Black Friday

Last night after Thanksgiving I tuned into the news and caught an ad that really grabbed me. A local retailer was offering a major brand 8 megapixel point and shoot digital camera for $88, that’s $11 a megapixel! That really lowers the bar for anyone who wants a digital camera.

But I suspect the advertising offer was to lure people into the store at some unholy hour of the morning, really early and after eating too much turkey too!

Then on the news Thursday night there were pictures of people lined up already waiting for the stores to open wanting to be the first to get in to pick off the choice bargains. There were also other lines of people on video earlier in the day of those queued up in longer lines than ever to obtain a free Thanksgiving dinner. The too kinds of lining up in a single news broadcast had a disparate visual dissonance because although the purposes were worlds apart, the people did not look that different. In other words people that look like just about any other American in a crowd are lining up to spend money while others are lined up because they don’t have the price of a meal. This is a very different “hard times” from the Depression era photo’s we saw from the 30’s.

Speaking of which there is now access to much of Life Magazine’s photo archives that have been scanned and made available on Google. Anyone interested in history in photo’s, photo-journalism, or just great photography, it is all there in the images from the Life Magazine archives including the photos from the Depression like those made by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.

http://images.google.com/hosted/life

An LCD Display For Christmas?

If you are buying yourself a Christmas present or someone is that needs some guidance, a new LCD display for digital photography selection is getting better and more affordable this season. Among the prime manufacturers NEC is sporting a new, high performance “P” Series, with the new 22 inch Multicynch P221W model. It is designed for professional graphics users and is built on the success of the highly rated 90 series NEC displays. This new model is sold with a kit including a calibration and profiling sensor based on the the X-Rite i! Dispaly 2 hardware and software. The NEC Multisynch P221W LCD display is slated to be available in store in December 20008 at a street price of $636.

At the other end of the price spectrum for an LCD display suitable for digital photography is the LG Electronics 22 inch W2252TQ with an MSRP of $339,95. This is a new model LGE display with specifications similar to the Flatron L2000C I tested awhile back, I have no reason to doubt this new model will performa as well or better. Check out what LG has to say about this new model line at:
http://us.lge.com/MONITORS/

The big bang for the buck in professional graphics LCD displays in Samsung’s Syncmaster 245T model. Originally with a retail list price well over a $1,000.00, this large 24 inch widescreen display is currently listed for sale by B&H Photo-Video for $619.95. That’s not at all bad for one of the best brand-models I have tested for use doing digital photography.

Finally at the very pinnacle of display performance is the Eizo ColorEdge, and the CE210W model I tested with great satisfaction. I was particularly impressed using the Eizo software and direct computer to display control via a USB connection from computer to display, I was able to achieve the most precise and effective calibration and profiling compared to any LCD display I have worked with. Chromix.com the Color Management specialists are currently offering the Eizo ColorEdge CE 210W 21 inch LCD display for $1149 after instant rebate.

THANKSGIVING

I am thankful for three days of gentle rain here in southern California ending a wildfire season that has been one of the worst.

I am thankful for an end of two years of often embarrassing political campaigning.

I am thankful for $4.00 gasoline that made people learn they can really drive their cars a bit less.

I am thankful for a slowdown in our economy that has awoken some to the fact we have become much too materialistic.

I am thankful for a financial crisis that has informed us we are too dependent on credit as the fuel for an excessive lifestyle.

I am thankful more Americans chose hope and change in their voting over more of the same politics of the last 30 years.

And I am thankful for having this new blog venue to share what I am thinking about digital photography.

Although the daily news keeps reminding us of bad times ahead there is really much to be thankful for if you just look for it.

Back To The Future

I am not thinking of a series of movies and time machines, but this week’s address by Barack Obama announcing his plans and intentions to put millions of Americans back to work. Of course newspaper columnists and TV pundits have already harkened back to the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the new Deal and its WPA organization to get people working during the Depression. But for me it recalled a very small part of the WPA that produced a lasting memorial to those times by a small team of photographers including Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. Their photographs, many of which have become well known are now in the Library of Congress and anyone can order prints for a very nominal fee. Considering what an Ansel Adams print fom the same era would cost today, in many respects what the WPA photographers and the Library of Congress catalogue of images has provided the American public, I believe is really more “American”.

So the question is, will the Obama administration follow the precedent of the 1930’s WPA and put photographers to work documenting American life in this time for future generations to see and enjoy? It does not seem likely today’s politics and practical challenges will call for an exact repeat, a new New Deal or a WPA, but we can hope can’t we? Isn’t that the theme Obama won on? Of course if enough of Americas millions of photographers launched a letter and e-mail campaign via the Barack Obama web site (http://www.barackobama.com/index.php) who knows. He is our first “connected” President elect, although security concerns are threatening to turn off his Blackberry.

Interesting though there is a modern technology precedent that might add weight to the concept of a WPA photographer II project. It is maybe prescient that the Democratic wife of California’s Republican Governor, Maria Shriver recently unveiled the California Legacy Trails. This is a new Adobe software based interactive featured web site of the California Museum web site. It could very well be a model for a US national web site project that would be a perfect venue for the photographs (and video) if such a project as the WPA photography team should be revived by the Obama Administration.

Although I am just dreaming out loud of course, this new California Museum web site is an ideal model for how the American story can be told in a way anyone can relate to in words, photographs and video. The reason I find it ideal is that it is not just one story but many, as the American dream is not just one vision but many, as many as there are individuals who make up all of America. Take a look at this web site and I think you will find why I am inspired that it is a model, not just for the work of a new WPA photography team should that come about, but more importantly as a way to tell the American story to the children and even adults who could benefit by a broader understanding of what it is to be a human being in America.

View the video at: http://www.californiamuseum.org/trails/#trails/women

Whether you agree with me or disagree, or have another thought, comment; or if you prefer, please write to me by e-mail at: goofotografx@gmail.com I would like to hear from you.

Casualty Of The Economy

A well established name in scanners, Microtek will no longer have an independent American Company representing its products in the US. Their offices in California are scheduled to be closed on December 12 of this year. However in compliance with US law warranties, repair and parts will be available for Microtek owners and users through a website portal at:
http://support.microtek.com

Microtek International will continue to offer scanning solutions through partners and OEM relationships in the US from its headquarters in Taiwan. Whether models like the recent and popular ArtixScan M1 will continue to offered for sale in the US through other venues remains to be seen.

The Best Of Both World’s

The popular phrase that acknowledges differences in “worlds” that may have particular advantages unique to each, took on new meaning to me today. I was upgrading an Apple Mac application called Parallels from version 3.0 to version 4.0, and realized the extent to which this software that supports running the Windows operating system on an Apple Mac seamlessly has changed the old concept of Apple vs Microsoft as an ether/or proposition to something else. I used to run both Apple Macs and a PC with Windows, but since Apple switched to Intel processors and became capable of also running other operating systems like Windows, I took advantage of this possibility and instead of replacing my old PC with a new one, just upgraded my Apple Mac and installed Parallels.

I chose to install Parallels Desktop, which is a software virtual machine, because unlike using the Apple Boot Camp solution to run Windows, you don’t have to re-boot to go from the Apple operating system to launch Windows. I often make screenshots for articles, or just make a quick reference to a Windows application to answer a reader question, so being able to switch from the Apple OS I do my work with to Windows seamlessly is a great convenience for me.

However my necessity to have a PC/Windows system to run applications that are exclusive to Windows to do my job writing about digital photography computing for an audience that is more Windows than Mac, obscured some advantages of having both operating systems on an Apple Mac I had not considered. The first awakening to these other advantages was when after obtaining a Kodachrome K3 IT-8 target slide I could use to profile my scanners specifically for scanning Kodachrome slides. I found none of the Apple Mac scanner profiling software I had was able to read the old “marilyn” style of IT-8 references Kodak used to produce the Kodachrome K3 targets. However remembering that some years back I had used Monaco Systems EZ Color profiling software on a PC, I dug through my huge stack of old software applications and found up a copy of version 2.0 of EZ Color. I installed it in Windows running on my Mac under Parallels, and found it worked fine, after also installing the original Windows driver for my now discontinued Minolta DiMage Scan Elite 5400-2 scanner.

This experience was useful a short time later when answering a reader’s question about a problem with an even rarer Minolta scanner the Multi-Pro model. This reader had just upgraded his Mac to Apple OS 10.5 and found that the SilverFast driver for his scanner would not work, and Lasersoft had not upgraded it for Apple version 10.5 and was not sure if or when that might get done. So I suggested he get and install Parallels and a copy of Windows XP Pro on his Mac. Then he could install the original Windows driver from the CD he got with the scanner and run it from Windows on his Mac.

Over the years I have collected software and most of the really old stuff is for Windows applications. I haven’t done it yet but as soon as I have the time I hope to have some old imaging resources available again I had given up on, but would still like to access. The reason is that as a for instance, an early version of Corel’s PhotoPaint had a marvelous collection of special effects filters that are not available in the current version or anywhere else for either Windows or Apple Mac. So I hope I can find the application CD’s for that old version of PhotoPaint. There are lots of such possibilities, like re-installing my very old copy of Lotus Notes address book so I can easily access the addresses of friends and acquaintances from years back from files I have stored on CD’s.

And, that reminds me - from the comments many people have made to me that they recognize an Apple Mac computer would be better(and definitely is) for their doing digital photography, but they don’t want to loose access to all of the Windows software they are used to. But by running Windows with Parallels on a new Intel Apple Mac they can still do all the computing things they did, and at no cost other than the time to re-install those programs. In addition I believe some of the intimidation caused by the idea of learning not just a new operating system but new applications too, would be lessened, and being able to go from the Apple OS to Windows, back and forth seamlessly, I know they would soon discover what I have learned, that doing computing on either system is not really very different.

The best of both worlds is having both with all the advantage of each. Check out Parallels 4.0 at www.parallels.com

Half Gone So Don’t Lose The Rest

A report on imaginginfo.com today says half of America’s photographic history will disappear. The research was done by a reputable company, GFK you can look up at www.gfk.com, and it was underwritten by ScanCafe, www.scancafe.com whose business self interest is an obvious incentive to fund such a poll. But in this case their self-interest does not make me have any doubts, based on the information Shutterbug magazine readers have been providing over the last decade. The reports of home stored photographic images that have been lost to fading, fungus and mildew and just plain poor storage in a damp environment, would have me guess what is lost may be even more than half.

Photographers began using color film in ernest in the 60’s and as the 35mm SLR enthusiasm grew by leaps and bounds the total of accumulated consumer photographs people have stored in those ubiquitous shoe-boxes may be even more than the estimated 550 billion suggested by the research. I’ve been photographing and using color since the fifties and other than Kodachrome slides most of my color images from the first 15 years of my photography are not recoverable, and only the slides and very few color negatives from the mid 60’s through 1980 can be considered in good condition. And I am pretty careful about storage and live in a raltively dry climate. So any photographer with a library of film images in color if they want their images preserved, should think about scanning the film and then archiving the files, would be my recommendation.

But also from the e-mail I receive from Shutterbug readers I get the impression the cost of a good scanner is less of an inhibitor to scanning than a concern that scanning is an odious, boring task and is hard to learn. When I first began scanning film in the beginning of the 90’s the software was not user friendly and both scanners and computers were slow, so it was tedious. But as the technology has improved as well as what can be done in the scanning process to reproduce very fine photographic qualities sometimes from mediocre to poor quality film images, is a challenge that is both fun to do and extremely satisfying. It is every bit as interesting and engaging as old fashioned darkroom developing and enlarging was, but in a much more comfortable environment free of noxious fumes and squinting in the dim illumination of a safelight.

Of course some would rather consider having the scanning done for them and that’s why a company like ScanCafe exists. In fact for a period in my life I was too busy to do my own scanning and at the time Kodak offered scanning to a CD through a number of labs which I took advantage of. But like having color prints made, even by a top-dollar pro lab, I was seldom really satisfied the results were what I had in mind, and I really dislike being one of those difficult impossible to satisfy customers. So, now semi-retired I have been able to spend more time scanning, and the more I do the better I get at it, and the more enjoyment I get from making an image look even better than it did when I first made the photograph.

And today, when time may be easier to come by than money, at the affordable prices of a good scanner, it’s as good a hobby as taking pictures with a digital camera because other than a miniscule amount of electricity burned, it cost nothing to scan film, and almost nothing to archive the resulting files on Gold/Gold CD’s. I’ve now filled about 600 CD’s with scanned film images I made in the past, and I’m happy I’ll probably never finish scanning my entire library because I’m having more fun with photography than ever.