(This follows on from a post yesterday)

Succinct review: It rocks!

Longer review: I have two monitors. One is a 21″ widescreen Dell and one is a 15″ Samsung which I pilfered after my parents’ accounts assistant retired. The former is a high-quality monitor by average-consumer standards, the latter is decidedly not. I was intrigued as to how they’d fare when calibrated properly, and once the spyder arrived I eagerly unpacked it, read through the instructions and installed the software. Immediately there was a problem: it jumped straight onto my secondary monitor, and wouldn’t move. The only way around this was to disable the monitor, which was probably sensible anyway. I plugged in the calibrator and the software prompted me to hang the unit over the screen:

The obvious first reaction is ‘OMGHEADCRAB‘. The second is ‘what’s it going to do, then?’. I started the calibration process, and it spent the next eight minutes displaying varying shades of red, green, blue and grey. It told me to remove the unit, then said ‘I’m done’ and showed a before/after switch. I flicked it.

It turns out my Dell is pretty good. The before/after warmed up the display a little - everything went slightly more orange than before - but nothing major. I didn’t care - the point was to get a calibration and put my mind at ease, and whether the adjustment was big or small was irrelevant. And now this was done - great! The software automatically told my Dell to use the spyder2express colour profile, and that was that. But the niggling voice at the back of my head said ‘how do you know? It’s a cheap calibrator - how can you be sure it’s done a good job?’. So I came up with a plan to test it.

The next step was calibrating the Samsung. This would generally be problematic as the spyder2express only supports one monitor - it will overwrite its previous profile if you re-run the calibration, and the files can’t be simply renamed in Windows Explorer¹. But I knew you could be sneaky and install the Microsoft Color Applet. This Control Panel extension gives you more sophisticated control over colour profiles, including the ability to rename them. So I renamed the Dell profile², then disabled my main monitor and ran the calibration on the Samsung.

This time: massive difference. The before/after button took me from cool blue to warm orange. 24h later I’m still noticing that the display is very different.

Now, two monitors provide a good test of the spyder’s abilities - since both monitors are calibrated, I should be able to put the same image up on both screens and see no difference. This was the moment of truth: if the colours are identical, the unit works as advertised. If they’re off, its quality is variable. And how much it’s off indicates how good a unit it really is. So I fired up the Lightroom 2.0 Beta, with its swish multi-monitor support, and opened a photo on both monitors simultaneously.

Result: to my eyes, identical. I could see contrast differences between the monitors, but there was no difference in the colour. Brilliant. I spent ages playing around in Lightroom, changing white balances and whatnot, and it remained consistent no matter what I threw at it.

Yesterday afternoon I took the spyder to my parents’ office. My Dad’s monitor is notoriously bad - the colours have always been washed out, and I have to keep its brightness low to prevent photos posterising. I was skeptical the spyder could do much with it, to be honest, but ran it anyway. The before/after showed a huge difference. Everything was again much warmer, but somehow less bright, too. I checked out his Picasa and photos looked much, much better, but I also found I could up the brightness much more without any posterising. I’m amazed at the difference. Mum’s monitor was better, and became a little warmer, but nothing too drastic. I brought up the same flickr page on both machines, stepped back, and they looked exactly the same. Excellent.

I was worried the spyder would be a disappointment. I was prepared to pay to get better colors than before, but I was hoping it wouldn’t be just mediocre. And it isn’t - I really couldn’t ask for anything more. I suppose the final test comes when I send some images off to the sRGB printers, but I’m confident - if it can produce perfectly matching colours on my monitors, there’s no reason to think it’s not matching the specifications. I spent most of today editing photos from my niece’s Naming Day last weekend, and it’s great to know that my parents will be seeing the same colours I am.

A bit more geeky stuff follows.

Continue reading ’spyder2express review’

1. possibly - I’ve seen conflicting reports about this [↩]
2. I kept getting in-use errors, so I actually ended up copying the profile in Windows Explorer, then renaming this copy in the Applet [↩]

Colours are annoying, particularly when you’re messing around with digital photos. If I email a photo to ten people at ten different computers, they’re all going to see slightly different colours. This is because every monitor has unique quirks in its colours. It’s a trade-off of non-professional consumer hardware, and is perfectly reasonable - most people don’t need to worry about how exactly their photos will appear on other machines. Unfortunately, I am no longer one of those people.

For example, I want to make a Blurb book of my Year 25 photos, and I’d obviously like the colours I see on-screen to be very close to the final result. Now, Blurb print their colours according to the sRGB standard. sRGB is a widely-used database of colour values: any two printers, if calibrated to this database, should print the exact same colour if I say ‘dudes, print me some green’. And computer monitors can be calibrated too - if I can ensure the green on my monitor matches the green in the sRGB specification, problem solved! But my monitor isn’t calibrated - I have no idea how well the colours on my screen match the sRGB colours. If my monitor is rubbish at green and displays them darker than it should, I’m going to get a Blurb book in which all the greens are too light.

So the question becomes, how do I ensure that I’m seeing the right colours? How can I calibrate my monitor? It’s possible to alter the colour balance in Windows, but that doesn’t help - Windows only knows it’s telling the monitor to display green, it can’t tell what colour my monitor is actually showing.

Thankfully, there’s an easy solution: I need to buy a hardware calibrator. This is a device that physically looks at the monitor while the computer displays a pre-determined series of colours. The accompanying software analyses the calibrator’s data and determines the difference between the theory and the reality. Then comes the clever bit - it adds a layer between the image and the monitor, called a colour profile. So your photo says ‘I am green’, then the colour profile says ‘right, I know that this particular green will come out too dark, so I’m going to tell the monitor to display a lighter green - one that will show a truly representative colour’. The photo isn’t changed at all, but the colour profile ensures you’re seeing the correct colours¹.

Unfortunately, a decent hardware calibrator costs £130. I can’t justify that for something I’m going to use once. But I’ve had various paying photo jobs recently(!), and I’ve become increasingly paranoid that colour-matching will bite me in the ass at some point. What if my not-too-shabby-but-getting-on-a-bit Dell 2004fpw is way out? I’ve had pictures printed before and they’ve been close enough, but what if the lab optimised them to fix the problems?

Then I discovered the Spyder2express hardware calibrator.

It’s a cheaper version of the £130 recommended-everywhere Spyder2. It only supports one monitor. There’s little in the way of configuration. But the reviews say it does a good job and actually uses the same hardware as its more expensive siblings - it’s the software that’s crippled, and the results aren’t necessarily as good as the fancier models. It also has the major advantage of ‘only’ costing £62 inc. delivery.

My paranoia got the better of me. I didn’t want the worry, and I figured pretty-close-but-not-perfect was much better than hope-things-turn-out-ok. I bought one. It arrived this morning.

Now, I knew this wasn’t going to be the most exciting purchase ever, and I was preparing myself for the anticlimax. I figured I’d use it once, then sit there looking at my £65 and wonder whether I’d made a mistake. Review tomorrow.

1. this always reminds me of the Hubble space telescope, which had a problem with its mirror after it was first launched, meaning it produced fuzzy images. They couldn’t replace the mirror in situ, so they designed a filter that exactly reversed the mirror’s flaw, and stuck it between the mirror and the CCDs. It worked. [↩]

The Big Picture displays images of current events, but large enough to fill your browser window. It sounds obvious, but simply having big images makes a hell of a difference to their impact. The front page selects one image, but each post contains 15-20.  Good places to start might be Daily Life in Sadr City, Mississippi Floodwaters and an Indonesian mud volcano (accidentally created during drilling, it’s now destroyed 10,000 homes). It’s not all depressing, though - there’s also a rain-soaked Euro 2008 match, weather conditions on Mars and helicopter shots of an uncontacted tribe in Brazil.

My first couple of university projects didn’t go well. The workbooks showing my thought processes, or not, were godawful, and the teachers didn’t like them or my images. My first project mark was 47 - a third and frowned upon - and the second 62, pulled up by a better workbook, but still not hot on the images. My overall timekeeping had been appalling, with the last week of both projects very stressful, and I really needed to get my act together for the new year.

So it’s now June, with the second term all finished, and I think I improved. I managed to organise myself better, and it was certainly less stressful, but by deadline day I’d lost all perspective on quality. I had no idea what the marks would be like, and wasn’t relishing finding out. They turned up on the uni intranet in the last couple of days, and I’ve had a nervous few seconds between email receipt and loading the page. I’ve written it up below, as much as a reminder for me as anything. Hopefully this isn’t too wanky of me.

Continue reading ‘First year results’

There’s currently a lot of fuss about photographers’ rights. Increasing numbers of photographers seem to be getting hassled for no good reason, and there’s little sign of it stopping. Obviously this a bit of a worry, but I want to make sure I understand all sides of the argument.

I try to look at the evidence skeptically, and the leaning I fight against is actually towards authority. In my experience the lone warriors battling against the injustices of authority are more likely to be jerks than heroes, so I look at their arguments first. And it’s often hard to find rationales amongst the fetishising of Orwell. Honestly, the way for the government to get rid of these people is to create an MMORPG of 1984¹. But if you ignore all the libertarian fantasies and slippery-slope talk there are lots of people asking a valid question: why shouldn’t people be allowed to take photographs in any public place?

The standard answer is, obviously, security. People who want to do Bad Things use photographs to help them plan. Ok. If they want to win me over, I need to be convinced that banning photography is a) effective and b) fair. Does it actually stop people Planning Things? Can I personally still apply for a permit to photograph inside St. Pancras? I think there’s a chance they may have a point, annoying to me as it may be, so I’ll at least hear them out.

Then along comes Bruce Schneier:

Since 9/11, there has been an increasing war on photography. Photographers have been harrassed, questioned, detained, arrested or worse, and declared to be unwelcome. We’ve been repeatedly told to watch out for photographers, especially suspicious ones. Clearly any terrorist is going to first photograph his target, so vigilance is required.

Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.

Ok, you win. Banning photography on security grounds is clearly bollocks. See his post for his - very interesting - take on why governments go down this road.

Still. People do themselves no favours. Check out this much-lauded ‘documentary’. It’s an odd little thing, contrasting the director’s angry encounter with a Community Support Officer with an internet petition supporting photographers’ rights. The latter turned out to be massively exaggerating the impending legislative threat, but the former is presented as if to say ‘but look, isn’t it all dreadful’.

Here’s what happens. The guy’s filming ’some ordinary street shots’ in the centre of London, in a heavy crowd, and he picks out a passing Community Support Officer. He tracks him with the camera for a few seconds, getting very close to the guy’s face (you’ll see how we know this in a minute). The CSO stops walking and asks him to stop filming, then reaches and puts his hand over the lens. Guy immediately launches into ‘you’ve assaulted me!’, and they have a competition to out-haughty each other over what right he has to carry on filming.

Now, the CSO is clearly out of line. There are no rules forbidding filming in a public place². He does himself no favours. But I think there’s dickery on both sides of the camera.

I suspect it comes from the attitude of Me vs The Man. The CSO isn’t a person, he’s the embodiment of Authority, and so doesn’t get common courtesy. There are a lot of people who, if you shove a camera in their face, will get uppity and put a hand over the lens. Me, I could give a damn, but I’ve got friends my age who insist I keep Flickr photos on heavy-privacy settings. Lots of people get very funny about privacy, including most of the aforementioned Orwell nuts - look at all the fuss over Google Street View. No, the CSO shouldn’t have done it, but he’s an actual person, not an automaton, and people make mistakes.

Then, given that it’s happened, the sensible thing is not to launch into ‘you’ve assaulted me’. This is clearly is not going to help. Also - and forgive me if I’m misinterpreting the strength of his hand against the camera - but get a grip. He’s clearly saying it for show. Of course you should be assertive, but it’s possible to state your rights without going on the attack and turning the situation into a competition. How many disagreements have ever been resolved reasonably when both sides go all macho? Doesn’t happen. I’m not saying the guy should have apologised, but something along the lines of ‘what reason is there I can’t film here?’ should resolve the situation much more effectively. The CSO demands to see some ID, which is obviously not ok (and a red flag to a bull), and the guy tells him he has a perfect right to film and he needs to know the law better. The encounter isn’t going to recover from this. Getting all haughty and looking for an argument - I love the oh-so-affronted ‘what’ when the (admittedly totally out-of-line) CSO tells him to ’shut up’ - isn’t helping anyone, it’s just advertising. How is the CSO going to react next time he sees someone filming? If the next guy is me, I’m going to have far less chance of a reasonable outcome because someone else didn’t behave properly.

I don’t think that video is a good example of anything. CSOs shouldn’t act like that, but neither should photographers. The guy filming possibly lost his cool in the situation, but I’m not sure it’s the best advert to put out there. I’d say there are very, very few situations where politeness isn’t the most effective solution, no matter how big a jerk you’re dealing with.

I don’t think photographers should put up with being hassled on the street. And we should campaign to point out the flaws in the arguments for doing so. But the us-and-them mentality isn’t productive either.

1. you’d never win, of course [↩]
2. well, it’s possible you might need a permit in some situations, but not commercially [↩]

I just finished a book called Shooter, by photojournalist David Hume Kennerly. I picked it up after seeing it recommended by Mr Hobby, and it’s one of those rare books that never gets boring.

This is because Kennerly has had quite the life. Assuming it’s all true, I’m astonished he’s not long dead. He started out photographing fires for his local paper, then became a general news photographer in Los Angeles, hairing to the scene of any and every crisis and somehow talking his way into its centre. Then it was some years in Vietnam, where he had countless close shaves involving bullets, from all sides, and eventually won the Pulitzer Prize. After Vietnam he became close friends with Gerald Ford, resulting in his being appointed official White House Photographer, with pretty much unfettered access to the administration. Then…well, it continues.

The guy must have the charm of the devil. Many of his stories involve him cajoling someone into helping him, or running into an old colleague/friend who gets him through the door. An introduction The Digital Journalist says Kennerly makes it seem effortless, but it’s actually extremely hard work:

In his address book he carries not only contact numbers, but birthdays, and will religiously send cards to the people he has photographed from locations all over the world.

And this is all very he-did-what?! But then comes the biggest surprise of all, when, during his time with President Ford, he turns 28. Bastard.

I imagine every reader finds themselves daydreaming about dropping it all and following in Kennerly’s footsteps. It’s the life you want to have had - not necessarily before you’re, you know, thirty, that’s just taking the piss - but reality seems to suggest could never happen. I don’t think I’m suited to photojournalism - 25 and I still get nervous making phone calls, baby - but I found myself thinking of local papers I could apply to.

I looked him up on Wikipedia this afternoon, and was a bit nervous. The book was published in 1979. There have been a lot of wars since then, and someone’s luck can only last so long - had he made it? I was happy to discover he’s still going, and his website has images of Rumsfeld touring Abu Ghraib, so he’s clearly still in the thick of it. Amazing.

I can’t recommend Shooter enough. It’s nicely written, totally inspiring if you’re into that kind of thing (but light on the technical aspects if you’re not) and generally enthralling. I defy you not to finish it liking the guy.

A snoot is anything that funnels light. Put one over a camera flash and you can accurately direct light into a particular area of a photo. I’d never really tried the technique until last week, when I assembled one at great expense by rolling up a card-dealing tablemat from my magician days. I’ve just got around to editing the results, and they’ve turned out better than I expected…I altered the contrast and exposure, but there’s no other Photoshopping on these:

These are the best of over 350 shots¹ and were more by chance than any vision in my head, but I’m pleased nonetheless. I’d only thrown the ’snoot’ into my bag as an afterthought, but I’ll certainly be taking it with me from now on. Next time I’ll try to properly take control of background by using the ambient light as fill.

I’m coming up with a plan for improving my portraits. I have some more kit (hopefully) arriving tomorrow that should be Fun Times…More on that when I’ve had a chance to play.

1. two very nice people bought me an 8gig memory card for my birthday, and it’s coming in very handy [↩]

Oooh, nice. Very nice indeed. The Strobist blog is my favourite online resource for learning about lighting, and now there’s a 10hr, 8-DVD set of seminars and on-location shoots.

For what it’s worth, when I write for the blog my target is usually myself as a 22-year-old (green) pro. I would put these DVDs at the level of advanced amateur. Especially for people who can learn better by watching someone actually doing something — and having them think out loud during the process.

I wouldn’t put myself at the advanced amateur level yet, but I’m thinking I could learn a lot from this. It’s £90 shipped to the UK. That’s a bit more than I should really be paying right now, but a pittance compared to most photography lighting seminar/courses. Tempted…

This evening I uploaded a picture taken on May 18th, and with that my Year 25 project is complete. I took a shot every day but one: an inexplicable m0rk on December 17th.

I have mixed feelings about the final result. In some ways it’s not what I intended. I wanted each picture to represent the day, and many don’t. Plenty were taken at 2330 when I got home and realised I hadn’t done anything. I intended the project to force me into taking pictures of places and people I don’t normally photograph, but this rarely happened. For example, I started uni in September, but there are no proper images of my fellow students as I never plucked up the courage to ask them - despite them also studying photography.

There are also way too many taken on my mobile phone. This always seemed like a good idea - usually because of some rationalisation about not getting my camera out of my bag due to safety/annoying people / whatever - then I’d get home and realise the results suck.

But, having said all that, there are still plenty of photos that do represent their day, and were taken with a proper camera. I’m happy with many, and am glad I actually managed to complete the thing.

I’ve also definitely improved over the year, and I can see the images evolve. I taught myself the basics of balancing flash with ambient light, I now understand the concept of formal image composition, even if I’m not very good at it, and I’m slowly getting better at predicting the look of the final exposure before clicking the shutter. I also finally sat down and learnt how to use Lightroom, and suddenly I could properly control the shadow and highlight points while editing - I think there’s a marked improvement in the image quality thereafter.

It’s also had the intended memory-bank effect. I checked over the set this evening - there were a few omissions / duplicates, and my pride at the final 365 total was dented when I realised it’s a leap year - and kept spotting and thinking about little events I’d forgotten, which is quite pleasant. My 25th year had sad days, happy days, scary-exciting days, celebrities, and plenty of monkeys - it’ll be fun to dig through in a few years.

So it’s a mixed bag. There are more than a few images that made me wince while uploading, and again now, but there are some that came out better than I remembered, and a few I’m very happy with. I didn’t learn as much from it as I hoped, but it wasn’t a waste of time either.

I’m going to make a Blurb book of the results. I don’t have a properly colour-balanced setup, so I’ll have to play the odds and just hope they resemble what I see on screen. I’m currently struggling to download all the images and keep them in order (I don’t have a local copy, sadly), but I’m sure I’ll find a way. However it turns out, it should make a neat little momento.

Is there a Year 26 Project? So far, yes. I’ve been toying with 52 Portraits or similar, but as I’ve got into the habit I see no reason not to continue for the moment. Objectives for this year:

• Be brave
• Take fewer, better shots, on decent equipment
• Check and double-check the goddamn focus (I hate hate hate it when the focus is off)
• Learn more about lighting, and put it into practice
• Take more portraits
• Be brave

I think that’s enough to be going along with.

A while ago I was casually asked if I’d stand in for a dance photographer at an upcoming event. I agreed before the question was finished, and Sunday was the day. It was nuts. Long periods of nothing punctuated by ten minutes of frantic activity. Fun though, at least once I stopped worrying all my equipment was going to spontaneously combust.

It was a dance competition day, held at a sports centre in Worcester. The prizes are for general prestige, as well as qualifying for entry into the larger events, and a crazy number of competitions are needed to cover the many levels of dancing. The ballroom section consisted of 12 competitions, each with 1-5 dances and most with multiple heats required to whittle people down to the final six. I don’t know how many rounds I watched, but it took almost 10 hours to get through the Juniors, Juveniles, Adult Ballroom and Adult Latin dancers.

I was photographing the trophy handovers and dancer line-ups. I had it easy, really, as most competitors were experienced and didn’t need to be told ‘left foot back, right shoulder forward’. Still, I had trouble getting them to move close enough to each other that there were no gaps. I thought I was doing an ok job, but much chimping¹ of the Ballroom line-ups showed various spaces through which you could drive a milk float. But I got all the necessary shots, thank goodness. At one point the announcer was ahead of me, and the trophy was being handed to the next winners as I’d just finished photographing the previous line-up. I got the shot by sliding into position, clicking the shutter before I’d finished moving. This either looked extremely cool or completely stupid.

Then, right at the end, I sold a photo! I’ve never sold anything to a stranger before. One of the winners wanted a copy of her line-up photo. I was taken aback and had no idea about price, but she wasn’t bothered and told me to send an invoice. Quite a little milestone, really.

I continued my project of trying to take dancing photographs that don’t completely suck, and by the end of the evening had enough confidence to start playing around. I put my wireless flash in various positions - it only got knocked over once, although that was bad - and wandered around the room trying to get some interesting angles. I haven’t had a chance to process them yet, but there were a couple that seemed ok. Here’s an early version:

The light level was such that the flash was on full power. Poor dancers.

1. incidentally, anyone who says chimping is a bad thing can bite me - instinctive chimping no matter what the scenario isn’t a good idea, but 90% of the time checking the rough image is a bloody good plan. Yes, you should know roughly what the image is going to look like, but a) people make mistakes b) people have to learn. So there. [↩]

This entrances me:

Cinco De Mayo Carnival from Andrew Curtis on Vimeo.

2683 images, taken with 1 second exposures every 2 seconds. I like the ride at 2:15. Full-size link.

This morning’s post delivered a bunch of cheapo close-up filters - essentially magnifying glasses for the lens - so I spent the evening finally taking my ‘abstract’ pictures. I lost any sense of coherence after a while, but I’m hopeful there’ll be something usable. Some of the digital test shots turned out ok:

I’m hoping the filters didn’t degrade the slide quality too much.

I’ve been panicking over my ‘Urban Landscape’ project today. I have a massive sheet of ideas, all of which are either too ambitious - recreating this effect - or too dull - traffic cones in various odd places. So just before midnight I jumped into the car, slapped my camera onto a dashboard-mounted-monsterpod and went for a drive:

These turned out better than I expected, and would certainly fit the ‘urban landscape’ remit. I took a bunch of shots on slide film, but the daylight balance means they’ll all be way orange. Still, they might do, and if they’re nearly ok I can always get some filters…

It’s three and a half weeks until my photo projects are due in, and I’m currently flailing in PrePanic, hoping to avoid a full-on FreakOut. My abstract photos aren’t going well. I wanted to do camera-tossing, but the results weren’t all that great. There’s literally one good shot, with another that’s ok, and I really need 3 excellent / 5 not-bad. If I want to progress I need to throw the camera higher, so it can spin more during exposure, on scenes other than my computer monitor. But with only 3.5 weeks, slide film being expensive to buy/develop and slow to process, plus the possibility of wrecking my film camera, I can’t justify continuing with that one. I took way too long to decide this, hence today’s flailing.

So this afternoon I set up an idea I had last night. Here’s how it turned out on digital, and I haven’t processed the results beyond converting them from RAW. In theory, the developed slide film should look the same:

I was really happy with this. It’s basically a straw in a cup of lemonade, backlit by a coloured flash. This was perfect. Pretty, detailed and definitely abstract, I could easily come up with a few variations. So I switched to my film camera.

Nope.

None of my film lenses will focus close enough. If I back off I get un-abstract-background in the frame, and obviously slide film can’t be cropped in post-production. Even my cheap-and-cheerful 300mm zoom, once I was standing across the room, couldn’t handle it. My digital lens can presumably focus on objects closer to the lens because of some smaller-frame-optics thing I haven’t figured out yet. Dammit! It’s so frustrating to have the setup in place and be able to get good results, yet not on the medium required.

</damian>damned old technology. Who uses slide film anyway? What’s the point? Grumble grumble.<damian>

I need a macro lens, or maybe some extension tubes…It’d be cheapest to hire the former, I think. The university may be able to give me one, but that’ll take some time. Hmmm. Shall figure something out.

Tried to take some uni project photos this afternoon. Failed. Did this instead.

Will try again tomorrow.