maiken

<p>So Iﾒm trying to learn about lighting, in particular using strobes

off-camera. I currently own a Canon 420EX to go with my 20D. Itﾒs been great so

far in camera-mounted TTL mode, but it has no manual controls, no synch cord

plug, and can only function as a slave using Canonﾒs IR scheme.

 

<p>If I really get into off-camera lighting, I will eventually want to be able

to trip strobes wirelessly. It seems to me that I have two top-level choices here:

 

<ul>

<li>If I buy Canon strobes, I am stuck with Canonﾒs IR signaling scheme, since

Canon strobes (as I understand it?) donﾒt have synch cord inputs or

general-purpose slaves. On the plus side, I can get full TTL metering and

on-camera control of lighting ratios for the whole multi-flash setup. On the

downside, Canon strobes are expensive, and Iﾒve heard complaints about the IR

signaling reliability outdoors.

 

<li>If I switch to third-party strobes (Nikon ﾖ gasp ﾖ seems to have a nice

range) that feature synch cord inputs and manual controls, I can independently

select a slaving system. I could go cheap with optical slaves (some strobes have

these built in) or more expensive with something like Pocket Wizards, but the

point is that the slave system is independent from the strobes. Downside: no TTL

metering; strobes get set manually.

</ul>

 

<p>The whole point is to learn about lighting, so Iﾒm not sure that having to

set strobes manually is actually a problem. I think it boils down to whether I

want to be married to Canonﾒs IR slaving scheme or not. I don't want to set off

down the wrong path and have to replace gear later.

 

<p>Anyone have any words of advice for me here? People shooting Canon bodies

with strobe lighting: have you stuck with Canonﾒs system or gone third-party?

 

<p>Thanks,

 

<p>Mark

I'm not sure where the hostility to inkjet is coming from, but if it helps you breathe more calmly, you are welcome to imagine that I asked the same original question, except proclaiming my love of the output from my local lab.

 

The point is, I would like to closely control the printing of the album pages myself, rather than turning myself over to someone else's selection of paper stock and printing process.

Looking at Kolo's refill pages, the smaller ones appear to be 8 1/2" x 11" with two punched holes. Has anyone tried mounting their own sheets into these albums, or others?

I've been picking through the forum archives but haven't found any direct

answer to this.

 

I would like to put together an album of prints. Being something of a stickler

for image quality, I would like to produce the prints myself by printing

directly onto album pages, because I expect this to look more polished than

mounting prints to cardstock album pages. I admire the overall look of albums

ordered from snapfish and other services, but the image quality leaves

something to be desired.

 

A key point is that I would like to select my own paper, and then bind it into

an album. I've spent quite a bit of time selecting my favorite papers and I'm

not keen on buying generic "printable album pages". Moab makes some of my

favorite paper, and they used to sell it with holes drilled for mounting in

their "Chinle Book", but they no longer offer that product.

 

Does anyone have experience assembling this type of album? Could I perhaps

leave a gutter on inkjet paper prints and drill or punch mounting holes

myself? Does anyone have a recommendation for attractive materials and covers

to use for this, or other ideas?

 

Alternatively, perhaps someone would like to disabuse me of the notion that

mounting prints onto album pages won't look as nice?

 

Thanks!

 

Mark

Everyone's aesthetic tastes are different; I would recommend ordering a sampler pack of several different paper types to compare and make your own decisions.

 

Personally, though, I've settled on Moab's Entrada Natural, which is a matte fine-art paper.

WHY ARE YOU WRITING IN ALL CAPS? IT'S DISTRACTING AND MUCH LESS READABLE! PLEASE STOP!

If you're working from RAW files, it would be even better to crop in Camera RAW directly. The crop tool is different; it lets you rotate the image and crop it in one operation, and your settings get stored in the .xml sidecar file that describes the way you processed your RAW file, so you can regenerate the same image again later.

Photoshop's Camera RAW converter (comes as part of Photoshop) understands files from the 20D and is very powerful.

 

I particularly recommend Camera RAW 3.x, which comes with Photoshop CS2, as the algorithm for processing 20D files was specifically improved to help address the high-ISO banding issue that some people see. CR3.x calculates the blackpoint for 20D files on a line-by-line basis, which helps with banding.

Rob Galbraith has a database of performance information for CF cards, measured in various popular cameras:

 

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007

<p>Thank you for the pointer. For other readers, the passages that seemed most relevant to me were:

 

<blockquote>

you may include brief quotations and thumbnail images in your submissions that are permitted under the copyright laws as "fair use", provided you correctly attribute these to their authors. Furthermore, when commenting on photos in the photo Gallery, you may include a version of the photo under discussion in your comment, altered or marked up to illustrate your comments. By uploading photos to the photo Gallery, you grant to other photo.net members permission to copy the photo, to make such alterations and markups for the purpose of commentary s they see fit, and to attach tthe modified photo to their comments on the photo.<br/>

[...]<br/>

Submission of material to any photo.net forums, chat rooms, image critique areas, or photo sharing systems does not transfer the copyright to that material to photo.net. However, by submitting the material, You grant photo.net and its successors or assigns a perpetual non-exclusive world-wide royalty-free license to publish that material on the World Wide Web as part of the photo.net web site for the purpose of operating, displaying, distributing and promoting the Site. photo.net will not use Your materials without attributing them to You. If You object to any modification by photo.net of Your materials (except for minor edits), or, in the case of forum postings, comments on photos, or comment on the Site's static content, to the use of Your materials separate from their original context, photo.net will either restore the original text and context, or delete the materials.

</blockquote>

 

<p>(by the way, notice some typos in the first paragraph)

 

<p>Perhaps the permission for others to use thumbnails or alterations to an image in the course of discussion is the source of the confusion?

<p>In <a href="http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?

msg_id=00CxJc&unified_p=1">this thread</a>, a photo.net member

mentions that he had originally assumed that his pictures posted to

PN "were copyright protected, and not usable for anything without

permission", but that he was corrected by PN staff and told this was

not so.

 

<p>Can a PN staffer please clarify this? Is use of PN in any way an

implicit waiver of the copyright protections a photographer usually

has over their images?

<i>Gold, no gold....doesn't matter for back-ups.. If the CD works now and isn't abused later, it will work forever.</i>

 

<p>I'm not sure this is true. I was surprised when I first learned that CD-Rs work by a chemical process: there is a dye substrate whose pigmentation is shifted by the application of strong light when the CD is first burned. The dye fades over time, which gives the disc a limited lifespan. I'm not it would be wise to assume that a CD-R would work "forever".

<p>An earlier answer mentions that <i>because</i> the flower girl is a minor, a release is required to use her likeness in promotional material. It's my understanding that using someone's likeness in promotional materials <i>may</i> expose you to liability, but that this isn't any more or less the case with minors.

 

<p>That is, the rules for taking / publishing photos of minors are the same as those for adults, except of course that you seek a release, you need to get it from a minor's guardian, not the minor themself, and that there are special laws for child pornography.

 

<p>Any contrary opinions?

<p>Here are some things to think about:

 

<ul>

<li>CD-Rs are only somewhat archival. DVD-Rs apparently have quite poor archival qualities.</li>

<li>CDs don't hold much data.</li>

<li>Never rely on just one medium.</li>

<li>Hard disk space is currently very cheap.</li>

<li>Don't forget to protect against theft or damage to your home equipment.</li>

</ul>

 

<p>Many people argue that when you put these factors together, the smartest thing to do at the moment is use hard disks to back up your data. I do this; I back up my photos to a second, old PC that I use as a file server, and also to an external hard disk that I turn on just to back up data to (then turn it off to defend against accidental erasure). Currently, though, I'm not keeping a backup offsite, as I should.

 

<p>Eventually some of my hard disks will fail. When that happens, I'll replace them and recreate the data from the other backups. This approach should last for a while.

 

<p>You might be able to get in the habit of burning CDs or DVDs of your pictures as you take them, filling up a disc, burning it, then starting a new "batch" of data until you have another disc worth, etc. CDs and DVDs stored offside might make a nice backstop against catastrophe in your home.

I don't see any banding in this image, but I have known my 20D to produce banding in the shadow areas of underexposed images at high ISOs (1600 and 3200). This seems to happen the most under interior lighting in the dark channels (e.g., the blue channel will have banding under very warm light, since it's even less exposed than the other channels).

 

CS2's RAW converter has an improvement that calculates the black point on a line-by-line basis instead of calculing a global black point for the entire image. This helps with the banding, since the line-by-line conversion can cancel out much of the repeating luminance variation. CS2's noise reduction algorithm in the RAW converter is also better. Since upgrading to CS2 I haven't had to work around objectionable banding.

 

The best fix, though, is to just expose correctly so you don't have to distort the image in post-processing.

 

If you are faced with obvious banding, one last-ditch option is to convert to B&W and either completely omit the channel that shows the most banding or use it much less than the other channels!

I'm not a wedding photographer, but I was really impressed with this set of images. I think you did a fantastic job of capturing a lot of poignant detail and fleeting moments. Great work!

Blu-ray will be great, assuming the resulting disks are reasonably archival. Modern DVD-Rs are much less archival than CD-Rs, and that's not saying a lot.

It sounds like you're wondering if some brands of drives are more reliable than others.

 

There may be an answer to that, but I don't know it. However, I would recommend instead that you NOT TRUST any drive, even one from a manufacturer with a good reputation, not to fail. You should design your backup strategy so that, at a bare minimum, if any single HD fails, your files will still be OK. Relying on any drive to run forever is a recipe for disaster.

 

Storage is cheap these days, so I do the following: pictures go onto my main PC, then get backed up immediately to a separate machine that works as my in-house file server. I also have an external HD connected to my main PC that spends almost all of its life turned off; I turn it on to back up to it, then turn it off again, so it can't be erased or otherwise damaged accidentally.

 

Also, give some thought to storing a copy of images that are very important to you offsite, to defend against fire, flooding, theft or other damage to your home equipment. This could include burning images to CDs or DVDs periodically and storing them a at a friend's house, or taking them to the office. This could also include buying a portable external HD that you store offsite but bring home periodically to update the contents.

If you are determined to do the selective-desaturation, I would revisit this image in Photoshop and spend more time isolating the flowers properly. The foliage and flowers at the top and bottom of the arrangement are B&W, whereas the center flowers are color. Also, color bleeds into the bride and groom's faces, as previously pointed out.

 

It looks like you may have used a circular gradient mask to isolate the flowers? If so, this was a mistake, IMHO. Here's a technique I frequently use quite successfully:

 

Use the lasso tool to trace the outline of the portion of the picture you're trying to isolate (the flowers). Be reasonably attentive in this process, but the outline doesn't have to bee 100% perfect. In areas where you're near another object that you definitely want to exclude, draw your border a few pixels back from that object. That is, give the bride and groom's face a berth of at least 10 pixels. Once your selection is done, feather it fairly aggressively; I frequently use 25 pixels or so. This rounds off selection mistakes and blends the mask into the surroundings.

 

Good luck!

<p><i>The only reason that 8x10 is even thought of as a standard is historically related to book publishing and paper manufacturing.</i>

 

<p>Well, there's also 4x5 film...

Bob makes a good point, but unless my math is off, prints from a 10D's 3072 x 2048 pixel sensor, at 300dpi, would make prints 10.24" x 6.82". Not a very convenient form factor.

<p><b>It doesn't matter</b> that Photoshop loads your image as "180 ppi". It only matters what dimensions you print it at.

 

<p>Here's an exercise: in Photoshop, go to the "Image Size" dialog. Uncheck the "Resample image" checkbox (to stop Photoshop from adding or throwing away image data). Now, change the image resolution. If you make it higher, Photoshop will make the print dimensions smaller. If you make the resolution lower, Photoshop will make the print dimensions larger. If you change the resolution (and therefore the print size) and hit OK, do you know what Photoshop does? <i>Nothing</i>; it just remembers that that's the size that you would like to print the image at when you get around to printing. It doesn't have any effect on the image data itself.

 

<p>There's a reason that the part of that dialog box that you're worring about is called "Document size"; those numbers only affect the dimensions of the image when you eventually print it out.

This question doesn't make any sense. A digital image in a computer has no resolution (in the sense of PPI/DPI) until it's printed.

 

Look at this another way: if you have your 10D set to capture "large" JPEGs, it records 3072 x 2048 pixels. If you print a JPEG straight from the camera at 4x6 inches, you will be printing at 512ppi. If you print at 8x12, you will be printing at 256ppi.

Even though I have been shooting as an amateur for years, it didn't occur to me until someone pointed it out recently that if I was using a flash while someone else was trying to shoot the same scene, I might "step on" their exposure. My ignorance was probably from having shot mostly landscape and street scenes until more recently.

 

I think a reminder like this could be genuinely educational, and be well-received, as long as it could somehow be delivered politely.

 

Many wedding-invitation packets arrive these days with driving directions, maps, timetables, and other auxiliary information. If you are hired early enough by the B&G, it might be worth tactfully encouraging them to put a gentle reminder in the invitation packet? Trying to hand out a card at the event may be more jarring and/or appear confrontational if you single people out.

I'm not sure if this is helpful to you or not, but perhaps you didn't know that if you're shooting RAW, no white-balance-related data alteration occurs in-camera? That is, WB is entirely a post-processing modification; the data captured by the camera will be the same no matter what the on-board WB setting is.

 

Now, it may be that if you shoot under very warm light, then balance the image in post-processing, that you accentuate shadow noise. But the WB setting on your camera won't make this effect any better or worse.