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Lone orchid in Scanniclift Copse
Spent a happy 4 hours moseying round Scanniclift Copse yesterday. Quite hard to pull a satisfying image out of the lushness, wildness, clutter. Sort of had a hunch that I wasn’t getting focusing quite right. I love the vibrance of this picture put it is spoiled by not having the pieces of wood pin sharp. In fact they are slightly less sharp than the tree trunk behind which misses the purpose of the picture. What I was seeing at the time was the orchid framed by the bits of rotten trunk. Now I see that the pieces of wood look like a pair of hares and that shoudl have been the focus. It looks very different printed out. My printer has rendered the blues of the bluebells much closer to the purple of the orchid. I took a lot of variants but it was quite tricky as my tripod and I were perched on a steep slope that was fragile and cumbly. Really need to go back in a week’s time when things are in fuller bloom – the flowers were only out in patches and in another week or two it will be a sea of colour. Hopefully by then my nice long lens will be repaired and back. Delighted to get the cheque through today from the insurers – very prompt thankyou!
Bluebells and log in Scanniclift Copse
This was the other one I liked best – the simplicity of it - and it has printed up well.
I also found this rather wonderfully grumpy face in the rocks.
Scanniclift rock face
Spent an hour or so putting my new Canon Pixma pro 9500 through its paces. Discovered it will print A3+ borderless if I select Matte Photo Paper instead of Other Fine Art paper (for my Fotospeed Natural Soft Textured). Takes a lot longer to print a page than the HP, but lovely lush quality coming out. A bit of trouble with a red colour cast on one of the ICC profiles supplied by Fotospeed, but I’ve emailed them the problem and see if that can be improved. It’s only 3 months since I really started concentrating on getting to grips with the printing, so what’s a few more days between friends. Suspect I shall end up practically giving away my HP inks on ebay. It’s reassuring to see a few “watchers” clocking up but nobody is making any bids! I’m a newbie to ebay, but the one item I bid on a few months back rocketed in price just in the last hour. So fingers crossed. Did all my Christmas cards over the weekend. Had planned to do a sophisticated design and print them up nicely, but ended up roughing up a card from a photo I took several years ago and printing on the photocopier as that was reliable and quick. Still, I suppose anything with snow and garnished with a bit of red will do. With a bit of luck I won’t be tearing my hair out over misbehaving printers in the runup to Christmas next year. And if it snows this winter I’ll be sure to be out there taking photos to make into a truly impressive Christmas card for 2009!
Christmas card
Spoke to HP support again this morning. At least speaking to a human being who sounds vaguely interested in and sympathetic about the problem – thanks Muneeb! But more fossiking and further delay as the problem has now been “escalated to level 3″ and I won’t hear back before middle of next week. In the meantime ran the test sheets using the custom ICC profiles and they are dramatically different on this printer than the previous one it replaced – much lighter, and the greens much brighter and yellower. Makes a bit difference in landscapes. Also intermittent woolly/fudgy prints that really aren’t as they should be. At first I thought it was probably me not getting all the settings correct but I’m reasonably confident it’s not that. On its own a “bad” print just looks “disappointing”. But trying to analyse it next to a “good” one there is definitely loss of definition, sort of pixelated, sort of dull, muddy, loss of vibrance and clarity. One photo I printed out in 6 sizes and different papers through the HP 9180 and one just on the photocopier. Sad to say the photocopier performed best. Apart from burning lots of expensive paper and ink I’m really at a loss how to progress. Just have to wait for HP next week. I think I’ve got to the stage of saying I want my money refunded and start again with another make. I’ve generally got on well with HP with a lot of our laptops and printers, but they’ll have to do well to keep me loyal after all this. They’re only snapped under artificial light at ISO 800, but here are the test sheets: Left = new printer, right = old printer. Top = Fotospeed Natural Soft Textured, bottom = Fotospeed Platinum Lustre.
Test sheets
One task I did manage to progress over the summer was starting to get to grips with colour management. Very tired of using expensive paper and inks and running too many dud copies. Bought a large pack of A4 platinum lustre Fineart paper by Fotospeed. Not cheap, but took advantage of their free custom ICC profiles. The problem is that although in other respects it is a very good printer, the HP photosmart pro B9180 printer appears to have no way of switching off the colour management in order to run the test print. HP’s helpdesk were hopeless. Googling the problem turned up Neil Snape’s website wich includes handy instructions for fixing the B9180’s photoshop plugin to work in Photoshop CS3 when it was only released to work in CS2. I liked the plugin before I upgraded, so did the fix, and hey presto! what a bonus – it also enabled me to turn off the colour management and get my test page printed. Sent it off to Fotospeed who swiftly emailed back the ICC profile which was then easy to install. The only disappointment is that the profile can’t be selected from the printer’s photoshop plugin print menu, so it’s back to the more cumbersome original. However, I am very pleased with the quality and colour accuracy of the prints I’m now getting. It has given me confidence to invest in some more Fotospeed papers (just ordered this evening) – a pack each of A4 and A3+ of their Natural Soft Texutred Natural Soft Texutred315gsm. The handy swatch they sent was also a help and I’m looking forward to seeing it in big sheets. I tend to print on paper too thin with larger sizes so it ripples a bit in the frame. The other thing I must do is buy some fresh glass. I got the current stock from a friend and it had been kept in a shed and appears to have been very finely randomly etched by insects – impossible to clean off by all means I’ve tried. Keeping and handling large sheets of glass is not easy with space very limited. More than once I’ve “bent” a 36″ x 48″ sheet sliding out from behind other things only to be rewarded with an impressive bang and a pile of diagnonal mishapes that are completely useless. Maybe I should decide on a standard size for framing A3 pictures and buy some sheets of glass ready cut.
Started this out as a 6 month project. Haven’t posted for a couple of months. Got bored with putting stuff “out there” for no particular reason. But the focus has carried on quietly. Haven’t achieved a single one of the targets I originally set, but have done some that weren’t there to start with. Done a lot more software learning than I expected, and branched off into Flash, Audition and Premier Pro. Have printed and hung some decent size pictures. Become more dissatisfied with the quality of my photo taking but not done much about it. Haven’t made as much time as I intended to get out taking pictures, but it has been very good to have a default option for days off. I have learned to value and enjoy more the creative arts aspects of my job such as book, poster and website design. To look for them and enjoy them in their own right in a new way – that has certainly been helpful. I’ve also got better kit than I had 6 months ago (part personal part work) but have yet to really make full enough use of it. I have been taking my art more seriously and putting money behind doing stuff to the best quality I can rather than trying to skimp on costs and do things on the cheap. Don’t know at this point whether I will bother to continue with the blog or even the project as a specific focus – need to think about that. Here’s from a recent trip to Steps Bridge. Wild daffodils
Collected the canvas today (see Nov 10), and it is not as successful as I had hoped. We had obviously crossed wires on what I was actually expecting by way of finish. It was a stretched canvas, but had staples all round the edges and bulky corners. Alan expected that it would be going into a wooden frame, but I was expecting it to be ready to hang. Anyway, I extracted the problem staples, gave the edges a steam iron, and sliced out and glued the corners which made the whole thing look neat and ready to hang. And it’s a good picture to look at even if the print has come up with less green than appeared on the screen. But it simply doesn’t cut the mustard in the location I had planned it for – the end wall of a rather square, low ceilinged meeting room. It is too small in the space, the wrong shape for the space (needs to be longer and thinner) and the wall lights are unflattering. So I have to find a suitable alternative home for this picture, and go back to the drawing room for the Long Barn end wall. I’m thinking maybe something much simpler and graphic but with a natural theme. Like a set of 3 different blades of grass? Hmm.
In the meantime the book arrives on Wednesday. Pre-publication sales have been a bit slow, so we’re hoping it will fly off the shelves once people have the actual copy to handle. I’m hoping the photos in that have been reproduced to a decent quality. We’ve also placed the order for the server with heaps of storage space and proper backup mechanisms so I can spend some time over the Christmas holidays having a good sort out of all my digital archives. Have also pushed the boat out and ordered Adobe CS3 Master Suite so there will be lots of playing and learning!
Remembered I had finally got round to ordering web and mail services for my personal domain a couple of weeks ago, but hadn’t then done anything further. Wowee. Actually got my pages uploaded. It’s only a very basic 4 photos, all I’ve been doing so far is playing with the coding. Now that it’s live I guess I shall have to get on with the content. Anyway, here it is folks. www.sarah.uk.net
Now, I need to make some decisions about printing. Am I going to buy an inkjet printer, or am I going to use an online service, or both? Cost of a decent A3 printer about £300 – £500 plus consumables. If I don’t use it very regularly will be wasting a lot of ink on cleaning routines. For £500 I could get over 60 A3 photographic prints at £7.50 each at Alan Cooper labs, or 100 at Bonusprint. I can use the Ricoh copier here at work for rough proofing before they go. If I don’t have a printer of my own that puts paid to the more experimental stuff like printing on fabric, speciality papers, transparencies etc that I got quite enthused about a couple of months back. I did some sending away a couple of years back with Bonusprint and had trouble with badly trimmed edges. The other problems were really proofing failures where I had oversharpened etc and it wasn’t obvious on screen but would have been if I’d done a test print. There’s obviously the instant gratification of prints with having my own printer, but also the instant frustration when it behaves badly (as all the ones I’ve had so far have). Last time I tried to do some A3s for our chapel I had endless problems with the copier dropping clumps of toner or the glossy paper not feeding in the HP9300. There’s also the space issue of needing somewhere to put a printer. I guess the sensible answer is to get stuck in with lab printing because I can always buy a printer later, but once the capital outlay is made for a printer there’s no going back. So, how about getting 6 photos printed up and displayed? Another issue is finding the time to do the framing so I can display them. I have plenty of materials, but it takes about an hour and a half to make a frame (and creates a lot of dust in the house). Buying frames seldom feels satisfactory because I don’t go into town very often anyway, and I either have to buy frames in advance, store them, and do pictures to fit them, or go looking for a frame to suit the picture I’ve done. The heat sealed on canvas effect works quite well, it’s lightweight, doesn’t need glass, and can either be hung “naked” or just put a frame round it. I’m more likely to get something hung if it comes back ready to go, than if I’ve got to do something else with it, by which time I might have lost interest anyway. So, rambling around the subject, it comes back to why I want output in the first place? If I want to work towards doing some sort of exhibition and/or sales, then that’s a different level of output from pictures to hang on the walls round here. I think at the moment I want to be hanging round here. But when all my digital files get sorted (note the passive tense) after we get a server (scheduled for early December), I will create a system for putting in one place all the pictures that I have outputted in any way so I can easily find them again. And maybe put a copy of the original digital file with it too.
Anyway, before all this chuntering I have also taken some photos today. Got out early and wandered along the Teign from Dogmarsh Bridge and up through Whiddon Deer Park. A huge amount of leaf fall since last Saturday so I wasn’t able to re-take in a more leisurely way some of my grab shots from last week. And quite overcast so needed to look for suitable subjects. A delight to chance upon a Peter Randall Page sculpture. The surface looks so 3D but it’s actually smooth (metal inset into polished granite). I just adore his work. http://www.peterrandall-page.com/index.htm. The middle one is a beautiful Galloway cow who just stood there looking picturesque until a brief shaft of sunlight brightened up her Beech tree. The third is in the deer park woodland. Lots of trees and a reasonable amount of colour, but not easy to find a simple composition. I think this one works okay. I’ve increased the saturation and contrast just a touch.
PS. The postcards are back and they’re all good, and they’re on display in the shop. The book has gone to press.
A walk along the Teign with a friend this morning and as a rare treat my camera was invited to accompany us. (Usually walking is walking and you don’t dawdle!) More like grab shots than anything considered because it’s hard to really take time over a shot when I’m not alone. No tripod and low light so most of them not sharp. For this one though the camera was resting on a bridge which helped.
The next one I loved the colours but it was too blurry to stand in its own right, even with smart sharpening. I gave it some paint daubs and edge brightening in photoshop for a more abstract effect.
Quite incredible how many proof reads a book needs before it goes to press. Four of us doing it, computer spell checks, readings, reading out loud, and still turning up errors. Repeated words across a line break, or missing words your brain just fills in. Wrong words that are actual words like badges instead of badgers. Takes a lot of smoothing out. And hard to pick up all the widows and orphans on the screen – keep having to print out to see them all. 160 pages, 200 captioned photos. The invitations to the launch have gone out, the paper is chosen, the pricing and packaging is sorted. Just a case of taking the final deep breath and sending it off. The file size of the pdf is just under 1GB so we use www.yousendit.com to transfer. I always hate that final commitment step, just knowing that some ghastly error or typo will be pointed out the moment it goes beyond the point of no return. Next stage is to get it on the on line shop – Paul is coming to help with that next week – and get it into the accounts system. A big financial outlay, so we need to be selling enthusiastically. I’ve enjoyed working on it and the two people who have read it so far have been very complimentary. Up to a point I benefit from having the pressure of an external production deadline rather than tootling along at my own pace. It helps force it all together.
