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Grin with cat attached
| In the eternal battle of man versus printer... | Nov. 19th, 2006 01:38 pm | |
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man can only win by lying. I've just spent around an hour trying to get a photo printed on a piece of 10x15 photo paper. I now have 5 versions of the print, of varying success, in front of me: Before printing: i) note that all my cameras have different aspect ratios and that said 4Mpx image is about 12x15. Crop it. ii) Note that my printer has no "10x15 (tabbed)" paper size. Create one. Print 1) Printed at 10x15. Came out in the top-left corner of the paper with a few mm border to the bottom and RHS. Measured paper, discovered 10x15 cm paper is in fact the standard photographic size of 6x4" and that HP are lying. (Legend has it that they had to rebuild part of my old school hall because the girders were in inches and the bricks in cm, at a 2.5 ratio). Resize image to 6x4, set "borderless print" Print 2) A beautiful borderless print, 6.25*4", right over the whole paper including the tab and perforation. Aesthetically acceptable, but not the print I asked for. Turn off borderless print to prevent width-scaling. Print 3) A beautiful print in the 6*4 page area, perfectly centered, and with a neat, perfectly symmetrical white border. Again, very pretty, but if I want a white border, I'll composite one. Turn borderless printing back on, and re-create the 6*4 (tabbed) paper size to lie about the tab and pretend it's not there. Print 4) Pretty close, but with a quarter-inch overprint into the tab. Not a problem on this image, but possibly more problematic on more precisely framed images. And I want to know how to print exactly what I ask for. Set "borderless expansion" to "small" and save settings. Print 5) A combination of "Eureka" and "Eubastard". 1.5 mm overprint into the tab; tauntingly close to what I wanted; a very nice print, but a quiet "neener neener" from the printer as it shows that, however nicely I ask, there is *no* way it will print exactly to size. Which is, I suppose, fair enough, as a home machine is unlikely to have the required degree of edge-detection accuracy. | ||
| A very well-spent Saturday | Aug. 19th, 2006 08:42 pm | |
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I woke up this morning with no plans for the weekend and was therefore moderately bored by 10:30; in search of things to do I took a quick look at the latest "This week" email from meetup.com. By sheer luck it told me that there was a London Photographer's Group meetup happening 2.5 hours later! So today I've been hiking around Hamstead Heath with about a dozen photo enthusiasts, getting rather more exercise than my legs are used to, plenty of fresh air, and probably about 300 photos. Shortly I shall sort through those and find some decent ones to post here; but right now I'm back home, glowing slightly with a day's sun and exercise, and feeling very happy with the day. mood:
 content | ||
| Impressive skies today... | Aug. 13th, 2006 08:34 pm | |
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  I decided to take pot luck today, given the random nature of the weather forecasts, and headed out to experiment with some black and white photography. I just about managed to keep myself and my camera dry, although I got a bit of a surprise when I was sheltering under the Millenium Bridge and it started leaking. Comments welcome - please take a look:   I must admit I've always been somewhat sceptical about black-and-white photography, in much the same way I mistrust "classic" literature. If they're black-and-white, "classic", or "arty" then things tend to get presumed to be good irrespective of their actual merit. But I was recommended to try it as a way of concentrating on light and composition, and as such today's shoot was quite interesting. I'm still getting used again to composing shots through a small viewfinder and trying to pick out the appropriate detail; exposure compensation and metering are still confusing me (ok, so if I set [] rather than [()] or [(o)], in what way will the camera get confused and how do I compensate?). And I can never remember what those symbols mean anyway. But; I know some of the effects I want to acheive and the methods to do so (grain=4xND filter + high ISO, B&W sky contrast=yellow/red filter), and I'm slowly getting to grips with the whole combination. The results are reasonable, and I think I can take them a lot further. | ||
| All my photography problems solved! | Jun. 25th, 2006 09:13 pm | |
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http://www.canon.co.jp/Imaging/enjoydsl mood:
amused | ||
| hrm, complex | Jun. 24th, 2006 09:13 pm | |
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Aside: just looked at the date on the edit box and got an odd jolt of familiarity... Anyhoo - I bought the 350D and it is TeH Shiny*; I'm being impressed by all sorts of odd things like the AF intelligence and speed, colour balance for B&W (no that's not an oxymoron), and the flash's habit of leaping up and trying to smack you in the face every time it thinks the scene's too dark. Having read most of the manual I'm starting to understand why it has such a wide range of Idiot Modes, 'cos it's distinctly complex (although I do at least know enough about photgraphic theory to understand why I might want to use any of the functions). Mildly amused to be back on CF cards, since that's what my first decent digicam used. Plus it's amusing to note the things that SLRs don't do, like LCD preview (well, duh me) and video. Oh, and fit in a fag packet. Still room in my collection for the Ixus then ;) * on recollection, I'm blaming Diva for that phrase | ||
| Numbers game | Jun. 24th, 2006 11:23 am | |
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Due to extreme parental generosity, and a degree of "Damnit, I can justify something good *this* year", I find myself suddenly in the market for a DSLR, in the GBP600 price bracket. Recommendations anyone? Quick startup, rapid autofocus, wide aperture / shutter range all priorities. TIA, Wechsler (now perkier, thanks people ;) | ||
| How to be cruel to a web browser | Apr. 14th, 2006 08:49 am | |
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Generate 4,881 thumbnails of all the digital photos you've ever taken.* Load them all in a float-based layout into one web page. View it, and create a 100-page PDF as a contact sheet. Which you then decide, maybe you won't print after all.† It'll stop and think about it for a while, but it copes. * Which is why I appeared as online all night; I left this machine running. † Dunno what the cost-per-page is on this printer, but I suspect it's significant for that sort of doc. | ||
| Photo Rules | Apr. 9th, 2005 10:02 pm | |
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I suspect the arrival of the new camera is going to cause quite a few picture uploads (mainly to http://wechsler.fotopic.net/ until I rewrite my own galleries), so I thought I'd restate ( the "rules" I generally apply to them ) | ||