Saturday, July 27, 2013

More From Ogden





 
Simply what I could find this afternoon. The first is two bins facing away from the sun, the second is the contents of a bin, the third another bin in glancing light, and the fourth is the corner by the firewall of an ancient truck lying by the side of the road. All were shot with the Nikon D800E. 1, 3 and 4 were focus blends. I'm happily using a Pixel brand remote release/timer. I did forget my LCD magnifier which in the bright sun was a silly mistake.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Blurb

I recently finished (well sort of) a book of my black and white photographs and had it printed by Blurb. It's not available, and frankly too expensive in hard cover and 12X12 for purchasing, but I wanted to see the quality and to 'test' the concept of such a book.

Although I did check it, there are bugs - looks like one of the images I must have sent them a web sized file, and I need to edit the text and get the title that I had assumed they would put up but didn't.

The book looks very nice. The cover printed very well, images front and back. The granularity of the images is a bit coarse, you don't notice it at first or with all images, but not ideal. Tonality is very good - the images hang together well, and I'm fussy. Colour wise, they all have a selenium toned look which is pleasing. Shadows and highlights are very well printed.

Overall I'm very pleased. I had heard that Blurb prints in Calgary and I even know a fellow who went to the print shop to get his book, but this came from Vancouver. More than likely printing quality varies with where the printing is done. I have seen books with finer screen printing, and books with much worse colour for black and white images, but considering this is a one off book, remarkably good.

To put things in perspective - this book printed better than 95% of the photographic books of 20 years ago, that's how far we have progressed.

After a bit more editing I might make the book available as a paper back.

George

Monday, July 01, 2013

Garden, Al, and C-Train





For lack of a great project, I decided to just putter in the garden, continuing my work with my 85 f1.4, with and without my shortest extension tube. While without, the 85 is sharp over a large area, with it it has a very small sweet spot, not correctable off axis by refocusing. Pity the lens has a 2 foot minimum focus - I seem to keep wanting to go a bit closer.

The image of the 69th street station was with my Zeiss 15.