Category Archives: Technique

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.

A little tweak here ….

Photographs, Technique

…. a little color there.

The beauty of the adjustments in Lightroom (I’m on 1.4.1) is that the results are seen instantly on the screen and the sliders for these are really quite intuitive – not something that can be said of the industrial might of Photoshop with its poor user interface. Further, unlike Aperture, which I no longer use, you do not need the latest liquid helium cooled MacPro with 16 gB of RAM and the latest $2,000 graphics card to run the thing at half decent speed – an old iMac G4 more than suffices and you can probably pick one of those up for $50 with a nice big screen at a yard sale.


Canon 5D, 24-105mm at 58mm, 1/250, f/8, ISO 100

Here you can see the bland original (underneath) and the final versions of this snap. The final adjustments can be seen here from Lightroom’s History panel – look at the right hand column of data.


Adjustment history for the image above

That seems like a lot of work until you realize it took about a minute or so to do, aided by the nice large 21.6″ Samsung LCD screen attached to my MacBook. Exotic? Hardly. Available today for under $200 from many makers. Viewsonic now lists a 22″ screen for as low as $160 – a perfect accessory for the MacBook’s small screen whose gloss finish does little to help photographers. The aftermarket screens come with matt surfaces, as they should. Another example where Apple’s marketing focus does little to serve users. Unless you are in a pretty dark room, the glossy screen is a real pain to use, but Apple no longer markets a matt screen version.

The Vibrance and Clarity sliders are especially useful in giving your image ‘pop’, but I find it’s easy to overdo things. A little goes a long way. Unlike the 50mm Canon f/1.4 optic, the 24-105mm L zoom used here displays no color fringing. Instead you get severe barrel distortion at 24mm, not something that’s visible here.

Immersive media

Panoramas

A step up from QTVR.

I have written a lot in this journal about my discovery and adoption of QTVR 360 degree virtual reality photography using Quicktime and a special camera mount. If you would like to see some of the results of my efforts, please click here.

Now all of that is old hat!


Immersive Media’s Dodeca 360 camera

How about a 360 degree movie version? Click here for a demonstration. The camera, by Immersive Media has no fewer than eleven lenses and can be worn on the head, for those seeking to emulate the man from Mars. It seems pretty light.

Now where’s my check book?

Large prints on canvas

Printing

Up to 86″ a side!

I came across this site while looking for a large print service.

They certainly use the right printers and fade free inks as this excerpt from their FAQ states:

“What kind of equipment are you using to print on canvas?

Photogonia uses state of the art printers like HP DESIGNJET 5500 series and EPSON STYLUS PRO 9800. These large format printers deliver high quality print jobs that fit the high standards that Photogonia sets for our products.

What kind of Ink are you using?

PhotoGonia uses ONLY original factory Inks like HP 83 UV Ink Cartridges for our HP printers and 8-color Epson Ultra Chrome K3â„¢ Ink For our Epson printers. PhotoGonia doesn’t use refills, third party Ink or generic Ink. ”

A 40″ x 30″ ‘gallery wrap’ canvas (the printed edges are stretched over the frame) is $322.50, shipped. Not cheap, but the alternative of buying an ultra-wide carriage printer for one or two prints a year is hardly a viable choice. For that matter, unless you regularly make large prints, this sort of service makes sense for any photographer limited by the 13″ carriage width common on home ink jet printers.

Ring flash

Technique

An awful lot to like.

The ring flash I have been using on the 5D with the 100mm Canon macro lens is proving to be a real joy. It’s pretty much set and forget. All I do is adjust ISO to procure an f/11 aperture with the camera on shutter priority and 1/200th (the fastest sync speed) and the circuitry in the flash takes care of balancing natural and artificial light. In use I simply leave the flash switched on all day – battery drain is only significant when recharging as opposed to maintaing a charged state. My current set of four alkaline AA batteries has lasted for some 16 hours and two hundred or so snaps, and shows no sign of dying.

F/11? That, I find, gives the best balance of definition and depth of field. Smaller apertures introduce diffraction and definition begins to fall – that’s physics, not Canon. Wider apertures at close distances result in very shallow depth of field – appropriate for plane, perpendicular surfaces only. ISO seems to end up in the range 100 to 400, which is the sweet spot for the 5D’s sensor. Nice!

Reflections of the tube in the ring flash can be an issue – though the sort seen here just enhances the sense of curves.

Occasionally, with reflective subjects, you get a nasty image of the flash tube reflected in the subject, like so:


Note reflections from the sun and the ring flash

I do not know whether the enhanced localised processing controls in Lightroom 2.0 could fix this – I”m still on 1.4.x and await 2.1, presumably suitably debugged. In the meanwhile, it’s back to that old dog Photoshop (Lightroom has a direct export and save function) and a few seconds with the Magic Eraser:


After using the Magic Eraser in PS CS2

That’s more like it. French Racing Blue never looked better. The wide brimmed individual on the left is none other than famed racing driver and backdrop man, Franklin Rudolph.