DVPhoto

It started with a leak from Amazon.com yesterday, and ended up with Canon making the official announcement today. The 40D and 1DsMKIII are now official, as well as a new 14mm wide angle lens and a new smaller simpler 4 stop IS system in two of their low end lenses. If pouring through numbers is your thing, then DP Review has all the info you need.

Obviously most of the buzz is around the new 21 mega pixels of the 1Ds, and of course the average Canon user is understandably happy that they now have an option that competes with Nikon’s D200. For me however the interest is in the IS, and most importantly the 14bit RAW files.

More Bits Equals More Detail

The 1DMKIII was the first Canon camera to come out with 14 bit RAW, and with the release of these new camera’s it is clear Canon intend for all their camera’s to have this from now on. For those that don’t know why this is a big thing, you need to understand how the camera stores the image. When the photo is taken, the sensor, which is actually an analogue device, needs to have its signal converted to a digital representation for storing. The resulting digital information used to be restricted to 4096 levels of brightness per pixel. While this seems like a lot, you need to understand that the levels are not linear. The brightest stop has half of these, with the next stop having half of what remains, and so forth until you reach the shadows where there are very few levels of brightness. This results in less shadow detail and is why many digital photographers suggest exposing to the right (another words exposing the image so that it is as bright as possible and then bring it down in post processing).

Now 14 bits goes from 4096 levels to 16384! This translates to better detail and tonality and one hopes, a noticeable increase in shadow detail. With Canon now having 14 bits as the norm, we can hope the other manufacturers follow suit, and in the end we all benefit.

IS for the caffeine lover

Canon’s new IS appears to be much smaller, and we hope cheaper, than the existing IS solution they have. They claim it’s effectiveness is equal to the old IS, and from the lenses they have decided to release it with, it seems clear that they intend to make IS available to as many people as possible.

I’ve been avoiding buying IS lenses due to the cost, but when these come out, my willpower may well be sapped.

Just over a month ago, I wrote Selling your Photography; a far too brief look at some of the options available online for selling ones photography as prints. The aim, finding a online print seller who would sell your prints for you, without too much effort from your side. The saying “There is no such thing as a free lunch” is apt here and the results were predictably bad. While there are many sites providing the ability to sell art online, getting sales on them is always going to take work.

Today however, I will look at the actual prints that two of these companies produce. My reasoning went that, although I was selling prints on multiple sites, my own marketing efforts should be directed towards the site that gives me the best combination of print options, cost, profit and of course, print quality. It didn’t take much effort to whittle this down to just two sites, Deviant Art & Imagekind. Both these sites provide a large selection of sizes (with some limitations on both), both allow the artist to set the price (above a specified base cost).

Three of the four criteria are easily compared just by looking at the web sites; but the fourth, print quality, required that I actually order prints from both sites. I decided on an image that I thought would test the print quality in both resolution and colour accuracy; one of my newer photos, Autumn’s Warmth.

I’ve bought prints through DeviantArt before, the process is simple, the prices for artists incredibly cheap. The problem was the image aspect ratio. This was a 2:1 panorama, and Deviantart only provides one size in this aspect ratio, 8 by 4 inches. Deviantart offers a huge number of print size (a definite plus), but only in set aspect ratios; some ratios better represented than others (a definite minus if you love panoramas). The shipping options ranged from cheap to expensive and covered all my needs. Deviantart prints are on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, with the options of Glossy, Luster and Matte.

Imagekind provides less size options, but the ratio of the photo is not limited. I chose the smallest print I could, which turned out to be 10 by 5 inches. The selection of papers is huge, and while the Epson glossy and enhanced matt are cheap quality options, I chose the Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl paper. Shipping options were limited, with only two rather expensive FedEx options available. FedExing to South Africa was going to be more than I could afford. This is where Imagekind really impressed; I emailed their customer care person, and after discussing my problem with her, she organised that my print be shipped to me via USPO at a greatly reduced price from their standard FedEx rates.

So far so good.

Deviantart wins on cost, just over a $5 including shipping. Imagekinds print cost was more, and although I could have chosen a cheaper paper, the cheapest option would have still come in at about 3 times the cost when shipping is included. The larger the print size, the less of an issue this is, with both sites charging essentially the same price for larger prints.

Imagekind wins on sizes & paper types available. Also their customer service impressed me, though I do not consider this a win over Deviantart, since I have never had the need to ask anything from them.

Well both prints arrived at my local post office on the same day and I rushed over to pick them up. I’ll save my first impressions until after the more clinical look at the scans. Both prints were scanned at 300dpi, and the image cropped to one section of the print that I believe gave good indication of detail and colour accuracy. A crop of the original image is also included.

Remember these are 300dpi scans, the imperfections you see are close to invisible with the naked eye.

The Deviant Art print is sharp and saturated. The colours are very smooth but as I have experienced with all Fuji Crystal Archive prints, they are not quite how I wanted them. I have found getting a print to look the way I want with the Fuji colour profile is difficult, this is most likely a deficiency on my part, and a greater knowledge of working with difficult colour profiles would probably make all the difference. Deviant Art wants you to upload the images with the SRGB colour profile, and this makes it even harder to get right.

The Imagekind print is far more noisy, and I can indeed see this noise with the naked eye. This is a noise I see with all ink jet prints on papers that don’t smooth the inks enough, and looking at the Imagekind media pack seems to reveal that this is at its worst with the paper I chose. That said the colours are correct, the image sharp, though not quite as sharp looking as the DeviantArt print.

Now back to the first impressions of the prints.

The DeviantArt print looks great. At first glance, it is contrasty and well saturated, the colours bright and shadows dark. It definitely has a certain wow factor. The feel of paper reminds one of your standard 1 hour print shop photo prints. Overall I was very pleased with the result; though the colours were obviously different from the digital file, the average viewer would not know this.

The Imagekind print came packaged in so many layers that it took me well over a minute to get it out. I thought I had been pleased with the DeviantArt print; but this was even better. The print had the advantage of being slightly larger, and also had a thin white border which seems to enhance the viewing. The colours were close perfect, and the image sharp. Though I could see the pattern of the ink jet printer if I looked really closely when taking in the image as a whole this was invisible. That Hahnemuhle Fine Art Pearl paper is something to behold, it looks & feels perfect, and managed to make the photo look more than just a photo.

The final result is a resounding victory to Imagekind, though if I had chosen a cheaper paper, this might have been closer. I obviously need to do some more learning with regard to colour profiles, and until that happens Imagekind will win every time. I upload an SRGB image, and the print I get is the same as what I see on screen.

Overall Deviant Art wins on cost, by quite a margin on small prints; with Imagekind beating them, often only narrowly, on every other aspect. I have no doubt that you would be pleased with prints from both these sites, and they are close enough that there is no truly better option.

First I must apologise for the lack of posts over the last two weeks. Work has been rather time consuming recently.

Last week a couple of site mentioned a new camera auction site, CameraGAS.com. You may well have already seen it by now; I still feel I should help promote it though. With a fixed $5 cost for listing a sale, this site looks like it could well become the preferred venue for selling camera’s and photographic supplies online. That is, as long as it gets enough support.

So go visit it, if you have something to sell or see something you want to buy, give it a try. Even if it doesn’t become the next EBay for cameras, maybe it will prompt EBay to reduce their costs, a move which would hopefully reduce prices and benefit all of us.

Many commentators have suggested that anything more than a thumbnail cannot be considered fair use. Mikes response was an image made up mostly of a freak copyright message.

Earlier this week Mike from TOP wrote a brief rant about copyright; or more accurately, a rant about essentially unknown photographers actively making it known they don’t want anyone using their work without prior approval, without giving people any way to contact them in the first place.

What seemed to me to be a reasonable request has turned into what Mike called a Copyright Brouhaha, and now a third post, Keep Your Freakin’ Hands Off My Picture, is causing even more arguments in the comments section.

While the articles are worth the read, the comments are where the meat is. There are two sides; the one, seemingly made up of some professional photographers and lawyers, claims that what Mike is doing (especially in his Random Excellence posts) is, if not legally wrong, at the very least morally questionable. The other side is made up of the rest of us, and seems to belief that posting images of other photographers to showcase their work (including linking back to their sites if possible) should easily fall within the provisions of fair use and is most certainly a good thing.

Now I can understand where the Pro photographers and lawyers are coming from. The pro photographer is out there to make money, as much of it as they can. A lawyer’s job is to twist the law to his clients benefit, if a law has some leeway in its interpretation, then all the better. Obviously when asked whether something is fair use, the default answer is “probably not”, since avoiding possible litigation is considered more important than the original intent of the law.

To my mind, the idea of fair use is there to allow others to comment on, learn from, and praise existing works. All of these are impractical unless you have the entire image to look at, and while you definitely do not need a full size image, a thumbnail will definitely not do.

While I do not dispute that the lawyers are correct when they say Mike could find himself in court for his current use of copyrighted images, I do think this shows that copyright law, and especially the concept of fair use, is currently broken.

Today there is an announcement on Strobist, that David has taken a 1 year leave of absence from The Baltimore Sun. The title, ” Blog, Newspaper, Family. Pick any Two.”, sounded rather ominous; newspaper and family being the choice I expected. It seems that running the blog, and doing seminars about lighting, is profitable enough for it to be an option.

This is great news, as Strobist is one of the best photography blogs out there, and an increase in dedication to it will only help to make it even better. Also in the pipeline is a DVD on lighting, which I’ll be sure to buy.

Congratulations David!

Well it seems that in less than one year after it started, What the Duck has been accepted by Universal Press Syndicate for syndication. Creator, Aaron Johnson, says “I’m now in decision making mode, keeping the best interest of the strip in mind.” So you might just find WTD appearing in a local newspaper or magazine near you.

Corbis, one of the largest traditional stock agencies around, has officially opened their new microstock site, SnapVillage.

The site is still very much in beta, so don’t expect it to all work perfectly, but at first glance it seems that Corbis are making a bid to change the way microstock works. There are a few things that make me want to join them immediately, and one thing that means I can’t.

At first glance I see the following.

Pros:

• You can set your prices yourself from $1 all the way to $50, which is more midrange stock than micro stock. There is a subscription model much like Shutterstocks, where the photographer only gets 30 cents, but you can opt out of that.
• Like with IStock, the top photographers will have the opportunity to be moved up to the more traditional stock business at Corbis. I assume you would have to be an exclusive photographer with them, though that remains to be seen.
• They will keyword and title your images for you if you want.

Cons:

• They only send payments via Paypal, so people like me who cannot receive payments from Paypal are a bit screwed. Please Corbis, add Moneybookers & Cheque payment please. Soon.
• So far it seems that when they keyword the images for you, they are very sparsely key worded. I think that while it seems like a very good idea, I’m not sure they will have the time to do it properly.

Obviously, since the site is still very much in development, there will be a lot of problems; but assuming you can actually receive payment from them, give it a try. And make sure you tell them any problems you encounter so they can improve the site as fast as possible.

I first heard about eye-fi about year ago, and while interesting I soon forgot about as it was far from complete. Well apparently it is finally nearing official release.

Unfortunately for me, and many other DSLR users, this is only available in SD for now; but I can’t see a reason why this couldn’t be incorporated into the larger CF format in the future.

Photocritic have a very interesting post titled “What do you do when they nick your photos?”

It’s a reality we all have to deal with when posting our photos online. Obviously the vast majority of us aren’t quite so popular/good that it becomes a huge problem. Yet even as a average photographer, you probably have a few great photos; imagine how you’d feel if someone else made a profit off those at your expense. Or worse; when you complained, you were the one who got censored?

Apart from the obvious “never put your photos online”, how do you stop someone using your images for their own gain. For me the most obvious is don’t give others access to the large resolution photos. Sure they can still steal your 600 pixel wide photos, but they won’t be able to use them for much. Other options include putting a water mark on the image, but the more effective the watermark (i.e. how much of the image it covers), the more it destroys the photos beauty.

Some people might think that proposed new laws might do the trick; but I think these laws miss the point and are more targeted at trying to put kids and their parents into jail. A teenager using your photo as a wall paper for his desktop is not the problem. Companies stealing your photos for profit is the problem, and the laws currently cover that just fine, though they could perhaps benefit from some changes making it easier for an individual to pursue a large company.

I personally use a Creative Commons license for most of my images. I also try to make sure no one can download full resolution versions. And I dread the day I find someone selling my work without my permission. I dread it because it will take effort and money to make them pay, but I sure as hell will do everything in my power to bring them to justice.

Win a
Canon
1Ds MKII
from CrestockThe Crestock Photography Contest 2007 is open, and the prizes are definitely worth a look. Broken into three rounds, the prizes are as follows: a Leica D-LUX 3 for round 1, a Nikon D40x plus PhotoShop CS3 for round 2, and the big one, the Canon 1Ds MK II for round 3! Yes that is a 1Ds MKII, with a 50mm f1.4L lens to go with it.

The theme for round 1 is “the Meaning of Life”, with submissions starting 2 days ago, and ending on the 7th of May. Round 2 has “Feeling Sexy?” as its theme, with submissions starting on the 7th of May and ending on the 21st of the same month. The final round, with the biggest prize, is “Speed Demon”. It opens for submission at the end of round 2, and ends on the 4th of June.

The rules as well as the terms and conditions appear to be quite fair; which is nice, given the number of competitions these days that have ridiculous rights grab language in the fine print.

Once each round is finished, the voting starts. Voting lasts for the length of the next round, and until the 18th of June for round 3. Unfortunately, the winners are determined by 50% of the public vote, and 50% the judges. Unfortunately I say, since this will probably give people with popular blogs and image galleries a huge advantage. One “Vote for My Image” post and they will surge ahead regardless of the quality of the submitted photo. Still, it looks to be an interesting contest, and hopefully the best images will win, even if they aren’t posted by the most popular photographers.

Oh yes, and look at the list of judges. Some very good photoblog owners in that list.