The Monomagician

Why is it that large organisations feel the need to involve all sorts of people in issues that frankly, they have no understanding of and can add absolutely no value to. Why also do these people then feel the need to “get to the bottom” of a problem. Not necessarily to learn what the root cause was, but to find out who’s to blame?

There are times when I detest working for a large organisation and not surprisingly, today was one of those times.

You can imagine how happy I was when lunchtime came around and after a quick sandwich, was able to take a walk outside with my Canon G9. The light was pretty awful. Yesterday was what I call a ‘glad to be alive day’ owing to the crisp air and blue skies. Today was an altogether greyer affair.

Just as I reached the end of my walk around the perimeter of my workplace, I spotted a single leaf stuck in a chainlink fence. The camera was out of my pocket in a flash. I had in mind a monochrome image with the backlit leaf standing out from the hedge behind and the tones and hardness of the chainlink fence contrasting with the delicacy of the leaf.

The exposure was made with -1EV worth of exposure compensation to tame the highlights at the top of the picture. I didn’t want to go any lower as I wanted to keep the noise levels down to a manageable level as I was already shooting at ISO 200 to make sure I could use a decent shutter speed.

I processed the image in Lightroom. There’s quite a steep curve - partly to emphasise the mid-tones and also to lower the values of the darks tones and shadows. I also played with the contrast a bit to harden the image and accentuate the chain link and make the leaf stand out a touch more. Finally, I tweaked the green and yellow channels to bring out the leaf a bit more.

The final image is shown below.

Leaf in Chainlink Fence.

If you want to see more pictures a week taken in 2008, please visit Mark’s Picture a Week Pages

I felt much, much better for my walk and knowing I had a reasonably good shot in the bag made the afternoon a much more pleasant proposition.

A decent swim after work helped too!

The final print, made onto Permajet 271 Oyster paper shows a full range of tones and there is plenty of detail in the leaf structure.
I’m in two minds as to whether it’s worth putting on to fibre paper. I think I’ll mull that over with a glass of Speyside Single cask whisky.

It was time to stop procrastinating and do some more coding on updates for David Pentland’s website.  David wants to be able to give more details about the pictures on the site, for example, materials, size information and not least, price.

I’d completed the database design a couple of weeks back.  Whilst I had stated coding the new pages, I was having trouble with the AJAX code.  So, this morning, I simplified the code and now everything that I had planned to write works properly.

Once I had finished coding on David’s site, I turned my attention to another problem that I had experienced a few months ago, namely how to resize images to make a thumbnail gallery.

The O’Reilly book ‘PHP in a Nutshell’ showed the way, but I was having real problems getting my head around the header() function and how it works.  I took a look at the HTML specification, but I could feel my will to live ebbing away as I read.

A quick Google search brought up a plethora of php examples.  I took the simplest code and within a couple of hours had modified it to enable me to produce a resized jpeg image which had the same aspect ratio of the original file.  I also added code to enable the size of the final image to be varied.

To test the code fully, I knocked up a PHP script that produced a thumbnail gallery from any jpeg images that may be in a directory.  In total, it took a couple of hours to produce a working gallery.  All that’s left to do is to do some styling and then work out how to roll it out on Monomagic.

A damned good day’s coding, which was just as well as the weather has been atrocious today. Time for a glass or two of wine!

Or evenings, more like…The 3800 has been in place for six days and has had a fair amount of use by us both.  I saw my mate Phil Malpas at work this morning. He’s had a 3800 for almost a year and hasn’t had to change the inks yet.  He’s not exactly frugal with his printing either.  So it looks like it was the right decision from an economic perspective.

I cannot fault the image quality.  We’ve made prints on Epson Premium Glossy as well as Permajet’s Oyster 271 paper.  Both look great with colour and black and white images, but for me, the Permajet has the edge by virtue of its whiter base.  The Epson paper is positively creamy compared to the Permajet.

As I write this, I’m making my fourth A4 print on Permajet’s Classic Fine Art Fibre Base Gloss paper.  This is a 295gm² fibre-based paper.  The output is simply lovely.  I am chuffed to bits with the quality of the prints.  I want to try a couple fo the prints at A3 or even A2 if I can afford the paper.  It cost £1 per sheet at A4.  A pack of 25 sheets of A2 Classic Fine Art Fibre Base Gloss comes in at £94.95.  Not cheap, but in the immortal words of the Loreal adverts, I’m worth it!

To top it all, I even managed to take some pictures this lunchtime with my Canon G9, which I hope will have potential for my Picture a week project.

Less than twenty four hours after ordering an Epson Stylus Pro 3800 from Warehouse Express, I had a text message from Home suggesting that I might want to take the afternoon off work.  Sadly, I had to stay. Someone has to pay the bills…

When I finally got Home, there was a very large box in the hallway.  Our plan of campaign took shape over a cuppa and a carrot muffin.  First, empty the CIS ink tanks back into their original bottles, then make some space in the back bedroom, move the 2400 and then give the space where it had been a damned good dust.  I also took the opportunity to tidy up some of the cabling behind the PC and printer, which resembled an explosion in a spaghetti factory, with some curly cable tidying stuff that I had lying around.

Getting the box with the 3800 in it up the stairs wasn’t exactly difficult, but we were hindered by one rather inquisitive Samoyed with a penchant for cardboard packaging.  Moreover, having just had traction on my spine the day before, I had to be very careful not to undo the good work that my physio had done.  The right-angle bend at the top of the stairs added another slight challenge that was overcome with a little grunting and careful application of brute force.

Once the box with printer inside was in our study, there wasn’t much room for much else.  However, it only took a couple of minutes to get the printer out of the box and carefully heave it into position on the bench.

Once the printer was in position, it was time to power it up. After a few seconds of whirring, the door covering the ink tank bay opened.  The ink tanks are huge! They all required a good shake before being inserted into the printer.  Each one went in with a satisfying ‘click’.  When the door was closed, it was just a case of waiting about ten minutes while the printer charged the ink lines and went through whatever routines were necessary to set itself up.  Time for a spot of supper and a small beer!

So, supper finished and dishes in the dishwasher and it was time to connect the printer to the PC.  There was a bit of a hiccough when the Epson software said it could’t see the printer, but as Windows XP had detected it, I figured it was OK to continue.  When I went into the Printers and Faxes app on the Control panel, the printer was visible and I was able to run a test print from the Epson Stylus 3800 properties tab with no problem.

So, in total, I reckon it took about an hour, maybe an hour and a half to remove the 2400 from the study and install the 3800 in its place.  All that was left to do was fire up Lightroom and have a go at making some test prints.

The first print was a copy of this…

Port Quin, Cornwall

This was printed onto Epson’s Premium Glossy photo paper.  It looked stunning, even as a 9 x 6 print on A4 paper.  It was maybe a little dark, but that’s probably because I haven’t calibrated my monitor for a while.  I can’t wait to print it up on to A3 on Permajet’s Oyster 271 paper, which has a much whiter base than then Epson paper that I prefer.  It just looks cleaner to my eyes.

We decided to stop after five prints as it was getting late and I was a) thirsty and b) wanted to watch Thursday’s episode of “The Restaurant”.

OH HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN!

So, after much ummming and ahhing, we’ve made a decision that was rather surprising.  Someone on the Talkphotography forum responded to an enquiry about printers, suggesting I take a look at the Epson 3800 printer.  His rationale was that the ink cartridges hold 80ml rather than the rather paltry 12.5ml on the 2400 and 27ml in the HP B9180.  His logic was that the printer comes with £500 worth of ink, so it would pay for itself in next to no time.

So we did a few sums and based on an assumption that all of the printers consumed the same amount of ink per print, and knowing that we replenished inks on the 2400 say 6 times per year, we were able to roughly estimate the running costs.

They went something like this:

The discounted price is because Epson are doing a promotion at the moment, rewarding customer loyalty. So my tired old broken 2400 is worth £150! Fantastic!

I know I had said I was reluctant to go for another Epson printer due to the lack of user-replaceable parts, but, if the printer is reliable and lasts more than two to three years, then we’ll be quids in.  In fact with the discounted price, running the Epson 3800 would cost just 16p more than the cost of the HP B9180 and a year’s supply of ink.

There is also the added bonus that we can print up to A2+ with the 3800 (not that it’s likely to be used that often, but still, it’s added value!).

The line to Warehouse Express will be red hot tomorrow morning!

Having spent most of Sunday morning researching the printer market, I had narrowed my search down to the Canon PIXMA 9500 and the HP B9180. The cost of the inks though is enough to make your hair curl!  Using a CIS really does make you realise how expensive inks are.

Just before lunch I happened to log on to Ebay and did a quick search for ‘Epson 2400′.  There were a couple for sale, including one that had been refurbished, with a low starting price of £70.

After a brief discussion, we agreed that a refurbished printer would be a good way to get us going again and enable us to continue to use the CIS.  We set a limit of £150.  Sadly, someone else had much deeper pockets as it went for £195.  Never mind.  Looks like we’ll have to wait for our funds to grow a touch more.

There’s no way I will buy a new Epson printer.  So if we can’t get a replacement 2400 for a reasonable price, then I would prefer to get a new HP or Canon.

My Epson 2400 is still not cooperating.  In spite of my best efforts, the print heads won’t move from the parked position, so I can’t even get the CIS cartridges out to take it a repairer.

Talking of repairers, my local Epson Service centre refuse to even touch printers that have had a CIS fitted.

So, I’m now minded to just cut my losses and buy a new printer.  I have a bad feeling that it may be uneconomic to repair the 2400.  It looks increasingly likely that any new printer will NOT be an Epson.  I have heard that Canon and HP have made some serious inroads into Epson’s dominance of the market and I really do like the idea of user-replaceable print heads and automatic colour calibration (this is found on some HP models apparently).

The CIS will be rendered obsolete, but having said that it has paid for itself twice over in the year it’s been in operation.  I suspect I could easily sell it on Ebay and recover some costs that way.

Time to do some serious research and more importantly, lay the foundations with the keeper of the purse-strings!