Photography
Although I’ve enjoyed photography since childhood, I’ve never studied it, and certainly can’t claim to amount to much as a photographer. I have good intentions, but lack the patience to delve into lenses and settings and films and lighting and techniques. I use Nikon camera bodies, lenses, and stobes, but am reluctant to recommend the brand to you, since Nikon accessories are overpriced. To its credit, Nikon’s quality is almost always consistent.
I bought a Nikon D-100 digital camera about three years ago. I’d resolved years earlier not to hop on the digital camera band wagon until I could achieve Photo CD resolution for less than $2,000. The D-100 delivers Photo CD resolution almost to a pixel, and when I bought mine, the list price was $1,999.95, although I was able to haggle the price down a bit.
The user interface would make clearer sense if I were a.) Japanese; b.) left-handed, or c.) both. All the controls work, mind, but counter-intuitively, and only after one has fooled around with needlessly small buttons. As promised, it works flawlessly with my Nikon AF lenses; unfortunately, it multiplies their focal lengths by an extra 50%. A larger CCD would have solved the problem. The decidedly un-Nikon-esque light metering system is inconsistent. Successive identical shots at identical settings produce different exposures about a quarter of the time. The software accompanying the camera proved a complete waste of time and hard drive space. I simply pop the card into the reader attached to the back of my computer, copy the images to my hard drive, and open them with Photoshop in LAB format: less waiting, less mousing, and fewer color transformations. Clarity is usually very good, although at exposures of a half-second or more, images are afflicted with noise, and since the noise occurs in the same pixels, I suspect the CCD was designed down to a price rather than up to a standard.
Color fidelity isn’t very good, but it’s very good. Strictly speaking, the color is usually off at least 10% either way in both the a and b channels, and occasionally by as much as 30%, and lightness channel deviations run between 5% and 50%; relatively speaking, however, those error rates are a vast improvement upon those I tolerated with both Photo CD and scanning transparencies myself. Shooting with a digital camera requires three steps: exposing the CCD, writing the file to the card and copying it to the hard drive, and opening it in Photoshop. Traditional image acquisition requires five: exposing the film, processing the film, scanning the transparency, writing the file to the hard drive, and opening it in Photoshop. Every time color data are handled, they’re shifted.
I used to shoot ten to twenty rolls of transparency film at roughly $12 per roll in every photographic shoot with a model, then drive the film across town, drive home, drive back a few days later to pick up the transparencies at roughly $10 per roll, drive home, sort the mounted transparencies, select the most promising, break open the mounts, coax my scanner into working, save the files, restart the computer, and hope for the best as I opened each file. I now shoot ten or twenty exposures, wait a few minutes for the camera to write the images to the card, remove the card from the camera and insert it into the reader, transfer the files to a hard drive, and open them and hope for the best. Since I use two cards, I can continue shooting while the reader transfers the files and Photoshop opens them. The cost and time savings alone have paid for the camera in the eight months I’ve owned the camera; equally to the point, I’m sure I’ve taken as many shot during these digital months as I’d previously taken in my entire life. I’ll never be a professional photographer, to be sure, but am a markedly better photographer for the additional practice and the ability to learn from mistakes within a few minutes rather than days later.
The D-100 is a decidedly imperfect camera, but is a significant improvement upon the traditional 35-millimeter camera.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ I shot more Agfa film than other brands during the last years I used film. The color fidelity under normal and low light conditions was better than Fujichrome’s, and I rarely encountered grain problems. It didn’t seem to be widely available, sad to say. I shot several rolls of very high-priced Kodak transparency film supposedly balanced for flesh tones. The results were a wretched mess: weird saturation problems, skin tones heavily skewed toward red, washed out blues, et cetera. I started out shooting negative film, switched to transparency because it gave me better results with Photo CD scans, returned to negative film when my Photo CD vendor figured out how to handle negatives well, then switched back to transparency film because my Polaroid 35-millimeter scanner (see below) does a third-rate job with negatives.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ I’m partial to Fujichrome film and Fuji CDs and removable storage cartridges. Fujichrome’s heightened saturation can be problematic if there’s insufficient light, but the grain is invariably very fine. The firm’s diskettes and storage cartridges are usually slightly less expensive and of higher quality than other companies’.
Addendum, June, 2008: while looking over this page, I realized I haven’t shot a roll of film in nearly six years. I finally traded in my accumulation of film cameras on a lens about a year ago. Times have changed.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ Scanning
I used a scanner the first time in 1986, and have owned, worked with, and test-driven a large assortment of expensive and cheap, small and large, fanciful and purely functional scanners. I even worked for a third-rate scanner company for awhile, and did some freelance marketing and advertising for another. If you don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to spend, do yourself a favor and consider Umax. Here’s a clue: a large number of competing scanner “manufacturers” use Umax engines; they should use Umax software, too.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ I’ve used a sizable number of Agfa scanners during the past decade that were fast, reliable, and rounded out with excellent software.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ I was initially skeptical of Kodak Photo CD, if only because Kodak films tend to be needlessly grainy and unpredictable, and people at Kodak film processing plants censor photographs. A fellow graphic designer showed me a scan he’d paid less than $2 for. I called Alpha CD Imaging of Menlo Park, Califlora, asked a gazillion and fifty-eleven questions, and have been going back ever since. The technology is outstanding, although Kodak’s software is encumbered with an irredeemably clunky user interface. Alpha CD has kept my business because I like courteous, prompt, consistent service.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ I purchased a Polaroid Sprint Scan 4000 35-millimeter scanner because I wanted very high resolution scans. I was going to buy a Nikon scanner, but couldn’t face the prospect of paying the Nikon brand premium, and anyway, the Polaroid’s resolution was 4,000 pixels per inch as opposed to the Nikon’s 2,700. I haggled long and hard, saved a substantial amount of money, and brought it home and hoped for the best. It took less than ten minutes to set up and connect the device and install the accompanying software. The device qua device does a minimally adequate job; the software is a wretched mess, which, sad to say, is the norm rather than the exception for scanner software.
The user interface is at least a decade behind the times. It’s completely mouse- rather than keyboard-based. Half the so-called “preferences” can’t be saved, but must be reestablished afresh at the start of each session. The scanner and its software do an average job of prescanning transparencies, but a third-rate job of scanning negatives. The tone and color alteration increments are exceedingly coarse, and don’t accurately reflect what’s actually being done to the image. Polaroid would have been miles ahead if it had simply licensed Umax’s software and duct-taped on its own drivers. The newest version of Polaroid’s software is less unstable than its predecessor; in all other respects, however, it’s the same wretched mess.
I’ve discovered a trick to scanning transparencies: remove them from their mounts and sandwich them in the negative holder rather than using the transparency holder, whose small springs apply so much pressure the transparencies tend to buckle slightly and fall out of focus.
In sum, don’t buy a Polaroid Sprint Scan 4000 unless you’re wholly prepared to pamper the third-rate software for the sake of high resolution and color you’ll need to revise extensively in Photoshop.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ Production
I’ve recently tried the high end color output device (name forgotten) at Accent Photo in Colorado Springs. It does a better, more consistent job than the Light Jet 5000 at Robyn Color in San Francisco. Customer service is far superior; the selection of Fuji papers was wider, and the price was slightly lower. Outstanding!
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ Once upon a time, the Light Jet 5000 at Robyn Color in San Francisco did an incomparable job of producing my paintings. The Light Jet 5000’s high resolution and Robyn Color’s use of Fuji rather than Kodak paper added up to significant advantages. Customer service was excellent, and the technical people even included a monitor calibration kit, complete with straightforward, intelligible directions. Alas, customer service fell through the floor. The quality of workmanship remained high, but I don’t patronize businesses that can’t even figure out their own prices.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ I purchased an Epson Stylus Color 3000 ink jet printer to offer affordably priced prints of most paintings. Considered strictly as a device, the printer does quite a good job; its software, however, is one of the most appalling excuses for software I’ve ever had to contend with. I’d be hard-pressed to tell you which I find most objectionable:
• The installer, which doesn’t actually install all the software
• The software itself, which is buggy and unreliable
• Epson’s alleged “technical support,” which is rude and incompetentThrough a slow process of trial and error and returning to Photoshop’s manual, I’ve discovered ways to improve the Stylus Color 3000’s color fidelity. In spite of Epson’s self-styled “technical support,” I finally received a copy of the current version of the software, which inexplicably wasn’t shipped with the printer. Could I simply replace the old version with the new? No, of course not. I had to wait on hold for someone to answer the telephone, wait awhile longer for my call to be transferred, wait awhile longer for it to be transferred to someone else, and finally be walked through a lengthy process of stripping away all the old software, then installing and configuring the new version from the ground up. Last, but not least, the new version destroyed my flat bed scanner’s software, which then had to be replaced. Do yourself a favor and buy something else!
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ I use watercolor paper and Pictorico’s very high quality film to produce ink jet prints. The latter is expensive and well worth its cost, and seems not to be widely and/or readily available. Second quality seems to dominate the market.
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