Focus After The Fact

This after noon I spent a couple of hours on a rescue job. A client supplied a set of images taken of his late mother, but due to a camera operator error they were all out of focus. Hence time spent trying to get a degree of sharpness into each image. If you're familiar with Apple's photo editing application, Aperture, you'll know this has a solid set of sharpening tools. You can sharpen the whole image or you can "paint" sharpness into an area of your image.

So, switch off USM in Silverfast, scan the negatives, then load them into Aperture. Finally yielding 12 images where the subject is acceptably sharp, and that area of the image is isolated with the background slightly unfocused. Then I was reminded of this - the Lytro field camera.

This is a special device, it's a camera that doesn't focus. It is a revolution in photography.

I won't try to describe the camera - just go to lytro.com to see it - but it looks different and the resulting image can be focused at any given point in the image. I don't mean finally, you can post the image on a website or email it and the observer can adapt focus as they wish. A truly brilliant idea.

Photo Apps

Having just acquired an iPad I opened the supplement in today's Sunday Times looking for ways to use my iPad for something photographic. They list several apps but most of them are for the iPhone. No use to me, I'm Android. Still they do mention a couple for the iPad.

8mm Vintage Camera: add a nostalgic style to movies. Adds dust and flecks and the sound of a running film reel.

Paper Camera: makes your photos look like they were hand-drawn on paper.

Thumba Photo Editor: looks like a powerful set of tools - cropping, rotating, brightness & contrast adjustments, hue / saturation, adjust white balance. Sounds a lot for just 79p.

Kodak. More Than Oops.

So, once proud Kodak has filed for protection from its creditors. For people of my age Kodak, like Coca Cola, Pepsi, Ford and so on, was one of the names we grew up with and as I've said many times it's a company that owns photography. So it should, it invented most of it.

I wish Kodak well, particularly those we've had contact with in their photo scanning division. Kodak is needed, not just by this business, but by everyone who has ever picked up a camera. Let's hope this tactic will give them the time they need to pull through.

Although I wish them well I have to say I think they're on the wrong track. Kodak IS images, not printers and certainly not flogging off their patents, which seems to be the plan of the current top man. Why, why, why are they flogging themselves to death advertising printers when surely the evidence of their own eyes must prove that nobody is bothered about printing.

Yesterday I was in a branch of PC World. Yes they had a cute display of Kodak printers, curiously at ankle level. Nobody taking any interest. People were congregating by the large displays of cameras, still and video, an area where once Kodak would have dominated. Nikon, Olympus, Leica are all great names from the past who have somehow pulled through to the other side. It would have been nice to see a Kodak credit on some of those cameras.

Best of luck Kodak, hope you make it, but you might have to forget those printers before it happens.

Photo Scanning

This is the first post about issues, thoughts, ideas, and a few gripes on photo scanning.

Photobook Prices to Fall?

When is a book not a book? Well according to the VAT man, when it’s a photobook. Apparently he’s long taken the view that a photobook is really a special type of photo album, which means they’ve been subject to VAT.

However a recent ruling in a case brought by Truprint, photo and photobook printers. it has been agreed that all photobooks should be treated like ordinary books, effectively exempt from VAT. Apparently there’s been a split for many years in the photobooks industry between those suppliers who emerged out of the book publishing trade and those who turned to photobooks from printing snapshots. It was difficult for the latter to compete with the former as the VAT people told them to charge VAT, not an instruction they’d given to their competitors who naturally thought they were in a variant of the book business. Truprint and I’d guess others are now in line for a chunky tax rebate.
What does that mean for the market? Maybe prices will fall, maybe not. At least all suppliers will be on the same tax footing going forward.