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February 26, 2008

No - This *Really* Sucks

Our car was stolen out of our garage today. We're trying to convince ourselves that it doesn't matter. It's just a car - we'll get another one. Of course, it's not that easy. We really liked this car a lot. It's been reliable and fun for 7 years, and we kept it in immaculate condition.

Now we hope that we never see it again. Neither of us wants to see our old friend with so much as a scratch on her. Boo-hoo. :(

Posted by thedude at 9:10 PM | Comments (8)

February 25, 2008

It's Never Too Late for Photo Fun

This poster was imagined almost 30 years ago. We shot these images of Steve in the living room and printed them by hand at the time. With lots of dodging, I was able to achieve decent results, but was limited to a print 24 inches wide. Thanks to the fact that I preserved the original 6 x 7 negatives, and to the miracle that is PhotoShop, I can now bring it to you with higher quality than I ever imagined. What you see above has been scaled down significantly from it's original 20,208 pixel width. That's more than twice the size of an image I recently printed 10 feet wide.

Posted by thedude at 6:51 PM | Comments (2)

February 19, 2008

On Film and Friends

Memories flood over me as I see some of these images unfold on my 24" display. Some of the images really smack me up and down and back up again - for a number of different reasons. A few things I thought when I saw this shot:

We must have been having a great time on this summer day in Wisconsin. We were no doubt clowning around without a care in the world and much to look forward to. It was a good time to be 14 or 15 years old.

I'm lucky to have spent several years with this guy. Bruce was a fabulous friend and he most definitely helped set my life in a positive direction. We need to get together again.

What a shame that the average teenager will definitely not have a couple thousand slides to sift through 40 years from now. In fact, they are unlikely to have more than a few pictures of any kind remaining four decades from now. Formats will change, storage media will come and go. Web sites and Inkjet prints will fade from their memories.

It's also sad that most images these days are shot on camera phones. No matter how good these devices get, they will never produce a shot like this, made with a Miranda Sensomat and a Soligor 200 mm lens. Some of my very first images were shot on 120 film, and when scanned today, produce files in excess of 200 megabytes. Compare that with your average 1 megapixel cell phone image.

Depth-of-focus issues have been a challenge forever, but I could get good bokeh before I even knew what it was.

These photos have managed to bring me tremendous joy four decades after I shot them. I'm lucky to have taken so many. I only wish I had taken more.

My advice? Get out and shoot some pictures.

Posted by thedude at 6:48 PM | Comments (3)

February 9, 2008

My Scanning Workflow

This stack represents about 2/3 of the slides that I have gone through in the last several days. In addition to this was a box containing another thousand or so loose slides. Fortunately, the majority of the slides went straight into the garbage. What remains are slides I definitely want to scan and some that I might want to scan. I kept most slides with familiar faces in them and trashed the scenic shots.

Now that I have "only" a couple thousand scanning candidates, the real work begins. Slides are loaded into a mounted film holder - usually three or four at a time. A preview scan is made. This gives me some idea how much tweaking I'll need to do. If I'm lucky, the slide will be in good shape and will not have faded too much. If the slide is an E-6 process film like Ektachrome or Fujichrome, I have the option of using digital ICE to greatly reduce the amount of dust-spotting I will have to do later. (ICE does not work on Kodachrome slides or black and white negatives.) If the slide has faded over the years, Nikon's digital ROC can be utilized to restore much of the slide's original color. After making these adjustments, it''s time to do another preview scan. When things are looking good, I scan at the scanner's highest resolution and bit depth. This produces a file approximately 120 megabytes in size, but gives me the most latitude for the work I'll do next.

So far, all of the steps have been performed "in the background". By that I mean while doing other things like working on this blog entry, responding to a ton of fan e-mail or even working on previously scanned images in PhotoShop. It's a good thing that it's possible to do this, or I'd never get anything else done. Scanning a single image this way can take up to 30 minutes. I'd rather not spend the next 2,000 hours on this project.

Finally, I open the scanned images in PhotoShop and use it's power to do the final tweaks. Usually this involves a visit to the Levels, Color Balance, and Hue controls. There is almost always some dust-spotting needed. Finally, the image is sharpened and sized for e-mailing. I have a PhotoShop Action for this, since pretty much the same steps get applied to all of my images.

Of course, I am painfully aware that the "best" way to maintain image fidelity would be to remove the slides from their holders, wet-mount them and have them drum scanned. I have had a few transparencies scanned this way by fellow SPAM'er, Kurt Krause, and these are the best-looking scans in my collection. Several of my Bali images including my "Bali Boys" shot was scanned in this way. But at $75.00 a pop, I'd have to take out a second mortgage on the loft.

Posted by thedude at 9:42 AM | Comments (4)

February 8, 2008

Incredible Synchronicity!

My new friend Jeri is dating my other friend Andrew. Jeri recently took a position at Bayer, whose offices are about 10 blocks from the offices of Affymetrix in Emeryville, where I work. One day Jeri passed by one of the lunch rooms on the sprawling campus and saw this shot of her boyfriend laminated and taped to the wall above the microwave! Pow! What the ...???

Now, this is interesting on several levels. Seeing her boyfriend on the wall in her new place of employment is in itself a huge coincidence. Then, realizing that this image could only have been downloaded and printed from her friend thedude's web site is also an amazing coincidence, wouldn't you say? (Nice to know that someone at Bayer reads thedude.com!) And I can't believe that out of all the images on the Internet that might be used to illustrate a messy kitchen, they picked this shot of Andrew. Amazing!

Posted by thedude at 10:22 AM | Comments (3)

February 7, 2008

Photo Advice from thedude

A coworker recently asked for photo advice after seeing the pictures I shot at our company Christmas party. I took the time compose a lengthy response, and figure I might as well share it with my regular readers too!

Hi thedude,

I was looking at the pictures you took at the party. They are amazing. How in the world do you get pictures with the color, contrast, and clarity that you captured?

I'm using a D70, as opposed to the D2x, but figure there is more to it than that. Is it in the lens? Post processing?

I'm looking to upgrade soon, and was hoping you had a minute to offer some advice as to why my pictures have a slightly washed out / less life-like look - regardless of the level of flash.

Thanks!

Where to begin? Well, first - thanks for the very kind words.

There are many pieces to this. Briefly:

ALWAYS shoot RAW. This is not just for the added sharpness, but most importantly, so that you can make tweaks to the color temperature and exposure.

UNDEREXPOSE. In a situation like this where the majority of the image is almost black, the camera needs to know that this is what you want. I underexpose flash shots by .3 or even .7 stops. All of the Affy party images were underexposed by .7 stops. This prevents blown out highlights.

Use a MANUAL setting. Shoot some test shots with the camera. Find an ISO/shutter speed combination that will capture some of the room light. Choose the slowest shutter speed possible and stop down the lens a couple stops from it's max. The idea is to get the best sharpness and depth of focus while capturing as much ambient light as possible. The Affy party images were shot at f4 at 1/25th of a second with a Nikkor 24-85mm f2.8 lens.

Use the most powerful flash you can find and attach the Gary Fong Lightsphere with an AmberDome. This will warm things up a bit so that the color of the light from the flash is close to the color of the ambient (incandescent) light.

Compose quickly, get in close, push the shutter release at exactly the right moment. :)

Post-processing:

Open a few of the best-looking images in the PhotoShop RAW converter. Adjust the color temperature until they look just right. I like my images to be a bit on the warm side. For the Affy images, 3700 degrees produced the results I liked best. Apply the same color temp to all flash images.

Adjust exposure individually in the RAW converter. Underexposing has its drawbacks, but blown out highlights are really bad. Nothing worse than super-shiny reflections on faces. If highlights are blown out, there is no easy way to repair them.

Create a PhotoShop Action to reduce the image size in steps and apply a tiny bit of smart sharpening filter as you go. In this case the original ~4200 pixel wide images were reduced to ~1800 pixels. Done properly, this will greatly enhance sharpness.

Practice, practice...

Good luck!

Posted by thedude at 9:29 AM | Comments (6)

February 3, 2008

My Never-Ending Scanning Project

A few years ago, my best man Steve and I split the cost of a Nikon film scanner. I figured I'd spend a few days scanning the best of the thousands of slides and negatives I have scattered around. Well, this little project has grown into a monster. I've been scanning on and off for the better part of three years, and I'm no where near done.

The main reason my project has grown so time-consuming is the amount time it takes to get a good scan. Initially, I cut corners and scanned at lower resolutions or lower bit-depth or even skipped a preview scan. Now I know that attempting to save time in this way a very bad idea. There is no way around the fact that every image must be preview scanned and adjusted individually. Also, there are several scanning options which must be enabled to get the best results. Doing this causes the amount of time per scan to increase dramatically. A single 35 mm slide now takes about 15-20 minutes to scan. My 6 x 7 cm images will take three or four times that. And that's before they even get opened in PhotoShop, which can easily add another hour or two to the process.

So now, in addition to the slides and negatives that have not yet been scanned, I have to go back and re-scan a buttload of images. This may not be as bad as it sounds though. It turns out that the scanner is perfectly happy scanning in the background. Even on my lowly pee see, I can color-correct and dust-spot an image in PhotoShop, and make an entry on my blog while the scanner hums away on another decades-old image.

Posted by thedude at 1:48 PM | Comments (6)

February 2, 2008

Our Lives in a Box of Old Kodachromes

You never know what you'll find. I had a few spare moments this rainy Saturday afternoon, and decided to take up my scanning project again. It didn't take long to find something fun and timely. These old slides were in the first box I opened. I'm sure Jim will love these! Ha!

Food has always played a big role in our lives. Jim's annual pig roast was one of the best-tasting events of the Wisconsin summer. What fun. Thanks for the memories, Jim!

Posted by thedude at 1:37 PM | Comments (2)