I’ve had an Epson 7600 for a few years and always thought of it as a big machine with an appetite for ink and a producer of impressive big prints. Up to 24″ wide by any length. Boy, have I had to recalibrate that thinking! I just got through shooting a job for some interior banners that will hang at the newly remodeled downtown Dallas YMCA. They are being printed on an HP Scitex XL Jet which prints up to 5 meters wide (196″). The images will be full bleed and the size is 9ft x 18ft. I shot using a rented Nikon D3x. I’ve written about that experience here. The resolution of the D3x is roughly 4000×6000 pixels. The long dimension of the banners of 18ft, or 216 inches. Dividing the resolution (6000 pixels) by the printed dimension (216 inches) will give us the maximum pixels per inch that I would get on the print: 6000/216=28. If I crop the image I would have fewer pixels. Is 28 ppi (pixels per inch) enough? Absolutely, because of viewing distance.

When I do my own exhibition prints, I have found that anything over about 150ppi is seldom seen in the print itself. If the image is a technical or highly detailed shot involving product with sharp edges, a super high-res multi image panorama or overlayed vector art or text, then going to 200 or 250 ppi can make a difference. Those images are hung on a wall and viewed from a few feet away – unless you’re like me and always lean in, tip your head, and look to see what kind of detail there is in the print. Its sometimes an unkind thing to do, but I’m always interested in printing technique and it doesn’t get in the way of enjoying the image as art.

These large banners will hang overhead and the minimum viewing distance from a 6′ person’s eyeballs to the bottom of the banner will be 7ft, assuming they are looking straight up. To the center of the banner would be about 11ft. More realistically, the viewing distance as people move around the room will be well over 15ft. If 150ppi is great quality at a viewing distance of 3 feet, then what happens at about 15ft? Subjectively, I can tell you that they look great. I’ve seen the prints at Color Place, who is doing the printing, and was pleased with how crisp they look from a few feet away. The numbers support this. There is a simple, linear relationship here. A viewing distance of 3ft is 1/5th of a viewing distance of 15ft. Take our target high quality image of 150ppi and divide by 5 and you get, yup, 30ppi. There is a good article on this topic here.

The ink droplets from the HP Scitex XL Jet printer that Color Place uses are pretty big. Well, big in the ink jet world. They are specified at 80 picoliters. By comparison, my Epson 7600 has a minimum drop size of 4 picoliters. That’s billionths of a liter, which is small! What that means is that the image from the XL Jet, when viewed closely, has quite a bit of dithering, a kind of noise pattern that results from the low printing resolution. That is actually a very good thing in terms of percieved sharpness. At a distance, that noise actually sharpens the image. Try it yourself. Print a photo, then add noise to it in your image editor. Put them side by side and step back. Often the noisier image will appear sharper.

I visited Color Place when they were printing and finishing the banners. The printer is really big, and so is the head assembly. I complain about buying 220ml cartridges for my printer. These guys buy ink by the gallon. When the print technician saw me photographing the bottles on the floor he said “Oh, that’s just junk ink. We can’t use that. Here’s the new stuff” and then showed me the cabinet with the new gallon jugs.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is how inexpensive this kind of banner printing has gotten. It costs me about $2/square foot in ink and paper to print on my Epson printer. You can get banners made for around $3 to $4 per sq. ft. You aren’t going to hang them in a gallery, but it is a blast seeing images this size.

I needed something higher resolution than my D300 for the big banner project. I’ve been a Nikon user forever so was leaning toward the D3x, since it would give me twice the resolution of my D300 plus a full size sensor and lower noise. I also considered the Canon 5D MkII and some medium format cameras. The Canon was a little lower resolution than the Nikon and online reviews and samples showed the D3x to have a (sometimes small) lead in image quality. The Hasselblad CF22 shoots at 4080 x 5440 pixel. The photos are to be printed at 18ftx9ft, or a 2:1 aspect ratio. So the number I care about here is the 5440 pixel horizontal resolution, which is less than the 6000 pixels of the D3x. I looked at specs for the Hasselblad CF39 at 5412×7212, which is more pixels and a bigger sensor. But considering that that’s only a 20% increase in resolution and it would be a totally new and strange system to work with, the D3x was the sensible choice for me. Plus, the camera is laid out just like my D2x so felt comfortable and familiar.

I rented it from an equipment house in Dallas and took it to the studio for some tests and to zero in the focus on the 3 prime lenses I was planning to use, a 50 f1.4, 85 f1.4, and 105 f2.0. I was also borrowing an 80-200 from a friend. I was going to be shooting close to wide open for limited depth of field and found that both the 50mm and 105 had to be compensated for in the setup menus.

This was going to be six shots spread out over 3 days. The first day of the shoot went well, having the D3x tethered gave me quick feedback on sharpness and cropping, although the Nikon Camera Control Pro 2 software just about drove me crazy. (that’s going to be another post!) The morning of the second day was when things changed. I was shooting some test exposures and when I looked down at the camera’s display, I was looking at the previous shot. I shot a few more and noticed that the counter was not incrementing. Another photographer was assisting me that day and he shoots with a D3, so knew this camera well. We had been shooting on dual CF cards in Backup mode, so the images were supposed to be written to both cards, but nothing was being written.

We pulled the cards and swapped them. Nothing. We tried the cards one at a time. No data was being written but the camera thought it was fine and showed no errors. Then I tethered to Camera Control and was able to control the camera but after exposing it wrote no files to the laptop. Then we tried Live View, both tethered and stand alone and neither worked. We did the 2 button reset, changed batteries, changed lenses, left it off for a few minutes with no battery, stood on one leg, basically tried everything. When we inserted and formatted yet a third card, it started shooting again but after 3 good frames the last one came up striped green on the screen, the kind of green that makes you stop breathing for minute if you’ve ever gotten that kind of data corruption before. That’s when we decided to stop shooting and reschedule for the next day. The camera had failed and I had a client looking at me from across the room. Normally, I would have a backup body, but this was a special situation with a rental and we just had to quit for the day.

We were really stunned that the D3x failed, as was the rental house. I was able to get another rental from another place in town and finish the job, using the same memory cards and same setup with no more problems. Unfortunately the rental house was unable to make it fail again and suggested that it was not the camera but the memory cards. That conversation didn’t end well, but I did get the job done, and the quality of the images was really impressive.

Three of the six shots were done with just ambient fluorescent light and a couple of reflectors. I used a Lastolite grey card for color and it worked well. A sturdy tripod was really important here since even a tiny bit of shake could really mess with a 1/4 second exposure with an 85mm lens.

Here’s the setup for two of the shots with the final images:

I wanted to be able to use my laptop tethered while shooting. I looked into a couple of commercial laptop trays, but they were kind of overkill. I used an extra Bogen Magic Arm and some plywood to make a usable platform. I cut a piece of 1/2″ plywood slightly smaller than the footprint of the Vaio laptop and inserted a 1/4″-20 threaded insert into the center, dressed it with some black gaffer’s tape, and made a strap out of velcro. It gave me a stable, adjustable platform for the laptop.

As part of gearing up to teach classes I needed a good video projector. There are so many on the market and the prices have tumbled over the years while the quality has gotten much better. I had settled on a couple of 720p resolution choices, but then figured that I’d look into the 1080p units so I could also use the projector at home on the weekends to watch movies. I spent a lot of time looking at reviews. If you’re reading this, then I’d bet you know just how obsessive the hunt for the perfect piece of equipment can become. Sometimes, that kind of crazy quest for the best just leaves me exhausted and wishing I had just bought the first choice. This time it all paid off.

I ended up buying the Epson 6500UB. For a while it was a toss up with the Panasonic PT-AE3000. The Epson won because of its brighter image, which I’ll need at the studio for presentations. The image that comes from this projector is really jaw droppingly beautiful. I have it set up temporarily at home projecting onto a full sheet of foam core. So, with a BluRay movie, we are watching images that are 8ft wide, and I have been stunned by the clarity, sharpness, saturation and black levels of this projector. The first couple movies I watched were Pixar animations, and it was a real treat to have part of the Pixar experience in our own home. Then I watched a recent film release and for a moment was shocked by all the film grain. It’s pretty cool to be viewing at a resolution that actually lets you see when they changed to a high ISO film stock for a dark interior or effect.

My new Vaio laptop has an HDMI port, and it works perfectly with this projector. The one thing that frustrates me when using HDMI is that the projector has a very slow handshaking process, so it takes up to 10 seconds for an image to show up. This is a real problem when feeding it from the HDMI connector on my Nikon D300. The image is beautiful, but every time you switch back from shooting mode to playback, nothing happens for a while until the image pops up. The solution to this will probably be an HDMI switcher that constantly outputs a signal so the data isn’t interrupted and the projector display stays live. We’ll see how that works out. . .

Photo by Epson

My friends who think of me as a total geek were really shocked when I announced that I was finally giving in and buying my first laptop. What took me so long? Like most photographers, part of the reason I enjoyed this business is that I didn’t want a desk job. Now we all have desk jobs, sitting in front of Lightroom or Photoshop for hours at a time. I have machines at the studio and at my home office and really liked not being wired in between. But I really needed to let clients see something bigger than the display on the back of my camera, and I wanted a new computer to use for teaching and demonstrations. So it was finally time.

I’ve been using computers for a long time. I used to catalog, sort and label slides on a Kaypro 10 using a DBaseII from the command line. That machine had the extra large 10 Megabyte hard drive and sported 64K of ram. That’s right, not 64GB or 64MB, but 64 thousand bytes. A friend and I bought similar machines at the same time at which point he made a prophetic statement about computers. He named it after himself and called it Ramsey’s law. It states: “The computer you want will always cost $3,000″. That has proven to be remarkably accurate over the years. You can find great machines for just a few hundred dollars now, but if you’re a photographer, the one you want is always around 3 grand.

When I started looking for a laptop my two main concerns were speed and display. I wanted it to be fast enough to run Lightroom, which can lag and stutter on the fastest machines. And I wanted a display that would calibrate well, be visible in high ambient light, and NOT have the ultra glossy finish that seems to be the surface of choice this year with designers. Of course I looked at the high end machines with big screens, optimized for Photoshop, and guess what? They cost around $3,000!

I’m used to working with a pair of large monitors on my studio machine and originally looked for a laptop with a big screen. I realized that big screen means big and heavy laptop. I’ve been doing my best to reduce the amount of gear and weight I carry around, so started looking at the smaller laptops. What I discovered and finally settled on, is a Sony Vaio VGN-Z530N/B. I really like this machine. It has an LED backlit display that is incredibly bright. After setting it up with my Xrite EyeOne Display 2, the difference between calibrated and uncalibrated was very slight. The screen is matte surface, has anti-reflection coating and a scratch resistant layer that offer protection help over time. It is fast, has a nice keyboard, and it very light, at a bit over 3 pounds. It will actually slip into the back pocket of my camera bag, but I’m using a small satchel to also carry the pile of cables and accessories that I’m now toting around. I paid $1,300 for it on sale at MicroCenter here in Dallas.

Photo by Sony