Printing: the beginning

A while back, I had promised my DW prints of my 5 best landscape photos so that she could do some fiber magic with them. For one reason or another, I didn't get around to it until today, where I brought out the only printer I have been able to afford so far: A Canon Selphy CP 760 portable postcard printer (not that I couldn't have gotten a bigger one, but there are priorities). It's small, prints only 10x15 cm, and uses a lot of ink and expensive paper, but it's a start. Later I'll get something that can do beautiful 33 cm wide panoramas and all.

At first print, my pictures came out very dark, much darker than they seemed on-screen. A quick bit of browsing revealed that a few brave souls had made printer profiles for the Selphy line, at least some of them. From this page, I downloaded the generic profile and the 720 profile and tried them out. The 720 was a bit better, but the colors still kinda muted. The generic profile, however, is actually really close to what I see on the monitor, with vivid colors and a pretty good feel to it. Makes me hopeful for home printing. I'll have to print the same pictures at my favorite print shop and compare.

This picture shows the difference, the left-most being with no profile, the middle with the '720 profile, and the right-most one with the generic Selphy profile. And before you say anything about overly saturated greens and Velvia disease, the early spring forest is actually that green in Denmark. I am in fact rather impressed that this little dude can reproduce it so well.

POTD 16/5 2010

"Cap" ©2008 Lars Clausen
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An old one, but a good one. This was the one that really opened my eyes to how much better my macro lens is.

No more POTD for at least a week, as we're going off to Samsø. I hope to bring back beautiful shots, but I don't know how much time I'll have to myself to shoot.

Focal length statistics

A nice little plug-in called data plot from Jeffrey Friedl confirmed what I suspected: My primes have a much larger percentage of keepers than my zooms.


All my pictures come out with the following distribution of focal length:



This graph mostly shows that while my SLR was new and I took pictures of everything that moved, I only had the 18-125 (28-200 equiv.). Thus the big clump at the bottom and the spike at 200 - I like tele shots. My two primes fall into the 71-89 and 90-108 mm range, hence extra many there. I hardly ever use my tele lenses at the outermost 1/4 except by having them "all racked out". One could say that that means I need more tele, but I think there'd always be a spike at the end as I tend to go for the limits. There's also a nice spike at the wide-angle side. 27% prime lens usage overall.

Let's take a look at which focal lengths/lenses give the most keepers. I rate my images with stars in the following manner:
1 star - unfocused, random, could probably be deleted.
2 stars - technically OK, compositionally not horrible. Can be used externally in a pinch.
3 stars - a good photo, can reasonably be used externally.
4 stars - a really good photo, likely to be used if part of an assignment.
5 stars - my very best. Will be used in portfolios, exhibits, on-line galleries etc.

1 star:



One confusing point here is that the 50 and 60 mms (incorrectly) got lumped into one group. A lot of the bulk in non-tele area has been removed, or possibly I just haven't rated so many of the earlier ones. 30% primes - various experiments have put a lot of prime pictures in here.

2 stars:


More of the wide-to-middle range feature here, probably travel snapshots that turned out ok. 21% primes - they get dwarfed by the snapshotting.

3 stars:



A smaller part of the good ones are in the middle area, but the primes and far ends hold their ground. The spike at 200 (far end of my 18-125) is shrinking, seems like that's pushing it too far. 25% primes, they're starting to pull away from the pack.

4 stars:


Up in the really good pictures area, I have a whopping 40% primes. There's still a spike at 200mm, but the medium range area and longest zoom have collapsed significantly.

5 stars:



Again, the primes hold a disproportionately large part (38%) of the "greatest hits". Probably because I tend to use the primes for critical things (assignments) and be more careful when I use them (macro). But to a certain degree also just because they (especially the 60mm) are just better. The remainder are fairly randomly scattered, with a spike at 200mm still, but not a very pronounced amount at 18mm - that lens is pretty weak there, and not wide-angle enough to be really impressive. The spike at 131-148 is curious: It's neither the near nor far end of any of my lenses, nor a prime. Maybe it's a sign that I really do need to get the 85 f/1.2 when I have DKK 10000+ available (though if Ken Rockwell is right that "For most people, even if someone was giving these away for free, the 85mm f/1.8 is a better lens because it focuses faster, focuses more easily, focuses closer, has less flare, weighs a lot less and is just as sharp," the 85mm f/1.8 at about DKK 2000 might be a good portrait lens for me. I just felt the lack of more light the last time I did portraits.

POTD 12/5 2010

Another from my tulip shot yesterday. There's just something about my 60mm lens - it creates a far larger proportion of keepers than my other lenses.



Again done "in situ" with onboard flash bounced off a small foldable bounce.

POTD 11/5 2010

After a long absence, mostly due to me not shooting anything that I could put here (for reasons of quality and permissions), POTD is back with a sample from todays tulip shoot:



This is the result of the contorted setup shown in the previous post. Of course, I could have snipped the whole thing off and taken it inside for a studio shot, but I don't like to do that. Never the easy way for me... Besides, it would probably have caused a goodly amount of the dust to fall off.

What the picture of the setup doesn't show is how I light it: I bounce the flash right into my little fold-out bounce, using the white side. This gives a large enough lit area compared to the tiny subject that the light is appropriately rounded without being flat, and makes the details stand out clearly. Again, not the easiest way, particularly because the flash has a limited rotation ability. I look forward to having my own studio some day.

Moving the light a little bit around to illuminate the front of the left stem might have made it nicer, or it might have cut the drama down. I really like the yellow-on-deep-purple effect it has right now, it's one of my favorite color combinations.

I heart my tripod (mostly)

As previously posted, I got a new tripod (Induro AX-214) to replace the too-long Manfrotto. While I haven't been able to go out and use it as much as one would hope for (having a sick wife meant having to pick up extra household chores), I'm giving it a work-out these days. I particularly like the ability to angle the center column. Here is todays setup:



In case it's hard to see, I'm shooting the petal-less tulip that's in front of the camera. I need to be pretty much parallel with the stem, hence the contortions.

I would have been hard-pressed to get this setup without serious damage to the other flowers, if at all. Other situations would simple have been impossible, such as placing the camera right next to a wall. I'm never getting another tripod without this feature.

The downside is that it takes a lot of turning on the two knobs on the column to get them to hold fast. There is no click or other indication of when it's fastened, the best you can do is tighten it a lot and re-check that it doesn't move. If you've been carefully positioning the camera in a cumbersome position, this can be a real bother. But part of it may just be that I should get used to placing the tripod in a place where I don't have to crawl over the tripod to get to the camera.

POTD 21/02 2010

"Snowed over"

"Fall" ©2007 Lars Clausen
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This is one where I had good use of my little remote control. Had to shake the branch then shoot immediately when a leaf fell off.