Nikon Coolscan Medium Format Scanner

We’ve just taken delivery of a new Nikon scanner, the big brother of the Coolscans we have used for the last couple of years to scan 35mm slides and negatives.

Medium format scanning has proved to be a steady source of business for us, and as so many professional photographers used this type of material we need to deliver top quality scans. Thankfully the Epson has done that, but the price is time. Of course a medium format scan into a tiff file results in a big file, and that takes a long time. Getting three or four scans out in an afternoon isn’t unusual, particularly when we use Digital ICE.

A couple of weeks ago we were approached by a pro photographer wanting a substantial archive of M/F slides and negatives scanned. It would be a great project, but at Epson speed it would take a very long time. So that’s why we’ve decided to invest in the new scanner. I’m hoping we’ll be able to offer a better service to our M/F clients.

Google Wave

Some months ago I applied for a Google Wave account. I had read an article saying Google had created something which was intended to be what email ought to be if it were invented today (not some decades ago when I joined the computer industry). So that’s to be Google Wave - email for 2010.

Well, today my invite came through. I feel like the owner of the first phone must have felt. It’s great technology but I’ve got nobody to call. So instead I’ve been looking at the various tutorials Google have put on Youtube. I’m in part excited and confused. There’s been only one element I’ve completely understood - photo sharing.

For the vast majority of clients for whom we scan photos returning their images by post or courier is fine, but for some it’s urgent. For many our service is the first step on the way to doing something creative with their scans. In many cases that’s an online photo album.

For over a year we’ve been using drop.io - yes that’s actually a web address. There you can quickly create a website onto which you can upload a whole range of things, photos, text etc etc. We’ve used this with great success when people have wanted scans back quickly. What’s more, it is free.

Lately, and mainly in connection with our free photo scanning offering, I’ve looked into more powerful photo sharing functions. I looked at the sites offered by Kodak, Nikon, Flickr and others such as SmugMugs. For the mix of features 1Scan clients will need we decided to go with Zenfolio.

Back to Google Wave. One of the most impressive elements of their demos is the ability to share images in real time. As with any demo, it demonstrates well; how it goes in practice I don’t know. But I’m keen to try. So if you’re a Google Wave-r add me in - jeff.underwood@googlewave.com

Let’s Wave.

Zenfolio

For the last few weeks we've been working on a major enhancement of our services, and central to that is an online photo storage service called Zenfolio.

What we're planning is to deliver scanned images not just via CD or DVD as we do now but to put clients scans onto a secure website. This will deliver a longterm backup of your photo scans should the CD be lost or damaged, it will quickly and simply allow friends and relatives to view an online photo album containing those scanned photos.

Additionally this will facilitate easy access to a range of gifts customised with your photos - gifts such as mousemats, T-shirts, jigsaw puzzles. And there's also a wide range of standard prints, enlargements and canvas prints.

More soon.

Resolution for Photobooks

Earlier today we were asked what is the best resolution for a client wanting photos scanned for an online book printing service called Blurb.

Having checked their website they recommend a resolution up to 300 dpi. Our standard resolution is 600 dpi - what should we do?

Actually I think the service would be more than able to print from our 600 dpi scans, but the easier solution is to scan at 300 dpi. Problem solved. So, if you are using an external service and want 300 rather than 600 dpi, just let us know.

Don't, if you value your photos ....

How do you know that was you, the kids and Aunt Mabel on holiday in 1981? Probably by writing on the back of the print. No problem there - until you reach for a ballpoint, felt tip marker pen, or many other nasty devices.

First, the ink can easily permeate the backing material on the print and react with the dyes that make the image. Resulting in staining and unsightly marks on the photos.

Second, the ink can take a very long time to dry. So if that print is put back in the stack the ink can be transfered onto the face of the print above it in the pile. Same result, another print spoiled.

If you must write on the back of a print (and the temptation is probably irresistable) please stick to the humble pencil. Don't reach for a biro or a marker pen.

Your scan, my scan, one scan?

I could bore for England on the subject of scanning. There are no short answers in my book when it comes to scanning.

But I struggled to know where to begin when I was asked a simple question - why is your scan different to mine? This was asked by a client, we scanned around 500 old photos last week. He was kind enough to say he liked ours better and wanted to know how he could match them should he scan his own images at home.

Well - scanner hardware varies, the image capture and light generating components all have a bearing on final scan. Then there's the software, and the intention of the tech / marketing guys who set everything up. Of course the scanner operator can over-ride the settings. Put it all together and there's an infinite variety of options available.

Here's my take. I think our bulk scanning service offers a warmer colouring than your originals may have. The Epson flatbed is noticeably colder in comparison.

The Nikons are much more objective on negatives, producing an image much closer to the data on the negative. Slide scanning is (I think) giving slightly deeper colours; Kodachromes can be very warm in comparison.

So what? Not a lot really - but please ask us to do some samples for you, using your material, then you can draw your own conclusions.

JPG or JPEG 2000?

We've been asked by a potential client if we can offer scan in JPG 2000 or JPEG 2000 format. The answer is yes.

If you'd like your jpgs as JPEG 2000 then just ask. We've always been able to supply this format for medium format and print scans, now we're extending this to cover all scans. Just ask, we'll do the rest.

The later jpg format offers better resolution on compression compared with "ordinary" jpg files.

Nikon SF-210

I've ben asked about our experience in 35mm slide scanning using the Nikon automatic slide feeder attachment, SF-210. Typically the question comes from someone who's frustrated with their unit, or wanting justification for spending over £500 on a bit of plastic having already spent the best part of £1,000 on a scanner.

The problem is slide jams. Yes, they happen to us too. The best preventative measure is to watch and listen to the unit, you can hear it as it struggles to feed a slide. Nimble fingers can help it on its way.

The best way to prevent jams is to get the gate adjustment correct via the knurled knob on the side of the slide feeder. Sort your slides so you have a batch of the same thickness and you'll be well on the way to smooth scanning.

Decent plastic mounts scan well, cardboard less so but generally OK. The worst are bent cardboard or card that has become "fluffy" over the years, the thicker card does catch on the mechanism.

People focus on the mechanics of the feeder and yes jams cost us time too. But what costs us more time is the rather hopeless way Nikon's sacnner software handles jams. Resetting that takes much longer and its a noticeable thorn in the side of smooth 35mm slide scanning.

Concentrate

Sometimes clients ask for advice - the most frequent topics are creating slideshows and assembling photo albums. I had their questions in mind when last weekend we vistited friends (that's not the Royal we, they're more my wife's friends so we went together).

"Would you like to see our photoalbums?" Genuinely I could say yes, and two Bonusprints albums were pulled off the coffee table. I started to flick through the images. Oh dear.

First impression, this is boring. Each page had been crammed with photos, consequently each one was the same size and very square. Now square is hard to compose for, and that did nothing for the images.

Second, this is a mess. What they'd done, and I can see it seemed like a good idea at the time, was get bound all the photos they'd taken this summer. They'd taken a trip to St Petersburg, there was some family celebration, a weekend away in Lille, and a relative held a retirement party. And more.

My brain was in overload, it was just image after image, we jumped from one location to another, from a Russian square to a marquee in Reading. I quickly lost the thread of what was going on. OK, it's easy to criticise but how would I have done it better.

Just concentrate - on one subject. Our Trip to Imperial Russia would have made a great album, and the viewer would experience the warm glow of knowing each page helps you explore a brilliant holiday. They had enough shots to fill an album and I suspect if you go to St petersburg you'll be hard pressed to take a bad photo. Then selectively invest in a few enlarged images. Go on, throw caution to the wind and have a single image on one page. That would have made a big impact.

What of the second album? I'd say the same should apply. Have one album, albeit smaller, for the events they'd taken shots. I would have skipped old Fred's retirement bash, but a few snaps of their kids over the summer would have been worth flicking through.

Next time I open iPhoto to compose a photoalbum I'm going to go for the event, the whole event, nothing but the event.

Kodachrome RIP

Spent most of yesterday scanning some pretty ancient slides, old and in poor condition is a rotten combination. Thankfully our scanners have some built-in tools that help, notably Digital ICE which is fantastic at removing major dust and scratches. As I chugged through the pile my little heart sank every time I came across a Kodachrome because Digital ICE sadly doesn’t work on this type of film. Scanning 35mm slide, you come across a lot of Kodachrome.

Having a love / hate relationship with the film didn’t stop me feeling a pang of remorse when I read in The Times this morning that after a production run of 74 years Kodak are withdrawing Kodachrome. It seems Kodachrome dates back to 1935 and originally appeared as 16mm movie film but then made the transition to 35mm slide stock. Over 100 million rolls of Kodachrome are said to have been made, and in America a state park has been named after it. The Zapruder film of the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 was shot on Kodachrome too. Somewhat oddly it seems to have been loved as much by professional photographers as by hobbyists. It must be one of the few truly global brand identities ranking alongside that of Kodak.

The Times quotes a 35mm slide as having 20 megapixels of data but they don’t give the source of that, interesting to me as that’s one of the highest figures I’ve seen for 35mm data capacity. Alongside the article is a glowing tribute to the quality, colours and warmth of Kodachrome, positioning it as the vinyl record equivalent of photography.

Paul Simon’s song “Kodachrome” made it to number 2 in the US pop charts in 1973, a song I still have on my iPod and often pops up on the radio. Apparently Dwayne’s Photo of Parsons, Kansas will process Kodachrome until 2010, at which point it’s a final goodbye to what must have been the world’s favourite film.

Totally Incorrect

When I saw a blog mentioned with the name of Totally Incorrect (www.totallyincorrect.com) I just had to take a look. I’m very glad I did, here’s why.

I’ve been asked to put together some slideshows for clients, two of whom wanted their weddings covered. David Holliday who writes Totally Incorrect also runs a wedding event / photography business called Unique Weddings, so on the main page of his blog he has a slideshow style clip promoting his service. As with any slideshow it’s a simple mix of photos and music. I just loved it, so I suggest you hop on over to totallyincorrect.com to take a look, but first let me explain why I liked it.

First, it works. If somebody did this of my wedding I know my wife and I would love it. We’d look at it time and again.

Second, there’s great inspiration in the shots David has taken. The still life of the bride’s shows, the table top with all the name labels. Would you have thought of taking those shots? I know the shoes my wife wore are important to her - 30+ years down the track they’re still at the back of the wardrobe.

What really hit me was the choice of music. The choice and David’s bravery in the way he uses it. To appreciate what I’m saying you’re going to have to watch all the way through to the very end to know what I mean. My choice for music would be classical, OK I can trot out some sort of logical justification for that but really nothing else ever crosses my mind. David’s choice isn’t classical, although it did sound to me as if it had classical overtones. Throughout it works, it’s a great choice but sorry I don’t know what the track is.

The bravery comes in at the end. He lets the track run through his images right into the very quiet ending. I bet 99.99% of us (me included) would have chopped out the quiet ending. That would be mundane, predictable and safe. David took a bold step and it really works. I bet if you ran that for the bride and groom you would hear their hearts beat as the clip ends.

It’s under four minutes. It’s great - and any one of us can learn from it. Go check it out NOW.

In Case of Fire?

What would you grab?

The American insurance company Chubb Corp. commissioned a poll which found that nearly half would grab a family photo album, while a fifth would reach for money. They surveyed 1,000 Americans and found that 13% would take a laptop, 7% would bring their pet and 2% would pack their jewelry.

One third of respondents said they don't store valuable documents in a fire-resistant safe or at an off-premise location. But 73% said they've cleared their roof or gutters of leaves and debris, and 70% have removed dead or flammable plants and trees from around their homes.

Still, a fifth said they haven't replaced the batteries in their smoke detectors.

Battle of the Sexes?

Facing a long flight to New York recently I went into the bookshop at Heathrow to invest in a couple of books. Just as well I did, American Airlines promptly cancelled our flight so we had four extra hours to kill until Virgin could rescue us and we were on our way.

One of the books was “Fl!p” by Peter Sheahan. maybe it should be Flip but it’s Fl!p on the arty red cover. I don’t expect a modern business book to mention a photo scanning service, and this is no exception, but it does mention the different attitudes men and women have to photos. The suggestion was that men are content with digital images while women want a physical image they can hand around. Not sure that’s true but I can see where he’s coming from.

When we got back Laura, who’d been managing the show while we were away, said she’d had a call from a client whose scanned photos hadn’t arrived in the mail. I had a message to ring their home number, which I did. There was nobody in so I left a message on their answering service. I explained that I would create an extra copy of the CD with their scanned photos and mail it to them that day.

Next day I received two calls within minutes of each other. First, Mr Client who said he’d received a text message from his wife to say what was in the mail. Thanks, he said, for the second CD, but the original package had now turned up. However it’s very useful to have a second copy of the CD which he was going to send to his brother. CD, CD, digital images, thanks.

Then Mrs Client rang, so happy that her original photos hadn’t been lost. How worried she’d been when told they’d gone out a day or two earlier, how she’d fretted she might never see them again, what a relief the prints have now arrived. Prints, prints, prints, thanks.

OK, just one small example. But it does support Peter Sheahan’s suggestion, in this case the woman was keen to get the prints back, while her husband was happy enough with the digital versions.

Jar Gallery

I like photo prints just as much as anybody, without prints we wouldn’t have a major chunk of our business which is indeed scanning prints for people. But I do like the idea of sharing photos and scanning is very much about being able to share - often across continents.

Prints are there to be enjoyed, yet all too often they live in obscurity at the back of a drawer. I really liked this idea and I’m not too proud to admit I came across it on an American website - using glass jars as photo frames. So I dug out an old marmalade jar, thankfully it had been through our dishwasher (Brentwood Council won’t recycle dirty glass) and just slotted a print inside it. I was lucky as the print immediately slipped neatly into the flat side of the jar, no scissors and trimming needed. I put the jar on the window sill and it took on life with the light behind it.

I then took the photo out and turned it round, of course you want the opening of the jar down to stop it trapping the dust (don’t you?). I was quite pleased with the result, for no cost and about five minutes time. I think if I’d dug out three or four photos I could have made a nice family group. Perhaps if your could line a jar with some protective plastic you might be able to make a decorative and useful present.

When the children were younger I think they’d have enjoyed making cheap but appreciate presents for grandparents, or perhaps this could be one of those primary school projects for Mother’s Day.

DPI - How much is enough?

From time to time we get asked about something called “dpi” - dots per inch. It’s a technical measure of how much data is used to convert a physical (analogue) image into a digital file. In some ways its easy to answer but often it gets very technical.

The easy answer is “enough”, and if you’re not technically minded feel free to click away now.

For the more geeky among us our basic print scanning service can deliver 300 dpi, 600 dpi or 1200 dpi. Let’s start with the original photos that we scan, they are printed at what is in digital terms 300 dpi. If you want to view images on a computer or TV scanning at 300 dpi will give you a more than acceptable result and will load pretty well in a photoframe. If you make reprints of the file at or a bit bigger than the original the image will be fine.

At 600 dpi you have a much bigger file, if you remember your geometry it’s four times bigger so that will be tougher to load into a photoframe, somewhat slower to load on a PC or DVD player but will deliver prints capable of being enlarged.

What about 1200 dpi? Yes, we can offer this but there’s a big “but”. We’ve done tests, as have a few clients, and in viewing terms on PC, TV/DVD, on Apple TV or similar photo streaming systems, there is no benefit. Technically your files will be 16 times bigger than those at 300 dpi giving you a big jpg file. It’s slow to load and hard to handle. Compared to scanning speeds of 300 dpi or 600 dpi at 1200 dpi you think the scanner has broken down it goes so slowly. For that reason we would typically charge more for 1200 dpi photo print scans. Frankly, it’s not worth the bother.

Yet if you look elsewhere you’ll see we offer very much higher dpi rates with jpg and tiff files when scanning negatives. How do we reconcile this? Well it’s all to do with the size of the original. Take a 35mm slide or negative, that’s very small so to get a decent size image or print a degree of enlargement is necessary. If we scanned that at 300 dpi it wouldn’t enlarge, so a four times enlargement would still only be a modest print (around postcard sized) and you’d need 1200 dpi for that. For that reason our Home slide and negative scanning runs at 2,000 dpi.

Is there a maximum? Well many people have suggested that the maximum amount of data that can be extracted from a 35mm slide or negative is 4,000 dpi. Nikon, one of the foremost names in photography and the maker of our 35mm scanners offer a maximum of 4,000 dpi on both their 35mm and medium format scanners. So that’s why we don’t go beyond 4,000 dpi.

What if the client is adamant in wanting a 4,000 dpi scan of an A4 sized print? I can’t think why it would be wanted or needed but we’re service business and in the final analysis the customer is always right.

Photo Security

I was scanning photos and listening to BBC Essex yesterday and was struck by an item on the awful fires in Australia. An Essex woman was desperately trying to contact her brother and his family who lived in one of the worst hit areas, naturally she feared the worst.

The tale had a happy ending, the BBC managed to track down the lost brother who was safe and well. Brother and sister had spoken and the brother was interviewed about his experience. What struck me was what he said he’d picked up the moment they got the instruction to evacuate his house immediately. First was a leather jacket (to help protect him from the fire) and third was “important documents”.

Second was his family photos. From a personal and professional perspective I can understand that, but I also have conversations with people planning to digitise their family photo archive, people who would find it hard to assemble all their photos in several hours. So what we would we, thankfully away from the risk of bush fires, do if faced with flood or someother British disaster?

I can smugly say all my photos are safely backed up online thanks to Apple and MobileMe. Digital files can be recovered instantly, even if I lost my computers as long as I could get internet access I could download my jpgs and re-instate my photo library. You could do the same, but you have to act now.

Improving Photos

Last week we did some scanning, a lot of scanning, so come Friday evening we had watched thousands of images run through the scanners. Some were from professional photographers but the vast majority were from people like me - keen amateur snappers just wanting to capture life’s precious moments. But it was a lot of jpgs, quite a few tiffs and a good few miles of photo paper.

Relaxing weekend, met up with friends and relatives at a christening where the conversation turned to photography. What, was the question, can the ordinary person do to get better photos?

Having stood looking at the photos slide their way into the mouth of Mr Nikon, Mr Kodak and Mr Epson one simple step was obvious. When taking a photo simply move closer to the subject. Doesn’t matter if its and individual, a small group or a formal wedding image, most people just have too much photographic ‘noise’ around the main subject and as a result the picture is disappointing. Is it meant to be a group shot or a view of the church?

If you’re taking a photo just move one or two steps closer to the subject before you put the camera to your eye; if you have a zoom facility zap straight in then gently come out until the view screen shows only the subject. If you have taken the picture already (maybe its been scanned or it’s a digital photo) open it in your photo editing program and look for the Crop function. That will enable you to cut out all the extra, distracting bits that detract from the photo. Cut it out - in this case less is always more.

Photoframe Mystery

We had a call from a lady who’d been given a photoframe for Christmas. She asked if we could scan some photos so she could see them on the frame, we went through the technical spec (jpg, dpi level) and she asked if we could do colour (yes), black and white (yes), both black & white and colour in the same batch (yes). And yes we would turn them all the right way round.

She had a very particular requirement, that the photos (of a cruise around the baltic states) appeared in the right order. We explained we could do that. A few days later the photos arrived, neatly labelled with Post-it notes and tied in a bundle with elastic bands. We took great care to scan the photos in exactly that order, put them onto a USB drive and sent them back.

The client rang to say she was happy, but you could hear the but in her voice. The but being the photos looked great but didn’t show in the desired order. Why?

I have a Philips photoframe and that can be set to show images in a random order. We talked on the phone and established that wasn’t the problem. There followed a couple of days of head scratching, lots of trials and a frustrating number of false dawns. Then we managed to find the solution.

We had scanned the photos in the right order, and numbered them accordingly. But our system generates a long file name. When we truncated the file names down to two digits the photos popped up in the right order. And we’d learnt a lot more about photoframes.