Category: Syndicated Feeds

I had a client come to be and ask about photographing some paintings. He wanted to have them shot with enough resolution to make reproductions of them for sale. Wonderful! I was glad he called because it’s not as easy to photograph a painting as one might imagine.

As you can see below, the shot is terribly washed out on the left hand side. What happened?

Glare from the flash caught the surface of the painting and bounced into the camera, creating a badly washed out looking left side. What about the right side? I had the polarizers from the lamps set to the proper orientation, so it looks fine.

You’re asking – wait a minute..did he polarize the flashes? Yes, in order to eliminate glare off the painting, I needed to polarize the light coming from my flashes. This way, I could align the light in such a manner as to nearly eliminate all the glare coming off the painting even before the light hit my camera lens. But, to get the correct effect, the lens also happens to have a second polarizer on it. And you need to use a polarizer alignment card to check the polarization to make sure it is correct.

Confused yet?

There’s a lot to photographing products and artwork because if done improperly, these problems will show up:

• Glare
• White balance
• Color calibration
• Lens distortion
• Orientation/perspective distortion

All of these problems will ruin your attempted reproduction. In order to photograph flat artwork properly, you’ll need the following tools beyond the usual photo tools:

• Polarizer panel for each light source
• Diffuser for polarized light source panels
• Polarization angle detector
• Polarizer for camera lens
• Color calibration reference card for printing
• Distortion profile for your lens
• Light stands
• Powerful strobes
• Light meter with remote trigger or flash sense

It takes quite a bit of equipment and even more know-how to photograph flat art properly. Even if you’re able to get away from the glare, the color calibration is a major deal. If your colors are incorrect, the client is going to be very unhappy. You can’t just put your camera on flash white balance and assume it’ll all work. Polarizers subtly shift color (especially in sunlight),  plus the color dye balance of your camera never matches the flashes. And the color balance of your flashes is never correct.

No matter how much effort you put into trying to color balance your lights, you’ll never get 100% of the way there. The only way is to have and use a color reference card, then know how to calibrate the final image so it looks correct.

Also, using hot lamps (light bulbs) is problematic for 2 reasons. They’re easier to align for polarization, true. But you have to have a LOT of light power to expose the image properly. That means your very expensive/nice painting is boiling under quartz halogen lamps.

Or you have to have a very long exposure. That means the rest of the lights in the room have to be extinguished. But wait, you’re in your gallery, so you can’t shoot this in the dark. So you need even more and more powerful lamps.

Then notice that the blues in your image are too dark because you’re using a tungsten/halogen light source. So you adjust the white balance but notice that there’s blue noise in your image.

It’s important that the light is uniform across the image as well. Otherwise there will be gradients of light that aren’t in the original piece. This makes a BIG difference. In order to measure the light uniformity, you’ll need to use a light meter (I use Sekonic-L608C) to check the uniformity across the painting. And you’ll need a way to remote trigger your strobes from the light meter while doing this as well. If the painting is brighter on one side or spot than the other, you’ll not be happy with the reproduction.

You care about getting the image correct, right? The above is the basics of what you have to consider, own and understand.

Or, you can just hire me and I’ll get you the images without the headaches and $1000′s in gear you’ll have to have to make this work correctly.

Note – Edge intentionally left on images

We just upgraded our lowly HP Laserjet P1102W with the HP Laserjet Pro 200 m251mw to print color brochures, flyers and mailers. We’re not getting rid of the P1102W, as it’s a great little desk printer that snaps to attention in a second when printing from iPads and iPhone as well as our Mac computers.

Overview of HP LaserJet 200

After working on the wireless settings for a bit, we were able to set up the connection to the router. That was pretty easy to do following the wireless prompts. Setting up the direct connection was a little more challenging only because I didn’t realize I had to click through three follow-me prompts. Once I got that part down, the iPad connected to the printer without a hitch.

The printer is heavy, weighing in at 40 pounds. It’s not a little desk printer unless you have a whopper of a desk. It’s best on its own little place. It has network, USB, wireless and all the other expected connections for printing. It’s a nice black box, much more attractive than the beige HP printers we’ve had for decades. The aesthetic is good. But that’s not why we bought it.

Competitor

We looked at the comparable Brother model HL-3170CDW as a worthy competitor. It has 600×1200 resolution and real duplex printing, something I really wish the HP 200 had. The HP can’t do single sheet flow-through feed. That almost pushed us to the Brother, but our experience with Brother products has been poor, so overcoming the negative history was difficult. But the Brother was reported to be difficult to work with Apple products and also the toner cartridges report being out based on page count, not an actual toner measurement. There are tricks on the web to get around this issue but we don’t have the inclination to fool around, we just want to print and get things done. The HP won.

Installation

I plugged the USB cable into my Macbook Pro and, as expected, OS X downloaded the driver, set the printer up and I was ready to go. No searching for drivers, wasting time figuring out irritating (HP) websites, analyzing why the driver didn’t work, and so forth. This is why we use Apple – sure it’s expensive, but at $100/hour, the “savings” of a PC gets eaten up in time wasted pretty quickly.

Heads and Tails

So far the print quality has been pretty amazing for an inexpensive 600DPI laser. It has a few gripes but nothing we can’t get past, at least for now.

Discussion

The print tray only holds 150 sheets for a printer this big, that’s embarrassing. Even my HP Laserjet 4P held more 20 years ago and it was smaller. The lack of feed through printing for card stock, envelopes and such is also a horrible omission. Maybe it’s too difficult with the feed path design, so who knows.

The toner cartridges are wretchedly expensive. Replacing 3 color (cyan, magenta, yellow) will set you back $210. Yes, that’s right. The extended black cartridge is another $80. Owch. But our experience with laser printers tells us this that printing $0.13/page compared to the liquid gold price of inkjets makes the laser win hands down.

The laser can sit for a year, fire up and print without issue. This is not a minor consideration. Ink jets clogged up just after 6 weeks of no use and require wasted time/$$$/frustration with nozzle cleaning. This cleaning process eats up huge amounts of ink and time. And, invariably, you’ll begin a print before you realize the jets are clogged. The ink jet wasn’t a consideration at all. Laser print resilience is far better, as one drop of water ruins ink jet prints whereas color laser prints are as tough as monochrome laser prints.

The print quality on this machine is amazing. It’s no 2800DPI photo printer but it holds its own far better than I ever expected. Its quality is far better than the P1102w in black and white, too.

Performance straight out of the box

This first image is printed from this PDF resolution test file on Staples 20 pound 89 brightness copy paper. The image was taken with an iPhone 6 under tungsten lighting – not the best representation for the quality of the image. And it’s generally dark, so the iPhone image is grainy, so note that for your image quality review.

The lighting caused the color shift as seen on the paper, but looking at the actual image, it’s amazingly good. At 0.25pt, the Red (MY) print shows some waviness in the Red. Apparently this can be calibrated out. If that’s the case, I expect the printer to look even better than it already does. (click for full-resolution image)

The second print page (again tungsten lighting, iPhone 6 image) comes from this JPG image test file. Again, the quality is amazing. We’re comparing the image to the original file viewed on a Macbook pro retina display and though the color isn’t perfect, it’s very near to the original. Since the printer is CMYK, there’s no way it can represent the color gamut of an sRGB file, so that’s fair. But just looking at the strawberries, I keep looking and am just amazed how good it looks. (click for full-resolution image)

Our best sub-$1000 ink jet printers looked TERRIBLE when printed on basic laser paper at high quality. At low quality, the ink jet was a joke. We’d always have to put in expensive paper, spend time, $$$, and irritation just to get to something matching this basic quality. Sure, the inkjet easily surpassed the resolution of this laser, but only when we used $1/page paper and a fortune in ink. So sure, the ink jet might seem better, but when you pour that much ink onto cheap paper, it ripples and is instantly damaged by water (think someone’s spittle hitting the paper – oops).

I’ll say it again – this is on cheap copy paper. Not expensive paper. So sure, you might see that your inkjet cartridges are cheaper, but to look good always, you have to use expensive paper. The HP 200 looks good on $0.01/page copy paper. Put that into your calculator when you’re figuring print quality/cost/volume.

The area where I can see the resolution catches up is in the electronics image and the the baby on the right hand side. At normal viewing distance (12 inches) the people look very good, though there’s a tiny bit of pixelation. The electronics image with darks and fine diagonal lines show the printer resolution limit. But you can still read “FULL AUTO STOP” without issue. The A’a lava looks really good for being a nearly black item.

Here’s a flyer we made up for photography tutoring. It’s much more interesting and eye-catching with color, a big upgrade from the black and white (yawn) we were using. Again, these shots are the same conditions as above. (click for full-resolution image)

But here’s the amazing thing. Even though I’ve not calibrated the Red so there’s no waviness in the 45 degree print, you can actually still read the FX badge on the Nikon D800.

This gives you a good idea of at what size the FX badge is relative to the entire brochure. I was amazed (again) how good this looks on cheap copy paper. Have I belabored the point? I can see the FX and read it at 12″ without glasses. For basic mailers, flyers and such, this is awesome. My main gripe is that I can’t send cardstock through the printer to make heavyweight brochures. I’ll still have to have that done elsewhere. Then again, if I wanted that ability, I could have stepped up and spent $500. And if I’m doing that much volume, I hire it out anyway, so I’m not going to waste toner to make 100′s of brochures on this laser paper.

Issues

The gamma isn’t correct on the printer but we’re not worried about that. It’s not a photo printer and we know that. The black zone below 16 (out of 255 steps) is indistinguishable from the black. And values above 243 (out of 255 steps) are indistinguishable from white. These all sound bad but it’s actually very difficult to tell in a photo image.

Wait, did I say no single sheet feed?

Conclusion

For $169, this printer is an amazing steal. As long as it doesn’t blow up with 2 years of use, I’ll be happy. I won’t be happy if it does die, but consider this: Staples charges $0.59 for basic color copies and $0.69 for high quality paper copies. It only takes 462 color pages printed off the laser to pay for itself in color copies from the store. We’ve already printed up 20+ pages on the first day. I expect we’ll cover the price differential very quickly. Plus, we can print at off hours and don’t have to drive anywhere to get these done, thus saving more money and allowing us to work at the normal crazy hours.

I’d buy it again. That’s my final analysis, even without duplex or feed-through printing.

Is this the end-all color printer? No, absolutely not. But at this price, it’s a steal for us.

We’ll update this page as we learn more.

We enjoyed a lunar eclipse just a few weeks ago but today we in North America were treated to a much rarer solar eclipse. The spectacle today was quite enjoyable in Jackson, WY, even though there were clouds obscuring the event right up to the peak. Then, miraculously, the clouds parted and we were treated to quite a sight.

The peak time in Wyoming was 4:23PM MST.  I’m betting someone got an interesting shot over the Tetons. I’ll bet Mike Jackson or Mike Cavaroc got something good, even though it was pretty overcast over there.

One of the most interesting parts of this event was the very large sun spots nearly in the middle of the sun. As we are in a peak of the sun spot cycle, this made for an especially interesting event. These sun spots are -only- at 2,700–4,200 °C compared to the surface of the sun at a comfortable 5,500 °C. This is the reason they appear so much darker. It isn’t that they’re not that hot, it’s just everything around them is that much hotter.

Live viewing with special filters for those in overcast and invisible areas can be seen on www.space.com. Of course! The most interesting thing visible in the online view was the solar flare or prominence. These are 1,600,000,000 times more powerful and the biggest atomic bomb ever made.  They are 10′s of millions of degrees celcius. Wrap your head around that one. The best part is no scientist knows why they occur. There are still mysteries out there.

One of the best tools for viewing a solar eclipse are these solar eclipse glasses. They’re sold on Amazon and such. Using these, you can actually stare straight at the sun. I have a pair and it’s pretty amazing that you can do that, as they block both the UV and visible light spectrum. You can look at the unobscured sun as well. Of course put them on BEFORE looking at the sun.

How did I get these photographs of the solar eclipse? Here’s the gear I used:

Nikon D800

Nikon 80-400mm f/4-5.6

Hoya 77mm NDx400 9 stop filter

Hoya 77mm Neutral Density (NDX8) 0.9 3-stop filter

Manfrotto Tripod and Kirk BH-3 ball head

These filters in combination were dark enough to look at the maximum eclipse without and problems. Once the moon started moving away from the sun, I had to use the DOF preview button on the D800 to keep viewing the event safely. Even adding on my Singh-Ray polarizer on top of these filters wouldn’t have been dark enough without either solar glasses or using the DOF preview.

I then shot all of my images on RAW and the above three are the best that came out. Other than shifting the color a bit to look more natural, these are as they came out of my D800. Normally I photograph jewelry, advertising, architecture and such, but fun sky displays always bring me outside.

WARNING: As always, NEVER look straight at the sun, ESPECIALLY through your camera. Permanent eye damage isn’t fun.