The Bastard File

I used to be embarrassed in shop class when the teacher talked about using bastard files. That sort of language was discouraged at home. I was careful not to use it in front of my mother.

Bless her, she is long gone. I am free to express myself when I edit pictures on the computer. And I do. Sometimes the family are scandalised and I have noted the occasionally the wife closes the door on the computer room when I am working in there. I just wish she wouldn't wedge it shut with a hammer...

Bastard files come in several varieties:

1: The ones that have a dynamic range of 56 stops. The low tones are so low that you can see nothing and the high tones are so high that you can see nothing. Eventually you lose interest and stop looking.

2: The noise traps. No matter what setting you have dialled into the camera these files have electronic noise. In the low tones, in the high tones, in the margin. Even the Exif data is speckled and grey. They look like someone has dropped them onto the floor and rolled them in kitty litter.

3: The Walking Dead. Files that have so little character or substance that the most attractive portions of them are the chromatic aberration. Many of them have been made using Big Stopper filters and many of them have been made by elderly Frenchmen.

4: The Fun House. Files so distorted that they could feature in a parliamentary enquiry. That lens that you bought at the Camera Mart for the low price was being sold for a very good reason...

5: The files that are supplied in the 18.5 - bit HOOTx format. This is a format devised by a graduate student in Nebraska that was briefly thrown out as freeware on the net in 1998 for a week. Before the narcs got to him. It surfaces like a dying Soviet submarine every few years and some fool converts normal digital data to it. and then throws away the normal digital data. No known program actually decodes it but once the files get into your drive they can never be removed.

6: The files that are all watermark. No actual image but entirely safe.

7: Commercial traps. The file that contains an opposing product to the one that you are trying to advertise. The kind of photo-bombng that spreads radiation.

8: Private traps. The thumb drive o' death that your mate gives you. Plug it in at your peril, but be warned that your mate has nursed a grievance against you for a long time and this may well be the opportunity to revenge it.

You must understand that none of this ever happened in the dear old days of film photography. We were pure and simple and never had fungus on our lenses. And none of our negative files ever got wet an smelly and mouldy. Wanna see some of my unicorn pictures?

As Simple As It Gets

If you are a keen enthusiastic photographer who wants to know all the possible permutations of lens/camera/computer/tripod/boom arm/studio light/cut lunch as it applies to post-modern iconic parameters of existential thought, rack off.

I am addressing myself to today to people who want to take pictures and see them easily - good pictures of real life.

1. Get a Fuji X 100s. Or another Fuji camera - the X-A1, X-M1, X-Pro1, etc. Suit yourself if you'd like a zoom lens or removable lenses, or are happy with a perfect fixed focal length. I'm happy with the 23mm lens on the X100s camera - it equates to a 35mm lens on an older film camera and that just about sees the world the way I see it when I am just looking.

The X 100s is the kind of camera that you really CAN put on automatic - in this case by turning the aperture and shutter rings to 'A' and leaving the auto focus switch to AF-S. If you've asked it to adjust the ISO itself, all you need to do is look through the viewfinder and press the button. I do this when I am on holiday, and am rewarded with perfect records of what i have seen - and I am amazed that the camera sees it the same way. I can go into an art gallery to admire the paintings and when allowed to take photos, the photos look like the paintings. It copes with whatever the galleries come up with for lighting.

2. Get a Mac. If you haven't got a computer yet, get an Apple laptop or iMac. The people in Apple shops are helpful. They know their product.

If you are already using a Windows PC, carry on. Your comfort and skill with it will help you to succeed.

3. Get Photoshop Elements 12. I bang on about this program a lot because I have used PE  programs for years - all the way from PE 3. I am not a computer wizard, and do not need to be - the Adobe people have made the Photoshop Elements programs easy to understand and easy to remember. I started out doing things using pictograms to help me and have advanced to using keyboard shortcuts - the thing just flies along.

Here's a couple of examples of easy shooting last Saturday at Big Al's Poker Run. It is just what I saw and just what I want to remember. You can get on board with these products too - right now.

PE For Smarties

Over the years we have seen any number of yellow-covered books in the bookstore entitled " Whatever For Dummies". The range of topics seems to have ranged from religion and philosophy to storm door repairs. I bought one that dealt with my new computer system and as I progressed through I realised it was telling the absolute truth...anyone who spent money on it was a dummy.

I tried another tack - I invested in the first of my Photoshop Elements editing programs...in this case it was Photoshop Elements 3. I found it surprisingly easy to use, and as my artistic ability was on a level with a preschooler, I was rewarded with bright pop colours. On everything...

Determined to do better I bought the Photoshop Elements 10 and switched to it. A whole new world of elegant image manipulation opened up...and I discovered the layer system as well. All of a sudden I could clean up all my image files as well as making an imaginary world of my own.

Photoshop Elements has since gone to No.11 and No.12 and they have added more features. More of the power of the classic Photoshop program has been added but the difficult learning curve that you might expect with the standard program is not there. PE is really intuitive.

Now, if you'd like to equip yourself with the best introduction to Photoshop Elements, make a booking to attend the February 9th workshop with Nick Melidonis at Shoot Photography. He'll show you how to get the best from it, while creating and managing your images.

Ring Jonathan Cousins at Shoot on 9228-8232 to book a place. Beginner or enthusiast, you can place your reliance on Adobe and their Photoshop Elements program.And you won't be a dummy...

Two Panel Or Three Panel?

Planning ahead for my holidays, I have decided to review the capabilities of my imaging system* to deliver panoramic pictures. That sounds very grand, but it really means I am going to see if I can't do the most with the least - least weight, least cost, least fuss.

I plan to reserve my serious cultural and intellectual efforts for toy stores, book stores, and pubs. If the Jack Stanbridge's put in a used book section, a couch, and a keg I would never leave the town...

Be that as it may I experimented this morning with the Fuji X camera perched on top of a monopod. The places I go to have other tourists swirling about and a tripod would be a distinct hazard - and the extra weight and volume of one would cut down on the capacity of my luggage to bring back toy cars and books. The monopod is a carbon fibre one, fits into my folded photo bag, and with a Novoflex panorama plate on top makes a handy war hammer for late night explorations.

The panorama plate is normally seen on a tripod - you get the bubble level centered and then spin the camera around the vertical axis and get good horizons on your image. I figured that I could HOLD it vertical and then spin it for 2 or three shots. Out on the lawn this morning to experiment...

Yes. it works. I let the camera set its own exposure, though on other occasions I would use manual - there are some scenes that change light value widely and you really need to set a good compromise and then run all the panels with it. The Fuji puts out a good image on the rear screen and writes its RAF files fast enough to let me do three panels.

The files go into the Photoshop Elements program in the computer - it has a very easy-to-use panorama maker that allows a number of different perspectives on the scene. You can get a flat horizon with essentially flat images or they can curve up at the ends in several ways. I have been experimenting with it but have not decided which I prefer.

One good setting in there removes most of the vignetting that might occur around the edges of the panels - in a single photograph it might be quite attractive, but in multiple panels it is disturbing. Of course it adds a little time to the assembly of the images, but it is automatic and you can drink coffee while it works.

Purists will squawk at the imprecision of the monopod vs the tripod - at the simplicity of the PSE10 program - and at the modest nature of the result. But if I see a good panorama I can capture it in a minute and I won't have to haul 10Kg of gear to do it. I can leave my nodal points and virtual reality at home in the cupboard and leave space in the camera bag for a chocolate bar. And a hot rod magazine.

Ya gotta get yer priorities right...

* I used to own a camera and photo album. Now it is an imaging system.

Avast There Ye Lubbers!

The International Talk Like A Pirate day came and went last year and we arrrred for all we were worth. In some cases it was about 56¢ worth...but it was a good day to celebrate slavery, murder, and theft on the high seas. The rum was particularly refreshing after the pillaging.

Being a pillager is fun, and profitable. Being a pillagee sucks. This is why the music producers make such an effort to seize pirated copies of their CDs and other recorded pieces of music and prosecute the offenders. I remember seeing television footage of thousands of discs being crushed under a front-end loader somewhere in Siam or the Dutch East Indies with the officers of the local militia standing around shaking hands for the camera.

 I couldn't help wondering if they would have had a more effective message had they substituted the local sellers of the discs under the wheels of the loader. Or a few of the  tourists who keep the trade alive by buying them.

In the photo world piracy seems to be expressed in two ways; stealing images off the net and displaying them on your own website and swarming through the studio windows of your local business rival with a knife between your teeth. Both are bad, but the first one particularly so - bloodshed is something that can be cleaned up with a mop and bucket but stolen images are on the net FOREVER. And ask as you might, it is nearly impossible to find someone who can remove them. Once your rival steals your picture of mysterious gunman on the grassy knoll, you will never get the credit you deserve.

How to combat this sort of thing? The studio invasion is easy - a small swivel gun loaded with langridge and trained on the window is cheap and simple insurance. Okay, you may have to replace the glass and repaint the wall a couple of times but your average pirate will get the message quickly. The website thefts are another matter.

Watermarking, copyrighting, studio advertising, outright defacement, all serve to make an image unattractive to pirates. They also make it unattractive to clients. You can do a number of computer tricks that make it awkward to try to download something but eventually a client will roast you for making it difficult to do. And eventually every computer command system ages or breaks down - my Pong game is getting problematical.
Then YOU can't download, upload, or control it. And it lurches away forever telling people what a klutz you are. If you don't believe me look at all the computer sites that went feral in 2004 and are still there...

The safest way to present your work is still in print form, in a steel frame, with a strong chain attached to the edge of the frame. Hold on to one end of the chain with one hand and a cutlass with the other hand. Arrrrrr....

Who she? The fabulous Cap'n Jane. Curviest buccaneer in the Caribbean.

Gapping The Generations - Or Not Poking The Bear

I was scrapping for a topic this morning until I talked to Ernest, our chief technician. He mentioned that he had read a request from me for information - I had put it out on the internet. When I expanded on what I wanted to know and why, he had a word of caution for me.

I tend to take Ernest's words of caution seriously. I remember he once advised me NOT to stick my fingers into a live light socket and this proved to be quite correct. I wish I had listened then - at least I can listen now.

The question I posed was what the new operating system for my Macintosh computers was like - I was looking at the advertisement for the OSX Maverick. It seems to be three steps on from the one that is in the computers now. The underlying reason for this is the advent of some new cameras that attract me - if I am to use RAW files from them I need to upgrade the ACR rating...and in turn this means a later operating system.

At this point the image of a beagle chasing its tail in a circle comes to mind, but read on...

Ernest mentioned that the newer operating systems are now involving themselves with information storage elsewhere in the electronic universe - the "cloud" system. Call me paranoid, but by accepting the benefits of the new software I think I might  be sending my images who knows where and in turn they might not come back to me. They might come back to other people. Hmmmm.

Personal data? I don't mind mine going everywhere, except I don't want people to know exactly what I think in case I don't agree with me. I had a garlic curry that didn't agree with me and that was unpleasant enough...I think I have come to terms with the thought that whatever I write or look at is noted down in Langley, Virginia or somewhere in Russia. I can only hope that when I become feeble-minded with age they can send some of it back to me.

Ernest said it best - if what I have now does what I need now, I would be a fool to chase the electronic rainbow on the basis of a colourful advert from Apple or the pressure of the next camera. If I change my computer to a new one, I can go in clean with a new system and all the current ACR keys will be good - and a considerable number of ones for the future. But if what I got ain't broke...don't fix it.

Not Too Proud To Learn

Sometimes it pays to pay attention. I found this out this last weekend.

I was asked to take series of family group pictures and as there were to be 10 people involved, I knew that my little studio would be strained to do it. Not that the little studio is a bad place - I have Elinchrom lights and shapers to deal with lots of different situations.  I use a Nikon digital system now and am very pleased with the resolution and colour rendition it provides ( particularly since I coordinated the in-camera white balance with the actual output of the lights and the Adobe Camera Raw section of the computer - I now get what I expect...).

But it is a little studio. I can do fighter jets and motor cars and ships at sea, but the Superior paper roll is still just 2750 mm wide. Some of the groups I take are 6 or more people and they tend to flow over the edges. I can composite and retouch but once they go past the edge of he paper it all gets time consuming.

So - I purchased a book by Matt Koskowski on photo compositing. One chapter was devoted to precisely the situation I was facing yesterday. And Koskowski was very specific on how he solved it - fixed positions for the subjects, light, and camera. Fortunately I practised the technique the night before using myself as  model and on the day it all worked like clockwork. The selections and final assembly were a breeze and as soon as I figure out exactly how I want the shadow to fall I can complete it. I hope the family won't mind if I give a preview.

Note as well: Big-name exclusive fashionable studios and the international award-winning legend mentors may wish to turn away and sip their hemlock cocktails now. I am going to suggest that small-name photographers with little studios that aren't exclusive at all might benefit by taking a leaf out of North American books. ( For the chronically anti-American amongst you, pretend that this is all Canadian...). Small studios there make a good ( Canadian) dollar out of high school graduation photos, Christmas card photos, and Halloween photos. Call it corny, call it trite, call it what you will - I call it money.

It might be difficult to get a chance at school pictures here in Western Australia - big firms have this sewn up and they do a good job of it. And it is a tough business - dealing with battle-hardened primary school teachers and their ravening hordes of children. I should not take it on with a Gatling, myself. But there may be high school yearbooks and senior classes who would welcome off-site studio shots of their graduating classes. If you are prepared to apply a little taste and a lot of patience, they can be the highlight of the school year.

Likewise Halloween. Throw yourself around like a pig in a fit if you will about the North American tradition of trick-or-treat, but if you advertise Halloween photo sets and then stock up with skulls and spiders and bats from Toys R Us, you can do a lot of good in October. Heavily gelled lights and photoshopped moons and graveyards are the go so don't hold back on the schlock - your customers will love it.

Christmas images for cards are a good idea, but don't get stuck with dong the cards yourself - provide good templated images on disc to the customers and get them to have the printing done by a commercial firm.

You'll end up with a lots of props to store, but take heart - the seasonal holidays come back each year and the corny props never date. And you can make pie out of the Jack-o-Lantern on the 1st of November...

The Annual Leap Of Faith

Spring is here, the grass is riz. I wonder where the annual update to Photoshop Elements is...

Ah, It's on the net. Just announced today in fact. I daresay we'll get some boxed sets of them fairly shortly...but don't ring me up this morning to ask when because I don't know.
Suffice it to say that if you are banging out your work on an older version, this might be a good investment.

I fit into the banging away category - I started my digital adolescence with the Elements 3 version - got free with a scaner. Then I bought Elements 6, and eventually went to Elements 10. Each one was separated far enough in generation to encompass real improvements while retaining most of the useful features of the past.

Note that I said " most " - in between 6 and 10 they ditched some paste-in graphics that they considered tired. In reality they were useful - I am going to go back and capture them and store them for future use. You can never tell when you'll need a Drum Majorette's cap to put onto a bridesmaid...

The new Photoshop Elements 12 seems to have additional features that move items in the picture and then fill in the backdrop behind them. Very useful for street and event photography. There is also an improvement to the straighten tool that settles the horizon and then fills in the little wedge-shaped blank areas at the side with similar content to the main subject.

I am also looking forward to an automatic colour correct that has the capability to learn your preferences and to slap it on at a click. I hope to use other plug-ins to custom craft a look that I can teach to the Photoshop Elements 12 - then I'll just go straight to it for a 50's look. You can do that with the plug-ins now but you are bouncing back and forward to do it. One stop shop is the go.

Is this program prestigious and complex enough for your photographic business? If you need prestige and complexity to sell your services go for the full PS6 Cloud and add a host of special layers and curves and extra operations. The clients will notice, or not, as the case may be...Make sure you tell them about how you spend hours at the computer hand-crafting their images.

Make sure they don't ever get to see what your editing desktop really looks like. Coffee cup rings on your laptop never look good. Especially when they are on the screen...

A Day With My Scaley Mates

Did goe to the Reptile Expo yesterdaye and was greatley entertained.

It was held at Bogan Central - otherwise known as the Cannington Agricultural Hall. The reason for the nickname is instantly evident, but so many fun things happen at this venue - the toy car expo next weekend and the collector's fairs, etc. - that the occasional flannel shirt and uggs is a small price to pay for the pleasures. Even if you are the one wearing them...

So - yesterday was reptiles, and it was a typical Perth experience - and eye-opener as to just how many people are interested in a subject, how sophisticated their knowledge is, and how much trade and commerce there is out there to support it. It is the same with quilt sewing, hot rods, iron ore mining, and Lithuanian ferret racing - give them a day out and there are a million people there.

We took a stand of goodies that might interest a reptilian - DGK grey cards, Adobe image programs, Datacolor Spyder - and a some magic Nikon cameras and a coupla Cullmann products.

Well, the 10:00 lecture from me on wildlife photography was attended by me. And after ten minutes even I left. Everyone was having too much fun with the rest of the snakes to want to listen. In the event, they did come and ask sensible questions at the stand.

They ran a photographic competition that was won by three suitable shooters - first and second prize were a father and son team and son beat father. I should advise him to guard his prize - a Cullmann 525 tripod and big carrying bag - well as there was a predatory gleam in Dad's eye...reptiles do that to you.

One thing was impressive - everyone from the pure enthusiast all the way up to the two wandering officers from the Conservation Department had the interests of the animals at heart - none of the reptiles were ill-housed or ill-treated. Some of the pythons seemed to be exercising a wicked sense of humour when they were allowed to climb over pretty girls. The frogs looked nonplussed and none of them elected to turn back into princesses no matter who kissed them. The bobtail goanna in the terrarium next to our table was prosperous - his keeper obviously knew exactly the right diet for him.

The day was a success - next Sunday is toy cars and I am looking out my tracky daks and Jackie Howe shirt in preparation. I wonder if I have time to grow a mullet before then...

Engage Automatic Warp Drive One, Mr Sulu...With Epson

Good news for those of you who have been following my experiments in the Scientific Ruritanian - the anti-gravity ray is finally working. Once I get the dog down off the ceiling I will be able to publish the final paper. Until then it may be as well to avoid walking under him...

On another front, I finally got to try one of the features of the Epson V700 scanner this weekend, and can report on the operation.

The V700 is a flat-bed scanner that has been specifically designed to accommodate transparent and solid copy from the tiniest miniature format to the 8 x 10 size. I have owned on for 5 years and have used it extensively to mine the archives of my negative and slide collection. I scan and save the images into the digital bag and then use the Adobe Photoshop Elements program to modify them.

In many case the modification is confined to cleaning the spots and dust from the scan. My negatives and slides have been stored in proper sleeves for the last 40 years but even the best storage is a little subject to contamination. Indeed, the act of taking an old negative out of storage and placing it in the dedicated scanner plates can attract some dust through static electricity. The newest negs have little to bother them, and the big sheet film negs are so big as to render small dust unexceptionable, but the 35mm and 120 ones from the 90's generally need some spotting.

Of course spotting these days is mouse or stylus-based using the spot feature of PSE10 and is very effective - you cannot see where the program has erased the problem. But it all takes time as you navigate around the image at 100% and zap the spots. Then you go out to page size and invariably you have missed one, so you zoom in again...

The Epson V700 has a feature that is designed to relieve this problem. There is an ICE circuit built into the control panel that supposedly removes the dust automatically. I tried it last night with the experiment of doing one scan on a moderately clean image and then spotting it manually - timing myself - and then repeated the scan on the same image with the ICE turned on.

At this juncture let me explain what I think the ICE is doing - if I am right it is science and if I am wrong it is sorcery. It makes a regular preview scan as pre normal - you inspect it and choos the size and crop. When you engage the ICE and tell it to scan it goes down your image once, then resets itself - with an audible click that is distinct to the ICE setting - and runs slowly down the image again. I suspect that it is looking at the surface of the film from a slightly different scan bar angle - hence the click - and then supplying the computer with two images to compare. the computer takes some time to do this before it spits the final image to wherever you have requested.

The time taken to do this is at least double that of the un-cleaned scan, and in some cases it may be more than double. But we are not talking about very long scans here, either. In any case in the end you have an image that is entirely free of dust - and here is the good part: I inspected the manual clean version and the auto clean version side by side and cannot see any loss of resolution. Just loss of dust.

The time taken to do the ICE clean is no longer - and in the case of a heavily contaminated surface can be much shorter - than the business of doing it yourself and then spotting away for 5 minutes.

Tonight I shall make the experiment of deliberately putting a fingerprint on the non-emulsion side of a negative and see if the mechanism can cope with the whorls and spots. I also have several negatives of shame that never received proper washing and have chemical contamination on the surface - it will be interesting to see what it makes of them.