Like most people with more than a passing interest in photography I have thousands of images stored on hard disks. The vast majority I’m not satisfied with. The ones that I think have some form of merit I’ll work on and file away somewhere safe. A small number of these find their way onto the web, either on this site or my flickr site. What doesn’t happen, or at least what I stopped doing a long time ago, is printing them. I’m not really sure when or why I stopped printing, I just did. Inclination? Time? Money? I really don’t know. But what has struck me over the last few days is what a shame this is, because I’m missing out on what is one of the fundamental pleasures of photography: looking at photos. In fact, if you look up a dictionary definition of photography, possibly I’m also missing the point of photography all together.

What brought on this realisation? Well, Kim is currently preparing for an exhibition of her work. So pretty much every flat surface in our studio and house is full of her prints. I’m quite used to seeing her images in Lightroom, but seeing this many of her images printed at A4 & A3+ is a different experience all together. It really made me think about what I’m missing with my images.

So, time to start printing again I think, and encourage you all to try the same!

Here are a collection of other photography sites I enjoy using (starting with a few friend and family plugs!). I’ll add to these over the next few weeks.

My Flickr site

Sites by my partner Kim: Kim Byrne Photography & Kim Byrne Landscapes (at the time of writing this, the former is about to move over to a new WordPress tyle and the latter is still in the process of being built)

The Luminous Landscape – a great resource for general photography advice. I also enjoyed their LR & Photoshop videos.

I’ve just tried to install my Spyder 3 Elite software on my new Snow Leopard iMac. Easy I would have thought, but unfortunately not. Turns out that the software is not actually an intel application so it requires rosetta to be installed first. As an aside, rosetta is effectively a PowerPC chip emulator that allows applicaitions complied for the old chipset to be used on intel machines. It’s an optional install on Snow Leopard because Apple are trying to move away from PowerPC completely. So for this reason, and that running an emulator will take up resources (memory, CPU etc) I’d prefer not to go the rosetta route. I had a look on datacolor’s website and there is an upgrade available. But, in order to install the upgrade you must first have the previous version installed. So, I’m somewhat stuck.

But, I’ve found an open source tool called Argyll CMS that is compatible with my Syder hardware. So, I’ll try that instead and let you know how I get on.

UPDATE

I should have checked in more detail first… The latest version of the Sypder 3 software does not need rosetta, nor does it require a prior installation of the PPC version. I did try using Argyll CMS but just couldn’t get, what I thought was, a good profile. They all seemed to have green colour casts. The software, and its accompanying explanation, give me the impression that the author knows what they are talking about so I suspect the problem was due to my usage. While looking, I also found a set of pre-built profiles (available via TFT Central). My 2nd monitor is a BENQ FP241W, and the profile for it from TFT worked well, in particular as it gave a white level close to 120 cd/m2 without having to change to pretty ropey controls on the monitor. Shame my Spyder 3 won’t allow this, as it tries to force you to do it the correct way via your hardware controls. Great if you have a monitor that supports it, but not so great when you don’t! By the way, I’ll explain in more detail about why 120 cd/m2 in a later article,. In short though it’s to do with my set-up being based around my main monitor being used for web work and my 2nd monitor being used for print work.

I’ve just been reading about Adobe’s release of Lightroom 3. It’s been in beta for a long time now, but I think that is probably a good thing: Plenty of feedback and lots of time to iron out problems. The list of new and improved features is both long and impressive. I particularly like the inclusion of tethered shooting, lens correction, improved vignette control & the new print layouts approach. You can see a full list over at Victoria Bampton’s site.

What really does disappoint me though is once again they have left out soft proofing. I can’t believe the argument that including it is not a priority for many photographers especially if you compare it to some of the other features that have found their way into LR3. Will its inclusion dent you Photoshop sales? Perhaps, but only a little as I can’t really believe that many people would really choose PS over LR just to get soft proofing, or not buy PS just because LR has soft proofing. They aer different products aimed at different users with different perceptions and needs. I fully accept that you can get great prints without soft proofing (and I’ll explain some of the techniques I use over the coming months), but its inclusion would give us the flexibility to choose the degree of control we have.

So, with that whinge over, will I buy it? Yes. I’ve already bought into the way LR works and I think the the features mentioned above are enough for me to justify the upgrade.