Moon ring!

Last July I was leading a group of photographers on a trip around Svalbard, not far from the North Pole. Highlights of the trip included polar bears and other wildlife, but other subjects caught our attention too. One example was parhelion, where the sunlight refracts through high-altitude ice crystals to form a wide ring around the sun.

Parhelion, Svalbard
July 2011

Read more »

Moving landscapes

Dragon head (A2_008708)

Can you see the sea-dragon rising from the deep? The eye, the teeth, the snout, the horns? It was taken on my first Antarctic voyage, and serves as an example of the constantly-changing scenery encountered from a moving ship. Let me describe...

Read more »

Setting the time on Canon cameras

With the recent end of Daylight Savings time here, I took the opportunity to check the time in all my devices and get them set as accurately as possible.

As I noted in my Daylight Savings again! post, for a long time I've used Canon's EOS Utility to set the time in my EOS cameras via USB cable in order to have them in sync with each other, the computer, and the time in my GPS trails. At the end of that post I commented "Sometimes I wish all my devices could sync their time from the computer!" So of course I set out to see if I was missing something...

And yes, it turns out I was. But be warned, the rest of this post is fairly geeky and technical!

Read more »

One big memory card, or multiples?

Some photographers prefer to use many "small" memory cards in their cameras ("small" these days is probably 4 GB!) whereas some photographers are happier using cards as large as they can afford. There are many reasons for each approach, some of which should be obvious to everyone and some of which become obvious with the benefit of experience.

Read more »

Daylight savings again!

It's that time of year again (at least in Victoria where I live). Daylight Savings has just ended, so we've had an extra hour of sleep and set our clocks back an hour. I've said it many times before, but it doesn't hurt to say it again: have you fixed ALL your clocks?

Golden light (A2_107990)

Read more »

A new photo printer for my office

R800: not the new printer

For years I've had an Epson R800 A4 printer in my office. This 8-ink pigment printer has been great at producing high-quality images (with a few limitations). I've printed a few 20cm-high panoramas using the roll paper attachment, and occasionally printed batches of DVDs and CDs with a logo template for use in delivering files to customers, but most of its work was in printing photos on A4 paper. Using my i1 Pro spectrophotometer I've generated custom profiles for a variety of papers.

Its lack of a grey ink (it has matte black and photo black inks, along with cyan, magenta, yellow, red, blue, and gloss-optimiser) has meant it's not great at monochrome prints (although at one stage I loaded it up with 8 shades of black PiezoTone ink for printing monochrome with QTR, with great results). But even so, for general-purpose photo printing it's been great. Prints from my R800 have been sold mounted and framed, and have even won prizes in international photography awards.

For images larger than could fit on A4 paper I usually print the images on larger printers such as at ImageScience, but over the last few years most of my images have been delivered in digital form and this has only occasionally been necessary. Being able to produce a quality result in-house on short notice is wonderful. I've occasionally considered getting a bigger (A3+) printer, but that's a big investment in both money and physical space. If I constantly produced prints larger than A4 it could be worthwhile though.

Time for a new printer?

Around the office we also have other printers for general printing, but the R800 was always the "photo" printer. But for most of 2011 the R800 sat idle. The cumulative months I spent abroad in South America, Antarctica, Norway, and east Africa with LuminOdyssey Photo Expeditions probably didn't help with that! Anyway, in late October I cleaned up the printer (surprisingly the nozzles came clear after just one cleaning cycle) and started printing again. I'd upgraded my profiling software to X-Rite's new i1Profiler, and used the printer to bed down the new profiling workflow.

In November I offered to print some custom CDs for a client, but then when I tried to do it I ran into all sorts of errors. I followed the usual procedures, but the printer always reported a mis-feed. It turns out the last time I printed CDs with the R800 was at least one OS version ago: I don't know if it's a hardware issue (I don't think so) or a software one. So I decided to finally look into the options for a different printer that could print CD/DVDs as well as generally replace the R800. I was aware that the R800's life was limited, as Epson's support for older printers under OS X Lion has been slow to arrive (unless we use the Gimp-print drivers, which is possible but different). I'm still running Snow Leopard, but the day will come...

I couldn't find any appropriate models in Epson's range unless I stepped up to much larger printers, and I'd heard good things about Canon's Pixma printers (and had got decent results with some that I'd profiled for customers). So I looked into Canon's range and drew up a list of the likely models and their features. I also compared this list to the models available at several nearby stores. At this point the printed CDs needed to be delivered to the customer in just over a day!

Read more »

October presentations (all free): workflow and polar travel photography

Star trails above the Hunter Valley, NSW (A2_102872)

On the evening of Thursday the 13th of October I will be talking with the Corio Bay Camera Club in Geelong about my image processing workflow (the chief software tools I use are Photoshop and Lightroom, but the talk's about more than just what the software can do). I'll be working with images from my recent travels.

Local camera clubs (or photographic societies, or whatever name they choose) are always welcoming of visitors: they hope you'll stick around and become members. So if you'll be in the area on the 13th, please drop by and introduce yourself! The meeting starts at 7:30pm.

Also, I've got several other club presentations this month: on Monday the 10th I'll be visiting the Essendon Camera Club to provide critique on their photographs, and on Tuesday the 25th I'll be presenting a slideshow and commentary at Williamstown Camera Club about my Arctic and Antarctic travels (several Williamstown members came on my 2011 Antarctic and African LuminOdysseys). Continue reading "October presentations (all free): workflow and polar travel photography"...