The Online Photographer: Ctein

<|-- removed generator --> The Online Photographer: Ctein

+ Sponsors

Resources

Ctein

Friday, 08 October 2010

Ctein in Minneapolis

Ctein showing prints last night in Minneapolis. Photo by John Camp.

Ctein is in Minnesota for, among other things, his Dye Transfer Series show (at the link, look lower left) at the Mpls Photo Center, 2400 North Second Street, Minneapolis, on the second floor of the Northwind Lofts. The opening is tonight from 7 to 10. Here's how to get there. If you can't make the opening but can get to Minneapolis, the show is up through the end of the month. Do not miss!

Mike

Send this post to a friend

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on Friday, 08 October 2010 at 09:36 AM in Ctein, Exhibits | Permalink | Comments (9)

Thursday, 07 October 2010

A Perfunctory Guide to Converting Photographic Film to Digital Prints, Part I

By Ctein

Too commonly I hear photographers engage in segregation by medium. Many are convinced that it's impossible to obtain satisfactory digital prints from photographic film. Or, conversely, satisfactory traditional (a.k.a. darkroom a.k.a. analog) prints from digital files. Neither happens to be true. In fact, many accomplished printers are successfully "coloring outside the lines." I will go so far as to say that in the hands of a skilled printer, a better print can often be made from film digitally than can be made in the darkroom unless one takes extraordinary measures. For some photographs, digital printing will exceed the very best darkroom prints. (I define success by how well the print serves the artist's intent. Spec-comparing and pixel-peeping are not part of that equation.)

As a long-standing dye transfer printer, I work with those very-best prints. In my rather informal and certainly not objective statistical sample, about half the time I think my digital prints are just as artistically successful as my dye transfer prints, although they look extremely different. About one third of the time the dye transfer prints are clearly superior. The remaining one sixth of the time, the digital prints come closer to fulfilling my artistic intentions than the dye transfer prints do. Considering that dye transfer is at the pinnacle of color darkroom processes, that's remarkable. Conventional color darkroom printing doesn't come close.

Even in the realm of black-and-white printing, digital holds its own. The ability to precisely control characteristic curve shapes with programs like Photoshop and Picture Window makes a huge difference in the tonal qualities of black-and-white prints. In broad terms, you can match any black-and-white film and darkroom paper combination that has ever existed. It may take you trial and error to get there, but it's entirely doable. My Alcoa Building photograph (below) is a good example. The density range of a good modern digital print on semigloss or gloss paper is not markedly different from that of a well made darkroom print. (If you're printing on matte papers, that's an entirely different matter, and you may have to give them up or get to be very, very good at printing). In the extreme, an exceptionally well-made black-and-white darkroom print may convey a longer density range than a digital print, but the far more precise and complete control over tonal placement in digital usually trumps that hand.

The negative languished in my files for over 30 years, after the darkroom paper that I needed to get it to print just right was discontinued. Last year I successfully printed this negative again...digitally. The print is better than the best darkroom print I'd ever been able to make.

That said, achieving these kind of results in digital prints is not easy nor always straightforward, and it requires paying attention to myriad details that may be unfamiliar to the traditional printer. Broadly speaking, the digital printing process can be divided into three steps: scanning the film to produce a raw digital file, manipulating that file in a program like Photoshop to obtain precisely the aesthetic results one wants, and successfully rendering that result on print paper. Obviously a short tutorial cannot tell you how to make masterful prints. It took me many years of my life to learn how to do that, and the methodologies would fill a book (which I may write some day). This relatively short series, though, will set you on the right course and help you avoid many of the more obvious pitfalls.

Scanning
Do get a dedicated film scanner. It is rare for a flatbed scanner to offer scan quality anywhere near as good as that produced by a proper film scanner, no matter what the printed specifications may suggest.

Scanning film, especially negative film, is very straightforward in principle. People most often get into trouble when they try to get too "clever" about their scanning, hoping to divine some magical trick. The purpose of scanning should simply be to capture as much data as possible from the original film in a form that is easily manipulated on the computer. Choose scanner settings that will catch the longest density range in the film, hopefully everything from the deepest shadows through the brightest highlights (this can frequently be done with a not-excessively-expensive scanner), at as high a resolution as is practical, and in as linear a form as is possible.

Aesthetically, such a scan will not look good: it will look flat, low in contrast and/or color saturation, and it will in no way make a good print by itself. Effectively, it is a digital negative. But, that's what you want to start off with.

Finding the scanner settings that allow capturing the maximum density range is a matter of trial and error. Every scanner software package behaves differently. You certainly want to do your scans in 16-bit-per-channel mode. You will need all that extra data later. Whether you scan the film as a negative or slide, whether you set the scanner in "linear" mode or not, these are matters that depend upon the particular make and model of scanner and software. There is not an obvious answer that I can give you except to try different modes and see which one captures the longest total density range. In some cases you will find that your scanner captures a longer density range from the film if you scan a negative as a slide, so don't be afraid to give this a try.

I'll pick this up next week with further comments on film scanning and some remarks about what a big win digital image manipulation is.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly TOP column appears on Thursday, usually in the morning.

Posted on Thursday, 07 October 2010 at 01:28 PM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | Permalink | Comments (60)

Thursday, 30 September 2010

Keeping 1000 True Fans

By Ctein

This is the latest installment in my series on running a "1000 True Fans" business experiment. The previous four articles about this were:

1000 Photographic Fans...Maybe?
Does Ctein Have 100 'True Fans'?
Finding 1000 True Fans
Supporting 1000 True Fans

It's Year Two, and now is when push comes to shove. In the previous columns, I've explained why this model can be a good fit for photographers. Unfortunately, there's one way in which it's not a good fit, and that is in the matter of keeping the True Fans. With any sort of subscription scheme, subscriber loss is always a major concern. That's true whether you're publishing a magazine or runnning a charity pledge. Folks will often sign up the first time on impulse; keeping them signing up year after year is an entirely different matter.

The problem for photographers is especially acute, much worse than it is for writers or musicians. When it comes to "experiential art," such as literature or music, the True Fans are always in the market for more. Doesn't matter if you've read a dozen Terry Pratchett or John Sandford novels; if you've enjoyed most of them (and if you're truly a True Fan, you did) you're looking forward to the next one. The appetite of a True Fan for new work of this sort is essentially unlimited.

It's a different matter when it comes to "tangible art," like paintings, sculptures, or photographs. True Fans don't acquire unlimited numbers of such works. Every collector reaches a point at which they say something like, "Gee, I still like Ctein's work, but I think I own enough Cteins." Enough might be a large number. My most avid patron owns nearly 50 of my dye transfer prints. That's an astonishing number. But even she finally reached the point at which she stopped buying new ones. She likes my new work as much as my old, but she has enough.

Most Fans, no matter how True, are going to reach that point well before 50! After that, if they're still supporting the artist, it's out of the goodness of their hearts, not in an expectation of receiving new work. That's the problem I face going into Year Two of this experiment.

I'm doing exceptionally well by most measures. More than two thirds of the Year One contributors renewed for a second year. That's an extremely high renewal rate, and I worked very hard to make that happen. Still, looking at it from the half-empty-cup side of things, that's a 30% loss. If I can't make that up, this scheme will peter out in a few years.

So, what have I done to encourage people to renew? I've provided them with incentives, new and better options, and better gifts:

People can now take one print as soon as they start their subscription, instead of two at the end (at the Tier 1 support level). Originally, people had to donate money to me for a year before they got their gift prints. I got resistance from folks who just couldn't imagine giving me money for a year on the promise that they would get something at the end. This is for those folks who feel that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
When people subscribe for Year Two, they immediately get a gift of a limited-edition, signed chapbook (see my previous two columns). There are only 200 copies, and the only way to get it is to be a Contributor; it's not for sale.
I surprised people with extras. Everyone got a set of holiday notecards last Christmas. When it came time for people to pick their gift prints at the end of their year's subscription, they discovered that I had added a dye transfer print to the choices, when I had only promised them digital prints.
I enhanced the rewards. People renewing at the Tier 2 or 3 level will have the option of choosing one of two large digital panoramic photographs in lieu of several 11 x 14 prints.

Higher-tier Contributors are going to have the option of receiving one of these two large (44 inch long) panoramic digital prints in lieu of several normal-sized 11 x 14 prints. Will that bring in more Contributors, in particular Tier 2 or 3 Contributors? We'll see.

Is it working? Well, as I said, I'm running about a 70% renewal rate, and that's incredibly good. I'm also getting a slightly higher percentage of renewals at the higher tiers, so I'm seeing something more like 75% of the revenue I did last year. But, as I said, there's still that 25–30% attrition, and I honestly haven't figured out how to make that up. Yet.

It's an interesting problem. It may turn out to be an intractable one.

Will I have more to write on this in another six months to a year? Honestly, I have no idea. It's an adventure.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning on TOP.

Posted on Thursday, 30 September 2010 at 11:00 AM in Collecting, Ctein | Permalink | Comments (20)

Thursday, 23 September 2010

Plus ça change

By Ctein

In the past I've written about my migration from film photography and darkroom printing to digital photography and digital printing:

Transition State

I Quit

Some of the results of this change are starting to become apparent to me. I'm a little surprised to find that it seems to be subtly altering the contents of photographs I make. Why I should be surprised by this, I don't know. Three years ago I wrote:

I Am the Camera...Or Is It the Other Way Around?

One would think I ought to have a bit of the self-aware clue. Well, sometimes, not so much.

I think working purely digitally is making me a bit freer, artistically speaking. With film photography and dye transfer printing, I gave every photograph weighty consideration. That's not too surprising considering my choice of media. It's not so much about the cost of film and processing as the printing, seeing as a single finished print would eat up over $100 in materials and as much as a week of my time. I try not to make photographs that don't at least have a chance of turning out to be portfolio-worthy. When adding a photograph to the portfolio consumes that kind of time and money, one is inclined to be rather selective; I set the bar high. Understand, I still made more portfolio-worthy photographs than I'll ever have time to print. There was no incentive for me to lower that bar.

The stakes aren't quite so high, nowadays. Making a portfolio-quality digital print from a digital photograph consumes considerably less of my time, energy, and money. By a full order of magnitude, in fact. That's a huge change, and it comes from the combination of both digital photography and digital printing. I can and do print my old film negatives digitally, but there's two hours of additional meticulous work just to produce a good, clean scan of the film. That's two hours I don't spend starting with a digital file.

The results aren't necessarily different. The illustration at the top of the post is one of my rare ventures into whimsy, but there are a handful of dye transfer prints in my portfolio (like this one and this one) that involve, for me, similar, um, "sensibilities." First they make me smile; then they make me think (thank you, Ig-Nobels). For the most part, it's not so much that I'm venturing into new artistic territory is that I'm much more comfortable playing, and at the sometimes-dubious fringes of that territory.

The best analogy I can come up with is that it's something like the difference in style between photographing with "mere" roll film and with an 8x10 view camera. One takes a much more considered and deliberate approach in the latter case. Which is good discipline, but can also be stultifying and limiting.

Some of the time, I am venturing outside of the comfortable and familiar neighborhoods. I'm willing to take greater risks and roll the dice more often, because the stakes aren't as high. This picture is the sort of photograph I would have been very unlikely to make in my film/dye transfer days. The odds of getting an artistically interesting composition would simply have been too low and required burning up inordinate amounts of film; in addition I would not have had a good sense if the experiment were successful until putting in considerable effort and money in the darkroom. I wouldn't have considered it worth that level of risk and investment for such a small chance of success; after all, as I said, I have no shortage of worthy negatives demanding to be printed.

In my brave new world of digital photography and printing, the cost of a roll of the dice was low. So I rolled them. Several times. To my delight and surprise, I won.

Maybe this is one of the reasons my Muse is so entranced by working with silicon instead of silver. It leaves her more opportunities to try something a bit different.

It'll be entertaining for all of us to see where this goes. Me, I love surprises.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Thursday mornings.

Featured Comment by Kosch: "After following this blog for 4+ years, I bought an Olympus OM2n on ebay for $45.

"The 85mm lens ($125) was an add on that I had to have, since I loved my 135 f2 lens from Canon on my 10D and this was the closest I could find. I bought 32 rolls of Tri-X film (400 ASA, B&W) and was as careful as possible for every shot since every roll cost me average $22—best digital scan possible on a CD and 4x6 prints as a more of an instant 'nice job, here is how it looks straight out of the camera.' From my film endeavor, I have 3 photos which have made me enough money to live on for a year.

"My digital photos have never made me a dime, but because of the amount of shots I am able to take with a digital camera, and coupled with the ease of editing and ability to post my photos online, I get more happiness overall with my digital photos. Shots of my wife and daughter bring more comments and joy from family and friends than a ridiculously sweet shot of a water pump from 1845, even though that damn water pump paid the bills in 2009, and it was a great film shot.

"Film still wins for me money-wise, I'm not sure why. I can sell a print blown up from 35mm film for $500 plus, but try and place a digital print next to the 35mm print, and the technically better (IMHO) digital will not sell. There is some sort of juxtaposition happening right now in the photo world...people prefer looking at the web photos, but when real money is involved, it has to be big, framed, and on the wall.

"I'm going to seek happiness in the awesome 10,000+ digital photos I take with my E-3 on my right side this year, but my money will be made (hopefully) this year again with my OM2 on my left side.

"Technology will win, but when?"

Posted on Thursday, 23 September 2010 at 10:22 AM in Ctein | Permalink | Comments (42)

Thursday, 16 September 2010

How To Make A Chapbook (Part II)

Part I is here

By Ctein

This is somewhat off-topic, but since most of you don't get my regular newsletter...

I'll be having a major show of dye transfer prints in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from October 8th through the 30th. The show emphasizes my Hawaii work.

I'd love to have you come to the opening on Friday, Oct 8 if you live in the Greater Twin Cities area (which extends from Winnipeg to Chicago). This is the first major public show of my dye transfer work in 25 years. Might not be another one until 2035. We now resume our regularly scheduled programming.

Last week I planned out a chapbook. I chose the format, medium, topic and photographs. Once I had work prints of those photos it was time to address some layout matters. The Epson printer driver is most uncooperative about centering printing on a sheet and printing with less than a half-inch margin. It kept begrudging me a few silly millimeters of image at the trailing edge. Finally, I simply told the printer it was printing on legal size paper. Of course, I ignored the nonexistent three inches of length, but it faked out the driver so that I wasn't butting up against its permitted print margins.

When you center-staple and fold the chapbook, the inside sheets are wound tighter than the outside ones. Going from the innermost sheet to the outermost sheets, the fold eats up about half a millimeter more paper on each successive page. Adjust the position of the photographs on the pages so that the pairs on the inside sheets are slightly closer together than those on the outer sheets. That compensates for the fold so that the assembled book has centered photos on every page and improves the look of the book.

Don't try to hurry the printing. Printing on the second side of a sheet before the first side has dried is asking for paper feed trouble, due to the sheets being floppier and more wrinkled. Print a batch of sheets for side one of sheet one, spread them out on a table to dry, and go on to print side one of sheet two. By the time you've printed all the side ones, the first sheets will be dry. Even so, you may need to hand-feed them through the printer to avoid them sticking to each other. Definitely don't load more than a few sheets at a time. Even so, about one in three times my printer whined that it couldn't successfully feed a sheet and I had to go aid it.

Consequently, printing is not a "set it and forget it" affair. It's best done as a background task when you have other computer work to do. I always have some—editing photographs, answering e-mail, writing these columns. Printing pages for chapbooks does not consume a lot of my time, as long as I'm not just babysitting the printer.

Once all the pages are printed and dried, collate and center-staple them (above). Fold the books along the staple line and burnish down the edge of the fold to tighten it. A horn or bone folder is ideal. (If some of the terms and tools in this article are unfamiliar to you, Google remains your friend.) I can't seem to find mine, so I've been using the rounded end of a Sharpie marker (below). It seems to serve.

At this point, you should have a nice-looking little booklet, but the edges opposite the fold will not be neatly aligned like the top and bottom ones (assuming you were careful collating your pages when you stapled them, which of course you were). That's partly because it's hard to precisely fold a book by hand, but mainly it's because the inner pages stick out more than the outer ones due to the fold (below). It's only a few millimeters, but to me it looks sloppy , though some artists like to have all three of the unbound edges ragged, to enhance the hand-made look.

Trimming the edge is tricky. A proper guillotine cutter is expensive and won't work well unless there is enough paper outside the cut line to clamp. I'm trimming only a few millimeters. I could print on oversized paper but that would substantially increase the cost of each book, not counting the cost of the guillotine cutter.

I tried conventional paper cutters. In fact I just spent over $100 on a heavy-duty rotary blade model that's designed for precise work. It didn't, well, um, cut it. Wasted money. I couldn't manage a straight and precise enough cut on 8 thick pages. (Anyone wanna buy a Swingline 9615A cutter?) After expending much time, thought, effort, and money, I returned to the traditional tried and true method. A solid metal straight edge and a box cutter or similarly sturdy and sharp hobby knife.

Lay your chapbook down on appropriate cutting surface. Place the steel rule on it a millimeter or so in from the edge of the cover page. Put your weight on the steel rule so that nothing will shift. Use that nice, fresh knife blade to trim off the pages flush with the rule. It's easier than it sounds. Don't try to cut all eight pages at once, you'll get worse results. Just make repeated passes along the edge of the rule, cutting off two or three sheets with each pass. Don't force it. Voilà, you have a finished chapbook with neatly trimmed edges.

Sign and number them and start sending them out. Wasn't that fun? Well, I think it's fun. I love making books. I can't wait to get started on my next one.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP every Thursday morning, for some value of "morning."

Featured Comment by John: "I make poetry chapbooks and hand sew the binding. Pretty simple and much nicer than staples.

"Once a book is folded, punch three tiny holds in the fold, thread them, and tie off the thread inside at the center hole. Pretty easy once you figure out the threading sequence. Dick Blick sells the right thread and needles.

"For trimming the right-side excess, Kinkos (now Fedex Office) does that very cheaply and accurately. I like my cover to overhang the pages a bit, so I add that after the trim. Just finish all the inside pages, fold them into completed books sans covers, and stack them. Kinkos will slice the whole stack in one cut on their high-end cutter."

Featured Comment by Terry Crooker: "Some tips for you. I am not a professional photographer, but I am a professional printer and now you are talking my business.

"First fold each sheet separately, then collate them. You will get tighter folds. Second take these to a small print shop and have them saddle stitch the books (if staples are OK with you) and face trim the books for you. Face trim is what trimming the push-out is called. The important part is to be sure you keep photos and text well inside the outside margins on the center sheets so nothing get trimmed off. Note: a real saddle stitcher doesn’t use staples but a continuous wire that it forms a staple from. These 'staples' tend to be neater and much tighter."

Posted on Thursday, 16 September 2010 at 12:20 PM in Ctein | Permalink | Comments (11)

Thursday, 09 September 2010

How To Make A Chapbook (Part I)

By Ctein

I made my first chapbook this summer, "First Snow, Minneapolis ~2009," as a gift for my True Fans (more on how that's going in two weeks). It's a form I've been wanting to use for some time; they're a great way for artists to express themselves. Chapbooks are not difficult to make, but there are tips which will make it even easier for the first-timer.

What is a chapbook? It's a pamphlet, usually paper-bound and center-stapled, containing a small, self-contained body of work by the artist. It's frequently used by poets for publishing a group of poems and by writers for individual short stories. For me it's a nice way to present a modest selection of photographs.

The front and back covers of my first chapbook, "First Snow, Minneapolis ~2009," 16 8.5 x 5.5" pages containing 15 4.5 x 6" photographs. Definitely not available through fine bookstores everywhere.

One of my Fans wondered if the name was a contraction of "chapter book"—a plausible hypothesis. The etymology's more interesting. The mid-1800's word originally referred to pamphlets sold and distributed by "chap men," itinerant peddlers and merchants. Chap, y'see, means to trade or barter. It's very old: the original form—"cyp"—goes back to the ninth century.

Another derivation from cyp became "cheap," as in a good deal or a bargain. That fits chapbooks to a T. Producing a full-blown book of work will typically consume hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars. A chapbook can be created with a few dozen hours work and, via computer magic, self-produced for a few dollars a copy. Such a deal!

How to proceed
First, decide on a format. I like four sheets of 8.5 x 11 paper, center stapled and folded in half, yielding a 16-page 5.5 x 8.5" chapbook. Depending on text, cover material, and white space, that allows for 12 to 16 4.5 x 7.5" photos.

Production details come next. For my clientele, obviously these should be be printed by me, although others might choose to go with commercial print-on-demand or small-run printing houses. For a signed and numbered edition of 200, doing my own printing was economical.

Printing on both sides of paper severely limits one's paper choices. Ilford Smooth Lustre Duo is a lovely paper that feels like heavyweight coated stock. It prints nearly as well as the true photographic inkjet papers; unfortunately it costs about $.65 a sheet, making for a more expensive book. Epson Premium Presentation Matt Double-Sided paper costs one third as much; it feels like high-quality heavyweight uncoated stock and, unfortunately, prints much the same way. Blacks are unconvincing and weak, entirely unsuitable for work that relies heavily on shadows. Otherwise, it's capable of better reproduction than you would normally see in a press-printed book.

I decided I to learn to work within those limits, halving the cost of the book.

Narrative flow
Having decided on form and the substance, one can look to subject matter. This is not your Magnum Opus. Just find a group of photos that entertains you and don't overthink it. My original notion, an excerpt from the Christmas in California or Final Frontier monographs, was clearly not going to work. Too large a fraction of the photographs in both volumes depend upon rich blacks. Fortunately, most photographs don't, and, as I discussed in last week's column on "Themes," it's easy for me to find groups of work within my photography that share a concept or exhibit commonality, even if that's not what I set out to do when I made them.

I've discussed how one goes about choosing the particular photographs for a book in "Every Picture Tells a Story."

Develop your narrative flow, decide what the front and back matter will look like and whether there will be any text (an artist's statement is nice but not obligatory). We're ready to print.

It took me a couple of days to learn how to make pleasing prints with this paper. I had to stop thinking of them as photographs and think of them as printed pages. Once I wasn't trying to make them into something they weren't it was a lot easier to get pleasing results, and printing went very quickly.

I countered the paper's weak reproduction with several tweaks. I substantially increased vibrance and saturation. I used wide-radius unsharp masking (see "How To Improve Digital Print Tonality") at the 25–35% level routinely, to improve gradation and tonal separation in fine detail. I circumvented the lack of good shadow separation with a Curves adjustment that really kicked up the contrast in the deeper shadows. That forced enough shadow-tone separation into the printed versions that the lack of solid blacks isn't evident.

Of course, those finished files would have printed very badly on photo-quality paper; they would have looked harsh and garish. On the Epson Double-Sided paper, they looked quite nice.

Next week, I'll cover layout, printing and production. Until then, start planning your books. I'll expect you all to have working prints by then!

CONTINUE TO PART II

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column on TOP appears every Thursday morning.

Featured Comment by Bahi: "That answered a few questions I had about the printing of the chapbook. The prints themselves have a presence and liveliness that I hadn't expected when first touching the paper used for the book. The pictures and collection also felt contemplative and quiet but also uplifting—I really enjoy looking at it."

Posted on Thursday, 09 September 2010 at 12:28 PM in Books, Ctein | Permalink | Comments (16)

Thursday, 02 September 2010

Themes—Preconceived, Ad Hoc, And Post Hoc

By Ctein

Mike's column last week, "Shooting to a Theme," was one of the most thought-provoking columns he's written in a long time. The comments from the readership were equally insightful and inspiring. I sat down to write a comment of my own, and it rapidly spun out of control, turning back on itself introspectively, recursively, and artistically. At which point I realized it was an entire column in itself. And so, here we are.

Mike's notion is a most interesting notion, indeed, and deserving of much serious thought. Of course, it's very photographer-dependent. For example, my friend Laurie Toby Edison is nearly 100% project driven; you could say she's just about entirely theme-oriented. She's done a little on-the-fly photography, but I would say that it's far more often for the purpose of getting her artistic bearings, a preamble to the theme that will develop or as a kind of conceptual sketch pad. I don't even have to ask her about this; I'm positive she is happiest working to a theme.

I'm at the opposite extreme. The very first theme I ever worked is the "Christmas in California" project, and it took me nearly 30 years of serious photography to get to that point. I think my muse wants to be the exact antithesis of Laurie's and what Paul described in the comments to Mike's column—almost every photograph in my portfolio is precisely the result of heading out blindly and hoping to stumble over a "masterpiece" (well, that's over-egotistical, even for me—I'm willing to stop at calling them "portfolio-quality photos"). In my case, those hopes are reliably fulfilled.

Since doing Christmas in California, I have worked on only one more theme—the "Jewels of Kilauea" project. I have thought of two more theme projects I might do someday. I don't know that I ever will.

Ctein, Yellowed Pahoehoe Surface, Kilauea, Hawaii, 2000
from the "Jewels of Kilauea" project

Just to be clear, I am distinguishing between preconceived themes and ad- or post-hoc constructions. I may have created five monographs, but only Christmas in California is creationally thematic. The other four were all constructed after the fact by portfolio-mining (like data-mining) and mostly were purely circumstantial. E.g., the Scotland monograph/portfolio exists merely because I discovered that after ten days of photographing in the Highlands, I had enough good photos to make up a coherent portfolio/monograph. But I didn't set out to do that, either consciously or unconsciously (yeah, I'd know—don't ask me to try to explain how that works). They're just a motley of randomly stumbled-over photos tied together by geographic circumstance. It's the data mining and organization that turns them into a coherent work, but that coherence did not exist until after the fact. It played absolutely no part in the creation of the photographs.

Similarly, like Jeffrey Goggin, high-quality urban night photography has been a recurrent theme in my work since my college days, but it's a theme only in the ad-hoc sense; it's never been a creative theme per se. It's just me stumbling over fine photos again, except now I'm stumbling around in the dark instead of in the light. Night just happens to be a place where I know I'll find cool photos to make.

That's okay. My friends the Flying Karamazov Brothers coined the brilliant line, "It doesn't matter how you get there if you don't know where you're going." Improvisation is the spice of my life, and I don't mind stumbling around, because I stumble over the damnedest, most wonderful things. I know that I would absolutely, positively not get more joy if my work followed themes, preconceived or not.

Apparently my muse, unlike Paul's, is quite happy just stumbling along. Is this of huge import? No. But I find it very interesting. For some reason, my muse is truly tickled by Paul's conceptualization of stumbling over photos. I'm going to have to figure out why that so delights her, but it surely does. I'm sure it means something. I may eventually understand what that something is. But not today or tomorrow, I think.

In counterpoint to that, one of the two new themes I am toying with is a project of doing really high quality aerial photography at night, which is just becoming technically possible. If I did that, it would be a creative themed project, in contrast to my ongoing, highly-productive nocturnal stumbling.

Different strokes, for different folks, under different circumstances, at different times. Consistency? That's a bore.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday, almost always in the morning.

Featured Comment by Carl Weese: "What happens with me is that I never begin with a theme or concept. In the course of just making pictures though, a theme may emerge and then I'll begin to follow it. Even once I start to follow that theme I'll still photograph anything else I run into that looks like it might make a picture. So one of my large, not yet completed projects—'White Churches'—consists almost entirely of subjects I ran into while traveling to work on my (large, uncompleted) project on drive-in theaters."

Carl Weese, from the "White Churches" project

Posted on Thursday, 02 September 2010 at 03:05 PM in Ctein | Permalink | Comments (40)

Thursday, 26 August 2010

Planned Obsolescence

By Ctein

There I was minding my own business, a few weeks back, printing out chapbooks for my True Fans. (Both the chapbooks and the True Fan experiment will be the subjects of upcoming columns, so please hold any questions). I was giving my Epson R2400 printer a thorough workout, with eight pages of printing in each chapbook and many dozens of books to print. Consequently, I was monitoring ink usage closely, working to figure out how many cartridges of each color I'd need to be buying.

I was used to seeing the Epson print monitor utility's normal warning about some ink cartridge getting low. They're always getting low. Then it threw me a new one: "Parts are nearing the end of their normal service life."

That's really not something you want to see, now is it?

Off to my friendly, neighborhood Google. A key phrase search quickly turned up many messages in Epson printer user groups that informed me the odds were very high that message was telling me that the waste ink reservoir was nearly full and needed replacement.

What? You've never heard of a waste ink reservoir, let alone imagined your printer might have one? Well, where did you think all the expensive ink your printer dumped whenever you did a head cleaning or a cartridge change went? That's a lot of lost dollars, um, milliliters of ink that's going somewhere, and it isn't sitting in the sugar-cubed size sponge the printhead parks over. Not unless it's some kind of Doctor Whovian sponge that's a lot bigger on the inside than the outside. Those are just the wicks that lead to feed lines that send the waste ink elsewhere.

That elsewhere is a waste ink reservoir, and eventually it gets full. Well, that should be no big deal; it's a replaceable component. On one of the Epson pro-level printers, 38XX and higher series, it's just a $40 user-changeable cartridge, requiring no more work than swapping an ink cartridge.

The lesser printers, 2XXX series and down, are another matter. The reservoir's inside the printer. Deep inside. In the 2400 and the 2880 it's in the base, and you have to do a full stripdown of the machine to get to it. Even I won't attempt that. An Epson repair shop can do it. It costs so much that a lot of folks wind up using that as the excuse to buy a new printer, and they discard their old one. I'm not kidding. To me it looks like built-in planned obsolescence by Epson, and y'know, that's kinda obscene. In my always-so-humble opinion, of course.

You could ignore that warning, but if you do, one of two things will happen. If you're lucky, when the printer's internal counter hits zero, the printer will simply stop dead and flash a set of red warning lights at you. If you're unlucky, it'll keep printing until the reservoir overflows and leaks black gunk into your printer and out any gaps in the case onto your desk and floor.

Maybe it was time to succumb to Epson's economic manipulations and buy the 3880 I've been considering (there's currently a $300 mail-in rebate deal). Instead I did a little more reading in those user groups. Know what? There are a bunch of folks out there who'll happily sell you an external waste ink bottle for about $10. The reservoirs may be hard to get to, but the feed lines to it are often routed just inside the case and accessible by popping a few side panels. That's not hard.

How bad could it be to risk a ten-spot? I ordered an InkRepublic Waste Ink Kit (left; photo courtesy InkRepublic.com). Good thing, as a few days after it arrived my printer stopped dead, red lights a-flashin'.

Takes about half an hour to open the case (below), drill a hole for the feed lines, get the bottle's lines hooked up, and get it all back together. It proved to be a weak design. The lines were just barely long enough and the vent holes in the bottle cap were too close to the ink lines, so stray ink bubbled out of them. I covered them with tape and drilled a small vent hole near the top of the bottle away from the lines. No more stray ink. It worked. It didn't cost me a substantial fraction of the price of a replacement printer.

One still must deal with the evil red lights.

I'll give Epson a small credit; they've posted for download the Epson Reset Utility, which zeroes out the printer's ink counter. Clearly, someone there understands what a lot of folks are doing, even if it ain't by-the-book. The software runs under Windows only, but it worked fine for me with Windows running under Parallels on my Mac (a little web searching will find third-party reset utilities for just about any platform).

So, no more ink warnings, no more red lights, and when the waste bottle fills up, I can unscrew it and empty it.

I may still buy a 3880 come the fall (my reserve cash ain't there yet). I'm getting bored with having to swap ink cartridges whenever I change media, and having to pop in fresh ink cartridges every time I turn around (well, it feels like that). But, if I do trade up, it'll be my choice, not something imposed on me by a greedy design.

Ctein

P.S. Still in Montreal, folks; back Monday.

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning on TOP.

Posted on Thursday, 26 August 2010 at 10:13 AM in Ctein, Printers and Printing | Permalink | Comments (24)

Thursday, 19 August 2010

How I Learned Not to Trust Camera Bodies

By Ctein

I should have learned fairly early in my photographic life that camera bodies were not the reliable, infallible devices I imagined them to be (and that far too many photographers still imagine them to be). Back when I was in college, I remember the early reviews of the Pentax 6x7 commenting that the relatively straight film path in that camera did a much better job of holding the film flat than the serpentine path in cameras that used film magazines, like Hasselblads and Rolleis.

In truth, that's the only time I can recall a mass circulation magazine suggesting that this might even be an issue. Clearly insiders were aware that some things might be rotten in Denmark, but the news rarely made it to us consumers. When I talked about "pernicious secrets" in my last column, I was thinking of incidents like that. The big lie by omission; reviews rarely talked about how badly camera bodies performed, so one simply didn't think about the fact that they performed badly. So, I read it, noted it, and then managed to forget it.

In the late 1970s I bought a Canonet GIII QL 17. That was a relatively inexpensive and compact rangefinder that came equipped with a remarkably good ƒ/1.7 lens. It was a little soft wide open (would have rated a "very good" by the lens tests of the time), but once you got it down to ƒ/4.5 or ƒ/5.6, it was brilliant. I mean that both figuratively and visually. I was very happy with it.

Several years later I read an article that talked about the desirability of having one's rangefinder cameras periodically checked for focus accuracy. It was a notion that hadn't occurred to me before. I ran some tests on my toy and, big surprise, the focus wasn't anywhere close to being accurate. Being a brave soul I took off the top of the camera, dug into the rangefinder mechanism, and found the two set screws that adjusted the focus. Through a process of considerable trial and error, I managed to get the camera into some semblance of decent focus. I even got reassembled correctly. Usually that doesn't happen; I'm better at deconstruction.

(Please do not post comments nor send me e-mails requesting any sort of assistance on disassembling or adjusting your camera. If you can't figure out how to do it yourself, I'm not going to help you break it.)

Miraculously, that ƒ/1.7 lens became achingly sharp even wide open.

When I bought a Pentax ME Super with 50 mm ƒ/1.7 lens in 1983, the first thing I did was run some lens tests. Because, of course, the lens is what really counts. Right? I still hadn't entirely internalized the lessons from the Canonet. Stopped down, that lens would put in excess of 100 line pairs per millimeter on film without breaking a sweat (I learned later that I had lucked into buying one of the better 50mm lenses that's ever been made). Wide open, though, I was seeing a so-so-by-my-standards 60 line pairs per millimeter (the magazine test standards of the time would have given this lens a near-excellent rating).

Pentax ME Super with 50mm ƒ/1.7 lens. Photo from here.

Now I remembered that important lesson. I ran a focus test on my Pentax, and sure enough it was decent, within manufacturing tolerances, but it was not spot on. I tweaked it until it was, and I reran my lens tests. Wide open, that lens would put over 100 line pair per millimeter on film. At ƒ/4.8 I could hit 150 line pairs per millimeter.

After that, I never bought a camera nor tested one for review where I didn't give the body a very thorough going over. Rarely, if ever, did I find one that was in the best possible adjustment. That held true for a quarter-century. I'd be most surprised if it's changed today.

Of course, some things aren't fixable. Aerial tests on medium format lenses show that the best of them can peak at over 200 line pair per millimeter. I rarely, if ever saw more than 70 line pair per millimeter in 6x6 or 6x7 format; the cameras simply didn't control the film plane well enough. My Fujica GA 645 could hit 100 line pair per millimeter...were it not for the fact that the autofocus mechanism wasn't anywhere near that accurate.

Which takes me to my last point: I've just been talking about one aspect of camera performance: accuracy of manual focus. I haven't told you about the myriad ways that autofocus does go wrong, or the rather substantial problems with getting accurate and repeatable exposure out of a camera body, or the ways in which the camera body and the lens don't interface quite like they're supposed to (a shared problem). Oh, I could write so many more columns. I will spare you, if you promise to take the underlying revelation to heart sans elaborate exposition.

Ctein

P.S. I'm off to Montréal for 10 days, so if responses to comments are few and far between, that'll be the reason why.

Ctein's weekly column appears on TOP every Thursday morning.

Posted on Thursday, 19 August 2010 at 11:08 AM in Cameras, new, Cameras, old, Ctein, Photo equipment | Permalink | Comments (48)

Thursday, 12 August 2010

The Lens is Not More Important Than the Camera

By Ctein

There are widely-held sentiments in photography that don't hold up under close scrutiny. Recently, a reader made the remark, "...besides, the lens is more important than the camera." This is not an uncommon feeling among photographers. It was frequently expressed back in the film era, the general argument being that a camera body, no matter how exquisitely crafted, was really nothing more than a box for carrying the lens and the film, and those were what really counted.

That thought shows a serious lack of appreciation for what a camera body is responsible for. Even back in the days of relatively simple mechanical cameras, the camera body was responsible for accurately setting the exposure, both lens aperture and shutter speed. It was responsible for holding the film flat, perpendicular to the optical axis of the lens, and in the correct plane of focus.

None of these responsibilities were easily fulfilled, and camera tests regularly demonstrated that. Failure wasn't always reported. Possibly the most pernicious open secret in the business was just how badly most camera bodies worked at holding the film flat and at producing accurate focus. Even 35mm had its problems, but the runouts for medium format and sheet film cameras were astonishingly large. Furthermore, stability was frequently an issue; many camera bodies, especially the flimsier and more "amateur" ones, could be brought into exquisite adjustment with little effort. Sadly that would not be likely to hold for more than a dozen rolls of film.

More than one photographer has reported on the mediocre performance of a kit lens or even an expensive prime used wide open without realizing that the fuzzy photograph they made was actually the fault of a camera body that wasn't holding the film flat or matching the focus screen position to the average film "plane."

The addition of electronics and automatic functions to camera bodies upped the ante. Electronic shutters did make shutter speeds more accurate, but the camera's built-in meter was responsible for determining what that shutter speed should be. In the most modern of cameras, focus was also determined automatically, with that technology introducing its own set of uncertainties.

Digital camera bodies take that to an even more extreme level. Not only are all the aforementioned characteristics still the province of the camera body, but now a camera body has the "film" built in. There's a lot more flexibility to that silicon chip than a roll of silver emulsion, so really it's more like buying into a family of films. Still, buying a digital camera body is like deciding that you're always going to be photographing with Kodachrome (25, 64, or 200) slide film. You get a look and a feel, an image quality that is characteristic of that camera. That remains true no matter what lens you slap on the front.

Oh yeah, they still haven't solved the focus issues. Many lenses, even cheap ones, are a lot better than people think they are. Well, at least now we can count on the "film" staying flat—even if it's not where the focusing screen or the autofocus module thinks it is.

To be sure, poor lenses ruin a lot of photographs. But, so do poor camera bodies. It's no easier making a camera body that achieves exquisite quality than it is a lens. And, unfortunately, it's no more common.

Ctein

P.S. My Digital Restoration from Start to Finish book sale has three more days to run. The sale ends Sunday, the 15th. Thanks to all past, present and future purchasers!

ADDENDUM: Quite a few commenters are missing a most important point and focusing on a body's features, not its real functionality. It's not about what the camera maker claims the camera body will do; I am talking about what most of them actually do. No platonic ideals, here; most camera bodies out there perform at less than their theoretical best in some aspect or another. In many cases, to a greater extent than many people realize, it's well below that theoretical best.

A good lens on a poorly-performing body will give you poor results. Really. Truly.

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP every Thursday morning.

Posted on Thursday, 12 August 2010 at 11:40 AM in Cameras, new, Cameras, old, Ctein | Permalink | Comments (83)

Thursday, 05 August 2010

Postscripts

By Ctein

This week I'm doing follow-ups to some recent columns of mine, a potpourri of factoids for your delectation. The links are to my previous columns on each subject. First, and most definitely not least...

Mac Color Management Hell Continues: When I last wrote about the Snow Leopard color management problems, there was hope that the next release of the MacOS, 10.6.4, would fix the ICC v4 bug. Indeed, it was widely reported that it had. Well, I have to tell you that reports of the demise of that bug are greatly exaggerated. I got in some new Harman paper and built a custom profile for it. The results? Take a look at figure 1. That cyan border outside of the image area that extends to the printable edges of the paper? Not my doing. That's the result of printing with an ICC v4 profile; the version 2 profile that I built in exactly the same way prints perfectly. Still broken, dammit.

Fig. 1. Color management is still not fixed in MacOS 10.6.4. Observe the cyan tint that appears outside the image area of this photograph, where no ink should be being laid on the paper whatsoever. That's a bug in how the OS handles ICC version for profiles. Version 2 profiles do not present this problem.

Note also the black ink stains at the edges of the print. The new Harman Baryta 320 paper prints beautifully but has just as bad a curl as the FB Al paper it replaced. Oh well, can't win 'em all.

Also, the standalone app from Adobe for printing out unprofiled targets for building profiles still doesn't have a release date. Those of you using Photoshop to print your targets will need to continue to use the hacks and workarounds described elsewhere. My profiling software drives the printer directly, so don't ask me questions about printing targets via Photoshop; I won't know anything.

Out with the Old Harman, in with the New: Harman Gloss FB Al paper is no more. It's been discontinued. When I wrote about it, I praised it for its appearance and damned it for its execrable quality control. Honestly, I'm glad I don't have it to kick around anymore; it's been replaced with a new paper, "Harman by Hahnemuhle" Gloss Baryta 320.

Baryta 320 looks almost identical to the old paper. The surface finish is just a bit toothier (though not as textured as Epson Exhibition Fiber Paper). It's almost identical to traditional air-dried F surface. I like it better. Color gamut is very similar to the old paper—a tad bigger, it looks like. You could hang Baryta 320 and Gloss FB Al prints next to each other and few would notice.

The big win is that quality control seems much improved, based on a highly non-statistical sample of 10 sheets of paper from one box. I'm hoping for a reject rate down around 10%, maybe even lower. Lousy compared to traditional darkroom papers, but a big win compared to the 35–40% reject rate I was suffering through with the old paper. Good riddance to it.

One unfortunate way that the new paper's just like the old paper is that it has a pronounced curl. It's bad enough that if I don't reverse roll it, I get head strikes at the edge of the paper. That's the source of the the black ink stains in the print borders in figure 1.

A Fly in the iPad Ointment: About 10 days ago, Apple released an update for the OS that crashed my iPad, forcing a "reset and restore." Imagine my not-at-at-all-delighted surprise at discovering that the restore did not restore all the content I had on the iPad. Most of the music and documents that I had laboriously transferred from multiple data sources around my house were wiped. iTunes on the Mac, which handles "backup" for the iPad basically only backs up files and content you sync via iTunes or purchase from an Apple online store.

If you're treating your iPad as nothing more than an overfed iPod, no problem. If you're using it as a more general-purpose computer, big problem.

I couldn't seem to find a backup program in the App Store, so I posted an innocent query asking if anyone knew of a real backup program for the iPad to the Apple Discussions group. Two surprises. First, there is no backup program for the iPad. Oh, my.

Second, a substantial number of users couldn't imagine why I would even need a backup program! Okay, I understand being a podhead (in contrast to gearhead), but apparently that understanding is not reciprocated. Several folks even took me to task for not using the iPad in the "proper" way. Sheesh.

On the other hand, every gearhead (in contrast to podhead) I've talked to has been shocked by this revelation as I was. No single and complete backup strategy? Good Lord, what is this, like, 1985?!

Looks like I'm going to have to roll my own out of chewing gum and sealing wax. This message should tell me how to take the music content I've assembled on my iPad and migrate it back to a single iTunes library on a Mac that I can back up. As for other files and documents, I'm currently playing around with Air Sharing from Avatron, the same folks who produce my beloved Air Display. Don't know if this will solve the entire problem, and if Apple breaks my iPad again I'm definitely not looking forward to a multi-stage recovery process. But it's better than none at all.

You've been warned.

Last and also definitely not least...

The Digital Restoration from Start to Finish book sale has been going really well. You folks have bought over 40 copies, and the sales still has 10 days to run. Just wanted to say thanks!

Over and out until next time.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP every Thursday morning, for some value of "morning."

Posted on Thursday, 05 August 2010 at 12:54 PM in Ctein | Permalink | Comments (30)

Thursday, 29 July 2010

Your Scanner Needs Cleaning!

By Ctein

No doubt some of you digital printers have been gloating at the hoops Mike has been jumping through to get himself established for traditional darkroom printing, as well as the myriad comments from all and sundry about the efforts they have to go through to control their printing environments. Problems with stray light, problems with light proofing, problems with safelights. All to make those unruly photons be where folks want them and not where they don't. How nice that digital printing is not heir to the same problems, don't you think?

Think again.

The truth about shmoosh
When was the last time you had your scanner cleaned? I'm not talking about the exterior surfaces like the platen on a flatbed scanner or the film carrier for a film scanner. I'm talking about the interior optics—the back side of the platen, the first surface mirrors inside the scanning head, the relay lens that's between those mirrors or between the mirror and the CCD array (see figure 1). If you've got a scanner that's more than a handful of years old, I can pretty much guarantee that stray photons are degrading your scans. And it's almost certainly crept up on you so gradually that you never even noticed.

Here's the thing. Even though all those internal optical surfaces are protected from direct exposure to the environment, the scanner isn't airtight. Dust creeps in, especially with a film scanner, which can't really be well sealed at all. In addition, the plastics, lubricants, and other synthetics inside the scanner outgas. You know that smudgy haze of plastic volatiles that appears inside your automobile windshield and can make it really, really hard to see when you're driving into the sun? Scientists call this "shmoosh." And, yeah, your scanner is like that. Or it will be. It just takes time.

Fig. 1. This is what the typical light path in a flatbed scanner and a film scanner looks like. The exact arrangement of mirrors and lenses will depend upon the scanner, but this gives you the idea. Shmoosh will show up on the underside of the glass platen, on the surfaces of mirrors, and on exposed lens surfaces.

What's the effect of that veil of deposits and dust that's coating mirrors and lenses? If it's prints you're scanning, it'll be something like figure 2. In mild cases, the veiling will be uniform and you may not even realize it's happened and that you're losing shadow detail. In severe cases, the deposits can be nonuniform, especially on the underside of the platen, and you see tonal variations in your scans that aren't in your originals but appear in the same place every time you do a scan.

Fig. 2. Shmoosh degrades shadows. At the least, it veils them; in severe cases, it may be a irregular enough that you don't even get uniform density, as seen in the lower third of this photograph.

In film scans, you may get the same kind of degradation as in figure 2, but the highly directional transmitted light and the high density range in some films (color slides and high-contrast black-and-white negatives) means you're also likely to see haloing, like in figure 3. When the highlights start bleeding, it's time for cleaning. Actually, it's way past time.

Fig. 3. Film scans can not only suffer a loss of contrast in dense areas but also have haloing when there is shmoosh in the light path. In positive scans, like what's shown here in the diagonal upper half, the halos will be light intruding into dark areas. In negative scans, it will be dark bleeding into highlights.

No help from me
Now here's the bad news. I won't tell you how to do this yourself. There are so many ways to go wrong and ruin your scanner. If you don't get it reassembled exactly the way it was when you took it apart, components may be out of alignment and you won't get sharp scans. The glass platen in a flatbed scanner is pretty durable, but the interior optics in any scanner aren't. The mirrors have their reflective coatings on top of the glass, not behind it, to avoid ghost images. Those coatings are very easy to scratch.

If you're good at mechanical assembly and disassembly and know exactly how to clean first-surface optics, go for it. If you don't, you need to hand this off to a trained professional. Don't email me asking me for tips or advice. I'm not going to be the "enabler" on this one.

Unfortunately, because I can do all the stuff myself, I don't know the names of good repair people to send scanners to for proper cleaning. Do any readers have recommendations?

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on Thursday mornings. We're on summer hours, so for now that means late mornings.

Posted on Thursday, 29 July 2010 at 11:40 AM in Ctein, Photo equipment | Permalink | Comments (24)

Sunday, 18 July 2010

'Digital Restoration' on Sale

I mentioned in my brief review of Ctein's book that he was planning a sale soon, and that I'd post the alert when it started. For the next month, to celebrate the publication of the second edition, Ctein will be selling autographed copies of Digital Restoration From Start to Finish at a substantial discount. The following prices below include Priority Mail shipping and California sales tax (if due): $39.00 for California; $36.00 for the rest of the U.S.; $43.00 for Canada; and $46.00 for all other countries.

For ordering details, please go here and scroll to the bottom of the page. The sale ends August 15, 2010.

Mike

Posted on Sunday, 18 July 2010 at 11:25 AM in Books, Ctein | Permalink | Comments (2)

Thursday, 15 July 2010

Why I Needed an iPad (and You Might Not)

My laptop screen is sporting the same arrangement of Photoshop palettes as I use at home when I've got it connected up to my large Apple Cinema Display. The iPad is sitting in landscape orientation on its iSee stand with the Pogo pen in front of it.

By Ctein

As soon as I read the detailed specifications for the iPad, I had a suspicion that most people were ignoring one of its more notable features: namely, that it was likely to be sporting the best display that had ever been put into a portable device.

The day they came out, in early April, my friend Mark Richards bought one. He showed it to me that weekend. I pulled up some difficult-to-render photographs from my website and pixel-peeped like mad. The iPad had a near-studio-quality display. (Truth is I've seen studio displays that were worse; I'm just very fussy.) The iPad held gamma well with changing viewing angle, and if it wasn't running full 24-bit color with no dithering, it was faking it well enough that I couldn't tell.

I commented that if only there was a way to run Photoshop on these things, I'd buy one in a minute. When I'm away from home, I'm stuck with doing my photographic work on a laptop computer. Laptop computer displays suck. I don't understand how people can do serious photographic work on them. I make do when I'm in the field, but only for rough editing and corrections; it's impossible to see exactly what's going on in a photograph. The iPad was so much better.

Mark then told me he'd heard that there was a way to tether an iPad to a laptop as a secondary display. I cursed him loudly; that bit of information might cost me mucho dinero. How well a $10 app worked would determine whether or not I'd buy many hundred of dollars worth of hardware.

I finally had a chance to try out the Air Display app on another friend's iPad (thank you, Chris) over my vacation last month in Minneapolis. It turned the iPad into a usable secondary high-quality monitor while running Photoshop on my MacBook Pro. The next day I went to the Apple store and bought one.

The low-end $500 model, with 16 GB of storage and no cellular network capabilities, would have been sufficient. After consideration, though, I ended up buying the 64 GB, 3G model. Why? First, this is more than merely a display. It's a self-contained computer, and it has never, ever made sense for me to buy at the low end of hardware. Second, as someone who hasn't had experience living in the being-connected-everywhere world, I didn't know whether I might care about that. It seemed foolish to get the model without cellular capability lest I discover later that I really want it and wind up replacing the whole computer. Several people impressed upon me that I'd likely find this a mighty useful feature, and they've been proved right. My price ended up nearly doubling, but whatthehell, it's only money.

Then there were the incidentals. An extended warranty (I am very bad with equipment care), a conductive foam Pogo Sketch stylus (fingers are just too fat for working directly on a photograph), and a Contour iSee for iPad (a hard clamshell with a collapsible stand that lets me prop up the iPad in landscape or portrait orientation).

There went a grand, but what did that get me? A portable dual-display rig with a studio-quality display that's touch sensitive, so I can brush directly on the photo I'm working on. Definitely worth it to me.

It's not as functional as a 12" Cintiq; there's no pressure sensitive stylus for the iPad (yet), and screen update is sluggish. But the cheap iPad's half the price, half the volume, a third the weight, and self-powered, and I'll bet the display's a lot better.

Here I'm taking advantage of the touch-sensitive screen on the iPad to do some burning in on a photograph with a masked curves adjustment layer.

The combination works well enough. It has occasional idiosyncrasies; most significantly, one has to get used to the lag time in the display update. It's not a problem in Photoshop when using brushes or working with adjustment layers—it can refresh small areas of the screen rapidly. It takes more than a second to do a full display update, so you wouldn't want to use it for anything that requires a decent frame rate or for presenting a slideshow. I do think there's a good chance that performance will improve in the future, as slow response time is the primary complaint everyone has about this category of apps. In the meantime, you should probably do as I did and try before you buy, to make sure you're comfortable with the screen update rates.

iPad color out of the box is acceptable. Not as good as a studio monitor, but close enough for serious work, and much, much better than anything I could get in a portable device before. I can use it for making serious refinements to a photograph, which was, after all, the point.

My efforts to color manage the iPad had mixed results. Profile Mechanic Monitor didn't work at all; every time I ran it I got an entirely different result and it was always bizarre. ColorMunki worked pretty well but not perfectly. The hues and the values are very good in the profile; the color-managed iPad's rendering of B&W photographs matches my prints exactly. But, the chroma is too high. Not by a lot—if I add hue/saturation adjustment layer and drop the saturation by 20 points, it looks just about right.

If I can't figure out how to get a better profile built, I'll just start adding a –20 point hue/saturation adjustment layer as a visual filter whenever I'm working in Photoshop in the field. It may be that I'm being too fussy about this. My Apple Cinema Display, fully calibrated, is about 10 points too low in saturation.

So, I'm a very happy camper and after three weeks I'm still not suffering from buyers remorse. I've got a much, much better portable digital darkroom than I ever thought I'd have.

Oh yeah, and let's not forget that it is an iPad, not just a portable monitor. Maybe it'll even prove useful in other ways. Ya nevva knows....

Incidentally, if readers know of any other large-screen portable devices with near-studio-quality displays, I would like to hear about them. (But please don't tout some netbook or other portable device with the usual lousy screens; sure, they have their uses, but not for my kind of work.)

Air Display creates a wireless connection between the iPad and my laptop, so I don't have to actually be seated at the laptop unless I need the big screen. I did my sorting and editing of photographs in Adobe Bridge and Adobe Camera RAW sitting on the comfy bed.

Ctein

Photographs copyright 2010 by David Dyer-Bennet. DDB made these photographs to illustrate this article while we were on a two-day photo trip over July 4 weekend up to Lake Superior's North Shore. They were posed for the sake of clarity and aesthetics, but they are not staged. This was my working setup and these were my working conditions.

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning. TOP is currently on summer hours, which means late morning for the time being.

Featured Comment by Steve G, Mendocino: "Ctein: Once again, my Thursday morning is enlivened by useful and relevant information, well presented. That being said, curse you—I'd dismissed the iPad until now."

Featured Comment by Bahi: "Very informative column—thanks. And I really like the pictures…there's something Old Testament about them. Prophet, tablet, etc. :-)"

Posted on Thursday, 15 July 2010 at 12:34 PM in Ctein, Photo equipment, Software | Permalink | Comments (62)

Monday, 12 July 2010

Ctein Workshop in Minneapolis

Our own Ctein will be teaching a one-day workshop at the Mpls Photo Center (2400 North Second Street, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA 55411) on Saturday, October 9: "Introduction to the Art of Digital Photo Restoration." See here for full details.

Ctein is the author of Digital Restoration from Start to Finish. If you have any interest in learning how to restore old or damaged photographs in particular, or in improving your digital processing skills generally, Ctein's workshop could be for you.

Mike

Featured Comment by Martin Doonan: "If the workshop is anything like the book, then it should be excellent. After buying a copy of the book a couple of weeks ago, I've read it pretty much cover to cover. It's not so much the tools covered as the new and precise ways to employ them that make it useful (and this coming from someone who's philosophically opposed to 'how-to' books). Highly recommended."

Posted on Monday, 12 July 2010 at 07:54 PM in Ctein, Workshops | Permalink | Comments (3)

Thursday, 08 July 2010

Darkening the Darkroom

Darkroom unwrapped! About 270 degrees of Ctein's darkroom, showing the plastic sheeting walls and about half of the overhead lights. No lack of lumens here.

By Ctein

As numerous recent conversations have made clear, a big darkroom concern is stray light. I concur. My dye transfer printing required me to deal with errant photons at a level that no sane process would require.

As I've made clear, I prefer black darkrooms, equipped with lots and lots of lights. You may prefer differently. Talking about what color one's darkroom walls should be, one of the commenters in a previous thread remarked that "Dave is right Ctein is wrong." Nope. Dave's right for Dave, and I'm right for me. That's all you can say. The color you paint your darkroom is as much about ergonomics as anything, and that often boils down to what's personally comfortable. For example, I could live with a grey darkroom rather than a black one, but I could never deal with one painted a bright color. It would totally mess up my color vision.

This is not just an issue for me as a color printer, it comes up when I do black-and-white work. If you're the kind of black-and-white printer who is sensitive to the tone (as in hue) of your black-and-white prints, it could very well mess up yours. Color constancy in human vision is something that is easy to upset and it can take hours to equilibrate, especially along the yellow-blue axis. I can't imagine working in a brightly colored darkroom trying to judge how warm-or cold-toned a print paper is, and whether I want to tone the processed print, and by how much. Neutral surroundings, please! Doesn't matter if they're black, white, charcoal gray, or middle gray. I just really, really want something that won't contaminate my color vision.

Be that as it may, this column's really about telling you how to find the stray light in your darkroom, not what color to paint the walls.

Step one. Turn off the lights. Sit down. Close your eyes. Meditate on how wonderful your life is for at least five minutes. Open your eyes. Do you see any light leaks? Plug them! If it's a few twinkles around window frames or joints in the wall or between the wall and the ceiling, black electricians tape works wonderfully. If it's light that's leaking around the frame of the door, put some weather stripping or flaps around the frame to baffle it. Make all that outside light go away.

Step two. Put a negative in your negative carrier, put the carrier in the enlarger, and set up the enlarger as if you were making a normal-sized print. Leaving the lens cap on the enlarger lens, turn on the enlarger and turn off the all the room lights. Once more, sit there, eyes closed, in the semi-dark and contemplate your good fortune. After five minutes open your eyes and look around the room.

Look at the light leaks from the enlarger and see where they go. Trace any patches of light on the walls light back to their sources on the enlarger head. You might have to get ingenious at blocking them. Sometimes black tape works, sometimes you'll have to build little baffles and hoods out of plastic, paper, cardboard, and tape; just do whatever it takes to trap the leakage from the enlarger. Be careful, though, not to close off ventilation ports that let cooling air into the larger head.

Pay extra special attention to any light that might be leaking down in the direction of the easel. You won't be able to get rid of all the stray light, but you'll be able to get rid of a lot of it. You'll likely have to repeat this step several times, making your modifications and checking your work, since doing the work in the dark may be difficult or even unsafe.

Test your success so far by taking a sheet of plain white paper, drawing a big fat black X on it with a wide felt tip marker, and putting the sheet of paper in your paper easel. Prepare the enlarger (and yourself) the same way you did in step two. After the obligatory contemplative five minutes, look at the paper easel. Can you see the X? You shouldn't! Or, at least, it should be nearly invisible—there should be that little light reaching your print easel.

Step three. Find a negative that has some area that is truly maximally dense. Perhaps a photograph you made where the sun is in the field of view? Doesn't matter what, so long as there's an area that is as close to D-max as possible. Got it? Put the negative in a carrier. Now, drop a bit of something totally opaque on top of the negative overlapping the D-max region. It can be a chip of cardboard, a hair, a bit of wire, anything that will make an absolutely black, sharp-edged shadow within the D-max area.

Put the negative carrier in your enlarger and focus the image sharply. Stop the lens down two or three stops to minimize flare and maximize contrast. Take a close look at the D-max area of the negative projected onto the print easel. Is the shadow of the opaque object within that area clearly much darker then the D-max of the film? If so, you're good!

If not, you'll need to figure out if it's flare or stray light within the enlarger system or light reflected off the print paper and scattered back again. A helpful diagnostic is to substantially reduce the magnification of the projected image. If you normally print 8x10, shrink the image down to 4x5 by lowering the enlarger head. That makes the projected image 3–4 times brighter, but it doesn't increase the amount of backscattered light. If the opaque shadow becomes much darker relative to the negative when you do this, then it's most likely backscatter that's causing your problem. You'll need to track that down.

If the relative clarity (or lack thereof) of the shadow in the projected image stays the same, then any problems you're having separating out tones of these dense areas are due to flare or light scattering within the enlarger head and/or the enlarger lens. You'll have to figure out what to do about that, but at least you'll know the problem isn't your darkroom.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning, for some value of "morning." (Note time stamp on this week's column!)

Posted on Thursday, 08 July 2010 at 12:59 PM in Ctein, Film and Darkroom | Permalink | Comments (30)

Thursday, 01 July 2010

It's Never Too Early to Start Planning for an Eclipse

By Ctein

Readers' questions occasionally inspire my columns. A year back, based on a question from Danny Low, I wrote about "Photographing a Supernova," an event that could occur anytime from tomorrow to 100,000 years from now.

A couple of weeks back I got an e-mail from DD-B (David Dyer-Bennet) asking for some advice on photographing the 2017 solar eclipse, whose timing is rather more precisely known and whose path of totality will cross the entire United States from the Pacific Northwest down to the southeast seaboard. It's never too early to start planning ahead for an eclipse, so this column is derived from my reply to his questions.

Do not miss!
Folks, this is a not-to-be-missed opportunity. Anybody who's anywhere on the North American continent should be planning a trip to see this. You really, really shouldn't miss it. You'll just have to take my word for that. I promise that you'll thank me afterwards. There's nothing else like it, and no photograph you've seen has ever done it remote justice, visually or emotionally. Partial eclipses don't count. Partial eclipses are to total eclipses as a McDonald's hamburger is to a filet mignon in a fine French restaurant—entities that theoretically belong to the same class but experientially have nothing at all in common.

A total eclipse is absolutely the most awesome thing I've ever seen. Remember that this is coming from a fellow who's seen a night launch of a Saturn V and stood four meters from red-hot flowing lava. You really may not want to make photographs; you may get a lot more out of the experience just watching. "May" in this case means better than 50% odds, no matter how dedicated a photographer you are.

A total eclipse is mesmerizing.You really may be unable to make photographs. Solar astronomers regularly tells stories about screwing up long-planned experiments the first time they see a total eclipse. Intellectual preparation doesn't work. I knew all of that going to my first total solar eclipse, and I got exactly zero photographs of totality. That was not my intent.

Lots of eclipse-related stuff hasn't been photographed, at least not much nor well. I don't recall seeing a good terrestrial photograph of the lunar shadow on the ground (there are some made by satellites). I don't think anyone has successfully photographed the shadow bands. Those are ripples of light that run quickly across the ground, caused by atmospheric refraction in the very few seconds just before or after totality, when the sun is just a thin slit. I know there are photographs of the landscape by eclipse light. I've got some so-so ones from my first eclipse (I did get photographs, even good photographs...just nothing of totality). The big problem is the same one as including the sun or the moon in a landscape photograph; the luminance range is positively huge. There's enough light. Maybe only 1000th as bright as real sunlight (I don't know, exactly), but much, much brighter than full moonlight. With a moderately high ISO, moderately fast lens, a tripod, and a non-moving landscape, the only real problem is from the exposure range.

Equipment, exposures, etc.
Regarding some of the apparently contradictory recommendations out there for equipment and exposures, not everyone is out to make the same photograph. If you want to capture maximum corona, you're looking at longer exposures although, as these things go, at relatively low magnifications and focal lengths. But, the brightness range from the outermost visible corona to the prominences and chromosphere right around the rim of the sun is easily 10 stops. When I photographed the 1991 eclipse in Baja Mexico, I used Reala 100, because it was the very lowest contrast, longest exposure range film I could find. My best exposure for catching the fullest extent of the corona was one second at ƒ/8 with an 800 mm lens (which produces a solar disk 8mm across). That was on my Pentax 67. That focal length would have been too long for 35mm work; I captured corona out to five solar radii, more than would fit in a 35mm frame. 400–500mm is a lot safer for "full frame" format.

By dint of using color negative film of especially low contrast, I was able to just barely get detail all the way in to the prominences while still holding the outermost corona in my prints (figure 1). Main issue you'll run into when photographing the outer corona with a digital camera is avoiding clipping highlights. (Yes, there are people out there doing some very, very clever single- and multi-image processing on eclipse photographs. Whole different topic; we're not going there this time.)

Fig. 1. You can make an eclipse photo like this...but is that really the best use of your eclipse-watching time? Seriously?

You wouldn't likely need to use that great an exposure. For one thing, in seven years optimal camera ISO is going to be at least 200 and it might be 400. For another, that exposure was pushing into the reciprocity failure region of the film for the dimmest parts of the scene. Not by a lot, but I was losing at least one stop of shadow speed, maybe more.

All told, I'd be surprised if you'll need an exposure longer than 1/4 second atƒ/8 to capture huge amounts of corona. For near-Sun detail, your exposure times would be more like 1/60–1/250 of a second...said with the caveat that the brightness of the corona is not predictable. The near-surface brightness is pretty standardized, but the brightness and clarity of the corona away from the surface not only depends upon the actual coronal activity, which can vary hugely, but also how clear and dark the atmosphere is that day.

Do you need a tracking mount? The sun is moving at 1/14,000 radian/second. If you're using a 500mm lens, that's 1/28th mm/sec in the sensor plane. With a 1-second exposure, that's roughly the "circle of confusion" you'd use for acceptable 35mm work, and I used the same thinking for determining my maximum exposures. The prints look just fine. If you're using 1/4 second, as I'm guessing you would be, that's 1/100 of a millimeter in the sensor plane. That's plenty, plenty sharp!

It's not pixel-level sharp, though, and many of the recommendations you'll read are from people thinking like astronomers. They're trying to figure out how close as they can get to seeing- and diffraction-limited performance. They may also be working at considerable higher magnifications. With decent seeing and a large enough aperture (at least 150mm and preferably 300mm) on a diffraction-limited scope, one should be able to reliably resolve down to better than 1/200,000 radian. That implies relatively short exposures. Hence the potential need for a tracking mount.

But there's a bigger, practical reason for using a tracking mount. It will keep the sun centered in the frame for the entire eclipse! For the serious solar photographer, it's one less thing for them to worry about. Once the camera rig is pointed at the sun, they don't have to keep adjusting it. As I intimated above, the fewer fiddly bits one has to deal with during an eclipse the better the chances of getting decent photographs and enjoying the eclipse.

Watch in awe
Still, my main recommendation would be to go mentally prepared to wind up just watching the most amazing spectacle on all of the planet Earth.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP every Thursday morning.

Featured Comment by Christian Dummer: "I can't but agree on the almost mystic nature of totality. I had the chance to see the Nov. 1994 eclipse in Putre (northern Chile). I was 18 at that time, and still have vivid memories of the enthralling display...in fact, I was so impressed by the experience that I made a resolution to watch the next total eclipse I could.

"So Ctein's timing with this post could not have been better! Right now, I'm only days away from a weekend trip to Easter Island (fortunately just a 5-hour flight away from my hometown, Santiago de Chile) to watch the July 11 eclipse that will be visible in the Southern Pacific and a small portion of Patagonia. Wife's coming along, equipment is all set, and all what's left is hoping for good weather. So thanks for the recommendations, they will certainly come in handy much earlier than 2017!"

Featured Comment by Nathan deGargoyle: "From my sub-teenage memories. It was the late '60's on a Swann's Hellenic Cruise. We were on a tour of Athens and had got to the Theatre of Dionysos. The lecturer had done the usual, got us to sit on the back row then spoke in an ordinary voice to show how good the acoustics were.

"Then he said 'There's an eclipse due in about half an hour. If we stay for it we'll have to miss the museum. Can we take a vote?'

"It came out about 60/40 for staying.

"So we sat in this ancient Greek theatre. Firstly the birds who had been calling loudly went quieter and quieter until there was silence, broken only by the passing traffic noise. Then it started to go dark, like a cloud had moved over the sun. They passed out bits of smoked glass but looking at the sun wasn't the point. I have never had a more eerie experience, all the better for it being totally unexpected (and probably even better still for being age 10.)"

Posted on Thursday, 01 July 2010 at 09:21 AM in Ctein, Shooting techniques | Permalink | Comments (24)

Thursday, 24 June 2010

The Ever-Shrinking Tripod

By Ctein

Y'know, it seems to me much the discussion around Mike's tripod column can be summed up by a rhetorical question that's similar to the one we ask of cameras:

Which will help you make better pictures—the $50, 2 kg tripod you take with you or the $500, 10 kg tripod you leave at home?

Before going to Baja in 1991 to photograph the solar eclipse, I bought a truly massive 'pod to support my Pentax 67 and the long telephoto lens I would be using. The Bogen (now Manfrotto) 3051 with a 3047 head was reasonably priced for what it offered (in other words, not all that cheap) and it was by far the most rugged and stable tripod I've ever used in my life.

Your intrepid author, accompanied by the monster Bogen tripod, photographing the 1991 solar eclipse. That little black box hanging off the end of the lens? That's a Pentax 67 body. Gives you an idea of the size of the tripod. The mentioned-in-passing Velbon tripod is the one attached directly to the camera body. (Photo by Paula Butler.)

It also weighed at least 7 or 8 kg; it had to be 10 with the Pentax mounted on it. I only ended up using it in the field a couple of times after that; it was simply too heavy for me to lug more than a short distance. Definitely no cross-country hikes with that one. I always ended up taking a relatively flimsy Velbon that I'd had since I can't remember when.

The Bogen was a great tool for the specific task I bought it for, but as a life purchase it sucked. Its primary function was to take up space in the back of the closet and get hauled out for camera, lens, or film tests. I sold it a couple of years back.

In 2002, while planning my trip to Hawaii to photograph the "Jewels of Kilauea" project, I needed a sturdy and flexible tripod that I could take out onto the lava fields. It sure wasn't going to be that Bogen! I needed stability without weight. My ultimate happy compromise was a Gitzo G2227 carbon fiber tripod with a Manfrotto 329RC4 head. That set me back more dinero than I can recall. $600? $800? Whatever, lots, but it was definitely the right tool for the job. I had no trouble carrying it for kilometers across uneven terrain. I still have it and use it. There's a good chance it's the tripod I'll have for the rest of my life.

But still, I don't carry it around routinely. It's a little bulky for that. So I've continued to move down the scale and found two tripods that work fabulously well for my current photographic "lifestyle" and cost me nearly nothing.

The first one I just plain stumbled across. I was going off on a road trip with a friend a few years back, and she needed to stop off at Ritz Cameras on the way to drop off some film for developing. Looking around the place, I realized that an inexpensive, lightweight tripod could be a real boon on the trip. I ended up buying a Quantaray QSX-6601TM on sale for $29.99. It's remarkably capable for what it is, having center leg braces, a quick release plate, and a removable and reversible monopod column. It's small enough with the column removed that it will fit in carry-on luggage, and it only weighs 1.5 kg.

Won't work worth a damn with a Pentax 67 (surprise!) or probably even a full-sized digital SLR. For cameras like my recent Fujifilm S100 and 6500 it proved entirely adequate. It's definitely a nice match for the positively petite Olympus Pen EP-1, even when I mount the 45–200mm zoom.

Is it going to be good in a strong wind? No. Is it going to last me the rest of my life? Given the almost-entirely plastic construction, I very much doubt it. But, when it finally dies, I'm out only $30. I've gotten a huge amount of use from it over the past 2 1/2 years; it's probably the smartest impulse purchase I ever made. It's almost all I've been using for field photography since I started making digital photographs.

Bottom of the bag
Almost. Some years earlier, I'd picked up (again at Ritz Camera) a Vanguard Mini Tabletop Tripod (similar to this one ) for the whopping sum of $12.94. It also weighs a whopping 350g and folds up into a 20 x 8 x 5 cm package. Consequently, it has permanent residence in the bottom of my shoulder bag next to the Olympus. I don't even notice the tripod is there...except when I need it.

A self portrait by my Olympus Pen camera, showing the Vanguard Mini tripod.
It's compact, it's cute, it's cheap, it's practical.

That isn't often, but it's sure nice to have it when it is. When I went up to the top of the Empire State building at night on my recent trip to New York City that's the tripod that went with me, because The Powers That Be don't much care for tripods on the observation deck. Nobody complains about a little gadget that's barely bigger than the small camera that's mounted on it. Setting it on floors, putting it on ledges, propping it against walls, I managed to get all the photographs I wanted with all my focal length lenses. Okay, it was a little dicey out at the 200mm end of things; this is not exactly the most stable camera platform. But it worked well enough that about half of my maximum telephoto photographs came out. Without that little 'pod, the percentage would have been precisely zero.

From the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State building, looking up.
Photographed with the Olympus Pen and the Vanguard Mini tripod.

Yup, that's the tripod I have with me...it's helped me make me more good pictures than the Bogen ever did.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column appears every Thursday morning, for some value of "morning."

Send this post to a friend

Note: Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. More...
Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on Thursday, 24 June 2010 at 01:00 PM in Ctein, Photo equipment | Permalink | Comments (31)

Digital Restoration

The Second Edition of Digital Restoration from Start to Finish: How to repair old and damaged photographs by Ctein has recently been published. (As we sometimes remember to mention, the name is pronounced "kuh-TINE" and it's his whole legal name.) Changes since the first edition are that the chapter on software has been completely rewritten; the examples are all new; a new chapter called "Beautification," about how to make pictures look better, has been added; there's a new section to help aid in diagnosing problems; and there's now better separation between the main text and the more than 80 How-To's. Changes throughout the text reflect refinements in presentation and methods and account for the use of more powerful computers and non-destructive editing.

The book is published by Focal Press, meaning that the editing and presentation are first rate.

The chapters are:

The Big Picture
Hardware for Restoration Work
Software for Restoration
Getting the Photo Into the Computer
Restoring Tone
Restoring Color
Making Masks
Damage Control
Tips, Tricks, and Enhancements
Beautification
Examples
Printing Tips
Archiving and Permanence

You can order a signed copy of Digital Restoration from Start to Finish through Ctein's website, or, if it's more convenient for you, you can order it through Amazon U.S. or Amazon U.K. There's also a PDF of the introduction and sections of several chapters available for download at the first link.

Finally, if you want to save some money, Ctein will be having a sale on the book at a later date, which we'll alert you to when the time comes.

Mike

Featured Comment by Scott Dommin: "I have the first edition of the book, which Ctein was kind enough to sign for me. It's the best book on the subject, bar none. The second edition should be even better. Even if you're not currently restoring a photo, you can flip through the book and be amazed at what is possible these days."

Featured Comment by Bahi: "I haven't yet read the book (shameful admission…I'm going to put that right shortly) but do have an idea of how good it might be, assuming that the author doesn't hold his cards too close to his chest.

"I recently asked Ctein to restore some very old photographs for a client and just had a chance to look at some of the incomplete work in progress. It may be unfinished but it's already beginning to look eye-poppingly good—there's genuine highlight detail in some of these pictures that we simply couldn't see in the originals. I'm not able to rule out the possibility that time travel was involved in obtaining the highlight detail (consider: long beard, interest in spacecraft, physics degree, clever fella, endless supply of dye transfer paper which Kodak stopped making sixteen years ago, etc.) but either way, we're talking about a book written by something of a wizard."

Posted on Thursday, 24 June 2010 at 10:42 AM in Books, Ctein | Permalink | Comments (19)

Thursday, 17 June 2010

Can You Get Good ISO 6400 from an Olympus E-P1?

By Ctein

I've just hit upon something rather cool and somewhat unexpected. Some of you will recall a column of mine from a year or so back called "JPEG...Seriously?" Well, I've found a reason for photographing JPEGs with my Olympus Pen E-P1. I can use them to get much, much better results at ISO 6400 than I could pull out of a RAW file using every trick I know.

(As usual, you can click on any of these illustrations to see them larger.)

Fig. 1. Olympus Pen RAW photographs at ISO 6400 are not lovely things. The full frame is on top, with a 100% magnification crop below. Observe the serious chroma noise, especially the horizontal and vertical stripes. © 2010 by Ctein.

As I wrote at the beginning of the year in "What Tests Don't Tell You," the E-P1 has some serious plaid chroma noise problems above ISO 800. It's great up to there, and then quality just falls off a cliff. ISO 1600 is marginal by my standards, everything above that is crap due to the chroma noise. Figure 1 shows a particularly egregious example of ISO 6400 quality in RAW mode; there's no way that I've found to make this RAW into a palatable photograph.

Now, take a look at the same photograph saved as JPEG in the camera (figure 2) . It's not perfect; there's some large low-frequency blotchiness, but that's the kind of stuff I could dodge or burn away. The chroma quality is not utterly sucking. It's usually not even this bad in most of the ISO 6400 photographs; this is just about the worst example I could come up with.

Fig. 2. The same photograph as in figure 1, but saved as a JPEG in camera. Excellent reduction of the chroma noise, but overall the picture is soft and veiled, and the highlights and shadows are blocked up. © 2010 by Ctein.

I'm truly amazed what the internal data massaging in the camera can do. If I had to, I could live with this as an okay snapshot. I don't much like that overall veiled quality, plus it's rather a shame losing several stops of highlight and shadow detail, most evident in the illuminated and dark stained glass windows and the trees).

So I said to myself, wait a minute...the Olympus can record in RAW+JPEG mode; what if I do that and then mix the two photographs in Photoshop? Start with the JPEG as the base layer, convert the RAW to a grayscale image (which almost completely eliminates the plaid problem), paste it in as a second layer over the JPEG, and set the blend mode to Luminosity (figure 3). I wind up with a photograph that has the clean chroma of the JPEG but retains most of the fine detail structure and tonal range of the RAW file. It's also a lot grainier.

Fig. 3. This layer stack combines a monochrome, noise-filtered copy of figure 1 with the JPEG from figure 2. The result is figure 4.

So, I further said to myself, what if I use my most flexible noise reduction plug-in (Imagenomic NoiseWare) to get rid of majority of the grain in the RAW layer, but not so much that I'm seriously compromising fine detail? Which leads me to Figure 4. Hey, it works! It's grainy, but the grain is even and tight. It's a nice compromise mix of the best characteristics of both source photographs.

Fig. 4. This is not half bad! Chroma noise is much better controlled than in the RAW photograph, but it preserves most of the RAW's detail and tonal range. It also has an acceptable compromise between grain and fine detail. © 2010 by Ctein.

It prints out as a fairly decent 8x10 (Mike's seen prints and Oren and Carl have seen full-size JPEGs, so they can confirm this). Nothing I would call professional quality by my standards, but more than pretty enough. It would be even better if I did a little bit of dodging and burning in on the remaining blotches; I didn't because I'm trying to show what the file really looks like. But, it wouldn't take me long to clean it up a lot more.

Best of all is that I can turn at least 90% of this merging process into a Photoshop automation. Possibly all of it; I haven't experimented with enough photographs yet. Even by hand it's very fast, but an automation would save me a whole bunch of repetitive mouse clicks.

Here are some of the better ISO 6400 results I've gotten out of this new trick (figures 5–7). Is it perfection? Of course not. But seeing as I'd previously decided this camera wasn't any good above ISO 800 I'm a mighty happy camper.

Fig. 6. The merged RAW+JPEG photo combines most of the exposure range of the RAW file and most of the noise reduction of the JPEG. Compare the 100% sections at the bottom, RAW on left, RAW+JPEG on right. © 2010 by Ctein.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column appears every Thursday on TOP.

Featured Comment by Semilog: "I suspect that there are at least a couple of things going on here.

"First, Olympus has access to much more proprietary information about the sensor and its specific hardware implementation than even, say, DxO does.

"Second, as Andrew Molitor says, the in-camera software (firmware) can be tuned to deal not only with a specific chip design/implementation, but a specific sample of a chip. This is really important because consumer devices, unlike scientific devices, have rather heterogeneous pixels.

"(Scientific devices are usually "grade 0," i.e., zero defects beyond a rather stringent specification. Moreover, scientific devices are generally CCDs, which are usually both more linear in response, and more homogeneous pixel-to-pixel than CMOS sensors. Because grade 0 devices are generally the cream of the crop, selected from much larger runs of devices, they also command very a very steep price premium. Your garden-variety D90 or E-PL1 is not going to contain a grade 0 sensor!)

"The sample-specific dark current calibration done at the factory accounts for variation not only between pixels, but between rows of pixels. On many cameras, this calibration is re-doable through the menus, useful since cosmic ray hits generate new hot and cold pixels over time.

"This sample-specific calibration information is potentially really important when making a zeroed image to start with, prior to application of conventional NR algorithms. This information is not stored in a RAW file, and thus is not available to any of the third-party RAW developers, fundamentally compromising their performance no matter how good they are (unless the dark subtraction is done upstream of the RAW file, which many forum idiots elsewhere deride as not kosher, but which is in fact a great idea, for reasons that now should be obvious)."

Posted on Thursday, 17 June 2010 at 02:46 PM in Ctein, Photo-tech, Software | Permalink | Comments (66)

Portals

Search

WWW
T.O.P.

Recent Posts

+ Sponsors

Resources

Ctein

Friday, 08 October 2010

Thursday, 07 October 2010

Thursday, 30 September 2010

Thursday, 23 September 2010

Thursday, 16 September 2010

Thursday, 09 September 2010

Thursday, 02 September 2010

Thursday, 26 August 2010

Thursday, 19 August 2010

Thursday, 12 August 2010

Thursday, 05 August 2010

Thursday, 29 July 2010

Sunday, 18 July 2010

Thursday, 15 July 2010

Monday, 12 July 2010

Thursday, 08 July 2010

Thursday, 01 July 2010

Thursday, 24 June 2010

Thursday, 17 June 2010

Portals

Search

Stats