RRD Photo Blog

So once again this time of year I've been forced to get some quick prints done at Walmart. Why? Well, because I don't have a RIP and the family "xmas gift order" gets placed (the various pics that need to be printed at various sizes and sent off to people as gifts) too near the deadline for me to order from Smugmug.

Once again this year I'm extremely disappointed in the print quality.

When I want a single print I typically just run it on my Canon i9900 - a dye ink printer that produces outstanding color prints (but ugly black & whites since it's forced to create gray tones through blending colored inks). This is relatively old technology. You would expect high tech lab equipment costing many $10k's - even if it's installed in a Walmart - to be able to produce a print that's at least on par with a $400 home photo printer.

Here are the results.

Original File
Canon i9900 Print on Ilford Gallerie Classic Pearl (scanned)
Walmart Lab Print via a giant Fuji machine on Fuji Crystal Archive (scanned)
Of course the moral of the story is to make your plans ahead of time so that you can either print everything yourself or outsource to a decent lab. But in a pinch you'd like to think that a photo center could get it a tad closer to "right".

Now, I will say that if you look at the Walmart prints on their own without any knowledge of the original photo you may be generally happy with them. This is especially the case if you happen to be a grandparent who could care less about print quality and just want more pictures of your granddaughter.  So off they go... there's always next year!


Disclaimer: I can't complain too much about the timing of "the order". If it were left up to me no one would ever get anything!

Oh - and to answer the obvious question of "why not find a good local lab?" - While I agree it would be a good idea to find a local lab who I can trust, this is a problem I run into approximately once per year. Any other time I need prints I can either just do them myself or order via Smugmug... The xmas prints are just too much to deal with at home since I need a combination of several prints or various pics at various shapes & sizes.

Hey RSS subscribers, sorry for the huge update you likely just received!  I'm moving my blog back to the Blogger platform in an attempt to simplify my life a bit and not deal with managing WordPress...

At this time I am not making updates to content but will keep the blog online for the foreseeable future since several of the posts get search traffic & have been helpful to those who find them.

Best,
Ryan

So this is pretty cool: Word Magazine has cobbled together a site allowing readers to drop a pin indicating the location where the cover art of an album was shot.  They call it the "Album Covers Map" (or maybe "Album Atlas" - it isn't clear) and it's a pretty cool concept.

The map appears to be in the early stages, though there are a lot of albums listed so far.  Still, the functionality is only so-so - at this point you don't get much more than the map with a pin & an info bubble with some generic Wikipedia text... Far more useful would be related info such as address/GPS coordinates, some back story on the photo, or at least the credentials of whomever is claiming to have identified the location. You'd think they'd at least drop an affiliate link to Amazon Music so that they can make a little money on the project! [update: now that I've browsed a bit more it appears that *some* albums have better info than others...]

That aside, this is a pretty cool use of Google Maps and it's very cool to be able to look for albums shot near you or somewhere you'll be traveling - should turn up some very useful location ideas.

Just a quick post to link to a great rant from Michael Reichmann on his Luminous Landscape site entitled The Fallacy of Judging Image Quality Online.

A little over a year ago I rushed to post about the latest release of Picasa, Google's free photo browser/manager/editor and their introduction of a Face Recognition feature. It turned out that my post was a bit premature in that they had actually only released this feature on the web version of the tool... well, today that has all changed - the 3.5 desktop release includes the mug finder!

Picasa Supports DNG - but can we use the face tags as keywords?
Now, this is all well and good for Picasa users, but I use Lightroom to manage my images. What I had written previously still applies - I'd love to find a way to work this into my workflow! Fortunately, the Picasa software supports popular RAW formats - including the Adobe DNG format. This means that you can turn Picasa loose on your image library and let it identify people in your photographs.

But - Picasa doesn't seem to save the name tags in the metadata of the files... this is a bummer, since it means we can use the tagging in other applications. Ideally, you would want the head tags to be added as keywords in some standard format - say person:first_last or something like that. I'm not too familiar with the ins and outs of Picasa, so this may be possible - more experimentation is necessary (I've not seen it in any obvious place so far). Another possibility would be to write a quick script that will automate the process of reading the head tags from Picasa and then updating the image EXIF with the keywords...

If anyone does, or knows of a way to do something like this please post in the comments!

About the Face Recognition Feature Performance
After downloading the software I let Picasa import the DNGs of a large wedding I'm currently working on... well over a thousand photos containing tons of faces and totaling 30GB or so. First thing to note: this is going to take a very... long... time. That's fine by me - I'd prefer that Picasa take the time to really look hard at the photos and figure out who's in them. Even if it works through the night, it'll certainly finish before I could - if it wasn't such a monumental task as to prevent my even attempting it in the first place!

The way the process works is pretty straightforward: Picasa scans all images and looks for FACES. If it knows that face, it'll take a shot at automatically tagging it. Otherwise, it will add the face to the "Album of Unnamed People" - a potter's field where you can go to assign names to faces. Clicking on a face will allow you to assign a name; from there Picasa will take this hint and apply it to the rest of the faces it has seen. The software appears to "learn" as it goes, so once you start giving it a few hints it'll get better and better at identifying the folks it comes across - in spite of lighting, pose or even focus (not that there are many of those... er... well, perhaps a few).

So like I said - this will take some time. Picasa has been chugging away in the background burning through CPU cycles (2.8GHz core 2 duo w/ 6MB cache & 4GB ram)... it is only 10% through analyzing the 30GB of images in the hour or so it has been running. The results look promising thus far & I'm sure this will be a great tool once we figure out how to extract the information from Picasa and embed it into the metadata.

Congrats to the Google Picasa team on a job well done & thanks for this great new feature!

Saturday's Cleveland Plain Dealer contains a nice feature on my uncle, Roger Mastroianni, and his 20-years of serving as the photographer for the Cleveland Orchestra.

Roger has what can be pretty much summed up as "the best gig ever": he follows the orchestra all over the world and produces interesting photographs - while listening to some of the world's best musicians perform. That's pretty tough to beat!

The story says that he began working with the orchestra in 1988. I can remember kicking around their place back then (as a kid) & being really interested in the way "Uncle Rodge" would use his camera; bouncing the flash, rubber-banding an index card on it for catch lights, etc. It took a few more years before I was able to understand & appreciate classical music, but I'm sure that his library of CDs was at least a catalyst for my interests there today.

I enjoyed his admission in the article about being "the gadget king"; both inside and outside of the world of photography this is an accurate description. Visiting Roger's studio in Cleveland is like entering a photo wonderland - there's just so much gear quite literally everywhere you look. He's got pretty much everything you've ever heard of, from cheap gimmicks to ultra high-end medium & large format systems with digital backs. Of course, most of the stuff never gets any use but Roger has a deep bag of tricks at his disposal when the need arises. (Which is a valid justification in my book... though I suspect my aunt wishes he'd trim some of the fat via eBay once in a while!)

If you haven't followed the link already, give it a whirl and check out the slide show of some of the great images Roger has made during his time with the orchestra. Roger also does some outstanding corporate, industrial and medical work; check out his portfolio at RogerMastroianni.com.

A very cool "first" for the blog today: my how-to on adding a sync port to the Canon 580EX flash has been used as inspiration for a similar post on a Portuguese photography blog.

Photographer Alessandro Dias contacted me a few weeks ago via the comments section about writing up his own how-to in Portuguese on his blog. I was happy to oblige & think it's pretty cool that he checked with me for permission first.  The post is now online & while the text is tough to follow Alessandro has illustrated the post with a ton of detailed photographs. 

Thanks to Alessandro for doing a great write-up!  Be sure to check out his portfolio site - he does some really nice portraiture work.
Canon 580EX Sync Port Mod (in Portuguese)