Category Archives: Technique

A ten year digital device

Printing

The Epson 1270 printer

When it first appeared on the market six years ago, the Epson 1270 color dye ink jet printer was the first consumer priced printer which could make large – meaning 13” wide and up to 44” long – prints with high quality and repeatability. I bought mine new in March, 2000 for $539.05 and proceeded to produce hundreds of color and monochrome prints with it. First in 8” x 10”, later in 13” x 19” sizes, which makes for a nice 22” x 28” wall sized matted, framed result.

I’m not writing this because the Epson has given up the ghost. Far from it. The only reason that I know exactly when I bought it and how much I paid is that I just resurrected the original shipping box from the attic and found the sales invoice in there. You see, the Epson will soon be making its way east to my nerdy friend whose current printer is limited to 8” x 10”, and he know and loves the quality this machine is capable of, reliably producing at 13” x 19” prints.

Ink remains easily available, even if all the colors are in one cartridge and the Epson’s software is about as good at predicting the ink levels as the Federal Reserve is at predicting inflation. Which is to say it gets it in the ball park but don’t stake your life (or next print) on it. Epson sold a lot of these wonderful printers and given the profit margins on ink sales you can bet fresh ink cartridges will be available for a long time.

Conservatively, I’m guessing that the 1270 has at least another four good years left in it, which makes for a ten year life in a digital age where products are seemingly obsolete days after hitting the market. Epson made the 1270 obsolete soon after I bought mine and eventually switched to pigment based inks with claims of great longevity. Didn’t worry me one bit. I have framed originals which are six years old and they look as fresh as the day they were made. I simply do not display them in full daylight eight hours a day.

One of the great appeals of the Epson 1270 was that its use of dye based inks, despite their reputation for fading, resulted in a color print quality very similar to that obtained with the old Cibachrome process. This was, for most, not something to be undertaken at home, as the temperature margins of the chemicals were narrow to put it mildly and their toxicity comparable to the effluent from Chernobyl. What Cibachrome gave you was a wonderful depth of color albeit at the expense of high contrast, so it matched up nicely with milder emulsions like Kodachrome II and, later, Kodachrome 25 and 64, provided your exposure was spot on. Paired with that old grain hound GAF/Ansco 500, Cibachrome was a dream. It was a strict teacher, but get the exposure right and the dynamic range was there for all to see.

The only reason the 1270 is moving on is that I find I want to make 16” x 20” and 18” x 24” prints more often, and if that does not sound like much of a change the latter size is almost twice the area of 13” x 19”. That’s a lot bigger when it comes to visual impact.

So B&H Photo has an order from me for a Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 (they are backlogged, suggesting the secret is out) offering dye based inks which, miracle of miracles, are allegedly fade resistant. I toyed with the idea of the Design Jet 130 model which goes up to 24” wide, but concluded that prints that large were pretty much the exception rather than the rule for me, so common sense prevailed over machismo.

Truth be told, I am a tad apprehensive about the new printer. Not that installing the thing worries me – heck, with an Apple iMac it’s just one more ‘Plug and Play’ exercise. No, as a long time user of HP’s 12C calculator (a device now some 25 years old!) my wariness results from my all too great familiarity with HP’s instruction manuals. Hewlett Packard was always an engineer’s company, run by and for engineers, with the brief exception of a disastrous, mercifully brief, time under a chief executive who confused her posterior with her elbow daily, while spending far too much time on the former in the corporate jet. Now that the company has returned as an engineering powerhouse, I’m afraid that the same people who wrote the manual for my 12C calculator will have been involved in the book for the DesignJet. They or their kids.

On the other hand, like all good engineers, they probably believe that instructions are for losers, so the first thing I propose to do when the machine finally arrives is to pitch the instruction book. Worked with the HP 12C and Reverse Polish Notation was never an issue for this Pole. Any descendant of a proud nation that can charge Panzers on horseback needs no instruction book. And it doesn’t hurt that I have an honors degree in Engineering earned before the days of ‘open book’ exams.

Goodbye Epson. You delivered beyond any rational expectations.

A break in the storm

Photography, Technique

More than just a rainbow

Name any of the world’s great democracies and the chances are that you will find its happy residents indulging in the cocktail hour before dinner. America, Britain, France, German, Australia, Brazil – all favor this pastime which many regard, myself included, as the very touchstone of civilization.

Then look at those dour nations who struggle with the very idea of ‘one man, one vote’; God forbid ‘one woman, one vote’ for many do not even allow women the freedom of the ballot box. The Saudis? They don’t drink. The Russians? They do nothing but drink. The North Koreans? Please….

So after a day of truly wretched weather which saw thunder showers every few minutes interspersed with brief rays of sunshine, the thought of the daily libation was very much on my mind as I made my way to the freezer with its gin every bit as cold as the glass next to the bottle. Just before opening the refrigerator I glanced to my left and there it was. A superb rainbow gracing the old estate – clear sky to its left and threatening clouds on the right. Now you should know I’m pretty much blind without my glasses but that didn’t stop me from rushing to the office to grab the 5D, nearly damaging myself on that insouciant boulevardier Bertie the Border Terrier en route, and exiting stage left at a rate of knots that would have given pause to the staunchest of Olympic competitors.

Forget the old wives’ tale that landscapes are a stationary subject. Not a bit of it. Give the elements five seconds and, likely as not, the effect is gone. So throwing caution to the winds I banged off a couple of snaps even though what I saw through the viewfinder was mostly a ghastly blur, trusting to the gods and the Canon’s automation to get things more or less right.

I rushed back in at scarcely lower a pace and placed the card in the reader. Locating my glasses gave confirmation that all was right with the technology from Canon HQ, but when I loaded the picture into Photoshop and snapped it up to 100% original size (that’s some 30″ x 45″ on a print with the 5D’s full frame sensor) it became clear that the otherwise denuded tree on the right was replete with more birds than you could shake a stick at. The small picture here scarcely does it justice but a few moments later as I sipped the soothing elixir, the magic lighting long gone, I could not but help reflect on this wonderful bit of serendipity.

Fixing distortions

Technique

A tweak in Photoshop CS2

I’m finding the definition of the Canon 24-105mm IS L lens to be equal to anything on medium format or from Leica on 35mm. What is not so good, however, is that at 24mm you get noticeable barrel distortion (the sides bow outwards) and darkening in the corners.

Sometimes these aberrations do not matter but if you have strong horizontals or verticals or large smooth tone areas, they can be irritating to put it mildly.

I had thought that the only way to correct these was to take RAW images and make the adjustments in the very nice Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) interface. As I have written earlier, proper exposure technique results in little added benefit with the EOS 5D’s full frame sensor using RAW compared with JPG Fine, at least for this user. Plus I’m getting comfortable with the in-camera processing of JPGs offered through the Picture Styles option. JPGs have the great benefit that file duplication is avoided and, of course, file sizes are smaller meaning import to your computer and loading in image processing software are both much faster.

Stated differently, I’m of the growing opinion that RAW is overrated. I do not see better definition or tonal range in any large prints I care to make. I have no need for an unprocessed original. Once I have processed it I like it as it is and cannot see changing it again. And the thought of having to catalog two images of each picture is complexity in search of confusion.

Well, looking through the myriad menus of Photoshop CS2 the other day, I chanced upon Filter->Distort->Lens Correction which offers the same ability to correct lens aberrations in JPGs as ACR does in RAW.

Here’s how it looks corrected on a screen shot:

Both barrel distrortion and vignetting are quickly corrected.

I’ll experiment some more with RAW but JPG Fine is just, well, fine for me.

Monochrome flashback

Photography, Technique

Still taking the occasional black and white picture

While I may have largely given up on black and white pictures, sometimes things just look better without color.

This was taken almost directly into the sun and the color original is already pretty desaturated. One click using the TLR Black and White Conversion action for Photoshop and a satisfying monochrome rendition results. I find the TLR plug-in gives a better monochrome tonal range than Photoshop’s native ‘Desaturate’ command. There are lots of other interesting actions on that site, too.

Note the slight vignetting in the sky from the Canon 24-105mm L lens at 24mm. I left it in as it heightens the mood.

Delegate the drudge of routine printing

Photography, Technique

American ingenuity never ceases to amaze.

Every year about this time our family – my wife, our son, the dog, the cat and I – engage in a nerve trying ritual.

The annual Christmas postcard picture.

For years now we have been taking this picture on the nearest point and shoot digital camera which falls to hand as the probability of catching all five cast members with bright smiles, good expressions and open eyes is …. well about as likely as that of finding a politician with integrity. Not impossible, but difficult, to say the least. So we place the camera on a tripod, gather together and bang away. Twenty tries usually does it. This year it was twenty one. Digital, of course, with its instant feedback, ensures we get something useable without having to wait for the film to come back from processing and going through the whole ordeal again.

Now, the picture taking part of the process, I must admit, is far from the most trying. The tough work begins when it comes to printing forty or fifty hard copies to mail to all and sundry. As I ordinarily use my wide carriage Epson printer for large prints which end up mounted and framed, making 4” x 6” postcard-sized ones is sheer agony. You can bet that the print nozzles will be clogged, rendering all and sundry in shades of purest magenta on the first pass. Then, after wasting much time and ink using the self-cleaning cycle (only a marketer could have thought up that misnomer), I try to recover that template I made for Photoshop years ago which places four prints on one sheet. Well, of course, it’s either missing in action or the annual software upgrade has rendered it useless again. Then when I get that bit sorted, I invariably run out of ink.

But then what would you expect? Take one of the very worst designed applications, a study in user torture named Photoshop, and pair it with the least friendly consumer gadget since the VCR – the home printer – and you have a recipe for frustration and failure.

So, this year, I said No More. I had come across an advertisement by one of the large drug stores in the West, Walgreens, which said you could upload your snaps and then elect to have them printed and ready in sixty minutes at a store of your choice. So we uploaded the annual snap (number 21 of 21!) to the local Walgreens, after first downloading their software which, believe it or not, even came in a version that works with computers preferred by human beings rather than geeks. I mean, of course, Apples. And not sixty minutes later, an email arrived asking that we drop by to pick up the prints. No, they don’t deliver. Not yet, anyway.

So we took the boy and the dog for a stroll down the road and there they were. Fifty beautiful 4” x 6” prints, perfectly exposed with those wonderful skin tones the home printer only dreams about, processed in a Fuji Frontier machine right there in the store. Total cost? $8. Yes, 16 cents apiece. Now had they been using a Kodak machine I would have gone elsewhere, as the second worst run American corporation (the prize goes to GM by a considerable margin) is not even capable of making a reliable machine or supporting after market service in a timely manner. So unreliable are the Kodak machines, and so poorly supported, that even the Wall Street Journal noticed after the large Target store chain threatened to return all its machines and going with Fuji if service did not improve. At my local Target, the Kodak machine is typically down 40% of the time.

The point of this piece is that while film may indeed be dead, the commercially made print is alive and kicking.

When I originally wrote the Film is Dead piece, I posted it on Photo.net to gauge reactions. Some fifty emails later, many laced with obscenities and personal attacks, I had in fact confirmed that Film must be Dead, otherwise why would so many deny the facts in ghetto language? It is troubling, though, that these purported aesthetes never graduated from grammar school.

Since that time, America’s second worst run corporation has restated earnings (they don’t even know how much they are losing), laid off thousands more employees (if all else fails, blame the worker – right out of the GM play book), has discontinued monochrome printing paper (excuse me, silver gelatin to those who still use it for cheap effect or is that marketing again?) and obsoleted (‘rationalized’ in MBA speak) most of its color film offerings. And that was just in one fiscal quarter.

So while film, which I still use for serious work, is on the way out, shortly joining the wax cylinder and the LP record as an avocation of the lunatic fringe, the genius of American capitalism, that prime mover of this great nation of hustlers, remains alive and kicking by making easy printing from digital originals a trivial matter.

I for one, while Walgreens and Fuji did their thing, got on with other more fun things this year rather than wasting time with the execrable Photoshop interface and the ink jet printer.

So go ahead and send your casual digital snaps to the local drug store – just make sure it does not use a Kodak machine if you want your prints back any time soon.