Calibrating a monitor with software is like measuring a car’s speed by licking a finger and sticking it out the window. — Dr. Rick Womer
After acquiring a high quality monitor, the next step toward accurate image processing is getting your monitor properly calibrated and profiled. But get a good monitor first: In my experience you’re better off using a high quality monitor without calibration/profiling than you are using a budget TN monitor that is calibrated and profiled. Calibration & profiling of a cheap monitor doesn’t help much because the image changes as soon as you move your head an inch! (For information on selecting a good LCD monitor, see my earlier article on this subject.) That said, if you’re serious about photography — particularly publishing your photographs — you have to do both: Get a high quality monitor and have it fully calibrated and profiled. But if your budget is tight I recommend you put your money into the best monitor you can afford (favoring quality over monitor size) and save up to get a calibration/profiling kit later. Don’t even think of trying to calibrate a monitor without a colorimeter: As Dr. Rick says in the quotation at the top of this page, it’s a fool’s errand.
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In my last post I showed some experimental shots from the 2009 Mayor’s Cup races here in Boston. Now I’ll present a collection of more conventional photography from this event.
Click the image above (or below) to see the rest of the photos.
So… yesterday I went downtown for the first annual Mayor’s Cup, a criterium bicycle race in downtown Boston. The racing started fairly late in the day for this time of year: The sun was pretty low even at
the start and, being downtown amidst all the buildings, much of the course was in deep shadow… except the parts that were in dazzling sunlight. Exposure, color balance, all extremely wacky. Even at the
default (neutral) raw conversion settings, color saturation was off the charts.
So rather than attempt the fool’s errand of trying to make the resulting shots look normal, I dialed down the highlights as much as possible, turned up the black levels and contrast and turned down the color saturation to get…
Click the image above (or below) to see the rest of the photos.
The introduction of the new Pentax K-X was held on September 16th, 2009 at the International Center of Photography on 6th Ave at 43rd street in New York City.
(My photo gallery of the trip is here.)
The ICP is definitely worth a visit if you get the chance. Their exhibit at the time of my visit was on the work of Richard Avedon, who is not one of my favorite photographers, but that’s probably all the more reason to have a look at his work, I thought to myself. (It’s also appropriate because Avedon did shoot with Pentax cameras for some time.) I was quite surprised at how much of it I liked. The thing is, it was his early stuff that really seemed good to me. The exhibit had the photographs grouped by time period and the later the year the less I liked his work. He seemed to have figured out what sold, at one point, and then stopped experimenting and growing. In his later work he seemed to be imitating his own “Richard Avedon style” (though certainly very well!) I once read an article that suggested that Liza Minnelli has, in effect, become a Liza Minnelli impersonator; I think Richard Avedon became a sort of photographic equivalent of that.
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Ever since the publication of the PDML Photo Annual (see link and photo at right), I’ve had a lot of people asking me how the photo mosaic on the cover was made. The answer is disappointingly mundane: I had software do it for me. Yes, there was no special skill involved (other than choosing an image that is well suited to this technique). Better still, the software I used was freeware. It doesn’t cost anything.
There are several applications available to create photo mosaics. I haven’t tried many; in fact, I’ve only tried one because the first one I downloaded worked so well that I didn’t feel the need to spend any more time searching. It’s an application called Andrea Mosaic and is one of the free photo applications recommended on my free software page. You can download it at Andrea Denzler’s web site. Here’s how it works…
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I’m going to start putting the photo galleries that are specific to my blog into their own blog entries, with their own category, to make easier for people (mainly me) to find them. So here’s the first one, from the 2008 Grandfather Mountain Nature Photography Weekend:
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General
The Grandfather Mountain Nature Photography Weekend is a 3-day photo workshop and contest at Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, organized by Don Nelson, a former professional photographer and rep for Nikon and Pentax. The photo contest is judged by myself and Doug Brewer, a photographer from Richmond, Kentucky. Tickets go on sale on April 1st and usually sell out within 5-10 hours(!) (Registration information here.) This event is also the unofficial annual meeting of members of the Pentax-Discuss Mailing List (PDML).
The Nature Photography Weekend always takes place on the first weekend after Memorial Day. From Friday afternoon through Sunday, participants get to take photos in one of the most spectacularly beautiful places on the continent, listen to talks by renowned nature photographers and participate in the casual yet competitive photo contest. “Casual” and “competitive” may seem contradictory, but they aren’t in this case. You’ll have to experience it to understand how this can work. You also get to meet the great people who comprise the participants in this event. For some, that’s the best part of the deal.
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One of the great annoyances of bad web design is the link that opens a new tab in your web browser rather than simply loading the new page in the current tab. It was even worse in the days before tabbed browsers, because it would open an entirely new browser window, but it’s still annoying and still bad web design: The idea is to keep you on the current web site (“pleeeeeze don’t leave!”) but it actually makes it more difficult to get back to the original page because the “Back” button no longer works. In other words, it causes the problem it’s intended to prevent. It has been known to be bad web design for 10 years now, but people still do it.
You know what’s worst about it, though? It’s just plain rude to treat visitors to your web site this way. The first rule of effective web design is, “Don’t piss off people who visit your web site”. So, all you web designers out there: Stop using the “target= ” attribute in your links! (Unless you’re using it with in a page that uses Frames — if you design web pages that use frames just step out back and shoot yourself now.)
Fortunately, there is a way for Firefox users to override inconsiderate web designers who use this technique. With a simple customization, you can make all links open in the same tab (and if you want to open a link in a new tab you can just right-click and select “Open Link in New Tab”).
Here’s how you do it:
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If you look at this page, you’ll notice I’ve recently edited a photography book that’s being sold to raise money for pediatric cancer research. My Significant Other, Lisa, is a pediatric pathologist. She diagnoses kids with cancer all the time and, unlike many pathologists, she does Fine Needle Aspiration (sometimes called “needle biopsy”) to get cells for diagnosis, which means she meets the kids in person, rather than simply looking at slides with tissue samples. Many of her friends are pediatric oncologists and surgeons who also deal with kids who have the most dire prognoses.
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We just spent a week in North Carolina doing a bit of easy hiking, but mostly relaxing and getting rested for the intense activity that we anticipate in the new year. It snowed on Wednesday and we went out for a walk through the neighborhood around our friends’ vacation cabin where we were staying. Naturally, I brought along my camera to be ready for any good shots that were to be had. I found myself “thinking in black and white” from the very start.
Click on the image at right to see a gallery of shots from this walk.
