Category Archives: Photography

Second fifteen

Photography, Technique

Enough mounting, framing and hanging for a while.

The goal for my one man show in April, 2007, is to have thirty, framed and glassed large prints on display, maybe supplemented by a couple dozen matted but unframed ones in the saw horses in the gallery.

The first fifteen have been shown here before.

Once the QuickTime image loads – click below – cursor over any of the pictures on the walls and the cursor will change to a finger pointing to a globe. Click and you will be take to a high quality image of the picture. Click the ‘back’ button on your browser to return to the panorama.

Click here

I ran out of conventional wall space in the home and the theater so I had to resort to hanging the final fifteen, now that they are framed, in the garage, which offers lots of unused white walls. Not the greatest display space, perhaps, but it beats having the framed pictures standing up against various walls, waiting to be accidentally kicked.

Here’s a fish eye snap of the ‘gallery’ – not high quality but you get the idea:

The production line process I mentioned in my piece on framing made this a reasonably efficient proces, fourteen steps in all, viz:

Cut the mounting tissue* (30 minutes)
Mat* (30)
Name and sign all the prints* (15)
Build frames (33)
Install glass (7)
Clean glass (60)
Install print/mount/mat sandwich* (7)
Insert framing points (15)
Drill holes for wire eyes (15)
Install wire eyes (30)
Install hanging wire (60)
Mark wall at standard heights – 70″ for the landscape prints, 73″ for the portrait format ones (30)
Knock in hangers (15)
Hang prints (7)

* Cotton gloves are worn in the asterisked steps, all of which involve print/hand contact.

Aggregate time for each step is shown in parentheses, above. The total of three hours and 21 minutes does not include the time taken to make the prints – reckon on 15-30 minutes per print. Excluding the printing time, the time per mounted and framed print is around 21 minutes with this production line approach, which is not as bad as you would think, considering that the final product is a professionally mounted and framed print with real glass. (Lucite or perspex may be lighter and less fragile, but attracts dust horribly and just looks cheap with large prints).

Each step is done 15 times before moving on to the next. Phew! It may be tedious but going through this process print by print would take infinitely longer. If you need to make a lot of exhibition prints, I commend this approach to you.

Why all this focus on time? Because time spent framing is time not spent taking pictures.

Zealotry

Dining, Photography

To some extent, we are all guilty.

If you accept the modern definition of a zealot as one who advocates the use of a specific technology regardless of its suitability, then I confess I am guilty.

Until digital came along, I was a Leica zealot. Once disgust with Microsoft came to bear, I became an Apple zealot.

I would argue my motivation was simply that something better had come along.

In the case of Leica, superior point-and-shoots – which is what the M Leica is all about – came to market at a fraction of the cost with far greater capabilities.

With Apple it was far easier. The Mac worked. Windows did not.

And now I am a fan of both digital image making and Apple computers. To the exclusion of all else? Not a bit of it. If something better comes along for my purposes, I will move on.

Some Leica film users stick with their old cameras because it’s in their comfort zone. I have no issues with that. It may be that they are limiting their options but that’s not my business. Whatever works for you and makes good snaps possible, have at it.

But here’s what works for me – that sweet little pocketable Panasonic Lumix LX-1.

So, apropos nothing, here are two snaps taken the other day. One is at a favorite restaurant in San Luis Obispo named Novo on Higuera Street, which has a gorgeous patio setting over the river. I asked for the ‘special’ and this magnificent production, halibut on a bed of spinach with that exotic pink mushroom, subtle in size (a rarity in corpulent America), sublime in taste, was presented:

Then, wandering down to that great sausage shop on Marsh Street in this lovely Victorian town, what did I come across?

This great old car company is run by an Englishman named Peter. An American success. He came here some 25 years ago as an illegal immigrant, employs 10 people, now has legal status and works on the finest English machines you could dream of. And it simply does not get any better than an S1 Bentley. We will forgive the missing hubcap and those frightful whitewall tires.

Always carry a (pocketable digital) camera.

Bigger and faster

Canon 5D

A 2 gB CF card joins the Canon 5D.

When I first got my Canon EOS 5D I opted for two of SanDisk’s fastest 1 gB cards, the so called Extreme III, costing $103 each in February, 2006.

As digital tends to result in more pictures being taken, and as I shoot only in RAW on the 5D, given the ease of processing RAW images in Apple’s Aperture, I found myself running out of space on these cards more frequently than I like. Each holds 58 RAW images.

CF card prices continue to come down apace in price so I have added one 2 gB Extreme IV card, $91.95 after rebate to my CF card collection. Twice as much storage for less than a 1 gB card just 9 months earlier!

SanDisk claims the Extreme III can write data at no less than 20mB per second; by comparison, the Extreme IV is rated at ‘up to 40 mB per second’. Now ‘up to’ probably is some sort of ideal scenario and I have no idea if the card is faster as, with the 5D’s huge internal buffer I don’t need to care, but there’s no denying the capacity increase.


With an empty 1 gB card


With an empty 2 gB card

Now 120 photographs in one session is a lot for this photographer, but not having to change cards in ‘mid roll’ is one less thing to worry about. Further, these cards are so reliable in use that I am far less concerned about data loss than when I first got the 5D – the argument being that it’s better to store images over several cards to reduce loss if a card goes bad.

The largest card on the SanDisk web site is a 16 mB Extreme III which would store no fewer than 960 (!) RAW images, albeit at a punitive cost in excess of $1,000. Which, I suppose, means it will be $200 in twelve months’ time. Maybe I will be writing this piece again in a year, extolling the virtues of a thousand image card….

A tale of two lenses

Lenses

Some empirical tests deliver surprising results.

Being the ‘serious’ photographer in the family, the sad responsibility of selling off everyone’s film cameras naturally falls on my shoulders as we all move on to the world of digital picture taking.

I made mention of my mother-in-law’s magnificent Kodak Medalist II earlier, at which time I also sold her film Canon Rebel, together with its cheesy 28-80mm ‘kit’ lens.

Years earlier I had bought the same Rebel but got so tired of the execrable quality of the kit lens that we sold it and replaced it with a better 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 Canon with improved optical and mechanical quality. When she decided to upgrade to the digital Rebel, we did the same, buying the pricey EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS in lieu of the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 non-IS kit lens. A wise decision once you have handled the latter.

Anyway, I finally decided to sell the film Rebel and I dutifully listed it for sale. However, as the lens will cover a full 35mm frame I spent a few moments taking some pictures with it side by side with the costly 24-105mm f/4 L lens, both on my Canon 5D. You can get some sense of the relative sizes of the lenses here:


Both lenses at their shortest focal lengths


Both lenses fully extended

I took pictures at full aperture and f/8 with both, at 28mm, 50mm and the 105mm maximum.

Looking at the results, I must confess any differences are more imagined than real, and I know my 24-105mm L is good for enlargements to any size any rational user would want.

The L lens adds an Image Stabilizer, goes wider at a very handy 24mm, has lots of metal, very smooth controls no wobble anywhere plus …. lots of weight and bulk. By contrast, the 28-105mm lens is very light, although the mount is metal, has a horribly raspy, grabby zoom ring and the lens barrel wobbles about merrily when fully extended. Both have autofocus with the L marginally faster, but not enough to make any practical difference. Oh! and yes, before I forget, the L is $1,300 and the other is $230.

Now we may have been lucky and got a really good example of the cheaper lens, but based on this little exercise, I would recommend it without hesitation for anyone looking for light weight, fine resolution and a nice broad zoom range good for 95% of anything a regular photographer might need. You might not want to bash it about too much or expect it to last to the next millenium but, then again, you would also save a lot on chiropractor bills, not to mention over $1,000 on the lens.

HP ink costs

Printing

The old HP 12C helps out.

In my piece on framing Really Big Prints I guessed at the cost of ink used by that frugal beast, the Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 printer.

Well, in the HP engineering spirit, I whipped out the old 12C and set to work.

Checking the ink levels on the printer showed the following:

Yellow 3/4 full
Black Full
Magenta 3/4
Cyan 3/4
Light Magenta 1/2
Light Cyan 1/2

Now as the level in each cartridge is reported in one quarter steps, I averaged 3/4 full to mean 5/8 full (i.e. half way between 3/4 and 1/2) and so on, making for ink use aggregating 2.5 cartridges.

Production?

13 18″ x 24″ prints and 27 13″ x 19″ prints, or 12,285 sq. in.

With cartridges averaging $35 (the prices differ, strangely, according to color), that works out to $87.50 in ink, or $1.75 for a 13″ x 19″ and $3.07 for an 18″ x 24″.

So my $4 ink cost-per-print estimate in that earlier journal entry was a tad high. You can make an 18″ x 24″ print with the HP DesignJet, paper included, for the price of a hamburger-and-fries at the local fast food joint.

The HP DesignJet dye-based series of printers (30, 90, 130) are frugal, indeed, when it comes to ink use. I cannot express how pleased I am with this large printer and, in truth, rather regret not having bought the 24″ carriage model, though how I would handle mounting and framing 24″ x 36″ monsters in 32″ x 42″ frames boggles the mind.