Category Archives: Photography

Outstanding journalism

Photography

Beating the muderous dictator in the Kremlin.

Some fighters, of course, fight. These Russians squared up. They fired Kalashnikovs or shotguns at incoming quadcopters, threw their own helmets or rifles into the path of their descending tormentors or swung long sticks, trying to knock 21st-century drones to dirt with weapons from eons ago. When all other defenses failed, the instant before incoming warheads impacted torsos and limbs, a few swatted or kicked at the quadcopters with bare hands or booted feet, lashing out reflexively at the candid cameras sent to kill them. Then they absorbed shrapnel and blast. The explosions claimed many victims instantly. Others were thrown down and expired slowly, gasping or twisting or rolling in pain, sometimes with uniforms aflame, while observation drones collected footage of their agonies. Occasionally, wounded Russian survivors ended their own lives with hand grenades or by shooting themselves with rifles. Some played dead and ended up that way.

This extract from a superb year-end piece in The New York Times titled “How Suicide Drones Transformed the Front Lines in Ukraine” by C. J. Chivers, written in gripping prose with photography no less compelling from David Guttenfelder, testifies to the wisdom of subscribing to the last great newspaper in America. With The Washington Post now edited by a Murdoch goon (subscription cancelled) and The Guardian likewise (subscription cancelled) there’s only the NYT left for a sane view of an increasingly nutty world.


Superior journalism from the finest paper in the U.S.
Click the image to read.

It’s clear that the only way to stop the Russkies’ aggression in Ukraine it to take out the psychopath in the Kremlin or hope for an early end to his miserable existence. Where is The Jackal when you need him?

Monitor calibration

Epson ET8550, Printing

Apple’s Monitor Display Calibrator.

For an index of all articles about the Epson ET8550 printer, click here.

There are two major aspects of calibrating the color rendering of your system if you want to make prints that match what you see on the display. And while no print – a reflective medium – can hope to match the dynamic range of a transmission technology like an LED screen, you still want to get as close as possible.

The first is to use the right icc paper profile for your printer and paper, something I describe here. And you must not let the printer manage color. The only way to invoke and use that paper/printer profile is to set up your computer to manage color. Leave the printer color management turned off.

The second aspect is monitor calibration. While in OS 10.15 Sequoia it’s hidden away, Apple’s Monitor Display Calibrator is still around and has been for ages. It’s a cheap (free) alternative to calibration hardware which will set you back a minimum of $170. While my Benq monitor comes very well calibrated out of the box, the Apple tool can make things even better. As for my X-Rite Eye-One Display 2 colorimeter it is toast as the makers have refused to update it to work with Apple Silicon CPUs. A business with the integrity of Adobe.

The problem is that Apple seems not to want anyone using the Monitor Display Calibrator as it’s well and truly hidden. Here’s how to find and use it.

Go to ‘System Settings (Apple symbol)->Displays’:


System Settings->Displays

Click on ‘Color Profile->Customize’:


System Settings->Displays->Color Profile

See that little ‘+’ symbol at the lower left, below? Hold down the Option key on your keyboard and click it. This will get you into the Monitor Display Calibrator which looks like this – be sure to click on ‘Expert Mode’ in the right hand window:


System Settings->Displays->Color Profile-Customize

The application will walk you through a five step process to adjust your monitor. Be sure to do this in an ambient light setting as similar as possible to that in which you will display your prints, as ambient light color (‘temperature’ if you speak Geek) affects color rendering in a print. Save the result and then go back into ‘System Settings->Displays’ and make sure your new monitor profile is the one you have selected – see the first image above.

You are done.


A nice print to display match.

Lightroom Classic and paper profiles

Epson ET8550

How to make sure you are using the paper/printer profile.

For an index of all articles about the Epson ET8550 printer, click here.

There’s a poor piece of interface design in the Print module of Lightroom Classic (LRc) which, if the user is not aware of it, will result in a custom paper profile NOT being used and will have LRc default to color management by the printer, which is NOT what you want. I’m on LRc 14.1.1 but would bet that earlier versions have the same bug. Easily checked if you read on.

Most quality paper manufacturers make icc profiles available for a variety of printers and for a broad selection of papers. For example, my default paper’s maker, the French Canson company, lists a host of profiles for its papers here. Dial in your printer’s make and model – the Epson ET-8550 in my case – and you can download and install the relevant profile(s) for use with LRc.

If you are using a custom icc profile matched to your printer and paper then you must not allow the printer to manage color. You want your computer to manage color which in the case of a Mac means you must use Colorsync. This will ensure that the tailored profile is applied when the print job is sent to the printer. Adobe has a somewhat cryptic italicized note to this effect in the Print Job section of the Print module, thus:


The Canson paper profile has been invoked under
‘Color Management’. Note Adobe’s italicized advisory.

The problem is that you cannot ‘turn off’ color management on purpose (meaning selecting ColorSync – see below) as LRc does that for you. But you sure as heck can accidentally turn it on, and I explain how that can happen in the details which follow.

Now click on Printer, lower right above and you get this:


The Print dialog.

Click on ‘Color Matching’ and you will see:


LRc has selected ColorSync. It’s greyed out,
so you would think it cannot be disabled. Read on.

Whatever you do, do NOT click on ‘Cancel’ to exit this dialog. If you do click on ‘Cancel’ and click on ‘Color Matching’ again guess what? Adobe switches the printer setting to ….


The Print dialog. LRc has switched
to ‘Managed by Printer’. WRONG!

The tailored custom paper and printer profile you think you are using will be bypassed and the printer will take control of color management, which is exactly what you do NOT want.

Instead, to exit the Print->Printer Options->Color Matching-> dialog (go up two images) you MUST click on ‘OK’. That will preserve the ColorSync setting and you should not have to go into that dialog box ever again. The ColorSync setting is stable and is preserved even if you exit and restart LRc.

How did I discover this? Well, print colors were off in my first run with Canson paper and only after a bit of digging did I realize that I had lost the ColorSync setting which ensures that LRc manages color using the custom paper/print profile. The Epson printer had taken over, messing things up as it does not know to apply the custom icc printer/paper profile. All the printer knows is that you are using glossy paper (if you told LRc that – in the ‘Print Settings’ drop down in three images above) and nothing else.

You can safely confirm that color management is indeed Off by clicking on Print Settings->Advanced Color Settings whereupon you should see this:


Confirmation that Color Management is Off.

Hardware changes in 2024

Photography

More of the same, really.

For my demanding Studio Dogs project big prints were de rigeur. The project took most of the year to complete, concluding with thirty-six large prints, all made on the excellent Epson ET-8550 printer, as frugal as it is reliable. After one year and over 400 13″ x 19″ prints I have had but one paper jam, probably my fault as I may have overloaded paper in the feed tray.


The Epson ET-8550 photo printer.

More software than hardware, the later images were printed on Canson paper from France and that paper is proving superior, as regards gloss retention, to the many sheets of Hewlett Packard dye ink paper which preceded it.


Canson high gloss printing paper.

Those Studio Dogs were all photographed on a Nikon D800 whose over ten year age makes it ancient in these digital times, yet there’s no improving on the images it delivers at a fraction of the cost of Nikon’s latest hardware. As for triggering the strobes, a remote strobe trigger, now almost two decades old, makes for a wireless connection.


The Nikon D800, introduced in 2012.

And if you think 2012 is old, how about the Novatron studio flash outfit I continue using, manufactured over a quarter of a century ago? Sure it has wires not rechargeable batteries (ugh!) but it’s as reliable as a hammer and puts out a lot of light.


Novatron outfit with Bert the Border Terrier.

And speaking of the Nikon D800 and its splendid 36mp sensor, another major project in 2024 was the re-digitizing of old film images at a quality level significantly superior to that obtained with dedicated Nikon film scanners. And we are not talking about a handful of scans here. How about over 2,200 in a matter of a few short weeks? This setup is not only good, it’s also spectacularly fast.


Inexpensive and outstanding film scanning setup.

The biggest hardware change in 2024 involved migration from the behemoth 2010 Mac Pro with its seven cooling fans and vast bulk to a minuscule single fan Mac Mini M4 which is a fraction of the cost of the oldie, confers the latest security updates via the Mac OS and delivers performance which is …. identical! Sadly the old Mac Pro will have to go to the recyclers as selling it with attendant shipping costs and transit risk is not a viable proposition. It is, in other words, worthless and I hate Apple for forcing me to upgrade from a bulletproof machine by obsoleting it with its truly useless annual OS upgrades.

And the Mini ‘upgrade’ with its Apple Silicon CPU/GPU meant that my old non-subscription Lightroom and Photoshop processing applications would no longer work and I am now on the hook for $10 monthly to Adobe for Lightroom Classic until I croak, and even my heirs will likely see these greedy bastards continue to make money off my estate. As for Photoshop, fughedaboutit. I bought Affinity Photo 2 which does every thing I need for a one-off payment.

On the movie display front I added a second ancient Intel Mac Mini to the living room TV to permit routing of movies, stored on hard drives in the remote home theater, to that TV. You would think the existing AppleTV 4K attached to the TV would suffice to do this but Greedy Timmy in Cupertino sees to it that routing of content from hard drives attached to remote Macs is impossible with the AppleTV puck. He wants you to buy more hardware and a sub-$150 ancient Intel Mac Mini is more than up to the task.

As for the Home Theater with its 120″ screen and LG UST projector, allied to a fine Sonos sound system, all is sweetness and light. The Theater continues to show a movie every night, the hardware has proved to be robust and fault free and the recent addition of a magnificent 1955 Rolleiflex 2.8D to the display of photo hardware adds that special touch.


The Rolleiflex 2.8D, manufactured
between Aug 1955 and Sep 1956.


The Home Theater with the LG Ultra Short Throw projector.

So 2024 paid homage to the old belief that buying the best is consonant with a long life, along with some ingenious gadgets which cost little but truly deliver. I only regret being forced to remainder that great Mac Pro and having to give Adobe more of my hard earned money.

Mac Mini M4 after one month – Part VI

Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

It will do, and is fine with LRc.

In Part III I set forth some technical measurements which indicated that the performance of the 2024 Mac Mini M4 was pretty much on a par with that of the 2010 Mac Pro fitted with dual 3.46gHz 6-core Intel CPUs, 80gb of memory and a speedy Nvidia GTX980 GPU. By contrast the M4 Mini has a single 10 core CPU and just 16gb of very fast memory. This testifies not only to the great performance gains realized by Apple with its in house Apple Silicon M4 CPU with its integrated GPU, but also shows just how awfully good that old behemoth, the Mac Pro tower was almost 15 years ago. Sadly, Apple’s planned obsolescence strategy, which saw to it that the Mac Pro was now six generations of MacOS behind, forced the upgrade. Well, that and the aggressive pricing of the new Mini, and my electricity bills will fall!

I now have a month of heavy daily use with the M4 Mini under my belt, much of that with the Apple Silicon optimized Lightroom Classic (LRc – v14.1.1), an upgrade from the prior Lightroom v6.4), so the following observations are mostly subjective.

Start up is much faster at 4-6 seconds compared with 20 for the older version, if I get a beachball it’s maybe once or twice a week, and with previews enabled image-to-image flipping is instantaneous. There’s the very occasional delay of 3-4 seconds for the image to render in full definition but that was also much the case with the Mac Pro.

More significantly, the latest version of LRc adds significant functionality in terms of localized image adjustments with both the Remove and Masking tools well implemented and easy to use, largely obsoleting the more complex variants in Photoshop. Indeed as I hate paying rent I dropped PS all together and made a one-off purchase of Affinity Photo 2 which does all I need on those rare occasions where LRc cannot do the trick.

A good example of the use of these new to me tools is in this night snap of a retailer’s window in Carmel, CA. The host of images I took in that setting all have a common factor which is that the dynamic range is very high, necessitating exposure for the highlights, to avoid burn out, with a post processing need to bring up the shadows. In the case of these ‘before’ and ‘after’ images not only was the shadows slider used to bring up the shadows across the whole image, I then selectively masked the fountain at the lower left to bring the sparkle in the water to life. The difference is, err…., night and day:


Before.


After.

In learning some of these new features I invested in Scott Kelby’s book. It does not cover the recently added Remove/Generative Fill functions but is an excellent learning resource, greatly superior to any video I have seen.

Returning to the Mac Mini M4, it never gets more than a tad warm to the touch, is small enough to nestle at the back of the keyboard tray and performs equally to the old Mac Pro at a fraction of the cost. While there were many frustrations regarding application incompatibility when switching from Intel to Apple Silicon CPUs these are now behind me, though I still hate paying Adobe $10 monthly in rent for LRc. Otherwise, what’s not to like?