This article – much more like today’s personal blogs – was included in the December 1995 contents of the Photon website. It looked back on one year, since the first day I connected to Internet in December 1994. At the time, I had absolutely no idea of the value of Photon. I learned to write HTML pages in the week before Christmas and put together then first Photon ‘pilot issue’ over the holiday break. Before this, I had no dial-up account and no knowledge of WWW. By mid-1995 Photon was in the world’s top ten websites, rated as third most popular website globally by Yahoo! and receiving more hits than Microsoft or Apple websites, or The White House, from its original hosting URL of http://www.scotborders.co.uk/photon
Author: David Kilpatrick
-
Microstock analysis
We have come across this site which presents an exceptional analysis of microstock sales:
http://www.perrush.be/SYF_micro_E_1.html
Not that, in your editor’s opinion, the results are all that wonderful – it would be easy enough to secure the same monthly earnings from a single direct sale to any publication, and it’s more interesting by far to try to place work directly with clients, talk to them, deal face to face or by email. But this is the best and most detailed analysis of microstock we have yet seen.
-DK
-
The Leaf Lumina scanning camera (1995)
David Kilpatrick reported in January 1996 on the performance of the Leaf Lumina, which Icon had acquired in early 1995 as one of the first digital studios to operate in Britain. Read this report on prices and technology in 1995-6 and weep!
-
Canon EOS 1n-RS (Photon magazine, February 1996)
BACK in 1996, David Kilpatrick and Andy Aitken reviewed the latest Canon for David’s Photon magazine. It has something which the Canon EOS 1D MkIII of 2007 also features – 10 frames a second. But to achieve this it had to sacrifice focus tracking and use a pellicle mirror, with the lens permanently stopped down during fast sequences. This article makes interesting reading in the light of developments since in the digital domain. (more…)
-
Judging colour in the darkroom
David Kilpatrick explains why controlled conditions are important and shows an example of a ring-around chart – something to keep pinned on your darkroom wall, made from your own test negatives or slides. This article was first published in 1996, and the principles if not the identical corrections can be applied to making inkjet tests from digital images. It is still most relevant to darkroom colour printing, for those who want to keep this art alive.
-
Cromazoning with just two lights
Dean Collins invented ‘cromazones’ – predictable, variable studio backdrop color from a gel-filtered background light. David Kilpatrick sets out to show how two low-cost strobes switchable down to quarter power give all the control you need.
We used Elinchrom EL250 and EL500 mains powered studio flash-heads. An Elinchrom Mini Optical Spot unit was used on the main light. The background light used red filter gel and a diffusing scrim. The seamless paper was black Colorama. Minolta 9000, 100mm f2.8 AF Macro, Fujichrome Provia 100. This article was originally prepared in 1995 for our first ever photo website and used images carefully trimmed in size to save bandwidth!
Zone Zero – plain black
Main light thru the Spot is the EL 500 at full power 500Ws. The incident light aperture reading using a Minolta Flashmeter IV is f11. There is no background light. To get a threshold trace of backdrop color, a red-gelled EL 250 at minimum power (64Ws) was moved until incident light on the black seamless paper was 2 stops less (f5.6). If you don’t see a change below, your monitor is set too dark or contrasty.
A trace of color
This hardly-visible trace of color is from the background flash at 64Ws, main light 500Ws. You’ll see a clear increase in background color in the next shot, where the background light (positioned on the floor under the subject shooting table) is turned up to half power – 125ws.
Rich dense color
For dark, dense color the background flash is at 125Ws half power, and the backdrop incident light reading is f8, one stop less than the main spotlight. The seamless paper is pure black at the top. This the lowest setting you’ll find useful in practice.
Pure deep color
With the background light up at full power (incident reading f11 same as main spot light) the color of the gel shows clearly, remaining deep, with a strong gradation to black. To widen the ratio between main (500Ws) and background (250Ws) light we now swap them over.
Strong color
The main spot light is now the EL 250 at full power with the lens opened up to f8. The background EL 500 head is at half power, 250Ws (f11). The result is pure strong color grading to dark gray at the top. We now have two stops further available main light power reduction, one stop further background boost.
Saturated color
The main light stays at 250Ws, camera set to f8; the background light is turned up to full 500Ws (f16). The result is saturated color with some remaining gradation in the background. The tiles now have a trace of reflected color. To adjust further, wider lens apertures will be needed.
Maximum color saturation
The main light is reduced to half power, 125Ws. The aperture set is now f5.6. The background light is at full power 500Ws, incident light reading f16. The saturated color burns out to pure ’emulsion layer’ red. The tiles have started to reflect color. The two small flash units now allow one step further by opening up to an unreasonably wide f4…
Color floods over
The aperture is now f4 and depth of field only just adequate, with the main spot turned down to 64Ws, quarter power. Red now floods the reflective tiles. Saturation in the center of the color zone is reduced, no backdrop gradation remains, but the black subject stays clean in our mid-grey painted studio.
Test your own setup on slide film, neg film or digital – which is likely to show a greater difference and may show may change in colour. Record your readings or settings so predictable color backgrounds can be created in future.
-
Colour modes and conversions (5D)
THE Konica Minolta Maxxum/Dynax 5D colour modes and conversions are like a whole box of film choices in one roll. This article was written using the 5D in 2005. The modes of the Sony Alpha 100 are similar, but the colour palettes will vary from these results. (more…)
-
How anti-shake aids art exhibit shooting
I SELL digital images through Alamy, the on-line photo library. When an original piece of art is out of copyright, and displayed in public or by an owner permitting photography, the ability to get a good quality reproduction copy on the spot without lights, tripod or flash is valuable. Some 8 per cent of my overall Alamy images sales over the past four years have been of signs, notices and labels – disproportionately high, compared to the actual number of such shots. As someone has commented, editors like pictures which tell their own story, and sometimes have words in the pictures does just that. (more…)
-
Frozen water – at 1/10th of a second?
WE spent a great week shooting mainly in Vaucluse, the district to the east of Avignon in the south of France, with Shirley using the 18-250mm Tamron f/3.5-6.3 lens exclusively. One object of this was to get some more example photos for a short article on the lens in our forthcoming Photoworld magazine. (more…)
-
Sony launches major HD advertisement campaign
9 July, 2007 – As take up of High Definition (HD) gains momentum in Europe, Sony is to launch a major Pan-European marketing campaign to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the company’s HD proposition and to educate consumers about the intricacies of HD.