Christmas Deadlines

We’re doing everything we can to make sure we meet our Christmas deadlines. One concern is potential delays in the mail at this time of year but we’ve been assured by Royal Mail that Recorded and Special Delivery will be unaffected.
Photo Scanning
All work with us now will be completed and posted to online albums. We have additional capacity for runs of up to 1,000 images but as next week goes on returning prints will be tight. Images will be available for download soon after scanning.
Slide Scanning
All work received will be scanned and returned. We could handle additional small tasks, up to 200, but larger projects will be completed in the New Year.
Negative Scanning
We are expecting a large batch of 35mm negatives which will absorb all capacity up to Christmas.
Video tapes to DVD
Existing orders and video tapes with us now will be completed. Nothing received from now can be completed before Christmas, sorry.

Divine Composition With Fibonacci’s Ratio (The Rule of Thirds on Steroids

If you’re interested in photo composition, there’s an interesting article here.

35mm Slide Scanner? Which?

You can’t win them all, although we try. Last week I had a couple of conversations with a client who’d inherited a stack of 35mm slides. He has nearly 200 slides.
Of course I said, use us. Save time and bother, access expertise and technology (high price scanners, specialist software) that hobbyists are unlikely to afford. He was doubtful, in retirement he has time, a decent PC, so why not spend his money on a scanner?
Today he rang to say he was going to take the DIY route, so - sorry, but ....
Could I recommend a 35mm slide scanner?
Not wanting to sound like a sore loser I said I’d revisit the scanner market, which I’ve just being doing via Amazon. As the many users of our slide scanner amnesty will know I have a virulent dislike of the many cheap and cheerless scanners based on the insides of cheap digital cameras. Don’t waste your money, I’m pleased to say there are better options available.
We use Epson flatbeds, their top-of-range V750 and they’re great although pricey. However Epson now offer a V330 capable of scanning slides and negatives, at £83-50. Not very much more than the cheapo boxes. Plus this unit will scan several slides in one session, helping with the boredom factor.
Next up in the Epson range is their V500 at £150. That’s a big step up but you do get Digital ICE, dramatically reducing dust and scratches; and the time you’ll need to invest to get decent scans.
I’ve never used a Canon scanner but many who do sing their praises. The lowest price Canon I could see is their 5600F, at just under £100. If the F stands for FARE that’s Canon’s alternative to Kodak’s Digital ICE so you might get decent, clean, scans. Judging by user feedback you might have an issue with Windows 7 though.
There - plenty of choice. Whatever you go for, get a decent scanner, not a toy.

Ho Ho Ho

Hard to believe but Christmas is coming. Took a trip to the High Street on Saturday and saw that even the charity shops have Christmas displays, so it’s time to highlight our seasonal offerings.
Again this year we’re offering our Gift Vouchers for any combination of our video conversion, photo scanning, slide scanning or negative scanning services. These are personalised with a message you choose, and we can either send the voucher to you, maybe to include with a Christmas card, or sent direct to the lucky recipient. They’ve been very popular every year and make a great contribution to saving family memories.
This year we’re offering a new twist. When you pay in advance for the voucher we’ll give you an extra 10% boost to the value of your voucher, preserving even more memories.
If you’re looking for other Christmas gift ideas we have suggestions.

Scan, Service, Services, Photo and 'S'

Some things I don’t understand and the dark arts of SEO are one. Small example follows.
I think 1Scan is a photo scanning service. So does Google, we rank pretty well for that. If you search on that term we’re pretty close to the top. I’m happy.
We pop up pretty high for photo scanning too. Seems reasonable to me.
I’d expect us to appear high up for searches on ‘photo scanning services’. That’s just an S tagged onto photo scanning. Yet for some reason we’ve just dropped 75 places for that term.
Then, we just bounced back. Minus 75, then promptly up 81. Crazy.

Final Cut - Video File Conversion

One of the services we offer is to convert video tapes to computer files. We can support a wide variety of file types, but about 80% of demand is for Windows compatible files, the balance Mac. I’m pleased to say clients have been very happy with what we’ve been doing over the last four years.
Mac clients have been supplied with Quicktime files, based on the MP4 codec. I’ll try to explain that, Quicktime isn’t strictly speaking a file type it is more like a wrapper inside of which is a file with your film. The structure of that file is determined by the codec selected, as I said, in the majority of cases we’ve used the MP4 codec. Then last week I got a call from a client who couldn’t open our files in the video editing program they wanted to use - Apple’s own Final Cut.
As a consequence over the last few days I’ve been reading, checking, testing to try to get to the bottom of this, finally arriving at this point. For reasons I cannot understand if a Quicktime file is created using MP4 it can be opened and edited using Apple’s iMovie product but the same file cannot be opened in Final Cut.
I think the file type / codec Final Cut is looking for is DV format. Now, we can produce DV files, but there’s a big but attached. Mainly - but, they’re gigantic. A movie converted into Quicktime / MP4 ay just over 1Gb landed at a whopping 66Gb when processed as a DV file. And the conversion took about four times longer. For that reason we’ve made it clear that we aren’t offering DV format files.
What’s the solution if you would like to use DV files in Final Cut? Well, you can open these in iMovie and use that program to convert them to DV format.

Scanner Smashing - the movie

Many people have taken advantage of our Slide Scanner Amnesty under which we credit the value of your old, knackered, broken scanner against the cost of our scanning service. But what do we do with the old scanners? Well, I just dump them at our local recycling centre.
I think some people have been a little suspicious, maybe thinking this is a clever ruse to make a fortune selling old scanners on eBay. They have maybe thought there’s a catch. So I thought I’d shoot a quick Flip camera video showing one scanner meeting its end. A simple, five minute job, or so I thought.
No, you can’t film this at the dump, very camera shy, and anyway there’s nothing to see. Electronic goods are sent away to be stripped down so there’s really nothing to see. Plan B, destroy it myself at home. Place Minolta scanner on lawn, set up camera, grab large hammer. Roll film.
Hit scanner. Nothing. Repeat, still nothing. The force of the blows were just being soaked up by the grass and no damage was being done to the slide scanner. So I dug out an old paving slab and placed the scanner on that. Roll film, hit scanner.
I must have hit that thing ten times before it showed any sign of damage. Eventually the plastic on the casing showed a small crack and a few blows began to break the unit. To be honest I was disappointed, I didn’t get the great drama I’d hoped for. Finally, more than a little frustrated, I just threw the hammer at it. Not a great contribution to modern cinema but at least you can now see what we do with old scanners, and it doesn’t involve ebay.

Best Results?

If you had a choice, we sometimes asked, which would give the best results?
OK, you’ve got photo prints, negatives and slides. In practice we can quickly rule out a choice between photo scanning and slide scanning. It’s exceptionally rare that anyone would have any volumes of slides from which prints had been made, so the slide would be your only source material and you’ll have to go with that.
Photos started out as negatives, so you should have a negative to go with each of the prints. Technically its undoubted that negative scanning yields a better image than photo scanning. Don’t blame us for that, it’s down to a thing called dynamic range. That’s a measure of the spread of colour information a photo or negative can handle. negatives normally have great range, commercial prints much less. So all your colours, particularly the details in the shadows and highlights, get compressed and lost in the printing process. Negative scanning catches that, photos have lost it already.
But .... we can scan photos at a much lower cost than negatives, so most people opt to have their photos scannned.

Bigger Photos

Facebook has announced it will support bigger photos, up to 960 pixels. More here.

If It's Not Us ...

Sure, we’d love to scan every photo, slide and negative you care to send our way but you have to be realistic. For many people it’s just too risky putting precious photos in the post. 1Scan is a local scanning service for Essex, north London, Kent and other parts of Greater London.
What if you live elsewhere? What if you just can’t trust the mail? Well you can try Google or maybe a dedicated scanning service directory. Find-a-Scanservice is a directory of scanning services, searchable by type of photo originals to be scanned and location. It covers the UK, Europe and pretty much the rest of the world. Great site and service.
If you want you photos, negatives or slides scanned try us, but if you can’t, now you know where to look.

Photo scanning - tiff or jpg?

We’re often asked by photo scanning clients, which file format should I opt for - tiff or jpg?
Sometimes clients think that one format offers a better quality image than the other. That isn’t the case, scanning quality is determined by the dpi setting. In essence the higher the dpi the better the quality of the scan. So a 4,000 dpi tiff file is the same image quality as a 4,000 dpi jpg.
A tiff file is uncompressed, while a jpg is compressed. The maths behind image file compression is brilliant so for the vast majority of applications the fact that the file is compressed isn’t an issue. In fact jpg files are smaller, easier to email, quicker to open, making life a lot easier for most of us.
If you intend to do a lot of serious image editing a tiff file may be better. You can save without compression until you get to a final image, which you might save as a jpg for distribution. You can edit and save a tiff file many, many times without loss of quality, that’s the advantage.
Professional photographers typically want tiff files although many serious amateurs also opt for tiffs. If you’ve bitten the bullet on the price of Photoshop the extra cost and processing overheads of tiffs are hardly likely to be a barrier.
If you have slides or negatives as a source material tiff files are a viable option. If you’re sending photos (prints) then its unlikely that you’ll get any real advantage from tiffs, which is why we scan prints to jpg files.

Photo Backup

Yesterday I had a surreal experience. I had to drive to three locations in London, returning work to one and collecting from the others. When I got home I saw TV images of damage to police cars at a junction I’d driven past a couple of hours ago. Then substantial fire damage in a block in Clapham where another of our clients work.
I just don’t think I live and work in areas at the mercy of fire raisers and looters, this is London in the 21st century. But it’s clear how people have suffered, and how much distress people suffer when they lose precious possessions. I have ben struck how high up the list the loss of family photos has been for people in Hackney and Tottenham. What we we do to protect our own memories?
First, it helps to get your photos into a digital format. In physical form 4,000 photos fills a good sized box, once scanned these photos (scanned in high quality) would fit onto a DVD. That disc is easier to store and copy, so a duplicate can be held off-site.
If you have a large number of scanned photos you’d be thinking of storing them on a hard drive. As we’ve seen all too vividly, you need to have your digital image files copied onto a backup of that hard drive, and here’s the point, stored safely off-site. Certainly you could make an arrangement with a friend or relative to store your backup and it’s an improvement. You should also give thought to a professional off-site file backup service. We’ve used Apple’s MobileMe service (soon to be replaced) and Dropbox, both have worked well for us. A couple of weeks ago I signed up for a remote version of Apple’s Timemachine called DollyDrive. This gives me a complete backup of my machine which is stored “in the cloud” so if I should lose my hard drive, or even my MacBook, there’s a complete copy of my system held out of harms way.

Photo Scanning & Photo Restore

We scan photos. We restore photos. But ...
Will we turn dull winter shots into sparkling summer days? Replace mouse eaten corners from ancient prints? Lift unsightly buildings from a cluttered background? The answer is no, that’s not what we do. What we’re trying to do when we scan a photo or scan a slide or negative is to get the best digital version of what landed on the camera at the time the shutter was pressed. Time takes its toll, dust and scratches are a problem so we do what we can with those.
We want to give you the best scan of the images as it was. To do anything more is not just very expensive but also potentially ruinous, as we don’t know what you want to see until the digital photo scan is in your view. We know how much colour restore to apply through a thorough digital analysis of the data in the scanned image. That’s the best we can do. And we think it’s the most you should want from a photo scanning service.

How can I save money?

It’s not the question we’re asked most often but it does come up from time to time, most often in relation to slide scanning. It goes like this, “I’ve got 5,000 slides, what’s the cheapest you can do?”
Here’s the answer. Any number we quote, when multiplied by a very large number, results in a shockingly large number. The most effective way to reduce the bill is simply to go though your stack, with a lightbox and loupe, and mercilessly cull the poor images. The number you need is probably only 10-20% of the total.
Negatives? Think about getting negatives printed and then get the prints scanned. Cheaper and quicker, and if you really have any great negs then you can have those scanned on our top flight negative scanners.
Prints? Take the same route as with slides, invest your time in deciding which images you actually really, really need scanned.
The answer is not to try to get a poorer quality scanning job done. You’ll be disappointed and might even have to have the whole lot done again.

Photobox Offer

Since we teamed up with Photobox to deliver photo books for us we’ve had a lot of positive feedback about the service. Not simply the quality of their prints but also their customer service and value for money.
Just received an email to say their current discount offer is being extended for another week. The offer is here.
This is what they’re offering. When you sign up for an account with them you’ll get 40 prints free. Then, whatever you buy (including photobooks) you’ll get a discount of at least 10%. If you spend more you’ll get an ever bigger discount - 20% if you spend over £20, and if you spend over £30 you’ll get 30% off normal prices.
It’s a great summer offer, don’t hesitate.

Polaroid Photo Scanning

We can boost faded colours, it’s a major part of what we do, and it’s important with slide scanning and photo scanning. These types of original images are most prone to fading and we can do a lot to recover the original saturation and brightness that may have been lost over time.
What about Polaroid? Should we use our software to recover colours?
If we apply these features we instantly see a result, whites snap in place and other colours are clearer. But should we? If you look at an unfaded Polaroid original you’ll see the colour isn’t quite accurate, Polaroids have a distinct colour balance which gives softer, warmer colours. It’s an attractive type of colour and one that’s valued by lovers of Polaroid photography. My feeling is we should leave scans as the closest we can to the colours we see. Unless you’d particularly like us to adjust your Polaroids when we scan them.

All in a day ...

Every so often, the phone rings, and today it rang quite a few times. A frequent question is what are you doing? Often in a roundabout way, normally to ask if we can squeeze in an urgent job. Today’s urgent tasks are slide scanning for a professional photographer, photo print scanning for a last minute photo album plus a couple of video surveillance tapes for a legal firm in York.
In between gaps in the calls it was heads down to get through a normal days work - today the focus was on two major jobs. The first is a slide scanning project, just over 1,000 slides for a family archive. It’s turning out to be a fiddly job. Most people who shot slides used the same film, in the same camera, with a pretty reliable exposure system. Kodachrome dominates too. This job is different, the photographer has chopped and changed from one film to another and he’s been tough in sifting out substandard slides. So you scan 5,10 or 15 slides, then adjust the set up and off you go with the next set. Still, the variation makes life interesting.
The second job is less demanding, scanning photos is intrinsically easier. They’re all just photos and they chug through our scanner quite happily. This job has a single challenge - volume. This afternoon we crossed the 8,000 mark completing the seventh of eight boxes. So far the results look good and I’m hopeful that we’ll finish this part of the project early Thursday or maybe even late Wednesday. Then we’re into the final leg which is reducing the 300+ folders the images have been scanned into. The aim is to get them all into folders for the various trips and family events specified by the client. We’ve been given a master list of around 75 master folders. Although that sounds like a major task in itself it shouldn’t take too long.
So tomorrow it will be full steam ahead from first thing in the morning until about 11:00 when the postman arrives. Then we’ll break off and hit the urgent jobs that we’ve been promised were mailed today. That will keep us busy until mid afternoon when its back to our two major tasks.
Just a normal day in the office.

iPad and Online Albums

For clients with photos we scan them and then create an online photo album. This is great for sharing images and we know from stats that friends and family from all over the world (including China, India, Sri Lanka, Canada, Australia and many more) enjoy access to these albums.
One feature of the albums is the ability to download digital copies of each photo. This facility has been used many, many times over the last 18 months. Unfortunately we have run into a glitch with the iPad. While users can use the iPad to view images, because Apple iOS on the iPad doesn’t support Flash, you can’t download directly from the web to an iPad.
The way round this is to download images to your PC then copy the photos across as part of the sync process.

Travel and Landscape Photography

School reunion at the weekend, too many years since we last met up, all too many years since we were young, keen and innocent. Amazed and impressed by what many of my school friends have achieved in particular one your lady, Marion Bull.
She’s become an acclaimed travel and landscape photographer with work published all over the world. When I got back I took a look at her website. There are some great images - take a look - Marion Bull - creative & editorial photography.