Last night, Lenny invited me to visit Jim Trotter.  Jim is a St. Louis-based photographer, working out of his home.  His specialties seem to be model shoots as well as architectural photography, and his images are spectacular.

Jim’s studio was astounding!  There were works covering the walls, enormous printers capable of printing images on canvas or printing images several feet wide, and a spacious shooting studio.  Jim was kind to us, indulging us with some insight into his workflow — using a PowerMac, Wacom tablet and Photoshop as his tools… all familiar friends to me.  He also showed off some of his gear.  He shoots a lot of large and medium format film as well as digital medium format.  I was really impressed with the resolution of the images that he produces with this gear.  He’s able to enlarge images to fantastic dimensions, all because he starting with such a large source image.

And then there was his home.  It was filled with artwork in progress.  Every room had something that either he or Joyce (his wife) were working on.  Aside from the home being beautiful, it was an extension of the two of them and of the studio, a reflection of travels and experience.  What people hang on their own walls is a window into their soul, and from the looks of their walls, this couple really enjoys their work and passion.

Jim told me about a local artist group, ArtDimensions, that happens to be meeting tonight.  I think I’ll go downtown tonight, and check them out.  It sounds like a great opportunity to get some of my work exhibited in town, and gain a little exposure that I wouldn’t otherwise have had.

I hold no illusion that I’ll be shooting at Jim’s level — that’s a far reach! — and I don’t expect to be shooting models.  It’s not what Jim’s photographing that’s the dream, it’s the fact that he is neck-deep in his photographic work, day in and day out.  For me, the dream is working at something that you’re passionate about, something that’s personally rewarding and satisfying.  The dream is creating art that can touch someone, and elicit a positive emotion from them, maybe brightening their day just a little.

That’s living the dream, and I will live it one day.

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…..  🙂

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?