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Friday, 17 July 2009

Christmas day two.
12:49

Ah, I just received my inks. And now Canon tells me my repaired 28mm f/1.8 has shipped. So good news all around!

The first prints.
02:49
So I got my printer today! And my SSD:
Christmas!

This photo courtesy of my new Samsung Alias 2 phone, which is pretty sweet. On the other hand, boo to Apple: Mac OS X 10.5 doesn't support Bluetooth BIP, so I couldn't dispatch this photo to $coworker's Mac and post it earlier today. Instead I read it off the MicroSD using my netbook's builtin SD reader (about which more below).


The printer is certainly big enough.
The printer, dominating my desk.


I see a long USB cable in my future.

I made a few prints on normal office paper and they're pretty awful, but I also bought some Epson Ultra Premium Photo Paper Glossy (figuring it'd be good to use up Epson's inks), so I thought that and Epson's canned profiles would give me better results.

Initially I just plugged in the printer, printed "Hello world!" and was happy. But then I saw that Epson's documentation says to install the software first, so I spent a few hours screwing around with that, because the first time I installed, Epson's canned profiles showed up in Lightroom's print module as color management options. But then they didn't show up upon the subsequent reinstalls. I finally hunted them down and... somehow... Got them reinstalled.

Finally I set up soft proofing using the glossy profile, and that warned me that the blues in my picture of Russian Hill are way out of gamut, so instead I'm going to print this picture:

Digital

I stuck two copies on the same sheet; the right-hand copy had brightness +35.

This print follows the guidelines in Epson's managing color document for the R2880:

File > Page Setup to select the 1400 and the appropriate paper (8x10 borderless). Then Print, and "Photoshop Manages Colors". The profile should be "SP1400 1410 UPGP". Rendering set to "relative colorimetric", "black point compensation" checked. Then hit "print", and in the Epson dialog... "Print Settings", select highest quality. It's already got the right paper. Turn off "high speed". Then select "Color management", turn it off... And let 'er rip.

So, while waiting for that to print... I installed my new SSD. I hope this one will last longer than an afternoon (it's already survived a couple of hibernate cycles, so...)

Eeebuntu 3.0 installed painlessly. I like it, despite GNOME.

(Ah, that took about 8 minutes to print.)

So, the print came out with a lot of wet ink beaded on its surface. That's... Not good. I'll try printing again; this time lightening the whole image 45, and I'll try with quality Photo instead of Photo RPM.

(4-5 minutes later)

Ok. That's much better. Note, don't use Photo RPM.

The paper instructions say dry for 15 minutes and then put it under a sheet of normal paper for 24 hours; if the normal sheet's wavy, replace it with a new one and check it again 24 hours later. So I'll have a look at these tomorrow morning and afternoon, I think. I'll probably also buy a pack of 13x19 Epson paper.

A note on the Canon interface
02:48

My friend Abhijit Menon-Sen writes:

The [Canon EOS d30 and 40D] cameras (and, as far as I know, all other EOS cameras) share one bad habit that has always annoyed me. In aperture-priority autoexposure mode, the wheel behind the shutter button controls the aperture and the dial on the back controls exposure (via a ±2 stop compensation). In manual exposure mode, these functions are gratuitously reversed, and the front wheel controls exposure directly.

It's clearer to think of it this way:

Thursday, 16 July 2009

Papers.
01:52

Paul Roark provides some profiles for UT14 on various papers. I'm not sure quite what they all are; but I should figure out which ones I'm interested in.

I think "N" means a neutral profile. Not sure what "cc2" or "nca" mean.

It also includes a set of saved curves:

I guess these match the profiles listed above.

I have some samples of Hahnemühle Photo Rag and Ilford Galerie Gold Fiber Silk, but I haven't checked out the other papers yet. I shall have to - particularly the glossy ones, since I really like Harman Gloss FB Al. I have two Harman prints in my living room and I like them a lot. But printing on them apparently takes some work - Roark mentions it's not for the novice. So, baby steps at first. I think I'll spend a little time with this picture while I'm using up the color inks the printer will ship with:

Tuesday, 14 July 2009

Inks (take two).
22:59

Earlier today I ordered up some UT14 inks from inksupply.com. Paul Roark writes about using these to dedicated an Epson Stylus Photo 1400 printer to black-and-white printing. His site is a wealth of information - but a little overwhelming for a beginner.

After asking the guys on Yahoo some questions (because MIS doesn't answer email reliably) I ordered $250 in inks and accoutrements:

As usual, a little bit of searching on photo.net will find you every opinion you want - e.g "Stick with Epson inks or you are bound to be sorry.". On the other hand a bunch of the guys on Yahoo are using MIS inks very happily.

So, I dunno how it'll go. But either way you can be sure I'll be bitching about it here.

Impatience.
12:00

My SSD is en route from Carson, California.

My printer is en route from Indianapolis (last report, Champaign, Illinois).

My lens is being repaired in Irvine, California.

I wish somehow we could harness the power of obsessive tracking page reloading, and use that to speed up the transport.

Sunday, 12 July 2009

Writing HTML by hand? It's not 1993!
22:26

Gustaf suggested I use Markdown, so I'm giving it a try. One thing I want is a simple syntax for linking to images in my portfolio - preferrably something as simple as [portfolio:image.jpg]. I bet wWith a little hacking it can be made to work; for example:

This is what it's all been about.
19:13

One morning (June 30th, it turns out) while getting ready for work I was listening to NPR. You'll find that is the way many of my news-related stories begin.

Anyway, they aired a story on the auction of oil production rights to foreign companies, and I thought to myself "This is what it's all been about" - the war in Iraq.

And it's happening just as we're beginning the pullout of troops, though I don't think the timing was intended that way.

Though this justification has never really sat all that well with me; from a cold-bloded financial perspective I always thought the oil could be gotten much more cheaply just by doing business with Hussein, but I guess the neocons could never stomach paying him. So instead they engineered the destruction of a recognized independent sovereign government.

Let's take a moment to remember the shifting justifications for the war. First it was the existential threat posed by the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This idea was never really credible, and when none were found after the invastion we started talking about... Spreading freedom, I think? Was that it? It's a curious kind of freedom, imposed at the end of a gun. And I think there was something in there about the abuses of human rights, a revolting irony given the Bush administration's use of torture. The other goal was to end the Iraq support of terrorism; to be fair, I don't know how much terrorism Iraq supported. Might have been a lot. But we know without doubt that there have never been ties between Iraq and al Qaeda.

I'm not sure what I find most contemptible about the neocons: Their callous disregard for human life, their hubris, or their cowardice. They're nearly anxious to use US military might, but I don't see any of them taking any risks themselves.

I am so hip.
17:54

That's right, bitches, I am blogging from a café.

Now I just need skinny jeans and a fixie and chunky-framed glasses and to hang my keys from a belt loop on a carabiner. Or is this passé, and I should be tweeting about it from my iPhone? I can't tell. Which I guess means I'm actually terminally unhip. Ohwell.

To continue my mind-numbingly trivial navel-gazing, I just left T-Mobile behind, hopefully forever. The phone (a Motorola V880) had awful battery life, and the service coverage was lousy. Plus this'll reduce the money my family pays overall to The Man, which is always a worthy goal.

Friday, 10 July 2009

Inks.
14:09

And what do you know, MIS just this minute emailed me about the inks.

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