Monthly Archives: March 2006

HP DesignJet 90 – Part I

Printing

The monster printer arrives

I dropped off the Epson 1270 printer at the UPS Store early in the afternoon not, it should be added, without a sigh. This great machine had served me well and many fine prints testify to its reliability and quality. I think the recipient will do great things with it. If nothing else, it will be a huge test of his technical skill – a 13″ x 19″ is not like making an 8″ x 10″. No sooner had I arrived home than Marty Paris, great acoustical guitarist that he is, arrived at the gate. “I have a big box for you” he intoned dramatically. Gulp! I had been without a printer for all of 45 minutes. Marty is our UPS man in his spare time and you could not meet a finer person.

Well, after Bert the Border Terrier had jumped in the UPS van for his cookie (Marty comes prepared) we struggled to get the 75 pound box on the dolly and lowered it gently to the ground. “Six years I got from the old printer, Marty”. “Wow! Nothing lasts more than three years today. That’s fantastic!” Nice to know the Epson has gone to a good home.

Bertie supervised while I struggled to unpack this bear. The fine people at B&H in New York had not chintzed on the packing, double boxing with more polystyrene peanuts than you really want to know about. By the time I got through the layers of tape, cardboard, polystyrene and plastic, the thing was almost manageable. The weight had halved. I had taken the precaution of clearing a space for it in the office – the old niche was too small – as well as running a long USB cable to feed it pictures. Enough time in the dark recesses of the wiring cabinet, replete with black beetles and cobwebs. There is a fortune waiting for the person who works out how to unwire home computers.

Now I must admit to some dismay on first extricating this monster from its cocoon. When I was an engineering student in London everyone knew that the finest laboratory instruments were made by Hewlett Packard. Later, on Wall Street, a like recognition played into the adoption of the HP12C as the calculator of choice. In neither case were clear instructions expected or available. You see, these devices were made by engineers for engineers, and no real engineer is going to read the instruction book. Heck, when Apollo was landing on the moon, did Buzz Aldrin check the book to determine why the panel was on the blink? Not a bit of it. A solid thump with a fist resolved the issue. It may have been “One small step for man” but a good bang ensured it was “A giant leap for humanity”. Or something.

So the cause of my dismay was none other than some of the clearest instructions known to man, on huge paper that even I could read. I’m not sure whether this means you should buy HP stock or sell it….

Anyway, with psychological support from Bertram, I manhandled the thing onto that nice little oak toppped sofaback I had made many moons ago from some alder, which I ebonized, and some gorgeous stairing oak for the top. It wasn’t conceived as a printer stand, but it does the job nicely.

HP does not supply a USB cable (how cheap is that?) but I was prepared, and my long cable was in place. The mechanical part of the installation was a breeze. You pop in six ink cartridges, followed by six print heads. Not for the colorblind, as several are like-sized, but easy to do.

Then came the software part. Now after my dismay at the clarity of the instructions, not to mention growing concern over the ease of the mechanical setup, I finally ran into a snag. And it was a big one. Try as it might, the drive mechanism in the iMac G5 refused to read the provided software CD. OK, I’m up to it, I can handle this, I’m not panicking. Dial up the HP web site, of course. Just download the driver. Not so easy, pal. The driver’s there, but you cannot download it. Mail order only. Can you believe this? Is Carly Fiorina still in charge, dammit? I though they fired her with a $40mm handshake. OK, OK. I’ll try HP Canada. No Designjet 90 in sight. Fine, how about England then. That bastion of civilization and decency must have the driver, no? No.

What to do? Well, maybe it’s just a quirk of the G5’s drive, or of the HP drive that made the CD. So I pop the CD in the iBook and Hey Presto!, she fires right up. Advised by Bert, that fount of wisdom, I plugged in one of the Firewire external drives to the iBook and before you could say ‘Woof!’ the software was on the G5’s hard drive. Minutes later the printer was installed. No lockups. The only Windows you will find in the old estate are in the walls.

That’s not to say that HP doen’t have some humorists at Software Central. Take a look at their wonderful proofreading of their software installation intructions:

The letter ‘u’ somehow dropped off the HP typewriter.

By this time the sun is setting, the evening libation beckons and I only have time for one quick print from the wretched Photoshop to see if the printer is speaking to the G5. So I load up a RAW image of the elephant seals just north of Hearst Castle on the magnificent Pacific coast and …. a jam. A piercing noise emanates from the beast and the yellow light blinks. Now in case you think HP is no longer dominated by engineers, just take a look at the control panel on this machine:

Now do you see why Aldrin resorted to brute force? Same guy designed the bloody buttons in the Lunar Module, for God’s sake. To be honest I had loaded one sheet of Epson Premium Luster in the HP to try things out, so maybe this was some sort of corporate rivalry at work and HP had the thing jam by design anytime non-HP paper was inserted. So I pressed every button in sight, threatened Bert with physical violence, and slammed ten more sheet of Epson’s finest on top of the one I had loaded.

And she printed just fine. 105 seconds for an 8″ x 10″ which is about four times faster than that great Epson 1270. Colors were right, density a tad pale, but this may well be the start of a beautiful friendship. Even if the birth was a Caesarean.

Gary Winogrand

Book reviews, Photographers

Book review

The old dictum has it that “If you having nothing good to say, say nothing”, so I will earnestly struggle to say something good about Garry Winogrand’s street photography. I purchased my copy of this book in June, 1992 and, amazingly it remains in print. I return to it earnestly every year or two trying to see what the famed critics who all gush over Winogrand’s work are going on about.

True, some of the early work here is not bad, capturing the feel of 1950s and ‘60s America. Where a set piece is involved, such as a night club or an event or a zoo, in other words somewhere where Winogrand could actually be bothered to make the slightest effort at framing the picture, then indeed there is some good photography. The many pictures from the night club El Morocco are exemplars of their kind and the zoo pictures are poignant and thoughtful.

But the overall feeling I always come away with from my repeated occasional marathons through this book, is that, well, the photographs are, for the most part, surpassingly ugly. In his gushing essay on the photographer’s work John Szarkowski nonetheless pulls no punches between the lines. Take a look at the contact sheet of Winogrand’s street shots in 1961 (vital, involved, he actually bothered to raise his camera to eye level in a few) with the one from 1982. Sorry, the latter is pure garbage. The other way in which Szarkowski takes a side swipe at Winogrand’s work is in reciting some mind numbing statistics about Winogrand’s prodigious use of film during his Los Angeles period, 1979-1981. In that time, Winogrand processed 8,522 rolls of 35mm film with another 5,000 or so rolls taken but not proofed. Half a million pictures in 2 years. That’s 20 rolls a day. Can you wonder his contact sheet from this period is rubbish? Judging from the 1982 contacts he just walked the streets frantically pressing the button all the time without looking for or at a subject. Well, I suppose Kodak loved him.

By all means get the book to see the work of an American icon. Just don’t expect too much.

Update May, 2019: Sad to report but Winogrand also wasted money on color film stock.

Long thoughts

Photography, Technique

200mm and 400mm are great focal lengths for landscapes

I have always enjoyed using a lens around 200mm for landscape photography. On the one hand, it’s relatively easy to hold steady hand held or with the aid of a monopod. On the other, it affords the easy opportunity of focusing on the essentials, cutting clutter.

I often find that selecting an elevated viewpoint and then composing to cut out the sky works well. This approach heightens the sense of drama and ‘stacking’ inherent in a lens of this length, such as in this picture taken the other day of some local vines just before spring pruning:

Another example of an elevated viewpoint, looking down into the valley in afternoon light is this one:

And finally, a strongly receding subject like this is only made bolder by the long lens:

Go longer, meaning 400mm in my case, and things get shakier. Literally. There’s more bulk to manhandle and more lens length for the wind to bear upon. It’s not that my 400mm lens is bad – it is not – but I have very rarely managed sharp large prints from it using film as they were nearly always plagued by definition-robbing camera shake. 400mm is long! The new ‘film speed’ opportunities offered by the full frame sensor in the Canon EOS 5D, even at 1600 ISO it’s near noise free, have literally brought my old Leitz 400mm f/6.8 Telyt back to life, once it was suitably adapted for use on the Canon body. This was taken at 1600 ISO and I think the shutter speed the camera selected was 1/1000th. Hand held with no support, the original is wonderfully detailed:

Now while there may be an ‘auto everything’ Canon 200mm L lens in my future, it’s really a pleasure to see these old Leitz 200mm and 400mm warhorses getting a new lease of life.

Canon’s EOS Capture

Canon 5D

Instant digital gratification?

I messed about some more with the software Canon provides with its 5D camera, Digital Photo Professional (DPP). You know the application with all those comedic spelling errors.

Well, I found more spelling errors, true, but I got to wondering about the little USB cable Canon provides with the camera that plugs into a receptacle under that silly flap on the side.

After installing DPP on my iBook, I plugged the camera in and switched the ‘Communications’ option on the Tools menu on the LCD from ‘Print/PTP’ (the default) to ‘PC Connect’. That really should read ‘iMac Connect’ but I’ll let it go. With the camera switched on, go to DPP->Tools->Start EOS Capture on the iBook and you are ready.

Take a snap in RAW format and, hey presto!, the picture appears on the iBook’s screen. It works as well in Jpg mode. You see the snap on a full screen where you can actually gauge sharpness, focus, exposure and so on, as opposed to the small LCD screen on the back of the camera where you mostly see your nose in the reflection.

For a studio photographer, whether taking product pictures or using live models, this strikes me as the bee’s knees in functionality. The pictures are automatically transferred from the camera’s card to the computer while all this is going on. Thus a smart pro could have his studio assistant view the screen shots and provide instant feedback allowing corrections to be made. After all, said assistant no longer has anything else to do as he’s not loading film any more. And you thought Polaroid invented instant gratification?

With the camera set to the lowest quality Jpg setting, a sharp picture pops on the screen in 3 seconds; with RAW it pops up blurred in 5 seconds and takes another 10 seconds to sharpen. There’s quite a bit of processinbg going on in this case and, let’s face it, my iBook’s 1.42 gHz processor isn’t the fastest on the planet. The timing with RAW + low quality Jpg is similar.

A separate panel on the iBook’s screen also appears allowing you to set many of the cameras settings using the keyboard, such as aperture, shutter, ISO, image quality. Most intriguingly, you can also enable a timer automating shots with stated intervals. Maybe astronomers will like this sort of thing?

The cable provided is ridiculously short – some eighteen inches – as to be unusable, but that’s nothing an extension cable cannot fix.

Postscript: I tried this set-up with a 15 foot long USB extension cable using my iMac G5 which has a 2 gHz Power PC processor, 2 gB of memory and very fast video processing. A sharp RAW image is displayed in 5 seconds, highest quality Jpg takes 3 seconds and lowest quality Jpg is around 1.5 seconds. These times suggest this would be an extremely capable studio installation as, by the time you have set the camera down to look at the monitor, the image will be there.

Robert Capa

Book reviews, Photographers

Blood and Champagne – book review

I recall approaching this book with the thought that Capa was not really a very good photographer. I came away thinking otherwise, realizing that what makes a war photograph ‘good’ is not beautiful composition or perfect lighting or wonderful technique. No, the act of being there and recording the moment is what makes a war photograph good and no one bested Capa at that.

This book does not include any of Capa’s pictures, being an unauthorized biography. No problem. Just go to the Magnum Photos web site to see hundreds of examples of his work. Alex Kershaw does a fine job of writing a gripping narrative which at the same time is well researched. While the book could do with fewer asterisked footnotes, the quality of research is never in doubt and the writing never dry or academic.

Capa, the man, clearly suffered from what we would now call an addictive personality. His determination to be at the latest war front speaks to his addiction to adrenaline. In between, there was the incessant gambling, the boozing and the women. The gambling nearly bankrupted the agency he founded with Cartier-Bresson, Chim Seymour and George Rodger, Magnum Photos. The boozing was tediously incessant. The women ranged from Ingrid Bergman to Parisian streetwalkers.

Yet what a life the man lead. From the Spanish revolution, where he was in the thick of the action on the Republican side, to the D-Day landings on murderous Omaha Beach, to Viet Nam which took his life, he swallowed his fear and waded into the front lines of action. Kershaw forthrightly addresses the question of whether the famous picture of the Spanish Republican soldier at the moment of death was faked, coming away uncertain. I think it was, having seen some purported contacts of the film roll years ago in a reputable British photography magazine which showed the soldier ‘dying’ half a dozen times in succession, but it’s hardly likely that Magnum, or whoever owns the negatives, is going to release them if that is the case. No matter. One or two fakes in a life as prolific as Capa’s can be forgiven.

He also recounts at considerable length the D-Day story, where Capa went in with the first wave on June 6, 1944, carrying two Contax cameras and a Rolleiflex, taking but 79 pictures. Not surprising he took so few. Capa was a studied photographer who knew not to waste film and knew even better that the goriest images would never pass muster with the censor at Life, whose audience was Middle Americans who wanted their war sanitized. Kershaw relates how a darkroom technician fried the films when drying them, leaving but 11 frames useable, 9 of which were published. To Life’s eternal discredit, the magazine blamed Capa in print, saying the majority of pictures were too blurred to reproduce.

Later, having taken the required five training jumps, Capa parachuted in, yes parachuted in, with the 17th Airborne over Wesel on the Dutch border, in March 1945. Stunning courage. He was armed with his cameras and a spare pair of underpants into which he admitted having to change upon landing!

That his life ended in 1954 at the age of 41 is hardly surprising. First, he was feeling pressure from up-and-comers David Douglas Duncan and Larry Burrows. That meant just one more war. Second, he was, as ever, broke and in need of money. Third, his unwavering dedication to being in the front lines meant that sooner or later the inevitable would happen. So Capa, his best work done, trod on that fatal land mine.

“It’s not enough to have talent”, Kershaw quotes Capa as saying, “You also have to be Hungarian”.

This is a gripping story. The book is available from Amazon.