The restriction that limits video recording in digitial cameras to 30 minutes could be abolished if the World Trade Organization's Information Technology Agreement (ITA) is expanded. Several countries, including the USA, have begun informal talks to extend the scope of the ITA to include products that are currently subject to tariffs and duty. At present, digital cameras' video cuts off after 30 minutes to avoid them being classified as video cameras (which attract 5.4% duty). If the video cameras are added to the ITA, this distinction would no longer matter. (via Nikkei)

There are rewards for getting up at 3:30 every morning to unload trucks....

By the way, here's why things were so quiet here on Wednesday...I was helping my son buy his first car! With one thing and another, it took most of the day.

It's a creampuff '98 Buick Park Avenue Ultra with loads of bling. Chrome rims, fenders, rocker panel, and exhaust tips. Even a little spoiler! And pinstriping. Only 40k miles, and our mechanic (we took it in to get checked over before forking over any dough) rhapsodized over its condition...he says the muffler is original, the underside is clean, there's no rust anywhere, and the engine compartment practically looks new. The interior is redolent of a 1910 bordello—acres of red leather, dark wood, and plush carpeting. It's got the works—sunroof, climate zones, even a head's-up display on the windshield like a fighter plane. The suspension is firmer than a standard Park Avenue (which of course is like saying it's a responsive ocean liner, but hey). Must have been some very cool dude's (or dudette's) Sunday go-to-meeting wheels.

Because it's big and old and a gas guzzler—big aging Buicks and Caddies are unpopular on Waukesha car lots—it didn't cost much. He paid half down (the least the bank would accept) and financed the other half. I cosigned. At least Papa's off the hook for those gasoline bills.

He's never been a car guy, and his taste runs to what I used to scornfully call "land yachts" when I was his age—cars like this were not cool in my youth. (For me, Buicks really were my father's cars.) But it's the kind of car he likes. And he loves it.

(And to throw in an on-topic bone, my iPhone takes better pictures than either of my first two dedicated digital cameras. Although I couldn't see the display when I took this—but I'm learning to look at the subject when I take iPhone pictures and and not try to squint at the viewing screen.)

All in all: fun day for Pop. Thanks for putting up with the momentary radio silence from TOP.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Who this is for: Novice or occasional printmakers (of any skill level as photographers) who currently don't print a lot and feel insecure about their abilities or dissatisfied with their results—and who have the luxury of making a considerable commitment to getting better.

Objectives: Improving your skills, your prints, and your comfort level, familiarity, and sense of fluency with digital printing.

Program duration: Three months (minimum) to (ideally) one year.

Time commitment required: About 10–30 minutes daily, at least five times a week, and several hours once every one, two, or three months. Plus whatever time you feel like putting into researching and learning (optional).

Equipment needed: An inkjet printer. Need not be large or fancy, but should be intended for photo printing and should have at least six inks.

Materials needed: A plentiful supply of a relatively cheap paper or two that you like, an ongoing supply of ink, and a metal-edge box.

Resources needed: Your archive of digital picture files (can be from any camera and all eras of digital, from whenever you got into it to now). Of course we're assuming you're a digital photographer, and already have a camera, a computer, etc.

The Program—Physical requirements
The idea is to make one print every day without working too hard at it or taking too long.

First, pick a paper or two—it need not be an expensive, premium paper, and in fact it's probably better if it's not. It should be reasonably priced and readily available. A paper that's designed for your particular printer and recommended by your printer's manufacturer, or that the manufacturer provides a profile for, is fine. Lay in a modest stock of it—a box or two. You can switch papers as the exercise progresses, so don't worry too much about what you pick at first.

Second, pick a standard size. Could be as small as 8x10" or A4, but shouldn't be any larger than 13x19" (Super-B). You can vary the image size on the sheet if you want to, to suit each picture. But maybe settle on a minimum border, meaning, the maximum image area you'll print when you print your biggest size image.

Third, get yourself a couple of print storage boxes, the same size as your standard paper size. Again, nothing fancy—a plain metal-edge box is fine.

Fire up your printer and make sure it's working okay and loaded with inks. Lay in one or two extra sets of inks so you won't have to go to the store or wait for mail order when you need to replace an empty cartridge. Never let yourself run out of ink or paper.

The Program—Daily action steps
To begin with, pick a decent picture you rather like that you've never printed before. It should be a "representative scene"—that is, don't pick a macro detail if you do mostly landscapes, or a single-color picture if you do mostly family portraits. It should have a reasonable range of subject brightnesses and colors in it, maybe a range of in-focus, sharp areas and out-of-d.o.f. blur. And, it should be a file that you think is of decent technical quality, from your current or best camera.

Print it.

...Using, of course, your standard paper and what will be your "ordinary" print size for this exercise.

For this first day only, take some time, and a few sheets of paper if you need to, to get what you think is a "competent" print. It should be reasonably well color balanced and of the right density, reasonably well sharpened, and otherwise attractive—something you could show to your family or friends without excuses—but as if you were showing them the content of the picture, not necessarily as a showpiece for your technical prowess. It should not be perfect, just good.

You can take your time on this first day just because you might be rusty, or maybe you haven't cranked up the ol' printer for a week or three. Get the bugs out. Shake the rust off.

Save only the last print. Tear the others up. Date it, and number it starting from "1."

The next day, look at your print from the day before. Spend a few (3–10) minutes with it. Really look at it. Ask yourself some questions. How'd you do? How does it work as a photograph? ...As a print? How well does it show the things it shows? Did you get the color balance right—what color cast does it have, if any? What could be improved, whether you know how to implement that improvement or not?

Then, pick a new file from your digital archives—nothing special, just a decent picture, decent file. Prepare it for printing, and run it off.

It doesn't have to be perfect. If it's really bad, or if you made some obvious error or forgot to do something you need to do, you might take another sheet of paper and try again. But don't stress over it. Just make a print. It's just going into the box. (If your prints look like sh*t for the first week, or the first three, no worries. It doesn't matter much in the long run.)

The next day, take a final look at your print from the day before and throw it in the box, face down. Spend a few minutes looking at and appraising your effort from yesterday. How well does it communicate? Does it look like what it's a picture of? What does it need? What bugs you about it? What should you have done differently—or what will you do differently if you eventually print it again?

Then, repeat...for the duration.

The idea is just to get into the habit of cranking off one print a day from a new, never-before-printed file. Use your archives, or go out and take new pictures to print; it doesn't matter. Once a print goes into the box, leave it there.

So, to reiterate, the daily action steps are:

• Take a last look at the 48-hour-old print and throw it face down in the box, in order.
• Appraise the 24-hour-old print at some deliberate length. Date and number it.
• Knock off a new print.

The Program—Skills and techniques
As you go along with this, keep thinking about what each picture needs and what your pictures in general need to make them better. Let your interest in your technical skills and your acquisition of new techniques grow naturally out of what the pictures need, and what the prints need. I'm not saying you shouldn't think about raising your game—you should, of course. However, although acquiring skills and techniques for their own sake is all well and good, you're going to do better if you learn the techniques because you need them. Not every printer needs to learn all possible techniques, unless you plan to be a full-time custom printer able to handle any situation. What you need to know is whatever skills and techniques are required to make your prints look the way you want them to look. Learn that; screw the rest.

It's in this context, of course, that technical advice like Ctein's of yesterday is most valuable. If you were in the middle of this exercise when you read that, you'd be rarin' to take his advice and try those techniques on your daily print. And you would, that very evening. This is what will happen as you go along—you'll become a sponge for the technical advice that suits you, because you'll be able to put it into play right away.

As you go along making a new print every day (or every weekday, or whatever interval you can work into your life), you'll find that your basic skills will gradually improve as you go. That's because your judgment will improve as you use it. This will happen almost whether you want it to happen or not. As long as you're looking at and thinking about each print you make each day, your judgment will gradually improve. You'll find it easier and easier to hit the right color pack (old fashioned term, sorry), get the density right, get the saturation level right, get just the amount of vignetting you like for each picture. You'll become dissatisfied with your old techniques and try new ones. You'll start to be aware of typical problems and you'll have made efforts to address them.

If you're taking the exercise seriously, gradually you'll become curious about printing. You'll poke around on forums or in how-to books or videos. You'll want to add certain things to your arsenal.

A month in, you might start to wonder about whether your monitor is calibrated. You'll read a bit about that, find out how you can do it. Two months in, you might start to wonder about what a custom profile is. Et cetera. Don't stint on learning, but don't force yourself, either; do it only when, and if, you want to.

I'm not saying you shouldn't worry about these things; I am saying, don't sweat it all at once. Have patience. Churn out your daily print; keep thinking about the prints you make; add subtleties when you want to, as you want to. Trust yourself—if you really need it, if it's really important, you'll get around to it. Just keep those prints flowing into the box.

The Program—Conceptually
It's imperative that each day you print a new file, meaning one you've never printed before. And of course that you do it every day, or every weekday (if you can't do it at least that often, this exercise isn't for you). But I'd really encourage you to not worry about what kind of pictures you print. Just pick stuff that you'd like to see a print of. Set aside all notions of "good" or "personal best" or ideas about exhibits or portfolios to show to museum curators or whatever. This is just an exercise. Pianists and violinists and saxophonists and vocalists have to practice every day—think of it like that. This ain't the concert. This is practice. Don't show the prints you make to anyone if it makes you feel uncomfortable; do so only if you want to. Print some "bad" shots some days or some funky shots.

As you go along, you might find you get temporarily "obsessed" or immersed in certain aspect of the prints. Maybe for a while sharpness will be all that you care about; maybe later you'll get over that and get interested in dark prints, or the transitions to blown-out highlights, or rendering reds, or balancing the overall print density to the viewing light, or whatever. Go with that. Whatever strikes you as important in any particular week, focus on it, if you want to.

But I'd really encourage you to set aside all notions of "this is a good photograph" or "this is worthy of printing" or "this will make me look good to others." For the duration of this exercise, don't worry about all that crap. Just print whatever you think you might want to see printed.

The Program—'The Master Print'
Okay, now for the exception to the above. Every so often—definitely not as frequently as once a week; once a month should probably be the most often you'll want to do this, and once every two or three months would be better—really pull out the stops. Set aside several hours, pick a tasty picture you really like, and print the sucker as well as you possibly can. You can even let this exercise take up two or three whole days if you want to—get a good guide print, evaluate it carefully in the cold light of the next morning, and get back to work. Take as much time as you need. Take as much paper as you need. Sweat every little detail. Get everything perfect.

When you end up with the best print you can make, make two copies instead of one. Throw one in the box, and put the other one on the wall, someplace where you'll see it frequently, and leave it there for a while—a couple of months, maybe. Or maybe until you do the next one.

It's the opposite of your regular daily nuthin'-special crank-it-out one-shot print...a deliberate striving for the best you can do at that particular point in time.

These print, you should show people if you want to. Ask their opinion. See what they think.

Very important: Don't mix up the two parts of this exercise. Don't start "perfecting" your daily prints and don't take "good enough" shortcuts with your occasional Master Prints. The one is quick-and-dirty, the other, you're going to give the very best effort the print requires. Separate those two parts of the exercise, and keep them separate.

Ideally, you'd make a Master Print like this three or four times over the course of a year-long exercise.

The Program—The end game
At some point, you'll probably have had enough of this. You might be surprised at how much has changed since you started—you might have a different printer; you might own a different monitor; your monitor might now be calibrated, your papers profiled; you'll know your printer driver inside and out; you might have learned that it works best for you to prepare your file in one program and print it from another. You might have migrated from your original paper to one that fits your needs and desires better (the more prints you make, the more you'll become interested in different papers, probably. If not, again, don't sweat it).

So here's the very last thing you do—and the most fun. Remember that technically decent, representative file you printed on the very first day? Get that file out again, and do your by-now-regular "Master Print" routines on it. Get a print you're proud of, that looks right to you.

Now go open the box. You'll want to leaf carefully through your whole year, and make a visual appraisal of your progress. But first, compare those two prints—the one you just made, and the very first one you made, at the very start of this learning program.

You might not think they'll be much different.

You will be amazed.

Mike

P.S. I can't think of a name for this learn-to-print program. Got any ideas?

TOP takes the day off on Saturday, tomorrow.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Mark Roberts: "How about 'The Money Pit'?

"That is, of course, tongue in cheek. This print program will naturally cost a bit of cash, but will end up costing less than many people spend on photo gear during a year and be much more beneficial in the long run."

Featured Comment by David Dyer-Bennet: "And, since inkjet printers thrive on use and die from inactivity, this program will help you preserve your technology investment!"

Awards:

• $ 5,000 — Cash Prizes
• $10,000 — Your Work Featured in a Major International Fine Art Fair
• $ 5,000 — Feature Article & Complimentary Ad in The Artist Showcase
• $ 4,000 — Membership with Artisan Direct, Ltd.
• $ 4,000 — Complimentary Art Marketing Consultation
• $ 5,000 — Art Show Catalogues
• Winners will be featured in The Artist Showcase Summer in the Hamptons Issue and Showcased in a National Art Fair.

There will be Separate Winners in each of 5 Categories, including: Photography and Mixed Media. Winners will be announced on December 1st, 2012.

How to enter this art contest

Take a look at Photocompete Facebook page. You will find more photography contests and competitions there! Join Photocompete on Twitter.

Theme: Exposed (The Contemporary Nude)

Art never tires of the nude. Photographic fads and styles come and go, but the nude, as a form of artistic expression, always remains fresh. From Alfred Stieglitz to Robert Mapplethorpe, from Edward Weston to Diane Arbus the nude never fails to captivate us.

Award:

• About 50 works will be chosen from submitted photographs to be shown in the Exposed exhibition at 1650 Gallery in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

How to enter this photography exhibition

Take a look at Photocompete Facebook page. You will find more photography contests and competitions there! Join Photocompete on Twitter.

A simple flash bouncer is the next best thing to shooting off camera flash. It either makes the flash bigger by diffusing some of its light, or have it bounce to the wall / ceiling creating a big spot of light that bounces back to the subject.

I guess this is why there are so many products that provide this function, along with a ton of DIY solutions to the same problem.

This is why it is refreshing to see a new take on that problem. Designer Benny Johansson (who made the genius cap holder and was  finalist on our sofbox contest) came up with a slightly different flash bouncer thingy built from two pieces of recycled plastic - the PilleVippo. The amazing thing about the PilleVippo is that it is super versatile and 100% DIY. It fits both point and shots and DSLRs. All you need is an old plastic container and a template you can get on Ben's site.

read more

Samsung has announced the US prices for its latest 'Smart' Wi-Fi enabled NX mirrorless cameras, the NX20, NX210 and NX1000. It has also said the NX1000 will be available from June at a price of around $699 with the 20-50mm retractable zoom. The range-topping 20MP NX20 with its electronic viewfinder will retail for around $1099, with the i-Fn version of the 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 kit zoom. The NX210, meanwhile, will cost around $899 with the same lens.

By Ctein

One of the interesting (because it was unexpected) results of the educational print offer of a few weeks back was that people thought I invoked extraordinary measures to come up with a good print of that photograph. Not even close. I worked with a level of care and attention to detail and meticulousness that most people wouldn't muster, but that's a different thing. In that respect, I am unusual, and that's why I get paid for what I do.

But the measures themselves had nothing extraordinary about them. They're just the kind of things that any more-than-routine printer should be doing.

Good printing is not accomplished merely by getting curves and color balance and saturation correct. That's basic, like figuring out the right exposure and paper grade (or filter pack) in the darkroom.

One step above that is local tone correction—dodging and burning in. It's always amazed me (not in a good way) how many printers don't do that, in the darkroom or out. The majority of photographs I've printed over the past 40 years, and that's many thousands, have been improved by some amount of local correction. Frequently, it's very slight and very subtle. But it's not the norm for a print to be better with none at all.

If you don't have that under your control, you're not even a competent printer. If you are, you're competent. You can be trusted to turn out a good journeyman print.

Note: In each of the following pairs of photographs, the "before" version is what I get from my default settings for Adobe Camera Raw prior to making any adjustments to the photograph. The "after" version is what I use to make my finished prints; it isn't optimized for viewing at small resolution on a screen, but you'll get the idea. To put it another way, the "before version" is what the camera saw, and the "after" version is what I saw when I made the photograph—and what I wanted in a print.

Before (above) and after (below): The most important change to this photograph was a lot of dodging and burning in. Human beings are really good at ignoring large-scale variations in brightness that cameras see all too clearly.

What is it take to move beyond that level? Just as in the darkroom, it requires some real understanding of the limitations and quirks of the media (both film/sensor and print) you're working with. That leads me to three tools that are part of my standard printmaking toolkit. Some variation on these ought to be part of yours.

1. Local contrast enhancement. Simply, you can do it with a mild dose of unsharp masking or you can do it in a much more sophisticated way with plug-ins like Photo Wiz's ContrastMaster. What you can't get away with is not doing it. Digital prints tend to come out flat, with poor separation of fine and subtle tonal differences. I don't know why, but I've observed it to be broadly true. The delicate nuances that are there in the original file, whether it comes from a digital camera or a film scan, don't get rendered well in the print. You need to make that tonal separation stronger in the file or the print will look duller than it should.

Before (above) and after (below): The near-setting sun produced a grazing light that brought out wonderful textures in the building and provided great contrast in tone and color between the building in the sky. I made adjustments that emphasized sharpness and fine tonal detail.

2. Deconvolution sharpening. Simply, there's Smart Sharpen in Photoshop, with a radius of a few tenths of the pixel and the percentage set to taste. Complexly, any of several plug-ins, like Topaz Lab's InFocus. If you're trying to produce a digital photograph with the best and most nicely-rendered fine detail, and you're using a Bayer array camera, this is pretty much a must. (Can't speak to non-Bayer array cameras; never printed from them.) There is a genuine improvement in sharpness and fine detail buried in those Raw files that deconvolution sharpening can dig out.

3. Noise reduction. It's the counterbalance to the previous two tools. Both local enhancement and sharpening increase noise at the same time they improve fine detail, gradation, and texture. Noise reduction, on the other hand, tends to suppress precisely those image attributes. Many digital files (and film scans) are improved by just a whisper of noise reduction, no matter how great the camera is. A lot more digital files need it when local enhancement or sharpening are coming into play.

Before (above) and after (below): To turn this photograph from what the camera saw into what I saw, I needed a certain amount of dodging and burning in but far more important was bringing up the large-scale tonal variations so that they would separate and print well.

Combining all three of these in different measures gives you broad control over the characteristics image. You can get reduced noise with no visible sacrifice of fine detail and texture. Or, you can get substantially improved sharpness and detail with no significant increase in noise. Or, you can split the difference and get a photograph that has lower noise and better sharpness at the same time.

Before (above) and after (below): This photograph got "the works"; everything in my basic toolkit was important to making this photograph work as a print: Proper dodging and burning in, local contrast enhancement to bring out the gorgeous ripples in the water I had seen, proper sharpening to bring out the details in the seals and make them stand out against the water, and noise reduction to get rid of the increased noise from the previous operations.

None of this is heroic; none of it is exceptional. It's the norm for good digital printing.

No mincing of words: this is what it takes to be better than run-of-the-mill.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column, which usually appears on Wednesdays, is a day late this week through no fault of his own.

[Note that the illustrations are only approximations. Real corrections would have to take size into account, as well as the big jump between screen and paper, and the TypePad blogging software has an effect on how illustrations look that is impossible to compensate for precisely. Finally, your monitor and its calibration might change what you're seeing relative to what Ctein—or anyone else—is seeing. —MJ]

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Richard Tugwell: "I bought one of Charlie Cramer's prints from TOP a while back—quite beautiful. I see he has an interesting and in-depth article on tonal adjustments using Lightroom 4 over at The Luminous-Landscape."

Featured Comment by Ned: "In my opinion this is an area where books, videos and other training techniques just don't cut it. I don't even know what a good print looks like, which is why I purchased Ctien's Micro 4/3 print. I don't like to print because I know it will be a piece of crap."

Mike replies: Sounds like you might be a candidte to become a client of a custom printer. Don't forget that there are numerous photographers, now and in history—including some of the greats—who let other people print their pictures for them. It's how Ctein makes his living. Perhaps his best-known client was the late rock-and-roll photographer Jim Marshall, but he prints for many other clients as well, some of whom are quite famous. Years ago I made my living as a custom printer too—and many of my clients at the time never made their own prints.

Remember this picture?

It was taken by Peter Turnley at Voja Mitrovic's retirement party, and shows Henri Cartier-Bresson and Josef Koudelka good-naturedly begging Voja not to retire.

Featured Comment by Ed: "Mornin', Ctein, great read as ever. To me printing is about effort and the ability to reject (no matter the cost). In a German documentary I saw Gursky at work at Grieger (one of the best digital print shops on the face of this planet). He was making a test print...2 meters 60 cm by .5 meter. Just to check local contrast, after he rejected a full print of 'Hamm Bergwerg Ost.' If your print does not provide what you want, tear it up—it is a painful, wasteful, yet very important part of the process of learning to print. And looking at examples like the ones you provided, well, that may make people wonder about their skills (and their preferences), but, hey, you don't get 40 years of experience overnight."