Elegant design.
I was struck by the exceptionally elegant design of this fire station in San Mateo on the SF Bay Peninsula.
iPhone 5 snaps.
Lightroom 5
Worth the money.
All the enhancements I set forth here are in the final release, made yesterday. The upgrade from earlier versions is $79 and easily worth the money, not least for the splendid keystone correction which is built-in.
Conversion of my catalog, some 10,000 mostly RAW files totaling 265GB with another 35GB of full size previews, took around 5 minutes and performance seems identical in all respects to Lightroom 4, meaning excellent. The application opens in 5-7 seconds on my nuclear powered Hackintosh (Sandy Bridge i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, nVidia GTX660 GPU), and image-to-image changes are instantaneous. Life-size previews really help here and I recommend you create those when importing files. The penalty in terms of storage space is modest, with 13% additional space used in my case.
Rain in Burlingame, CA. A rare sight.
Photo taken on the iPhone 5, processed in Lightroom 5.
Printing Paper for the HP DesignJet 30/90/130 – Part IV – Fade tests
Very disappointing.
It has now been three months since I started fade tests on six selected Hahnemühle ink jet printing papers, test prints having been made on my HP DesignJet 90 dye ink printer, cut in half with one half exposed to eight hours of bright sun and the other half stored in darkness. Mine is a non-smoking household. I used original HP inks in all cases.
Three matte and three glossy test strips in the sun.
I reviewed Hahnemühle glossy printing papers here and matte papers here.
The results are extremely disappointing and I cannot recommend any of these papers for use with the HP DesighnJet dye ink printers if exposure to strong sun is contemplated.
Here are the before and after results – it’s obvious which is the ‘before’ and ‘after’ print in all cases:
Baryta FB Glossy
Fine Art Baryta Glossy
Fine Art Pearl Glossy
German Etching Matte
Photo Rag Bright White Matte
Photo Rag Ultra Smooth Matte
The prints subjected to sun exposure were placed behind a regular domestic window. If mounted behind UV glass they might fare better but, candidly, the results are so poor that I would not waste time or money on any of these papers for use with HP dye inkjet printers.
Hahnemühle’s statement that their papers are ‘compatible’ with dye inks is at best a vague obfuscation, at worst an outright lie.
Use with pigment inks – no better: I cannot even recommend these papers for use with pigment inks. Look at the white margins in the above results. It’s even clearer in the originals I am holding in front of me. Without exception, every single margin – where no ink was ever deposited – is yellowed, the worst being the three glossy grades, the first three above. If you contemplate buying costly art prints ask which paper was used and if you hear Hahnemühle – run for cover with your check book, regardless whether dye or pigment inks were used.
I will move on and test other brands when time permits.
In the Presidio
Civil war era glass.
Nikon D3x, 35mm f/2 MF pre-Ai Nikkor.
Death of the Photojournalist
And high time, too.
When the CEO of Yahoo!, Marissa Meyer, stated the other day that there are no more professional photographers when addressing the changes at Flickr, she was dead right. Sure, in true politically correct fashion she retracted her truthful opinion, but that does not change how right it was.
I wrote the same thing here six years ago. It’s obvious.
The other day the Chicago Sun Times laid off all its staffer photographers. They are all freelancers now, just like you and me. And the reason is simple. You luck out at and find yourself at whatever the breaking news of the day happens to be and your cell phone records the happening for the Times and for posterity. In full movie mode, likely as not. Why pay some guy to do that when the Times can get it from you free, or pretty close? And you will have been in the right place at the right time.
Photojournalism – the paid kind – is dead and about time. Anyone can take a picture and PJ does not demand quality results. It demands that the photographer was at the scene. And we are all photographers now. Today Capa’s dying Spanish revolutionary soldier would have been pictured by his colleague in the trenches with his iPhone. The picture would be no better or worse. All it took was being there. And unlike Capa’s image, quite possibly faked judging by his contact sheet which seems to be surprisingly unavailable from Magnum, the modern one would be the real thing.
Capa’s dying soldier – or not.
You say that human interest stories demand solid training and great gear? Fine have at it. But they aren’t worth very much to a media outlet catering to a zero attention span audience. High time these so called photojournalists were off the payroll as the economics make no sense.