Morris Jensen Paints Me!

Well, one of my images actually.

I’ve had a conversation with Morris on the DPChallenge site, one of the better challenge sites around in my opinion. He asked permission to paint one of my images, and I asked for an attribution on his site where the painting is displayed. I must say that I am really, really pleased with the result.

Here’s a small version of his image:

The image on his site is in the hiking and camping section: http://www.morrisjensen.com/index.html

My original image:

And a Draganized version:

The Dragan version hung in the lobby gallery at my office building for a year, and several people asked for copies of this image in 12x18 size to frame. It’s quite popular.

This was shot on my first walk in the woods with the D300 and new Nikon 300 F4 AFS. I shot from tripod, a Feisol 3471 with Markins M20L ball head. I was very pleased with this result.

And I’m very pleased to have Morris paint it. Go have a look.

Use a High Quality, Hardware Calibrated Monitor!

This subject comes up so often on the DPReview site that there should be a sticky post at the top level explaining the issues with commenting on tone or color when your monitor sucks. It’s just silly to tell someone they have bad tone or color when your monitor is cheap and you don’t calibrate.

A particularly vocal (and often obnoxious) “dude” on the Fuji Talk Forum has again brought this specter to the fore, so I thought it time to add my $0.02.

A 10 year old cathode-ray tube  (CRT) is asking for problems as they lose their ability to retain focus after some years and people end up posting terribly over-sharpened images. Yuck. I also found that it was pretty hard to adjust the white and black points unless the monitor was fairly expensive. Perhaps a hardware calibrator can take care of that, but I suggest amateurs just bite the bullet and get a good LCD panel.

Now we need to define “good:” where LCD panels are concerned. A panel in use for gaming can be of any quality … every panel made today is probably excellent for that task. They are all lightning fast and most are bright and vibrant and of course accept a HDMI port and sport full HD panels.

Unfortunately, most panels got good and fast and cheap by using TN technology, which is the lowest form of panels … 6 bits of color information and some fancy dithering algorithms to fake out a 32bit color space. The angle of view is so narrow that you can see color changes at the edges without moving your head. It is impossible to see uniform color across a TN panel from normal working distance. And they do not calibrate well at all in my experience. So, for photography the typical panel available today is a very bad choice. If you are using a TN panel, I assert that you have no right whatsoever to comment on someone else’s colors or tones because you have no clue what they really are.

So if 98% of panels are unsuitable for photography, are we not lost?

No … there are still many panels around that can do the job. But they will definitely cost you more than the el-cheapos. There are three technologies that are vastly better than TN for photographic editing. They are (in order from lowest to highest quality overall) MVA, PVA and IPS. I use an older NEC MVA panel and can tell you that it calibrates beautifully. Colors and tones are uniform across the screen and I can hold me head anywhere and still see them accurately.

IPS is the best technology and happens to be the technology used for most Apple panels, which makes sense since Apple has a strong niche in the arts. There is a newer and cheaper variant that is apparently also good for photography – eIPS. Seen in some cheaper monitors … but still not cheap like TN panels.

Here is an example of how my two panels render colors and tones … note that you may or may not see these as I see them, after all you are seeing them on your own monitor. But you will be able to easily assess the *relative* differences between these two panels as seen by my D700, and that’s the point of this demonstration. The TN panel is on the left and the MVA panel is on the right.

So how can you tell how well your panel is doing?

I use the lagom.nl site, which provides the best LCD monitor test images I have yet seen.

You can verify that your contrast is set correctly … here is their explanation:

The following image shows scales of linearly increasing RGB values. On a good monitor, you should see roughly equal steps in brightness over the full range from 1 to 32, and in all colors. Bar 1 should be visible. A bad monitor will not show the leftmost few rectangles, will not show a difference between the rightmost few, or shows a relatively large jump between numbers 31 and 32.

And here is a small snapshot of the step-wedges on the page:

There are pages to aid in gamma calibration (but please, do yourself a favor and get a hardware calibrator) and to verify white and black points. Here is a snippet from the black point page so you can see you your monitor is doing in the lowest tones. On my MVA panel I can see every tone from1 and upwards.

But what about white point? Can you see the top shades or are they pure white, indistinguishable form the surrounding 255?

So go to the site and check every aspect of your monitor. If you can’t see all tones or if your gamma is way off, then get yourself a hardware calibrator. It’s just too hard to guess … your eye compensates too easily.

I use the Huey Pro calibrator and it works well for multiple monitors. It reads the ambient light and can change the brightness of the monitor to compensate. There is no reason to go up in price as there are plenty of article that suggest that the accuracy of all the consumer colorimeters is similar and that a real step up requires serious money in both the monitor and the colorimeter (the name of the device used for calibration.)

Click on the following to see the Huey Pro for just over 80 bucks at the time of writing. The Spider Express 3 is not much more but does not do dual monitors, so watch out for that!

And here are some very good IPS panels in order by increasing cost that start quite inexpensive to help you in your search …

Fix a Clogged Canon Print Head

My MP520 is a wonderful machine for general purpose printing. It scans and copies and the ink is a reasonable cost. Especially when purchased on eBay from places like 123ink.ca …

But sometimes the print heads will block permanently. In my case, the black ink suddenly stopped coming out. Colors printed perfectly but black was blank. I tried everything, including buying a new ink cartridge.

Well, it turns out that the head was just clogged and that cleaning it is as easy a task as you could imagine.

What I did (thanks to the many articles on the Internet):

1. Raise the whole scanning bed up until the arm drops to hold it up. The ink tanks will move to the center.
   
2. Remove the four ink cartridges and place in a lunch-sized baggy, I recommend you put them in their in the same configuration you see here as that makes reassembly a trivial and error-free operation.
   
3. Prop the inks up somewhere exactly as they sit in the tank. This will keep the ink flowing properly once reinstalled.
4. Lift the arm on the left of the ink tanks, as shown in the imagei n step 2.
5. Once lifted, the holder at the back that contains the print heads will be loose. Grab the top and tilt it gently forward until it lifts out.
6. In a container (I used my bathroom sink) fill with very hot water and some Ammonia based window cleaner. Drop the print head holder into the water and let soak for several hours.
7. Take the heads out of the water (you will see the water filled with ink) and place right side up onto some folded paper towel or tissue paper. Make that thick as a surprising amount of ink will run from the color heads.
8. Reinstall the heads and add the ink tanks back.
9. Recharge the heads – I used one cleaning cycle to do that.
10. Print a nozzle check pattern. Mine came out perfect.

So I saved myself the price of a new printer. Try it, it’s a simple job and the printer prints like new again.

I Love the Smell of Fraud in the Morning

Just spending too much time disputing 2 grand in fraudulent charges. I put all bills through a credit card to collect air line points, which has been most helpful for my Aeroplan balance. But because of that, it is hard to see fraud when it appears …

The obvious ploy is to put through small charges and then double it each month until the jig is up. Well, this was month three and the quadrupled charge got my attention. After scanning the last 4 months with a fine toothed comb, I found four charges in total … one to the “Maple Truck Stop” and three to “Bell Mobility.” My card is now cancelled (and I will spend the next 3 hours calling all my vendors to have them hold charges until Monday when my new account arrives) and these charges are in dispute. I will be lucky to get half back since I did not notice the April charges in time …

Such is life I suppose. The lazy like to suck the life blood of the productive part of the population.

Wascilly Wabbit – D700

I got home the other evening just before 8pm and it was getting dark. As I walked up my front walkway, I noticed a rabbit munching away on my lawn. I thought this was way cool, so I went into the house and grabbed my D700 and the 70-300VR and walked out onto my porch from where I shot a number of images of this fella.

He just sat there munching … once in a while raising his head to look around. I hot many shots, but only processed those that gave a mildly interesting perspective on the creature.

As mentioned, it was getting dark. To get decent shutter speeds, I was forced to shoot at 5000 ISO. And even then I was getting very slow shutter … 1/50s is very low when trying to capture 300mm images …

 

I got tired of seeing blur so I doubled the ISO to 10000 … and the images got somewhat crisper. Of course, there is grain in the images, but I’d rather deal with that (ACR6 makes it pretty easy) than fight blur. Blur always wins …

Ok, get ready for this next one. The odds of catching it were not high … I only noticed it as I was processing. He stuck his tongue out for a moment …

 

And then he left …

Macro Lenses, Close Up Filters, and Extension Tubes

I happen to have some inexpensive extension tubes that I bought from China on eBay one day a few years ago. I also have a couple of Canon 500D achromat (multi-element corrected) close up filters in 58mm and 77mm. And I have a nice Sigma 105mm 2.8 Macro lens that can focus on its own to 1:1 magnification.

So what does 1:1 magnification mean? Well, it’s pretty simple … the sensor on my D700 is 36mm across (same as 35mm film frame) and if I focus at closest distance with the Sigma, I get a 36mm cross section of the subject on the sensor. This is also known as life-sized.

Now … when you shoot macro, you are often trying to get higher magnifications than that … 2:1 and even 3:1 (18mm cross section and 12mm cross section respectively) can get you shots of the individual elements of a bug’s eyes. For example, here is a dragonfly image shot with my D70s and the Sigma 105mm 2.8 macro with Tamron 1.4x teleconverter and Canon 500D achromat. I lit it with flash, which kills camera movement and allows for small apertures for depth of field. The setup looks like this:

Magnification of this setup was measured at 2.1:1 … a bit larger than twice life-sized.

Here is the dragonfly and the crop … you can see that I got quite a bit of detail here …

So … back to this experiment. I thought I’d try a full blown setup with extension tubes against 2x Kenko teleconverter and Sigma 105 against my new Nikon 105 AI … the Sigma shot with and without the Canon 500D achromat. I did not do all combinations, but I did enough of them to get interesting …

A note on how I focused – I set each lens at closest focus and then used a macro rail to focus the camera. I then stopped down to shoot (these extension tubes are manual.) The rail looks like this:

This is as precise a focus mechanism as you can use. And if you want pin point focus, you can enable live view and focus a magnified image.

The first setup is the D700 with the extension tubes (full set) and the Sigma 105 and 500D.

A close up of the 500D.

This produces the image:

This captures a cross section approximately 15.8mm wide. That makes it 36/15.8 = 2.28:1 magnification … not too shabby.

How about with the 500D?

That’s 18.1mm for about 1.98:1 magnification. Not bad at all …

Now let’s try the Nikon with the tubes but no 500D (I have step up rings and might just use them sometime with this setup, but not today) …

That’s a 28mm cross-section … for 1.3:1 magnification … wow … that’s pretty good for an older lens that focuses at a long distance. Hmmm ….

Switching to the teleconverter and put the 500D back on … this introduces extra glass in the system, so should degenerate the image somewhat. But we’re really only looking at magnification right now …

Wow … I count only 15.5mm in that cross-section … so we get 2.32:1 magnification, very slightly edging out the extension tubes. And the viewfinder remains much brighter …

With the TC and the Nikon (no image of this setup), the magnification is disappointing.

So is the dust, but let’s pretend we didn’t see that :-)

137mm … that’s 1:3.8 magnification, or about 1/4 life-sized … this is perfect for flowers by the way. So a useful combination may have been born. Gotta try it on flowers. Stay tuned.

I find the tubes rather inconvenient as the light drops dramatically in the viewfinder. The 2x TC is easy to use and works really well with these lenses. Magnification is high and sharpness seems ok. Add the 500D and you really have something if you are bug hunting …