Ctein Catches Up

Waaaay too much fun! DDB + Ctein + Deep-IR-converted
Olympus Pen + Full-frame Fisheye.

This week's column by Ctein

I am returned from Minneapolis, sanity restored (well, as much as it's ever going to be, which is always subject to question), but I'm still a bit disorganized, so this'll be another catch-up column. More meaty ones are in the works (see the end notes).

DDB's RAW converter investigation
So, TOP's very own indefatigable, and perhaps masochistic, DDB (David Dyer-Bennet, for the uninitiated) has decided to experiment with six different RAW converters. He'll be posting his reviews piece-by-piece online at dd-b.net. A fine service to the community, and better him than me.

No doubt as installments get posted he will provide Mike with specific links and Mike will pass them on to you all (right, guys?—Hint, hint, Mike?) [Your wish is my command, good Sirs —Mike the Ed. a.k.a. Sancho Panza.]

An 'Is it plugged in?' printer problem
Just before heading out to Minneapolis I felt an overwhelming need for a few hours of "me" photographic time, so I went to work on some new photographs. Midway through printing the second photo, my Epson 3880 developed a massive clog on the photo-black print head. My 3880's been close to perfect that way, but life happens. I ran some ordinary cleaning cycles and it got worse and worse, until almost no photo-black nozzles were laying down ink.

Damn. Probably not fixable. The printer's under warranty so Epson will send me a new one, but first they're gonna want I run a power-cleaning cycle. I hate those—they eat up lots of money and almost never work for me. Still, they'll insist.

Double damn, my maintenance cartridge is too full! So, next morning (one day before leaving for Minneapolis, now, and I so do not need unscheduled shopping trips) I drive to Calumet and pick up a cartridge, plus a couple of inks, just in case some of them are too low to premit a power clean.

I get back home, swap in the new maintenance cartridge, and decide to swap any ink cart that looks less than half full. Might as well swap out the photo black, even though it's 60% full. Maybe it'll jar something loose in the ink line. Hey, one can always hope.

The cartridge in the printer is empty. I can tell, just from the weight in my hand. It's empty? It's EMPTY?!? The printer swears it's 60% full. I put it on a scale to be really sure. It's truly bone dry. Well, now, y'know, that just might explain the near-total lack of ink droplets coming from the photo-black print head. Ya think? Just maybe?

OK, pop in a black cart that really does have ink in it, run a nozzle check, and—everything's perfect! Yay, no ink-wasting power clean, no having to call Epson for a new printer, just a waste of some of my time and temper.

Best I can figure, the cartridge must've been underfilled to begin with, as the ink consumption looked entirely normal while I'd been using it.

I've never seen anything like this before. But, if I ever see a near-total head clog again, I'll check first to see if there's really ink in the printer...no matter what the control panel readout tells me.

SuperFocus rebate note
I found out from the SuperFocus folks that there's no limit to the number of times folks can use my referral discount, which saves you 10% on the order (not sure if it's just the special frames or the entire order, but it's a savings of at least $50) and gets me a rebate, so feel free to ask me for my serial number if you might be contemplating a pair for yourself.

Another printing surprise
Back in April, on my last visit to Minneapolis, I chanced upon a remarkable scene of a bird's impact on a downtown St. Paul window, preserved by the dust of the window and the powder from the bird's wings.

The full frame, reduced to 800 pixels, doesn't give a hint of the wealth
of detail and subtlety that lies in this photograph.

DDB and I noodled around with my photograph on his computer for a while, and it looked extremely promising. It was complex and subtle and detailed and compelling and lyrical and disturbingly dark all at the same time.

This 100% section shows off the detail, although a screen JPEG still loses the subtlety. Even the barbs on the feathers are preserved in the powder image.

DDB and I both agreed that the big question would be whether it would print out decently. As I've written about in many previous columns, digital prints lose subtlety and fine gradation. I suspect the culprit is the rendering algorithms, as one sees it from all kinds of printers, and from all sorts of source material. It's why there is such widespread use of local contrast-enhancing techniques such as "clarity" sliders and wide-radius unsharp masking, and plug-ins like ContrastMaster. Without these, digital prints go unnecessarily flat.

Enhancing those delicacies so that they print as well as they look on a display is a tricky business. Occasionally it's easy; at other times it just doesn't work at all. I have a few photographs that simply failed to survive the translation from screen to print. I was most concerned about my bird photograph with its delicate visual intricacy. It might very well prove to be beyond my skills to print acceptably.

Two weeks ago, after I fixed my printer's "head clog," I decided to run out a test print of this photograph (from the file DDB and I had worked up) to see if it had possibilities or not. Might as well get it over with.

The first print out looked perfect. Actually, better than perfect; it was stunning. It eclipsed what I'd been seeing on the screen; it was so much better than that. I've never had that happen before. Always it's been as I said; printing wants to lose a little something and one works hard to make sure it doesn't get its own way.

It's not just me; several other folks have now seen both the screen and print versions, and we're all in agreement. The screen version, seen big on a high-quality monitor (not the dinky little 800 pixel JPEG you see here) is remarkable; the print is astonishing.

There's no question in my mind that it's one of my best works; I'd be thrilled if I made one photograph a year this good.

It'll be interesting to see if it sells. Not just because of the subject matter, but because although it looks pretty good on a computer screen, it doesn't look half so good as it does in a print. Time will tell.

•     •     •

So, what's coming up?
Next week should see the first column about my just-arrived IR-converted Olympus Pen. There'll be several over the next few months. I've done some good art in the past with digital IR (a medium near and dear to our 'steamed editor's heart [Note that I once wrote an essay called "Why I Hate Infrared." —Ed.]), vis:

  Infrared from a conventional Fuji S100 with a visible-light
blocking filter over the lens.

We'll see if this new camera serves me as well. In the meantime it's almost too much fun, as DDB would say! (See top illustration.)

After that, another tea column about Jon Singer's and my visit with Bill Waddington, owner of TeaSource. Also, almost too much fun for all three of us, and Jon and I learnt some fascinating new things about the dark teas and the pu ers. (Meanwhile, you can find pictures of Singer and I hosting tea tastings at Fourth Street Fantasy here.

Then, possibly, a report on some informal tests of Olympus' Micro 4/3 40–150mm zoom and 60mm macro lenses. Or maybe more about the IR Pen?

Nah, that's thinking way too far ahead.

Back to preparing and shipping dye transfer prints.

Happy 4th, and don't detonate anything I wouldn't detonate.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

We catch up with Ctein every Wednesday a.m. on TOP, and one never knows what one will find.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Craig: "I've learned not to trust printers when they tell me how much toner is left. It turns out some of them don't actually have sensors to tell them how much toner is in a cartridge; they just tell you that the toner is low every few months or every few thousand pages (whichever comes first) whether it is or not. For me, this would typically mean replacing a cartridge that was more than half full, but it's interesting that you had the opposite experience."

Gijs: "That is the most stunning image forming process I've seen! It's like a fossil of a bird strike. This reminds me of a snippit from the the Jim Jarmusch film Down by Law. In one scene, Roberto Benigni's character, who is sharing a jail cell with Tom Waits and John Lorie has drawn a window on the cell wall. He asks whether in correct English one looks 'out the window' or 'at the window.' John Lorie's answer is, 'in this case, I think we'll have to say looking at the window.' I'm going to be spending a lot more time looking at windows thanks to you, Ctein!"

Comments

[Jeff]

Never saw your 2008 article, Mike, until now. I thought I was the only one with a visceral, nails on the chalkboard, reaction to infrared photos. Sorry, Ctein.

Ubiquitous wide open lens effects, with mis-focused subjects (if one can even determine the intended subject) generate a similar response.

[Ed]

Ctein,

Could you do the world a favouw and do a comparison betwix the 60th.....the Sigma 60mm and the Olympus 60mm Macro (for ordinary photography of course).

Would be cool to hear you comments on these lenses as they are both nice performers (or so the pigeons say, if they are not busy staring in you pictures).

Greets, Ed

Who is writing software for an Arduino.....

[Tony Mclean]

The wonderful I.R. picture at the ead of your post has reminded me to get out my old ZZ Top images for a re-listen. ;-)

[Mathew Hargreaves]

Ctein,

ACR for Canon IR converted camera is not as good for doing RAW IR conversions. At least my usage shows they are always magenta looking. Canon software reads the colors correctly and you get more greens and cyans. Might it be possible for DDB to use one of your IR RAW files in his RAW converters test? It would be nice to know if others render the colors accurately before the work begins.

[David]

HIppies in Infra red!!!

The Glitter Rockers want a piece of that infra red action. I am sure of that.

[ctein]

Dear Gijs,

One of the keys to having more wonderful photographs in your life is to remember to just spend a lot more time looking, period.

~~~~

Dear Ed,

That would be a very sensible comparison, especially in light of the factor-of-two difference in price. But that's only if I were doing formal lens tests. I'm not. I'm just looking at a couple of lenses that personally interest me that DDB happened to own, so I played with them some and ran some comparisons to my already-owned lenses while we were out making IR photographs and all that stuff.

The thing is, I don't have any interest in 60mm, per se. I've got the 45mm Olympus f/1.8; if I need a slightly narrower field of view of 16mm, I'll just crop. I've got some vague interest in the 75mm f/1.8, down the line, which makes the 60 even less interesting. But I don't own a good macro lens. I used to care a lot about macro photography, viz. the Jewels of Kilauea series. I don't know if I still do. But, maybe, and that's enough to get me to casually look at the Olympus lens. But the Sigma? No interest at all.

~~~~

Dear Mathew,

The Olympus came back from Life Pixel with a custom white balance calibration that is almost perfectly neutral. It's there in the metadata that RAW converters see, so when I open the image up in Bridge and ACR, it also looks almost perfectly neutral. I don't see any reason to run it through other RAW converters.

~~~~

Dear David and Tony,

You are not so far off. You can't see it in the IR photograph, but I'm also wearing my pretty stylish new clothes. Combined with my uber-stylish glasses (at least, according to the rest of the world), I'm not wearing the right style of clothes to read as hippie (which I'm not) and they are way too chic and colorful to read as computer geek (which I'm not).

So after the day's photography and our obligatory pizza dinner, DDB and I went out for our obligatory ice cream. A fellow came up to us in the ice cream parlor who was absolutely, positively convinced we were in some band, to the extent that even with our repeated polite denials, he was rattling off the names of small local groups (I presume) positive we would know of and have some connection to them.

It was pretty clear he knew the local music scene and he was totally sure we were part of it. Had to have been the clothes. That kind of thing never, ever happened to me when I was doing the artist-black look for the past 15 years.

So you wanna be a rock 'n roll star? It's all in the threads, man.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
======================================

[ctein]

Dear Jeff,

See, now I've given you advance warning that you can totally skip next-week's column!

We're all about service, here.

I can promise (or is it a threat) that there will be at least two columns on the subject, maybe three, over the next month or so.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
======================================

[Nige]

Can't find the original at the moment to check the date but this is from a few years ago...

http://i299.photobucket.com/albums/mm294/HGMonaro350/whatisit.jpg

[Doug Dolde]

Looks more like Dusty Hill in the foreground. Where's your axe?

[Nick Kiest]

Would love to hear more about your IR adventures. I want to convert a m4/3rds camera to IR, but have not had the money available. Would love to know what lenses seems to work, and what luck you have with RAW converters. The lack of good support for IR in ACR/Lightroom bums me out. I currently have a canon S90 converted to IR with 850nm blocking filter.

[Nige]

A quick search of the hard drive to find my whatisit.jpg shows that I did that on 05-03-2008 (3rd May 2008). Looking at the folder for that day I can see I took it at 1:48pm using a Pentax K10D with 50-200 zoom (set at 105mm or 157e). Exposure was 1/200sec @ f6.3 on 200ISO (how's that for trival infomation).

Now I've got a few extra moments I'll add to my bird imprint story. This is the only one that's left a decent imprint (some have left feathers stuck to the window) but it happens more than rarely. Enough that if our dogs hear a thud, they know that they have a chance of catching the dazed bird and they sprint around looking for it. They have obviously worked out that it's easier than catching them themselves.

[Not to be critical, but if that happens regularly enough to train the dogs, shouldn't you put a few stickers on your windows to prevent more birds from maiming themselves in the future? After all, birds are human too. --Mike]

[Dave Stewart]

The bird that hit that window probably realised what was about to happen, going by the wings spread out as if in an attempt to slow down, whereas...

[toto]

Spy vs. Spy!

[Jeff]

Ctein, that's ok; we're just on different wavelengths. :)

[Jeff Glass]

Looks like my kamikaze bird was a bit more committed (or blind) than Ctein's, coming in full-out, beak-first, wings spread!

It appeared on my daughter's window one day a couple years ago. We found no remnants on the ground below which made us wonder: Did she get up and just walk away from this?!! (wink)

It makes for a good novelty photo, although I'd recommend "converting" to black & white for more . . . impact.

http://www.jeffglassphoto.com/blog/ (Can't recall how to post the image directly, but it's the first one on my blog page).

[Dennis]

That selfie looks like a movie still from a sci-fi cult classic. I wanted to comment that the bird impact photo is really special. And then I wondered if it might fit into the imaginary sci-fi flick that featured the first shot :)

[Bear.]

When I was kid living in Canberra, we had a big plate glass window facing west. One summer, with the sun very low on the horizon and reflecting directly into the window, a whole flock of budgerigars - about 50 of them - flew into the window at speed and knocked themselves senseless onto the patio. They all lay there for about an hour, then, as one, they all came to and flew off.

[Ger Lawlor]

Hello!
1. An actual bird WAS harmed in the making of this image?
2. Thank the Lord that pigs don't fly.
3. How about a 'normal' photo of the new outfit?
4. The mysteries of the universe are simple compared to the carry-on with print heads on Epson printers. One day all fine, next a complete colour stops.... Sometimes takes one cleaning cycle, other times, ten (usually when you are on the last drain of some cartridge, and a rush job - and this is a 9900!)

[Ed]

Ctein,

I know your "Jewels of Kelaea" series and they are not stricktly macro....at least not al of them (or ther must be a 20mm fern growing I don't know about :-)).

Now that little devil Sigma will suprise you if I have to believe this review.

http://lcap.tistory.com/entry/Sigma-60mm-f28-DN-vs-Olympus-60mm-f28-Macro

Being more crisp then the Oly....now I find that hard to believe and since you and your new eagle specs are a benchmark to us all (enough of the sucking up done?), your views would be loved.

Greets, Ed.

[Oskar Ojala]

Since I've been doing some IR photography for a few years now, I will probably find next week's column interesting. I was already surprised to note how well your sunglasses block IR in the top picture.

All the tech stuff aside, I find that composing in IR is hard, even with a digital camera with live view. It's so different from what we usually see and I believe that's why many (most?) IR pic seen on the net tend to rely on effect for visual impact rather than an interesting subject and composition. Is IR something you believe will be a significant part of your work, or just a little test at the side at this point?

[Michael Matthews]

I think it's a late-in-life rumspringa.

Note how the tentative lead adventurer appears to be holding onto something familiar for stability.

[Al Benas]

I had the same issue with my old, deceased Epson 3800; underfilled PK cartridges (same cartridge as yours). Started weighing all new cartridges. The problem could be worse, you could live in my area where there is no place to buy supplies and have to keep a backup stash at all times.

[George Bernabe]

I hope the bird on window print is made available for purchase because I'd like to buy one.

[D]

I recently purchased a IR converted Nikon D70. I have thus far had a bunch of fun with it and maybe even made a good image or two... I will be very interested in whatever you choose to include on the blog about your IR experiences. I don't know of this interests you - but I would be very interested in color IR results and how you go about getting the RAW IR file to look "right."

[ctein]

Dear Ed,

Where did I say they were all "macro?"

I am not interested in the Sigma lens.
"No" means no. End of discussion.

~~~~

Dear Oskar,

Look at the IR work in my portfolio online. You decide.

~~~~

Dear Michael,

Hahaha. I just watched the wonderful PBS "American Experience" film on the Amish three days ago, so I totally get it.

~~~~

Dear George,

You can purchase it. 17" x22" print size, order information is at ctein.com/howorder.htm

pax / Ctein

[Ed]

Your problem Ctein,

So test your Oly, it will be okay I can asure you (see link) and it well should be at 500 dollars. I won't invest in it for 3 reasons:

1) I don't do macro (boring)
2) I think it is way to big
3) I think it is way to expensive
4) I'll spend the 300 dollars in my pocket on some gears for a motorised panoramahead I'm building for myself (saving about 2700 dollars in the proces).

for an excelent test of the 60 (one that Ctein has no means of topping).

http://blog.mingthein.com/2012/09/21/olympus-60-2-8-macro/

Greats, Ed.