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.

Bye-bye Network TV

The digital revolution has been a hard task master for those industries and companies that didn’t react promptly to the new environment. Witness photography, with many giants now gone or shadows of their past glory. Now our national TV networks say they are in trouble. They spent their money buying rights to import foreign shows to broadcast over the air with local advertising. Today cable companies offer these same programs from local and foreign sources as well as fresh cable-only sources, some even owned by the networks.

TV advertising is dwindling forcing the networks to cut costs and search for other sources of revenue. On the cost side, the smaller stations are being closed, and local programming, including news, is being eliminated. For revenue, the networks are pressing the CTRC to allow carriage fees - charging the cable company and its customers for the right to receive by cable programming now offered free over the air.

Which leads to the question, “What value do we get from the networks today?” Local news? No - cut back and trivialized by attempts to “entertain” the viewer. National programs? Not much - most programming funds are spent competing for foreign programming. PVRs and on-demand services are freeing us from network driven schedules while DVDs and the web let us view missed episodes of favourite shows.

If you eliminate over the air transmissions, our networks have nothing to offer that isn’t already available from other sources. And over the air transmissions are necessary for less and less of our population. Cable serves the larger communities while satellite services bring 100s of channels to remote communities. Our networks are lumbered with soon to be obsolete transmission facilities, and incapable of creating much fresh content. Another Kodak moment? (image copyright Corel Draw 9)

Photographic Canadiana Index

For our 25^th Anniversary in year 2000, I updated the index to our journal, Photographic Canadiana and  Bob Lansdale took my database records and typeset them in QuarkXpress to produce a 42 page paper index. Since 2000, technology has changed. For our 35th Anniversary which begins this May, we plan to include an updated index of 35 years of the journal on a DVD featuring all 35 years of the publication. Meantime, I have the index itself available in a searchable pdf file on the web. The index allows you to search the wealth of material the PHSC has published over the years. The initial web update covers the first 34 years, then as the four issues of volume 35 are published I will add their content to the online index. Enjoy.

Postcards and Photographica

Ed Warner and I attended the Postcard Show today. There is an overlap with photographica - some postcards are photographic cards, like the 1910 picture of the Barrie Market Hall shown here. And some dealers have images like this pretty Notman portrait of Miss Fortescue of Montreal taken in 1891. How did I know this detail? Because Notman thoughtfully included a reference number on the back of each of his photographs - 96548 in this case - and the McCord Museum in Montreal has a search box on its website for such data. I also saw a number of albums - some with quite attractive photographs, and even glass plate negatives that were amateur, not studio. Some dealers also have papers and ephemera - bits and pieces of history, sometimes of photographic interest, like the letter from Kodak that enclosed a number of old brochures on commercial darkroom gear.

A New Home on the Web

I completed the move of our website to a new ISP host over this weekend - the third home it has occupied since its inception April 17, 1996 sharing a server operated by OnRamp in Markham, Ontario. On April 12, 2001 we went live on a shared server at Easyhosting (Look TV) using our new domain name. 

The latest move was prompted by cost and feature considerations. I first discovered A2 Hosting in February 2008, while helping an “accidental client” move and transform his wholesale site to a modern database-driven service. This new site is hosted by A2. I was introduced to A2’s service and features during the time I spent adding customized bits of code to my client’s site. We went live in March of last year and I continued to make small changes into the summer.  

This time, with the PHSC, I was moving a live site making it important to get all the bits and pieces organized and executed in the correct order to avoid any loss of access. Using a temporary URL, I uploaded a copy of the 358 megabytes of files that make up our website. After verifying a random sample of pages, I changed our nameservers at CIRA , completing the switchover in minutes. 

My last step was to establish our email address on the new mail server and point it to my prime address. We still have a bit of our web presence at Easyhosting - they continue to be our domain name registrar.

A Different Bend

One of the problems with my beloved Sony F828 and similar cameras is the degree of distortion at the extremes of the zoom. This is quite obvious with straight objects in the picture. DXO Labs in Europe have a clever solution. They calculate the distorted light path and reverse it in software. The EXIF data in the shot gives the program the necessary data. The program works with selected cameras and lenses - including mine. The program has a number of other adjustments as well and works with Lightroom and Photoshop. The improvement in the image is astonishing. The program allows fast before/after comparisons as you adjust various parameters - the default settings work great. Once the adjustments are selected, you initiate processing to apply the changes to the actual file. Worth a peek at the 14 day free trial.