Monthly Archives: November 2008

HP Designjet 90 still available!

Printing

A great bargain.

Click on ‘Printing’ in the left hand column and you will see that I am a huge fan of HP’s previous generation DesignJet 90 18″ wide printer. A small footprint, fade free inks, great reliability and …. cheap for what you get. HP’s current large format printers start well north of $2,000.

I thought that the HP DJ90 was no longer available, but a quick spot of Googling and it seems they are still available new.

The print quality is beyond reproach, not least owing to the use of dye inks which results in a really deep black. As for the fade free claim, I can attest to one print I have at a friend’s home, under plain glass, which is in bright sun 8 hours a day and has been for two years. It’s as good as new.

So if large prints are your thing, check out the HP DJ90 or 130 (which will print up to 24″ wide).

Update: Check the Comments to this piece for a discussion of paper and supplies availability. I have also added extensive details about HP’s newly released (2008) profiles for many non-HP papers.

Lightroom 2 tutorials

Lightroom

Assessing whether to upgrade.

Now that Lightroom 2.0 has come and gone, with the usual fixes for basic bugs which should never have left Adobe’s labs (Americans always prefer garbage today to quality tomorrow), Lightroom 2.1 is beginning to intrigue me. I’m still using 1.4.1 because it’s stable and does what I need, but one of the appeals of 2.1 is the ability to do localized adjustments without hopping over to Photoshop. That’s something I tend to avoid like the plague.

The other evening as I was flipping though photography podcasts on the Apple TV – you can do the same on your computer (Mac or the other kind) using iTunes – I came across a counterintuitively named one going by the title Photowalkthrough.

Here’s the download page in iTunes – just search in iTunes on ‘Photowalkthrough’.

The podcasts of interest are the ones on Lightroom 2. I have watched a couple and there are really nice on screen demos of the use of the local adjustment brush which seems to be the key feature added in LR2. I was especially impressed by the auto masking feature which restricts edits to, say, backgrounds or foregrounds, based on the outline of the object concerned. No need to outline the item in advance, as you might in Photoshop.

I seem to recall reading that the upgrade from LR 1 is some $100 and after watching a few more of these I may well spring for the cost. There’s a 30 day free trial version available, of which more here.

How many pixels?

Cameras

Most of the time!

It never ceases to amaze me how photographers will splash out on the latest megapixel wonder camera. Point-and-shoots now often boast over 10 megapixels and DSLRs are now up to 22+ mps in full frame sensors. Yet where do all those pictures end up? Why, on a computer screen of course, likely 20″ diagonal in size or less.

Scroll down a while and take a look at the many articles here where I include snaps to illustrate some hardware issue. Chances are that the picture was made with my ancient (5 years old) Olympus 5050Z – a 5 megapixel camera which I use at its lowest quality setting, generating 640 x 480 pixel images – 0.3 megapixels. That’s nice as I can upload them to this journal without any further compression. It probably sells used for well under $100.

Before they got caught up in the pixel race, Nikon’s professional DSLRs offered a relatively low pixel count, preferring to focus on sturdiness and speed of operation. The 3 or 4 mp originals were more than good enough for newspaper work, most of the time, and even then the quality of the original could not possibly be reflected in newsprint reproduction.

So my take on all of this is that the only photographers needing more than 640 x 480 are those making large prints (like me!) and pros working for large format glossy magazines where the difference matters (half a dozen other guys).

Of course, if you were to show up at a modeling session with Linda Evangelista, say, with my little Oly, I do suspect that you might be unceremoniously shown the door, but that’s not to say your pictures would have been any worse than the pro’s had you actually been allowed to take them

One more step

Photographs

America makes another huge step forward.

So much of the world so desperately wants America to be good and great again, that it bears recalling one of the ugliest times in the nation’s history, best characterized by this Dorothea Lange depression era picture.


Mississippi, June 1937

Some seventy years after Lange snapped this picture, bigotry and racism remain nascent in much of our nation, but we rise above this, moving on joyfully.

The bursting blood vessels, the guns, the bibles, the braying of hounds and the clinking of manacles become ever more distant as America once more has the opportunity of being a beacon of light and progress. The senescent purported ‘hero’ (when Americans say ‘hero’ they usually mean ‘victim’) and his boastful ignoramus of a running mate will now return to the cesspool whence they came, hopefully never to be heard from again. An America whose leaders denigrate education, intelligence and thoughtful reflection is not one I want anything to do with. Judging by yesterday’s polling, I am not alone.

It’s been a long time since January 20, 1980, the last time Americans proudly held their heads high and thought “This is what we stand for. This is the example we will set”. Since that time we have seen an America guilty of unilateral military aggression, the abolition of many rights granted us in the Constitution, and crimes of greed unparalleled in our short history. I, along with many of my fellow Americans, hope that the new administration will once more make America an example, not the pariah it has become.

Those who appreciate Lange’s iconic photograph understand.

Color abstraction

Photographs

The mind’s eye

I can never resist this sort of thing – a tight collection of shapes, reflections, textures and a little color.


Panasonic LX1, 1/250, f/8, ISO 100. 16:9 Widescreen format.

The car’s price tag, visible in the original, states $28,888, so you can guess this was taken in the San Francisco Bay Area with its large Chinese population, the number ‘8’ being a symbol of good luck in that culture.