PIXelations

This holiday week has been more about housekeeping odds and ends than photography. I was forced to upgrade my DVD burner because it was frequently not writing successfully. This would waste a lot of DVD’s, not to mention that I rely on this as my photo and data backup/archiving. I then was able to clean out my photo directories once archived so I have room for a new year of projects. I think I’ll have to watch for a deal on a 250 gb internal hard drive. I need the room. I have an external drive but I don’t like the speed. It is OK for archiving too, but that is about all I can use it for. The transfer rates are too slow to use as a scratch drive for PSCS.

I did some printing with my new Epson R2400. This is a truly amazing printer. It’s fast, especially since I am using what it likes best: firewire. I made the decision to print on matte finish only. This way I won’t have to worry about changing inks and wasting ink in the changeover.

A frient of mine at work asked me to print a couple of photos he took recently. Although these were low-res, scanned pictures from film, they still came out OK as 8x10’s. I did have a heck of a time setting up the defaults. The first time print was fine but came out darker than on my semi-calibrated monitor. I expected as much. The second print took three prints and actually turning off PSCS and turning on printer-driver color management to get the picture. Print-preview is a great thing to see how close you get to WYSIWYG.

TO DO
I want to print some of my stuff using the Adobe 1998 colorspace. I set my 20D already to this colorspace. I will also use the Epson paper profiles as well. However, since I got an Amazon gift certificate, I applied this toward this monitor calibrator (yeah, I know, FINALLY!). I didn’t want to spend a lot on one till I see exactly if it helps. I just have to remember to do a convert-to-profile for sRGB when I want to upload to the web or let CVS print out my snapshots. Knowing how my memory is, I better record a PSCS action for this...

I did manage to get behind the camera for some practice though, besides the usual family gatherings Christmas snapshots. I took a walk at Session Woods again, although it was overcast. I was bored and I just wanted to practice to try and keep sharp with my equipment. At my age (53) I struggle to remember all this tech stuff. There was no wildlife activity. The pond was frozen so I settled for some attempted “artsy” ice shots. I took about 30 pictures, but only the one below was even remotely worthy. So I processed this as black and white in duotone:



Oh, and Happy New Year to everyone!