to keep her away from (glass) windows for the well-being of her laptop and the safety of beings outdoors.

Solving Video Babble

Video comes in many variations and versions on a multitude of media. The other day, I received a DVD video of 1920s home movies to review. The disk opened with Front Row on my Mac. Its menu gave a choice of an introduction and four short movies. I copied it to my Mac so others could see the DVD while I had a copy to review. Unfortunately, the copy was stuck on the introduction. The menu keys for Front Row now changed the system audio volume instead of the menu choices.

I tried iTunes. No luck. QuickTime. No luck. A google search suggested creating a dmg file (disk image). No luck. Another search suggested using DropDMG to make a DVD image. No luck. Yet another google search suggested a free cross platform media player. Success.

VLC Media Player ( www.videolan.org), approaching its version 1.0 is part of the VideoLAN software project which produces free and open software for use in multimedia under the GNU (General Public License). It handles a wealth of formats and is offered in compiled versions (binaries) for numerous operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and a dozen versions of Linux. If you need a player for video, check it out.

Kodachrome 1935 - 2009

Sad to learn Kodachrome, the storied colour slide film, will disappear this year. It was born two years before me and would have made it possible for my dad to snap me in colour, but his camera was a trusty Kodak Junior Six-20 which he loaded with Verichrome B&W film. In the 1950s, when I finally bought my first 35mm camera, we had a choice of the expensive and slow Kodachrome colour slide film and the faster process-it-yourself Anscochrome slide film based on the Agfa patents. I soon learned to favour the Kodachrome for colour. Most of my Anscochrome slides from the late 50s are now faded magenta while most of the Kodachromes are still usable. Slow speed and high contrast were a nuisance. I think by the time I bought Kodachrome, it was rated asa 10 and prone to blown highlights or dense shadows unless the lighting was relatively flat.

The Kodachromes are marvels of colour accuracy and fine detail. I shot this old Buick wheel 40 years ago this September at a museum near Plattsburg NY. Even today the colour and detail are there. In our leap to embrace digital we have left behind a revolutionary invention that brought quality colour initially to 16mm home movies and a year later to the 35 mm “minicams” that were capturing consumer attention world-wide.

I’ve been Googled

Last Wednesday morning as I was walking my old hound Bailey on Melbert Road, a car drove by us with a strange pole and spinning boxes on top. The logo on the car door was the familiar Google. The car passed me, drove around a short crescent and on down Melbert. It was one of the Google Street View cars taking 360 degree shots of streets in Toronto. So some day you may see me and my beagle scooting along on a sunny day in the west end of the city. (Nb this picture is from a Globe and Mail article the next day on Street Views in Japan. The car that passed me looked like a Chevy).

Colourful Spyder

In February I scanned some fabrics for a client. He commented later that the light purples were a bit off which surprised me since I had adjusted the images comparing to the actual fabric viewed by an Ott Light. The following month, our speaker was Andrew Patrick of Epson who talked about modern digital printing and colour management.

This prompted me to finally get a calibration device for my monitor. I decided on the Spyder3 Pro since a friend of mine was pleased with the earlier version for his monitor. The installation and starting instructions were cryptic. It didn’t help that the initial palette on the Mac used Chinese to label the various buttons. Since the palette listed my applications, I assumed I was looking at the right folder and clicked the highlighted button. Installation was a success. Now what? Turns out only the utility program was open which has no screens. I tracked down the calibration application in my apps folder and we were off to the races. The end result was very satisfying. My monitor colours look much better.

As many sites and blogs have noted, the actual calibration steps are quite simple with a good set of help files in the program itself. When I finished, the before/after toggle on the sample images seemed to show a slightly darker image that before. On second look, the highlights were no longer slightly blown out. One of the samples in greyscale showed a yellowish colour cast had been removed. When I closed the chart, it was apparent that the whites on my screen were cleaner now. The discovered colour cast would have affected the pale purple fabric scans and as a result my adjusted files were indeed slightly off when viewed on a different monitor. NB. On my Windows XP computer all screens were in English and the utility icon in the tray had a menu item to start the calibration program. The calibration has given new life to my 11 year old Trinitron Multiscan 400PS. The change is remarkable.

The Party’s Over

Last Wednesday Andrew Patrick from Epson dropped in to talk with our members about digital printing. He had with him some absolutely astounding pictures - this thumbnail is a small piece of one advertisement for The Stylus Pro 3800 printer, printed on that printer using Epson glossy paper and eight colour Ultrachrome K3 ink technology. The photograph was taken by Douglas Dubler, NY. A computer screen simply can't do justice to the colour and dynamic range of the actual print.

Andrew told us that the current inks and papers give a 42% wider colour gamut vs. Silver-halide based printing. Even inexpensive printers with today’s inks can offer this quality. And the estimated life of the print now exceeds that of silver-halide based colour processes by a factor of 5 to 6 times! For the first time, I felt in my heart that our silver-halide based processes have quietly slipped into history.

The resolution of modern digital cameras, and their dynamic range when shooting in raw mode, exceeds the capabilities of the old film processes in moving from exposure to print. The cameras, films and papers of our youth are now more sentimental than relevant to today’s photography. Andrew noted that even prints created in the past decade would have more detail and depth of colour reprinted today with modern inks and papers from the same digital file.

Silver-halide (and early digital) are becoming the artifacts of the collector and photographic historian. It was great fun, but the party’s over.