Friday evening. 7.30. Getting ready to go to see “Watchmen”.
Like many people, I check my mobile phone periodically to see if I’ve missed any calls. At 7.32 I saw that I’d missed two from a friend who I knew was in Spain on holiday. Weird. Surely something serious has happened if he’s ringing me while he’s on holiday, so I called him back.
Although PCs are shipping with huge data storage, few people back-up their data properly. I imagine that there are millions of people that don’t even back-up their photos, instead entrusting the security of their memories to a bunch of precise, high-speed components that require just the smallest piece of dust to cause total failure.
Going on suggestions from the Ilford Photo forum I processed this in Ilfosol 3. 1+14 dilution for 6 minutes at 20 celcius, five inversions every 30 seconds.
It’s been scanned with an HP ScanJet 4890, in 24-bit colour, and then converted to monochrome using PhotoShop’s “Channel Mixer” adjustment layer.
I’ve just processed a roll of [someone else’s] Lucky SHD400 in Ilfosol S. I gambled on using a 1+9 dilution for 6.5 minutes. The negative looks fine, though I haven’t scanned anything yet.
Update
Here’s a sample scan from the film, courtesy of sunflowerdave.
A month’s salary buys you about 120 tonnes of one or .6 carats of the other.
I cannot even begin to imagine how much pain I’ll be in, for a very long time, if this photo ever ends up on the internet.
Strobist: Nikon D80 & Sigma 105mm f/2.8 Macro with SB600 off-camera-right on 1/8 with the on-camera flash set at 1/2. Home-made macro box on left, back, right and top to bounce light back in.
Shot at f/10 for 1/160.
Carrie Kirby posted this at wisebread.com. It was removed a few hours later, possibly because it condones copyright theft.
We’re having a children’s photographer work our daughter’s first birthday party, so we can give each set of guest parents a photo to remind them of this wonderful first year.
Luckily, the photographer has agreed to relinquish the rights to the images, so our guests won’t have to go back to her and buy pictures of their own kids. That’s not how it usually works, though. Despite the ease of image duplication in the modern world, most photographers still sell their work by the print.
As a customer, I feel like photographers are obscuring the value of their service when they charge this way. When I can buy a decent-looking print for under a buck, buying copies of my child’s portrait from the photographer at $25 or more seems outrageous.
I understand what the photographer is charging for — the value of her time, her talent, her training, and the editing she’s done on the photos — not to mention the studio space and equipment she used creating them. Our photographer also said she wants to retain control of her images to make sure they are only reproduced as high-quality prints. Still, it’s puzzling to me why more photographers don’t charge a larger sitting fee — thereby charging for the work, which is their actual product — and then provide digital images of the photos taken. After all, the right to reproduce pictures of my kids isn’t worth much to the photographer once I’m done buying my prints.
Confession time: The last time we had portraits taken of our daughters, we did what I believe many, many consumers do these days. We bought what we felt was a decent amount of prints, in this case, a package that, combined with the sitting fee, cost $600. After spending that much money, we felt that we had rewarded the photographer enough for the service she’d provided us.
So… we scanned our photos, tried our best to correct for the image quality loss, and shared them digitally, made additional copies for friends and family, and even uploaded them into calendars as gifts for family members.
Did I feel guilty about this? Sort of. I also felt frustrated that, despite our best efforts, the prints did not look as nice as they would have if we’d printed from the original digital files. Since my photographer seemd happy with the $600 she received for photographing my kids, why couldn’t she just give me what I really wanted?
And of course, there was the anxiety about getting busted. Last year, we went through the same routine, and we were confronted by a Walgreen staff member who told us they woudln’t reproduce the prints because they were obviously professionally done. This year, to our relief, no one called us on our transgression.
There are limits to how far I’m willing to go in my crimes against photography. I bought nearly a dozen prints from the photographer, most of them 8 by 10s. I would not, for instance, have walked out of her studio having purchased only one or two 8 by 10s and then fired up the printing press.
Next time, I may play by the photographer’s rules and spend the same amount of money for a larger number of prints, just in smaller formats, and forgo the jury-rigged duplication efforts. Or better yet, I’ll finally find a photographer whose work I love and who charges the way I want to pay.
What about you? Have you scanned and duplicated those professional photo shots? Do you feel like you did anything wrong? Or do you feel that, since you already paid the photographer, the crime was a victimless one? Would you be willing to pay more for photo sittings if you could get digital files of the edited shots?
For some reason we get ladybirds in our bathroom all year round. Only ever one at a time, but they can appear at any time.
This shot took about 8 attempts to get. This wing-opening sequence lasts about a second before the shell closes, so this was far more luck than judgment.
EMAP, the publisher behind “Digital Photo” and “Practical Photography” magazines, re-launched their photography web site this week. As a replacement to the aging, crumbling http://www.photographymags.co.uk/ site, http://www.photoanswers.co.uk/ was promised to be a first-rate development. However, this has turned out to be anything but the reality. (more…)
Easily done. You’re about to clean your teeth and you accidentally put your speedlight in your mouth and your camera magically takes a photo, firing the flash in the process.
If you ever get cold teeth, try this. It’s warming.
punkysmonky asked for help on making this photo better. As you can see the background is a bit cluttered - the black should reach all the way up the frame, or the white should reach to the floor. That aside, it’s a lovely family portrait, so it was worth half an hour of my time in an effort to make it into something that could go in a photo frame. (more…)
Powered by WordPress