Itoya large print portfolio

Printing, Technique

An inexpensive display approach for large prints.

It costs some $40 to mount, mat and frame a print for hanging. Not cheap, especially is you have many. A related issue is that wall space is limited unless you are an oligarch or billionaire.

One inexpensive alternative is the ‘family’ album, but that usually comes in small sizes for display of wallet sized prints.

However, there is a fine product to be had, made by Itoya, which comes with 24 13″x19″ plastic sleeves, each with a black interleaver to prevent ‘bleed through’ with back to back images. B&H has the best price; buy two or more and shipping is free.


The album holds 48 13″x19″ prints, back to back.
Click the image to go to B&H.

Longevity? I have one where the prints have been in contact with the acid-free plastic sheets for over a decade and the colors are as good as new, with no yellowing. One cautionary word. If your prints are freshly made let them air dry for 24 hours before inserting in the sleeves. This will avoid having heavy ink areas stick to the plastic. That is certainly my experience with the Epson ET 8550.

It takes longer to sort the prints than it does to insert them in the sleeves:


This batch used less than one tank of ink in total in the Epson 8550.

Nikon D800 film scanning – Part IV

Film

Can you say ‘fast’?

For an index of all my Film related articles, click here.

There is absolutely no upside to time spent scanning old films, other than the end result. The process is of surpassing tedium and the goal of the previous three articles, starting here, has been to make this process fast and seamless, without sacrificing a commitment to the highest quality results.

With LR tethering working well and a carefully tailored import preset dialed in in the tethering panel (exposure, contrast, vibrance and so on) I set about the project seriously and here is this morning’s result:


28 scans, 47 minutes.

Yup, 28 high quality scans in just 47 minutes and that includes negative strip selection and insertion in the film strip carrier, dusting, image recording using the D800 rig, conversion in Lightroom from negative to positive (in the import settings, so it’s automated), dust retouching – the most time consuming step though LR’s clone/heal tool is excellent and fast – and final contrast/exposure/vibrance tweaks. And I was not rushing things. The final step is to rename the files to conform with the original negative numbers should the originals ever need to be retrieved. The computer is a 2010 MacPro with two 3.47gHz 6 core CPUs, 96gB of 1333MHz RAM and an Nvidia 980GTX GPU.

The results are ready for printing …. large:


Magnificent English sheepdog.

These were taken at Crufts Dog Show in February, 1972. Leica M3, 50mm and 90mm Elmar lenses, TriX processed in Microphen pushed to 800ASA/ISO.

The North End Road

Photographs

Fruit and veg.

England is certainly not the agricultural powerhouse that is France and the United States, but when I was a lad growing up in London they grew fine fruit and veg and, yes, exported a lot of that. Now exports are zero in the wake of the greatest act of economic suicide – Brexit – since George III lost America. Oh! well. The produce was fresh and chemical free, back then.

These were snapped in the fall of 1971 along the North End Road which not only featured produce vendors but also the occasional spiv unloading clothing which had fallen off the back of the truck, one wary eye out for the cops.








Leica M3, 35mm and 90mm Elmar lenses, TriX.

Amazingly, the market exists to this day.

I went down to the demonstration

Photographs

August, 1971.


Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Leicester Square, London, in my youth was the place to demonstrate, make merry and vent your frustrations at The Man.

Snapped on my then newly acquired Leica M3, 50mm and 90mm Elmar lenses, TriX film, scanned on a Nikon D800. I was 19 years old:










You can read about the Soledad Brothers here.

Nikon D800 film scanning – Part III

Film

Some further efficiency fixes and related notes.

For an index of all my Film related articles, click here.

In Part II I looked at batch inversion and color negative imaging. Here I look at tethered capture and focusing considerations.

Tethered capture: Lightroom has long supported tethered capture with many Nikon and Canon cameras; the camera is connected with a cable to the computer and after tethered capture is enabled (File->Tethered Capture->Start Tethered Capture) this panel will appear on the display:


The tethered capture information panel.

Comments on user fora suggest many have issues getting LR to recognize supported cameras – indeed I had that issue – and one fix from Adobe goes as follows. Go to this directory in Finder:


This is the file to erase.

Erase the highlighted file – this is for LR6. It will be recreated when you next start LR. After doing that my tethered D800 was recognized fine.

I wrote about tethered capture here and because Nikon uses the fragile USB2/USB3 Mini USB connector I strongly recommend you concoct a strain relief at the camera end, whether a piece of wire, as I show, or the more elegant Nikon USB Cable Clip. Damaging the camera body will not make your day when that sub-optimal connector is yanked/torqued out accidentally.

Why tether? Because you see the image on a large display seconds after pressing the shutter button. Nothing is recorded on the camera’s CF or SD card. The image is sent straight into LR where sharpness and alignment are easily judged. This speeds work flow and you can bang away at those old negatives with abandon, watching the images pop up on the display. You no longer have to remove the SD/CF card from the camera and insert it in your card reader.

Film strip orientation. There a lot of nonsense written about making sure the matte side of the negative faces the lens. I tried both ways, flipping the image for comparison. This image has microfine detail in the child’s pullover and there is no distinguishable difference between matte side and glossy side to the lens. So I use glossy side to the lens as there’s no need to flip the image in LR. Here are enlarged comparator images:


Glossy and matte sides to the camera lens, respectively.

Here is the processed image:


Glossy side to the camera lens works fine.

Focus point: Once inserted in the film strip holder, the film is slightly bowed in a convex shape on the glossy side, the one which faces the camera lens. I do not use a glass film strip holder to try and remove this bowing, as holders which use plain glass can cause “Newton rings” interference on the image. These manifest themselves as rainbow like patterns. There are “anti-Newton ring” glasses available but they are lightly etched to prevent this phenomenon and reduce definition in the image as a result. Further, four glass surfaces mean four more areas on which dust can accumulate.

I use an aperture of f/9.5 on the Micro Nikkor AF-S lens which is the sweet spot where depth of field and definition meet. You do not want to use the lens at full or minimum aperture where definition suffers. Further, depth of field at full aperture is very slim, making critical manual focus that much harder. Given that the film surface is not plane, does it make sense to focus on an area half way out from the center of the image to optimize depth of field and related sharpness across the frame?

In the comparator images below, the first used spot focus in the center while the second focused midway between the center and the edge of the long side of the negative. I used the directional pad on the D800 to move the autofocus point, having earlier determined that auto focus is superior to manual focus. The latter uses the viewfinder LED indicator to show best focus and I have found that nailing that is so critical that deferring to auto focus is easier and more repeatable.


Center and half left spot focus points.

There is no discernible difference between the center and half-left spot focus point images with the grain sharp at all points. Conclusion – center spot focus is just fine at f/9.5.

How fast is the process, a key goal of this project? Read about that here.