Arranged Delirium

I am a poetaster. Thank you Word of the Day…

Some of my sabbatical work this term has gone into the professional development of my digital photography. And, I’ve learned a lot of new things, especially in regard to printing. I’ll describe more about that later in the post, but first I want to underscore the importance of the medium in photography. Of course we all know the impact that the medium plays in the quality of the final image; but working through all these photos (about 6000) over the past few months has helped me appreciate all over again the differences between imagery presented electronically from imagery produced for print. I suppose I am still in some way surprised at how certain imagery will work wonderfully electronically and not in print - and vice versa.

I’ve also come to recognize that I’ve underestimated the importance of Depth of Field - particularly for large prints. I was specifically working on that with this series of images, but failed to give it enough emphasis. I’ll look forward to getting back into the field to correct that! But I’ve digressed from the printing issue…

Over the past year I’ve had the opportunity to carefully evaluate several large format printers and consider their impact on the final results of my work. (I’ll preface these comments by saying that almost all of this imagery looks good at smaller resolutions) At larger print resolutions, color becomes more of a factor and truthfully - the quality of the print head and its ability to deliver precision points of ink, plays a large factor. So, how do you decide what you need if you want to print larger photos than the 8 x 11 that any good inkjet can do?

First, the number of inks makes a difference. In my comparisons, any printer with more, separate, ink wells gives results that are more true to the image. Aside from that, it comes down to the precision of the print-head and the quality of the software drivers and the printers color-matching abilities. You have two fine options for A3 printing - both the HP Photosmart B8550 and the Canon PIXMA Pro9000 are good printers. The quality of the Canon prints is clearly superior; but the HP is much cheaper, and in my experience, reliable. HP makes some higher-end models, but they are newer and I haven’t had the opportunity to test them. Its conceivable that the quality of these might be closer to the Canon, but for less than $200 the B8550 seems hard to beat.

But I need more precision and larger prints for my own work. That means I’ve got to move up to the next level, and of those printers I think the Epson Stylus Pro 3880 holds the most promise. You can find a good review of it here. And this blog does a nice job of identifying the strengths and potential weaknesses of the device.

There’s a nice article by Kevin Carey in the Chronicle of Higher Education examining the benefits of studying computing. It also bemoans the loss of majors in computing - a trend that we’ve seen throughout most of the last decade, although that seems to be improving over the last couple of years. (Fortunately we haven’t seen that drop-off in majors at W&J; my guess is that its the result of our interdisciplinary curriculum.) I especially liked some of his examples which I though did a good job of relating the activities of computing to other fields. I think I’ll keep it around and perhaps link to it as a resource for students that are considering study in the field.

The comments to the article are - as typical - both helpful and negative. What do you think? Can you see the value in studying computing? If so, why have we been seeing the decline in enrollments across the country?

Shawn Blanc has a blog post up on the potential value of MobileMe. Its a bit long unless you are interested in the topic, but insightful. (MobileMe of course, is Apple’s ill-titled mobile sync service.) MobileMe is something I’ve been using for years - which is why I have a .mac address - but I still struggle to define in terms of value. It is something I haven’t found to be particularly useful aside from syncing email and calendars. Truthfully, Dropbox does a much better job of syncing files between machines - so there’s no way I’m going back to the MobileMe iDisk service at this point.

Really - if you don’t have a Dropbox account, you need to get one. Do it now. This means you.

So, I am in essence maintaining the service due to the number of devices I have, email sync, and a handy calendar publishing feature. All things that I could do in other ways if I had time to set it up. I guess I’m paying for convenience, but its a steep price at this point. And without some additional value coming from somewhere - its only a matter of time until I abandon it…

If you are interested in photography - or interested in the future of publishing - you might be interested in Lights, Camera, Capture! at the iTunes Store. This is a book/DVD combo that you can buy from Amazon for $29. But you can also get the content for $9.99 by purchasing it as an app for your iPad.

This title is a very nice, basic introduction to lighting for photography (useful for filmmaking as well) and the nature of the app medium is that it combines the text and DVD video into one package. I actually think its much better than the book/DVD combo and a good example of how this type of publication is better than the traditional media it replaces. More often than not, I prefer to read the physical hard-copy of a text. But in this case, I prefer the app since it conveniently places the relevant video content immediately within the context of the text itself. That means I actually access it - when I have DVD content associated with a text, I rarely access it. After all, that would require me to:

1. Find said disc
2. Goto computer
3. Wait for optical media to load (uugh.)
4. Try to remember what I was wanting to watch and why

Its too much of a cognitive break - and its the reason why combined media have never been effective (aside from marketing purposes). Another nice thing about it is its portability. If I’m shooting in the field, I’m not going to want to take several books, a laptop, and the corresponding media. I can just take my camera and iPad.