And it is….

Of course, when it’s quiet in the Deuaxmayne, that usually means I’m up to something.  This week’s exercise has been to integrate Photoshop actions, Photoshop commands and Applescript.

Since I can’t yet get RAW images working through JAlbum, I’ve been pondering genning up my own code to do similar page-building, all through the graces of Photoshop and Applescript.  So far, the results have been promising.  Last night, I built a script to take an image and make the web-ready size and the thumbnail-sized images.  Next is to apply filters, apply a graphical watermark — that will be the tough part — and then build HTML around the images.  I’ve probably got another week’s work on the code, and then the photo albums should begin to look better, and be updated more frequently.

Stay tuned!

This morning has the new Canon 30D body showing up on their website.

My initial reaction is…. so what?

In truth, it appears that there’s not a ton of differences between the 20D and the 30D.  A tweak here and there, but essentially the same camera.  I have to say that I’m not hugely surprised.  DPReview has a nice article detailing some of the differences.

With the 5D just coming out late last year, I was pretty sure Canon wouldn’t infringe on its turf by increasing the pixel density on the 30D.  And, given the 1Ds out there, they couldn’t speed up the 20D frame speed.

To me, the 30D is a funny beast.  It does make a few things nicer than the 20D, but I don’t see folks upgrading from the 20D to the 30D.  Maybe if I didn’t already have two Canon EOS bodies, then I’d think about it….. 

At the request of my biggest fans, I’ve been trying to get the photo albums up to date again. The challenge with that has been that JAlbum has not supported RAW images, and that’s all I’ve been shooting lately.

Enter jrawio.

This little goodie knows how to read RAW images, and extend ‘em to JAlbum and any other java code. That’s cool, and the missing link and rosetta stone all in one for me. All that’s needed is to add this to the classpath for JAlbum when it runs.

Yeah…….

The most common recommendation for making that change is in the JAlbum.lax file. Well, for a Mac, the JAlbum.lax file doesn’t exist. In Apple-land, the key file is Info.plist, and it lives in /Applications/JAlbum/JAlbum.app/Contents. Before changing it, make a copy!

In here, you’ll find the -Xms and -Xmx parms (which I have now doctored to suit me, 1024M to start, and 1536M as a max), along with the classpath. This is all XML, so it’s pretty clear what to change. So, with my classpath set, and my memory set higher, I tried to see if JAlbum would pull the new jar file into the fold.

It seems to be working pretty well, but it beats the hell out of the Quad G5 for the first few minutes before finally getting moving. And, for the first time since I’ve had the Quad, I heard the jet fans begin stir while doing processing, and I watched the system utilization go to 100% on all the processors. For 170 RAW images, it took about 10 minutes to churn through ‘em all which isn’t obscene.

However, the generated images were dark… very dark.  So much so that I couldn’t but barely make out anything in the images.  Ugh……

Back to the drawing board, I guess.

Happy 12th birthday, Sio!  This morning, Beck and I served Sio breakfast in bed, in honor of her hitting her ‘tween year (between a kid and a teenager).

The rest of the day was spent on the go, most of it at the Carvin Bash in Swansea.  Unfortunately, the bitter cold kept a lot of folks away, but the half dozen or so folks there seemed to enjoy themselves.  It was held in a decent sized hall, complete with a stage, tables and chairs.  By the time we got there, the Carvinites were already in full swing, playing their hearts out… loudly!  It was a lot of fun though, with a birthday singing/playing to Sio, good music and lunch.

Man, what a lot of gear was there!  Kev brought eight guitars and a big amp stack, others brought a lot of their stuff.  We made a “class photo” of all the guitars in their stands, and there were 16 Carvins standing at attention — certainly a thing of beauty.

We pointed the Family Truckster toward Missouri a few hours into the jam session, and Kev joined us sometime later in the afternoon to spend the rest of Sio’s birthday at home, quietly enjoying having family around.

Kevin has arrived in the Big Lou.  He’s up here for a Carvin Bash tomorrow in Swansea.  Walking through the house, I caught him really checking out the house a couple of times, and then it dawned on me that he hasn’t seen the house “finished”, as when he was last here was move-in weekend just over two years ago.  Doesn’t seem like it could have been that long.

It’s nice having him visiting — I just don’t get to see my family enough, and it’s nice to have a little part of home in our home.

This morning, we awoke to temperatures in the 60s.  In fact, by 3pm, it was 74 here.  In February?!

Reality struck quickly though, as a front passed through just after 3pm, bringing high winds and loads of hail.  In fact, it hailed for nearly fifteen minutes at the office, creating “haildrifts” against the building that were 2-3 inches deep.  I stood in the 2nd floor cafeteria, face almost against the wall of windows, and watched the hail falling from the sky.  It was as though someone skyward was lobbing small rocks at the Earth, and image was so cool.  From that vantage point, and at the angle the hailstones were falling, it was easy to lose yourself in the visuals of the storm.  By far, this was one of the coolest storms I’ve been in.

The cold came in quickly behind the front, and by the time I finished with tennis at 8pm, it was 30 and snowing.  Truly, if you don’t like the weather in the Midwest, just wait a few minutes — it’ll change!

 

No, that’s not a place where all the four-leafers come from… it’s the name of Intel’s newest technological beastie.  Four cores in the same processor.  Four!

Now I don’t know if Apple will introduce these in their high-end Mactel replacement for the PowerMac line, but man, what a workstation a couple of those bad boys would be!  My quad G5 is a screamer, and I can’t imagine how Photoshop (optimized for Intel, of course) would run on an 8-way processor environment.  From what I’ve read, PS can run as much as 45% faster on the quad G5 as compared to a dualie, so I’ve gotta figure that a dual-quad-core box would scream in PS, as well as for video rendering.

However, I think it’ll be a while before that happens.  The chips aren’t due out until next year, and I’d be surprised if Apple jumped on them immediately.  Apple’s committed to replacing the whole line of PPC-based Macs with Intel chips, so they’ll have to do something for the high end workstation before the quad-cores are ready from Intel.

So what’ll happen with the replacement for the PowerMacs?  Dunno, but I’m committed for at least two years to the workstation hardware I’ve come to know and love!

I’ve been quiet over the last few days…. for good reason. I’ve been running around like a maniac preparing for my first photo competition.

Yep, I decided to enter a local competition sponsored by the Professional Photographers Association of Greater St. Louis (PPAGSL). I’d just heard about this competition on Thursday, and frantically started getting ready for it.

Friday, I spent most of the night preparing my image files for print. This competition required 8×10″ images, which mine aren’t really suited well for — my prints are either 8×12″ or 10×15″. So I hacked and cropped, and finally had six images ready for printing.

On Saturday, I took them to Wolf Camera, and once again, they blew out the reds in two of the images. Ugh. Dejected and out of time, I decided I would reprint a couple of them at home, and see if I could do better. Later in the afternoon, I went to Sam’s Club, and discovered that they carry Ilford inkjet papers — really good stuff! I picked up a box, and brought it home to try re-printing the two red images.

All through the night, I printed and printed, and finally got the new paper working well with my printer, and got my two newly red prints done well. Then there was the challenge of mounting them.

The competition requirements dictated a mount board no more than 1/8″ thick. I never could find board that thin, so I used corrogated cardboard. Cheap, easy to cut, but impossible to get a good clean cut with. However, I decided that was what I had to go with — there was just no more time.

Into the wee hours I hacked and mounted until my six images were ready to go.

This morning, I awoke, knowing that the competition was in front of me, and I was nervous as could be… today I would stand toe to toe with “real” professional photographers, and my work would, for the first time, be displayed publicly. I gathered my images, my courage and my car keys, and headed toward the competition.

I met Karen there — she was entered also — and we chatted before and after the program, awaiting the print competition. The time came, and we both sat on the edge of our seats, awaiting the appearance of our work. Here are the six entries I submitted, along with scores and comments.

	On Her White Stallion Score: 75 None of the judges made any comments about this print. I knew it was probably the weakest, and the score bore that out.
	Red Sky at Dawn Score: 76 This was one of the images that Wolf had such trouble printing — it looked like a scene from Mars! Again, the judges had no comments on this piece.
	Yosemite Falls Score: 77 This was, I thought, one of my better images. I love the color of the rainbow in the spray from the falls. Again, no comment from the judging panel, but a little better score.
	Orange Frost Score: 79 While this one didn’t generate any conversation, it did make the last cut, and unfortunately, didn’t make it to the final. Still, I think it’s one of the better images I’ve produced.
	Snowfire Score: 79 Again, this one made the last cut, but didn’t make it to the final. For this image, though, the judges had some constructive criticism, mostly having to do with the lack of detail in the snow. I’ll be going back to Photoshop with this one to see what I can do about bringing out some detail in the snow.
	Color of Fall Score: 79 This one generated the most conversation among the judges. While examining it, they went through a whole exercise on rotating the image to find what seemed to look best (which, BTW, was not the way that the image was shot). Then there were other points about the bright leaves top and bottom — they appeared much brighter on the print that Wolf created. The comment that sat with me though was one of the judges saying that he “applauded the maker” of this image. That’s cool! Like the other two images scored at 79, this one didn’t make it to the final.

How close was I to taking a position? Well, close. The highest scored item I can remember was around 82 or so. If any of my images with 79 had gone to 80, there’s a good shot I would’ve pulled a 2nd or 3rd place in my group.

This experience has really energized me, and I can already tell that I’m hooked on showing my work. I’m sure there will be more to come!

I decided to invest a little money and time, and try to figure out with whom I would print my photos.  The contestants?  Creve Coeur Camera, Wolf Camera, and mPix.  I sent/delivered the same image files to all three.  I preferred to print 10″x15″, and only Creve Coeur couldn’t do that, so 8″x12″ was the best I could do there.  Also, I decided to have mPix apply their pearlescent finish to their prints.

To my eye, Creve Coeur was the truest to my original images’ color.  I’m throwing them out of the sharpness decision, as their print was smaller, and artificially sharper as compared to Wolf and mPix.

Frankly, mPix munged the details of the images, almost like they were shot overexposed, and they really trended one photo way toward toward the green.  Given that, I eliminated them.

That left Creve Coeur and Wolf.  I’m finding that folks preferred the Wolf images over the Creve Coeur images, primarily due to the color saturation that Wolf produced with these images.

Pricewise, they’re roughly a wash (extrapolating a 10×15 print size cost from Creve Coeur since they don’t print that size).

Sharpness is tough to judge given that Creve Coeur’s image was smaller, and therefore (theoretically) sharper.

Overall, I’d say it’s a push between Creve Coeur and Wolf.  A slight nod goes to Creve Coeur due to color accuracy and ease of use (web uploads).  A slight nod goes to Wolf due to printing at a size (10″x15″) that makes sense to me.

So now, let’s throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing.

I couldn’t find that any of these guys offers anything but “matte” and “glossy” finishes.  Lustre coating is really the stuff I love — it’s right between the two, and gives my images the look I prefer, at least based on what I printed at Yosemite.  And, there’s an ICC profile for the Epson lustre paper, so in a managed color workflow, I should be able to take my calibrated monitor, along with profiles for the printer and paper, and produce prints that are spot-on the right color with what I see on the screen.  Also, the ink/paper combination is a tested and known quantity, allegedly providing over 100 years of colorfastness.  (Is that a word?)

So in the scenario with me rolling my own, the Epson printer I would prefer to run is the R2400, which allows me to run up to 13×19.  However, for this discussion, we’ll stick with 10×15 since that’s what I printed.  The closest fit in Epson lustre coat paper I could find is the 11.7×16.5, which is just under $2/sheet, and would allow for plenty of border for handling and mounting.  Print cartridges are about $15 each, and it takes seven of them to make an image.  Yield from the cartridges at 5% coverage is 450pgs for black, and 520pgs for color.  Realistically, I would assume much higher coverage, probably approaching an average of 50% per color/black, which takes the yields down to about 40-50pgs for a cartridge — that might even be a little high.  Assuming that across the cartridge set cost ($105), that works out to about $2-$3 for ink, and now you’re at $5/print on the high end.

That’s half the cost of Creve Coeur or Wolf per print, and about 2/3rds of the cost of mPix at the 10×15 size.

Now the Epson R2400 is a pricey printer, but with the savings per sheet (let’s say $4), you’d recover the cost of the hardware after a little over 200 prints.  And that’s assuming you print a lot of stuff, would print 200 big prints anyway (whether or not you owned a printer), and never sold anything.  Obviously, not selling anything wouldn’t be the preferred path! 

I’m not convinced that this would be an ideal combination for running off 100 prints of the same image.  It’d take a long time to get it done, and managing that size of print job would be challenging.  Of course, I’m not likely to go to a photoprocessor and run off 100 prints of the same image at these sizes — that’d be $1k per image, and I’d rather have a few copies of a lot of images than a whole lot of copies of one or two images.

So what did I prove?  Well, I proved that there are vast differences in print producers when you say “don’t mess with my color”.  And I think mathematically, there’s at least a decent argument for a home printer for print sizes up to 13×19 in low quantity runs.

Not much of a decision on who/what the winner is, eh?

Having my iPod has dramatically changed how I listen to music, and how much I listen to music.  That little device is like crack and caffeine, all rolled into one.  I can’t start my day at work without having some music going — sometimes harsh stuff, sometimes bubblegum, but it’s *always* there.  And throughout the day, my Sennie’s are on my head, and someone’s music is cranking through my head.

A couple of observations though….

This thing really lends itself well to short-attention-span listening.  I’ll find a track I haven’t listened to for a while, and while looking for that, I find others I haven’t listened to for a while.  I’ll start listening to one, only to flip to another before that one’s done.  More proof that I’ve got ADD! 

I also find that I don’t know the newer music I add as well as the older music.  That may just be that I’ve had more time to get familiar with the older music — it’s been around longer.  However, I think there’s a difference in listening style that may have nothing to do with the iPod or digital music in general.

In the old days, I’d get down to K-Mart, and could only afford to buy an album every now then.  My collection was small, and I would wear the grooves out of the discs.  I had music on all the time, just less of it to choose from.  It was nothing for me to be up all night, with a stack of vinyl on the turntable keeping me company through the night.  I knew what was coming when, even down to where to pops and crackles were on the vinyl.  (In fact, there are a few songs that I still expect to hear pops from at certain points — I guess early training runs deep!)

Now, I can buy music whenever I want, and when I do, it becomes part of much larger tapestry of tunes I listen to.  And, instead of listening to everything I own a lot, I stage music for moods, or tasks, or because something external reminded me of a particular track or artist.  That’s probably why my iPod habits are so bad — too many choices, and really no opportunity to get as intimate with each as I might’ve a long time ago.

I guess that’s not the worst problem to have, eh?