Client Story: Doug Allan

The cameraman Doug Allan is a well known name in the world of wildlife documentaries and I help Doug with the stills side of his business.
Doug asked me to get involved in the preparation of the images for his first book "Freeze Frame" that is just about to be released.
Some of the images date back to the early part of his career so care was needed to reduce grain and get the images looking as fresh as the day they were taken, CMYK files were prepared for the books designer Simon Bishop.

Simon has just let me know that the printing at Butler Tanner and Dennis in Somerset went well and he is very pleased with the results of the two days of printing on the new Heidelberg press there.

Copyrightimage Ltd will also be handling book distribution so Jennie will be sorting on-line orders for the book.

Book details:
"Multi-award winning wildlife photographer and cameraman Doug Allan, of the BBC’s Frozen Planet now turns the focus on himself in his first book “Freeze Frame”!

Having worked on Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Human Planet, Life, the recent Ocean Giants and the sensational Frozen Planet, Doug brings together a collection of astounding anecdotes and breathtakingly beautiful photographs from the remotest places on Earth.

Have you ever been watching one of the BBC’s groundbreaking wildlife documentaries and thought “How did he get that shot?!” – well now you can find out the incredible stories behind the images in Doug Allan’s début book.

Braving the elements and depths of the Antarctic and Arctic Oceans, Doug has produced a fascinating 240 page book filled with exceptional photographs and secrets of life behind the lens, giving you a peek into the often hostile yet inspiring world of a wildlife cameraman

This book is so much more than a collection of superb images. Doug started life as a research diver in 1976 at Signy Island, Antarctica. Now with 35 years of experience in the Antarctic and Arctic, the stories that accompany every picture in this book tell of Doug’s astonishing adventures and encounters, his insights and emotions, his deep understanding of the biology of the animals and the psychology of film-makers.

Following a foreword from friend, Sir David Attenborough, the book is split into six sections; with many stories from Doug’s unique polar experiences and Arctic field craft, highlighting the challenges - and frustrations - of filming the animals themselves.

The book contains 70 long and short stories under the following themes:
• Camerawork
• Polar Heavens
• Ice & Snow, Cold and Colder
• Shots to Remember
• Near Misses
• Characters I Have Known
• Turning Up the Heat

From being pulled under water by a walrus, to the cunning and predatory Orca whale’s hunting skills. Doug invites you to learn about and discover the awe-inspiring nature hidden within the polar wastelands. Often exciting, sometimes humorous and always revealing and refreshingly honest, this is a uniquely personal portrait of the polar environments and the animals that live there, written by the man who’s spent more time there with a camera than anyone else.

“Every picture tells a story. I’ve just given the ones in this book a chance to tell theirs.”
- Doug Allan

Doug has won four Emmy and four BAFTA awards, as well as several Wildscreen Pandas. With Freeze Frame Doug gives the public a chance to step into his frozen world – without the frostbite!

Freeze Frame will be available from February 2012 pre-order here or at www.dougallan.com

You can pre-order Doug Allan's new book "Freeze Frame" in hardback here (for buyers in the UK):
£25 + £6 P&P

Orders taken now, deliveries start early February 2012
Pay with either a credit card or your PayPal account.
Your credit card will be debited by "TartanDragon" Ltd".
Buy now to ensure a copy of the first edition.

Getty upload site tip

Quick tip if you upload images to the Getty site-
I'm uploading clients images to the Getty upload portal, and as usual its like wading through treacle.
Multiple text fields with only a selection needed to be filled in and an irregular acceptance of text in each field means lots of extra work to get the data to stick.

The solution - Use the tab key starting at the top field, just tab through the fields you don't need to fill in, the data sticks each time doh!

Backup Compact Camera (updated)

I know several clients who use Canon G10/11/12 cameras as a lightweight addition to their dSLRs. Very handy for capturing pictures adhoc when taking the usual kit out would be a pain or draw unwanted attention.

It has been possible to get the best of these images through Getty quality control but a lot of the time image quality can be an issue.

Canon have announced a possible solution. Its a little larger than the older G series (only a bit), but the sensor inside is 6x bigger. This will mean less noise on the 14MP sensor. Its on pre order at the moment and will cost approx £700 inc VAT.

DP have a review here

No sample images as yet but if your about to buy a G12 you may want to wait and see.

Update
Things are looking good, early pre production sample images are available here:
http://www.dpreview.com/galleries/reviewsamples/albums/canon-powershot-g1-x-preview-samples

Not quite Canon 1Ds MkIII / 5D MkII quality but pretty impressive for a small 14mp compact, particularly at high iso. Nice.

The HD video samples look very fragile with quite bad moire, lets hope this improves on the production model,  less important than the stills quality though...

Lightroom 4 Public Beta

Looks like Lightroom 4 will be a worthwhile upgrade when it appears later this year.

You can preview the new functionality yourself by downloading the beta from Adobe.

For me the biggest changes are the new develop settings layout, soft proofing for your different printer profiles and the map function will become of interest when more cameras contain gps circuitry.

On a more "Ed Reardon" note Adobe have "kindly encouraged their programmers to get their fingers out" and burning images to DVD is now supported in the 64bit version of Windows 7, something they should fix in Lightroom 3 but have not.

UK upgrade price will no doubt be the same price as the US plus a special supplement to pay for a new Adobe executive aircraft.

Ed

Adobe create problems for their users

It has been brought to my attention that there are some problems with creating ePUB documents with Adobe Indesign 5.0.

Apparently Adobe have fixed the problems but rather than allow users to receive an update they are telling them to upgrade to 5.5 to get the fix.

Is that a fair thing to do? Im sure there are people who happily pay for new products when the ones they have are faulty but it doesn't seem right to me.

More to come
Adobe also plans to radically change  the system where users of their software could upgrade to the latest version of the program for an upgrade fee. In the past you would have paid something like £160 ($248.00 US) for an upgrade from say Photoshop CS2 to CS5. Now the planned upgrade version to CS6 is only available if you own the previous release meaning that if you have missed out on the upgrade to CS5 but wanted to upgrade your CS4 ,3 or 2 to CS6 you will need to pay the full price of the program again.

This will mean that someone moving to Photoshop CS6 will have to pay the same as someone who hasn't paid Adobe in the past. Currently Photoshop CS5 sells on the Adobe store for £548 excluding sales tax (VAT) - that is $851 US.

Clients who are not VAT registered will need to pay £657 or its equivalent for the upgrade (that's over $1,000.00 US) when moving to Photoshop CS6 and assuming the price remains the same as current.

Adobe have offered a time limited plan for users of CS2,3,4 to upgrade to CS5 at 20% less  then pay the separate upgrade to CS6 when it comes out, very generous of them to offer this?

Clearly we are in an unhealthy situation where Adobe are feeling strong enough to milk their customers. Once dominant companies such as Quark have in the past also gone through such a stage.

In a competitive market this does not happen, market failure is causing Adobe to move to a place it should not be. In the future we need to be cautious with dealing with this ugly aspect of the company, this means expecting the software to function as specified, if we are to pay (much) more then we need to demand more.

Here is the statement from a serious user of Adobe software who was kind enough to write to me detailing her story:

I was using InDesign CS5 to create an ePub of my new book, The Global Indie Author: How anyone can self-publish in the U.S. and worldwide markets. (I am both a writer and a photographer.) The export to ePub utility in CS5 is full of bugs that are program-specific, meaning they are not the result of unforeseen issues with your OS or in conflict with another program. It was clear InDesign CS5 had been released prematurely: there was no way the programmers didn’t know about these bugs. To add insult to injury, Adobe didn’t release any patches; they simply “fixed” the problems for CS5.5 and told consumers to upgrade. It was outrageous. The analogy I made was to a car with a manufacturing defect: the company is forced by law to perform a recall; they can’t just say, “Oh, we fixed that problem in the next model; just go buy a new car.” Yet this was precisely what Adobe was doing. So I complained both publicly and directly to Adobe and they offered me a free upgrade to CS5.5. I have no illusions it was to neutralize the threat I posed, and fair enough. But I hope others will realise that Adobe is not so big that they are impervious to consumer ill-will.

Michelle Demers

Client Story: Random House / BBC Books / Frozen Planet

With the exciting BBC Frozen Planet series due to be aired on TV this month I'm pleased to reveal my work on the accompanying book of the series.

I was asked to prepare all the images for the book. I worked closely with the designer supplying colour managed and exactingly sharpened CMYK images from supplied RGB originals.

The most important part of the work was to ensure tonal and colour consistency between series of shots. As often happens sequences were filmed with multiple cameras and bringing together their disparate shots can reveal quite major exposure differences that spoil the consistency of the scenes portrayed, it was my job to provide a better visual match whilst retaining accuracy and the integrity of the shots. Such as sequence in the book is in chapter 5 covering the hunting of bison by wolves.

There was a variety of sources for the images from high quality RAW files to HD screen grabs that needed careful interpolation and sharpening to work on the printed page.

In TV and Film production the process of colour balancing images in sequence is called "grading", what I offered was the stills equivalent and was very pleased to receive an email from the authors Alastair Fothergill and Vanessa Berlowitz thanking me for doing the work. This meant a lot to me as is so often the case I found myself immersed in the subject matter and wanted to get the best possible results.

If you have an important book project and want the very best results from the images then please feel free to contact me, its not a costly process given the difference that good grading and preparation can make.


The Frozen Planet book is now available and can be purchased on-line, here is Amazons page of the book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Frozen-Planet-Alastair-Fothergill/dp/1846079624/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1319471881&sr=8-3

Client Story: Hard Rain Project

HARD RAIN: What'll You Do Now?
at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew till 25th September 2011

Mark Edwards has used his original Hard Rain Project set of images as the core element of a new project that considers how we can as individuals and as a society can move towards a sustainable future for the Planet.

This powerful exhibition is currently on show at Kew Gardens in London, you can read all about the project and the exhibition here:
http://www.hardrainproject.com/

Kudos to the management of Kew Gardens for allowing some "difficult" images amongst the beauty of the gardens,  in my opinion this raises their profile as a conservationist organisation  and the garden location is exactly the right place for thousands of people each day to consider the issues raised.

Photography is at its best when it combines passion with meaningful subject matter and this exhibition has plenty of both. I recommend you visit the site or exhibition as it travels the world.

My involvement
I have worked with Mark to help prepare the images for printing for both this outdoor exhibition as well as for the book and Audio Visual uses.

Careful colour grading and consideration of Marks preferences for tonality means that the exhibition has a consistency of vision in the printed results.

Image restoration was part of the work undertaken to allow for the enlargement of low resolution images to 1 meter or more, I was always careful to keep the veracity of the underlying image and keep the image pure whilst reducing noise, chromatic aberration and other artifacts that would have impeded the message or meaning of the image coming through.

If you are planning a book or exhibition and have material from multiple sources it will always pay you to have me look at the material and quote on preparing the files for greater clarity and consistency and give greater readability to the work.

Stephen

x-rite do the right thing for potential OSX Lion users

It looks like x-rite have decided to include support for their older hardware (such as the i1 display 2) in i1profiler software (specifically i1Basic) which is designed to run on  OSX 10.7 (Lion).

 They have done this after an outcry from users and suppliers who have rightly pointed out to them that not supporting their recent hardware is not the behaviour of a company that cares about its users.

So all very positive, though according the the table in the following link there will be a "nominal" fee if you bought your i1 display 2 before 2011, lets hope they drop the fee and just do the right thing.

http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=264

September is still some way off so don't update to Lion till they release this, - a calibrated screen is far more important than sliding icons and App store jiggery pokery.

Stephen

Higher capacity Image Storage from Synology

For people who need greater digital image storage capacity than the current affordable 10.9TB Thecus then you may want to have a look at the following solution:

http://www.storagereview.com/synology_targets_photographers_new_ds2411_nas

I would estimate that filled with 3TB drives this should provide between 24-30TB of usable Raid 5 space (36TB unformatted). To put this in perspective thats enough for over  1/2 million uncompressed A3+ Tiffs or over 1 million camera raw images.

Synology have a good reputation for building solid kit so this look like a viable way to accommodate image collections. The 165mb/sec writing and 195mb/sec reading in raid 5 mode means that access to images is not going to be a problem.

As always - this is not a backup solution in itself, copies of all files must exist in some form as the device is a single point of failure (theft etc). What it does provide is fast and simple access to a large image collection.

Alert:Windows ATI Radeon 4870 video card / CS5 / CMYK / Problem

A bit of an obscure one this as I know clients with the above graphics card either don't use Photoshop CS5 or never work in CMYK but I'm putting this information out there for people who may see the same problem.

With current and recent drivers switching screen mode in Photoshop (the F key) causes the display of a CMYK image to go saturated/incorrect.

I always advise clients the F key is a great way to view your images against black or white as well as the default grey surround. The display of the image against black allows you to spot weak / grey shadows and against white allows you to check highlight areas as they would print on paper.

Unfortunately with recent Windows ATI drivers and Photoshop CS5 *and* CMYK images the colours within the image distort in the different display modes. This does not happen with an RGB image!

Because I prepare images for rerpo I do need to have accurate CMYK previews so have invested in a Nvidea GTX 550Ti card with 2GB of memory, this card does not have the same problem and its extra memory is a real bonus when opening lots of images in Open GL mode. It also has the advantage that I can use the Graphics card processors (Cuda cores) to help calculate and apply noise suppression using the latest version of Neat Image noise reduction.

When I first started using Neat image it took up to 60 seconds to process an A3/300dpi image, now with the help of the new video card this is reduced to a few seconds.

Reading round the edges it would appear that Adobe engineers are using HP workstations with Nvidea graphics cards when developing Photoshop, the card I have bought is quite modest (approx £100) but is sufficient for Photoshop, clients using Adobe Premier will benefit from a faster Nvidea card that will aid real time video rendering.

All a little sad really as I was more than happy with my ATI card till now, but its more important that I can trust my screen and that's why I made the change.

Stephen