so many stars

Tattoo Project

Tue, 9 Jan 2007 00:33:52 -0500

the tattoo project
i am currently working with another lehigh valley based artist named adam kuder on a collaborative project centered on a tattoo theme. while adam’s contribution to this collaboration will be much more free form and involve several different artistic mediums, i am focused on capturing the individual personalities through my fine art style of portrait photography.
so, if you have a tattoo, want a tattoo, love your tattoo, or hate your tattoo, we would like to talk to you and hopefully get you to pose for us.
the end goal of this project will result in an exhibition at a lehigh valley gallery. if you are interested to pose, please feel free to contact me directly either through email or at my myspace page.
email: scott@silverystars.com
myspace: http://www.myspace.com/silverystars

Real Black and White

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 22:37:03 -0500

I tend to be the kind of photographer who wants to try out all the latest gadgets as soon as they’re available. But I’m also a purist that likes things to be a certain way. Oh, and there’s that control freak thing too. So, with the whole digital photography (which certainly isn’t in its infancy any more), the image quality is mature and the software can manipulate the photos in amazing ways. But in order to finance most of the high-end digital SLR equipment that I use, I had to make some sacrifices. One of the most conscious sacrifices was to sell my traditional film-based cameras and go all-digital, all the time.
So the problem is that now I have to straddle the world of being ultra-modern and enjoy the clarity and sharpness and speed with which I can process photos with the lack of a way to make true black and white prints like I used to get out of my darkroom. See, the Epson printer that I have has to mix a bunch of colors to produce a black and white image. And as good as the drivers at mixing everything together, you still end up with something that kinda looks more muddy than silvery. (This is where the control freak thing comes in, for those keeping score. When I say black, I mean black! Not brown.)
But there might be a solution that’s really not that intolerable. Seems like some guys up in Vermont had the brainy idea of replacing all the color Epson cartridges with their own filled with pure black pigment inks. 7 different shades that supposedly print wonderfully on a variety of fine art papers. So I’ve ordered a set, which are apparently swappable mid-stream with the color ink sets. The claim is that they produce wonderfully even-toned, completely neutral black and white prints. I guess I’ll believe it when I see it later this week. I ordered a set of the Neutral K7 inks from B&H and another sample pack of Hahnemüle paper. This weekend, if I have time, I will make some more sample prints and see if we can get something worthy of a portfolio.
enjoy,
scott
Image above is Vamping at Popmart, Bethlehem, PA © 2006 scott nichol

New Site is Up (finally)

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 12:07:08 -0400

After about 2 or 3 days of hard work, the new site is up and I think it looks great. Gone, it seems are the days of laboriously hand-coded HTML and CSS because, for my time and money, iWeb does a fantastic job. It used to take me about a week to tweak and customize all of the CSS required to make a great looking collection of web pages. The results look great and, well, you’re soaking in it, as they say. Take a look here: www.silverystars.com
For what its worth, though, I’m still struggling to get the folks over at photoshelter.com to understand the subtleties of a managed color workflow. Their post processing after uploading images through the Aperture export plugin involves stripping the embedded color profiles from the images and “trying to make them look as good as possible” as one of their tech support guys told me. The result of their post processing is that, in many cases, the images (especially black and whites) tend to get blocked up in the shadows.
You can actually see what I’m talking about in the images here. On the left is the original from Aperture. Notice the nice subtle shadow detail to the right of the model’s nose? You can see plenty of detail in the shadowed areas including her right eyebrow, the hollow of the eye, and details of the hair. This is all gone in the image on the right, which is the result of stripping the color profile and whatever other post-processing that Photoshelter is doing. As well, the highlights in the Photoshelter image are a little harsh and don’t have the subtleties and softness in the original Aperture image.
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Photoshelter’s site and the services they provide. I’ve ordered prints and they all look fantastic, but this is because they don’t touch my original image. The workflow out to the printing services maintains the color profiles and this is how it should be in a managed workflow. However, I have a problems asking my clients to review the images and make purchasing decisions based on images that aren’t displayed as I had intended.
Image above is Spire of the Empire State Building, New York City © 2004 scott nichol
enjoy,
scott

Customizing Aperture Web Galleries

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 11:26:51 -0400

Today we'll talk about quick ways to customize the output from Aperture's Web Galleries. Aperture's galleries, while a little bit limited, are effective tools for client review of their projects. But I wanted to add some content to the pages so that it integrates better with the rest of my studio's site. In particular, I wanted links back to other pages on the site and a link for contacting me via email.
In many of Aperture's gallery layouts, there are title text boxes and sub-title text boxes. I use the subtitle text boxes on the thumbnail pages to enter a search/replace friendly text string. Pick a string and stick to it, I use "SilveryStars" because this doesn't naturally occur anywhere else in metadata strings, keywords or captions. So, go ahead and change your subtitle text to your string.
For the detail pages, I typically rely on the fact that I always have the same metadata tags and the last one is the copyright notice. So for the detail pages we'll rely on this to be the replacement string.
The next step may seem obvious, but the idea is to search and replace on these strings and replace them with some additional HTML that will provide the links. The best way I've found to do this is with a BBEdit feature called "Text Factories". These text factories can be run right from BBEdit's action menu and even for a folder full of 60 or so HTML files, the search and replace only takes about a second or two. The only caveat is that the text factories can be setup to run on files within one directory. You can't choose which folder to run it on when you run it.
So what I did was create a folder called "Galleries2BProcessed" and export all my Aperture galleries to this folder, then run the text factory from BBEdit. When its done, I move the whole gallery folder into my client's folder for upload to the web site. So let's setup the text factory.
In BBEdit, from the menu, choose New->Text Factory.
Click the Choose... button to set the folder on which the text factory will run
Click the Other... button and select your "Galleries2BProcessed" folder
Back in the text factory window, you can click the Options... button to change some of the default settings like whether or not you want to be asked for confirmation on saving the changed HTML files. You might want to leave this on as you debug your factory.
The first action will change our search string on the thumbnail pages. So, set the first action to Replace All from the pop-up menu. In the Options... dialog, set the Search For: text to something like:
<H2>SilveryStars</H2>
and the Replace With: text to the HTML code that you want to take its place. Now keep in mind this is text should not be a complete HTML document with header and body tags, just the HTML you want placed in this little area of the web page.
Make a new action to modify the detail pages by pressing the "+" button and set its action to Replace All as well. I have my options set to Search For:
Copyright Notice: (c) 2006 Scott Nichol <LI></UL>
For the Replace With: text you should probably open the HTML of an gallery you've already created and look for and copy the text and paste it into the search field so that you get it just right. Also, be sure to include this text in the replacement text or you'll loose some of the HTML needed for the original layout. After this, paste in the HTML code for the links you want to appear below the metadata attributes section.
One last action I usually include is a search and replace on some of the CSS definitions that are in the "global.css" file that's down in the assets/css folder inside the gallery. I replace the definitions of the colors for the a, a:visited, and a:hoover so that it matches a style that I like and works with my site. You can do this if you like, but a discussion of modifying CSS is beyond the scope of this tip!
Save the Text Factory to your <home>/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Text Factories/ folder. This will make it appear in BBEdit's action menu (the one with the gear icon).
Now after you've exported one of your galleries to the "Galleries2BeProcessed" folder, you can run the factory by choosing it from the BBEdit action menu and viola! You've got a customized Aperture web gallery in just a few seconds! Its obviously a lot of work to set up, but if you're going to customize a lot of galleries, the time savings on the back end are worth it.
You can see an example of how this looks here: Viktoria's Gallery
enjoy,
scott

Tethered Shooting with Aperture

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 11:29:25 -0400

Let's talk about shooting tethered where we have the camera on a tripod, typically shooting some still life subjects in a studio environment and each new picture is automatically downloaded to the workstation and put directly into your Aperture library for immediate review and analysis.
Solutions exist for this but are often limited to specific cameras (Nikon Capture) or only run on Windows. Luckily, the Image Capture application has built-in support for remote control of lots of pro and semi-pro cameras. Thoughtfully, Apple engineers included this as a remote control "Take a picture" Automator action which allows us to build a workflow application that snaps a picture, imports it into an Aperture project of our choice, and tags the new picture with a set of metadata.
To build this workflow we'll take the following steps:
Connect your camera to your Mac using its USB cable and turn it on
Create a new Automator workflow and from the Image Capture library drag the Take Picture action into the workflow
NOTE 1: personally, I would leave the Delete image from camera after download option unchecked. This gives you a backup of the images from your session should anything go wrong with the workflow.
NOTE 2: The action should show you your camera name and if it is connected. If it doensn't show up, try switching its USB connection mode from Mass Storage to PTP
From the Aperture library, drag the Import Photos action to the end of the workflow and set the project that you want each photo imported into
Finally, drag the Set IPTC Tags action into the the workflow after the Import Photos action
I usually use this to have all of the images tagged with my default credit, copyright, keywords, and other metadata so I don't have to do it later!
Save this workflow (file type should be Application) and place it in your dock
Now with the workflow app in the dock you can set up everything in the studio, frame your shot, and turn to your workstation. Hit the workflow app with a single click. If your camera is supported, this will fire the shutter and in a second or two the new image should be available in Aperture. You can use the arrow keys to select the new image and with the inspectors shown, you can immediately see the histograms, use the loupe to inspect image details (or just drop into full screen mode), and rank the image. Now you can make adjustments to your lighting or setup and repeat the process again. This is far better than inspecting images on the smallish displays on the backs of cameras and with a calibrated monitor, well, you'll really know what you're looking at! And the workflow helps you to fine tune your studio setup and adjust to changes quickly without the guess work of what the images will really look like.
Image above is a still life study of a Gerber Daisy, © 2006 scott nichol
enjoy,
scott