the things we think but do not say

Last year at Halloween, Sara and I hosted a party where I created a photo booth for our guests. I wanted to thank everyone for making such a great effort for their costumes but it was also a way to get a chance to experiment with some lights. That weekend was my first experience with rented lights (from Calumet, natch). Well, I’m glad to say I’m a lot more experienced and I got asked a few months ago to try a reprise of the photo booth at a friend’s wedding.

Photo booths can come in all manner of forms. Some are small little box-rooms complete with swiveling stools and curtains. Some are fully manned, ‘booths’ that have a photographer carefully operating them for guests. But the one that I saw that opened my eyes to the whole concept was at a wedding in Martha’s Vineyard, by a photography by the name of Joe Mikos. A terrific wedding photographer btw. Joe set things up so that any guest could take a seat in a special room and shoot photos of themselves for fun with a camera setup on the other side of the room. The experience was enlightening. The shutter was triggered by the guests and everyone gets to pose and look silly. Endless fun.

But there was one aspect that I thought was lacking in the setup I saw. Even though the camera was digital, there was no visual feedback for the guests. You just had to take it for granted that the shots turned out ok. You’d see the photos eventually by contacting the bride and groom, or if you’re willing, through the photographer.

To me, this looked like an easy design opportunity to give the guests that vital piece of feedback. At the Halloween party, I set up the camera to record directly into my laptop and then I simply turned it around to face the people. Pretty obvious really.

Now, I’m hardly an expert so I’m sure that you can probably go about things in a smarter way, but I will try to recount my steps as best I can. And before it gets too confusing, I’m going to be using the words, ’strobe’ and ‘flash’ interchangeably throughout. Same thing, two different names.

Ok, so the setup does requires a fair bit of kit some not so expensive, some kinda expensive.

1. A digital camera or a digital SLR that lets you fire the camera remotely and that has software available that let’s you record your images directly to a laptop. Nikon and Canon digital SLRs have all this in spades. This process is sometimes called ‘tethered shooting’ by some photogs and it’s often used to let art directors (or in this case, drunken guests) view the images as they are being taken.

2. A strobe/flash or two. This can take a wide variety of forms from off camera flashes like the Nikon SB-800 or the Canon 580 EXII, a large soft box, or even a ring flash. I like to rent my lights from Calumet as light are pretty expensive. I’ll assume that you can set them up. I just asked my rental guy at Calumet to run through it all with me.

3. A way for the camera to trigger the strobes/flashes. I’ve only ever had excellent results from with Pocket Wizards (which work by radio which means there’s no line of sight issues) so I would happily recommended them. They are expensive but there’s more than a few ebay knock offs. Just search for ‘wireless radio trigger‘. The cheapest, non Pocket Wizard way is to use a long sync cable for your camera, but you’re probably going to have to make sure you’re got a Wein-Safe-Sync-thingy to make sure you don’t accidentally fry your camera. Radio triggers never have that problem.

Remember this bit does not trigger your camera, only the flashes. To trigger the shutter on your camera go to the next step.

4. The actual remote that fires the camera itself usually comes in two common forms. Many consumer SLRs (like the Nikon D70, 50, 40 etc) have a IR port on the front of the body which can take a IR signal from a tiny little remote which is very affordable (< $20). If you look carefully, you can see it in hands of the photos in this post. I hear that a universal TV remote can even work. Since it's IR it need a good, clear line of sight for it to work. Usually not a problem, just something to be aware of.

The other kind of remote is usually only used on professional DSLR camera bodies, like the Nikon D200/300, D2x/D3, or the Canon 1 Series cameras and the 5D. A port on the front of the camera takes an electronic signal from a little hand held trigger. They're usually branded Canon or Nikon and usually expensive. For some reason, the same type of IR remote for the non pro cameras that were only $20 are now really expensive at $330 for the pro camera bodies.

While no less expensive, but certainly more versatile is employing a Pocket Wizard as your trigger. Now this bit gets confusing.

To get the PW in your hand to trigger the camera, you've got to get a cable that runs from another Pocket Wizard that's sitting on the hot shoe of your camera. You've got to run a cable from the hot shoe mounted PW into a special port on the front of the camera to trigger the shutter. While renting Pocket Wizards is usually not that expensive ($15 a piece) this bloody cable that fires these professional body cameras is not rentable and over $100! Remember, if you do go down this route, you're now looking at renting/owning three PWs: one for the trigger, one for the camera and then one for the strobes.

5. Ok, now this might not be totally obvious, but where you position your laptop will have a huge impact on your photos. The whole point of this kind of setup is so that the feedback from the laptop lets each guest really nail the shot they want. Seeing each shot immediately after each shot encourages a lot of experimentation. When I did my first photo booth, I setup my laptop just somewhere off and to the side of my camera, sitting on a stool I think. I had no idea what a problem this would eventually become. Once a guest saw their photos being replayed on the laptop screen, their eyes were constantly drawn to the screen. You couldn't get them to look at anything else, and especially not at the lens! So, for a lot of the photos from my first party, everyone's eyes were pointing down and to the left of the image. Once it happened, no retraining was going to fix it.

So this time, I wanted to be sure to position the laptop so that it was as close to the lens as possible. And there’s really only a few places that this could mean; either directly above, to the side or below. After trying out all the options, I found to my surprise that setting the laptop just below the lens worked the best. This time around, all the guest eyes look like their looking directly into the camera, when in fact their eyes are glued to the laptop screen.

To position the laptop, I used another tripod and bought myself a “laptop plate”. I had no idea these things existed, but Manfrotto makes one. I got mine for $40 at Calumet even though this link says it’s $100. Its basically a cast iron plate with a reversible 1/4″ and 1/8″ screw thread on it. Heck, anything that you can adjust as a flat level platform will work here.

6. One additional thing that I developed for the booth at the wedding was the use of an LCD projector hooked up to the laptop. By relaying the images from the laptop to a space outside the booth, everyone else got to see what was going on in the booth. It just got even more people thinking of what to do when it was their turn.

Ok, so with that long list of stuff to get, here are the steps for setting up the photo booth:

1. Download or install the software that lets you record your images directly to your laptop. The two pieces of software that I have experience with, is Nikon’s Camera Capture Pro and Canon’s EOS Utility. Nikon’s software is an additional expense to the camera while Canon’s is shipped with it’s DSLRs. If you’ve got a Nikon camera, I’d recommend going here and testing out their 30 day trail. If you’re sneaky like me, you could try starting your 30 day trail the same month your wedding is scheduled…

The software is should be pretty self explanatory but the thing to get right is setting where the files are being written to (your desktop, an external hard drive etc) . Watch out though for a step where you might have to tell the software to open an application to view the images. Canon uses a separate application to view the images called ZoomBrowser EX.

2. Connect the USB cable to the laptop and to the camera. Test out a shot to make sure each image is writing to the laptop and the image is reviewing on screen afterwards.

3. Mount the camera onto a tripod and frame the shot with a test subject (or use yourself if you’ve already got the remote working).

4. Activates the strobes and test fire your flashes directly (no need to confuse matters yet with Pocket Wizards or sync cables).

5. Attach a Pocket Wizard to your camera’s hot shoe mount.

For small flash units like the Nikon SB-800 or the Canon 580 EXII, connect the other Pocket Wizard to your flash with the cable that ships with the PW. One end goes into the PW the other end goes into the flash. You really can’t screw anything up.

If you’re using larger strobes and their power packs (Profoto, Bowens, Hensel etc), then you’ll like need a slightly different cable than the one that ships with the PW. I would recommend that if you rent the lights make sure that the rental location supplies the appropriate cable.

Whenever you use Pocket Wizards, just make sure they’re both on (seriously, I’ve forgotten this step a bunch) and make sure that both PWs are on the same channel.

6. Set up your laptop on to another tripod and sit it on the laptop plate. Position the laptop directly under the lens. If you have it, connect the LCD projector to the laptop and position it outside the booth and project the images onto a screen or a wall.

7. Test fire your setup!

On the night of the party each time someone uses the booth the sequence of events should play out as such:

Drunk guest picks up the remote and triggers it with their sweaty hands,
The camera receives a signal and the shutter on the camera is released,
Simultaneously, the Pocket Wizard mounted on the camera sends a signal out and fires the strobe(s),
The camera’s sensor records an image and the file is written directly to the laptop,
The laptop displays the images on the screen,
The drunk guest is amazed at the feedback and tries the shot again!

Many thanks to April and Lucas Daniel for asking me to setup their photo booth. They created some very handy white board speech bubbles for their friends and family to leave messages in their photo guest book.

Lastly, thanks to Craig for helping me set up the booth this time and suggesting that I write this up.

If you’re looking to have one of these things at your wedding but are stuck on how to do it yourself, give me a shout at georgeaye [at] gmail dot com.

Critical Mass July 2007 -35210

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

If the craziness of this week with the proposal video wasn’t enough, I got some more great news today.

One of photos taken during the last Critical Mass Chicago ride won third place in the Hidden Chicago photo contest in Time Out Chicago!

The winning photos are available in the “Photo Issue” in Time Out Chicago today and online here.

Woot!

yes.

Originally uploaded by emyduck.

After a few days of riding a huge internet wave, the flood of comments, links and hits are starting to calm down around here.

This tiny insignificant, gnat of a blog went from picking up accidental traffic from random Google image searches (not even real text searches!) to at one point, getting 18,000 hits in one hour. That was more hits than this blog has had in its entire lifetime.

Even though I mentioned this in my last post, I would like to take another opportunity to thank everyone for their support. Sara and I are still in shock over how much heartfelt goodwill this video has generated. We’re honored to have read so many lovely warm wishes.

Some of my favourite comments I read so far:

“You had me at laser cut foam core”
“the feel-good YouTube video of the summer”
“Just an all around feel good video. You watch this video - you’re gonna feel good!” as spoken in a strong southern drawl, by JohhnyTV.

++++
I’d like to acknowledge a few people whose support was critical in all of this:

Annette Ferrara, my friend the writer and art historian who dug the idea from the start. She was instrumental in helping me find a gallery to host the event.

Britton Bertran (from 40000), for being such a supportive gallery owner and idea patron. Throughout the build and during our initial talks, he was able to give really helpful constructive design critique that made the installation so much more stronger. I think that any artist would do well to have Britton in their corner.

Eli Robb, for his performance on the night of the opening. He brought the artiste, Serge Gandaora to life. The black cut-off t-shirt was a nice touch.

To all my friends that were so good for playing along with the ruse. In particular, I’d like to thank Emily (who also took the photo above). Also to her husband, Craig for his fantastic photos of the night that I used for the video. Also to Erin and Chad for their photos.

And to John Grimley and Matt in the studio for helping me understand how to use the bench drill and for letting me borrow the tools from the IDEO workshop.
++++
And now some answers to the growing list of FAQ:

The soundtrack is by the Icelandic band, Sigur Ros. The song is called Sæglópur from their album, Takk. Please don’t sue me Sigur Ros! I love your song and think of all the people that now do too.

Everyone at the gallery that night was in on the plan. But I think there were a few people who walked in off the street, thinking it was a real opening. Thanks, random people, for making the event look more “real.”

“My Early Muir Owl” is an anagram of “Will you marry me.”
“Serge Gandaora” is an anagram of “george and sara”.

The white ‘art’ on the walls were the original 3′ x 2′ foam core sheets that I used to cut out the letter forms.

I only got one paper cut during the entire build.

The installation took about 24 hours in total. 4-6 hours each day over four days.

How the installation was made:
Each base was cut from a few bits of spare MDF with a circular saw bit on a bench drill.
The tall rods were made from 8′ length of aluminium screen door frames cut to length. Each stroke of the letter forms was a made from stacks of identical cutouts or folded together from a flattened ‘net’.

The full ‘artist statement’ written by Eli/Serge can be found here.

Sara said yes!

++++

In the end of all this, we’re just glad we can share our happiness.

iPhone details-0394

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

Ugh.

Whenever I think I’m free of it’s grasp, I realise that it has still got a hold on me.

Why oh why must I be haunted by you?

Why must you be so damn attractive?

Why must you be such a compelling experience?

Ugh.

I thought the other day, wouldn’t it be cool to show someone your latest photos on this thing? It sure would dumbass. That’s what Stevie J wants you to think! But wouldn’t it be cool to just keep up on just those few blogs and sites you read each day without booting up your laptop? Yup. But wouldn’t it be cool to be able to only carry one device that had a camera, mp3 and phone in it? ARGH!

Damn you iPhone. Your day of reckoning will come…

Pitchfork 2007 Sunday-34214

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

My little photo essay about the fans of Pitchfork went live earlier this week on Gapers’ Block. Wahoo!

As previously posted about on this blog, I wanted to present a photo story from the other side of the stage.

Check it out the Gapers’ Block slide show here.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I got myself a new camera body about a week ago and after some 5500 exposures I think I can give it a short assessment.

But before I get into that, I wanted to give a shout out to my favourite camera gear store in the city; Calumet Photographic. Not only do all their staff have a great amount of experience to impart, but they’re very good at scaling their knowledge appropriately, from teaching newbs like me, the basics of how to use a two head lighting kit to giving their recommendations on the latest pro gear. Plus they let you rent which makes things like $1700 lens seem a little more affordable.

Ok, back to the gear list:

Canon EOS 1D Mk III
Canon EF 16-35L f2.8 (rented)
Canon EF 24-70L f2.8 (rented)
Canon EF 70-200L f2.8 IS (rented)
Spare battery for 1DMk III
Four 4gb Lexar 133x CF memory cards
Domke F2 bag

So what worked and what didn’t? Actually, everything worked out great! The only time I had anything that was close to a equipment fault was due to my incompetence. I thought the auto focus on my 70-200 was broken, so I tried turning the body on and off a bunch of times, then mounting and unmounting the lens… then I remembered that there’s a switch on the lens itself that turns the AF off. Ugh.

After a full weekend of shooting, my favourite lens was the tremendously heavy 70-200L f2.8 IS. It had the reach I needed to get some great close ups of detailed facial expressions during the performance at Pitchfork but also has the added bonus of getting people to move out of your way, since it’s so freaking large. The lens is white and with the hood attached it’s about the length of my arm. Let me tell you, it’s very hard to dance along to De La Soul’s, “Rock Co.Kane Flow” with it hanging off your neck.

Ok, now onto the new body: it’s ridiculously good. I’ve never owned a tool that performed with such purpose and conviction. Almost every aspect of its design and operation has been optimized for the task at hand, and that task is always to get the shot: battery life is over 2500-3000 exposures per charge, ISO is readable in the viewfinder, the viewfinder is HUGE and bright, the vertical grip has a complete replication of the control layout, the blackout time in the viewfinder is a barely perceivable 80ms, and a huge array of custom functions to tweak and adjust the controls to your preferences.

Now there’s been a huge ruckus all over the internets about the new Auto Focus system built into the MKIII, and while I have yet to do any definitive tests, I am pretty satisfied with how it’s been behaving. A great source of relief to me so far, is how well placed many of the 45 AF points are laid out within the viewfinder.

How I learnt to focus on all my previous cameras is to find an element in the image that I want to focus on, then start the ‘Focus Lock and Recompose’ sequence. The focused element then doesn’t always fall in the dead centre of the image. I started using this process years ago and it’s totally instinctive now. But this technique just becomes a pain when you’re trying to compose a portrait where the subject isn’t used to holding still with a toothy grin on their face. I don’t want to be constantly, ‘Focus Lock and Recomposing’ on them either, as in that split second when I’m reorientating the camera, they might move their head and body and the shot will be thrown off. I just want there to be an AF point directly on the person’s eyes for a portrait and it want it to be placed so things look right proportionally when the camera is set into a vertical orientation. I guess that I could revert to manual focus to really make sure the AF doesn’t move around, but I don’t think that I could trust that I could react to a person’s movement quickly enough to guarantee that I got that tiny, subtle change in expression or glance of the eyes. The whole time I was shooting close ups of the artists at Pitchfork, I would change to the vertical grip, hit the ‘select AF point’ under my thumb then roll my index finger two clicks until it hits the upper most AF marker. Done. Shoot. Next shot.

One additional thing I noticed while using the Mk III was that I retrained my eyes to use a technique that I’d forgotten about since my first film camera, the Canon A1. Since there’s so much fast movement on stage at any one time it’s important to not be too blinkered looking through your viewfinder and miss something happening just out of the frame. My old film camera had a really expressive, bright viewfinder which I missed dearly when I moved to my Nikon D70. But since moving to the Mk III, I found that while I have this new viewfinder up against my right eye, I can once again open my left eye and let my mind blend the images together. This way I can ‘see’ through the lens while keeping a check on whatever else is happening on the stage with both eyes open quite naturally.

All in all, I’m very happy with the new body and when matched with some decent glass, it’s a formidable package.

Pitchfork 2007 Saturday-33495

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

I wanted to share a collection of photos from this past weekend. This is a series of portraits taken during Pitchfork that tells the other side of the performances; the people who are there to watch, listen and experience the shows. I think it gives some context to the event and it reminds me that just because I wore a ‘press pass’, I’m still just a fan.

The slideshow starts here.

This weekend featured two new types of photography for me: on Friday night, my first proper wedding (where I didn’t know the couple at all) and then my first indie rock concert on Saturday and Sunday. All in all, I was taking photos, thinking of taking photos, and running to get to a new place to take photos for 72hrs.

While it was exciting to take photos at the wedding, it’s hard to compare it to a two day long concert where over 30 of the hottest bands are playing. I was lucky enough to be the photographer for Gapers Block (a Chicago centric webzine) which gave me the all important “Press Pass” to the gigs. And I can tell you I was surprised how many layers of ‘exclusivity’ there is. At the bottom is the lowly, ticker holding punter of course. Then there’s student volunteer crew members, then there’s the regular crew, then there’s the press, then there’s the press with yellow stickers (for photo access), then there’s VIP, then there’s security, then there’s Artist, and then there’s Pitchfork management that truly have ‘All Area Access’. Oh and there’s all manner of combinations too.

Despite the layered cake of permissions and access, my ‘press pass + yellow sticker’ did let get to places that I would never have seen in the past as a normal concert goer. This manifests itself mainly in the form of the ‘Press pit’ which is a rather sweaty way to call the gap of space caught between the main stage and the crowd. I don’t know if I ever noticed before, but if you’re all the way up the front of the crowd, you’ll see all the press photographers all running around switching lens or switching camera bodies trying to get the best line of sight. Since I’m not a ‘hardened veteran’ to all this yet, I spent more than a few moments at each stage, taking photos of the press crew as they would dive in and out of each others way. Somehow, instinctively each photographer knew just how much room they need to position themselves, get the shot and not be in someone else’s way at the same time. And naturally, it’s also the best place to see the band as you’re less than ten feet from the artists. Good for photographers and great for photographers who are also fans of the bands.

While this is might not be true at all concerts, the photography policy at Pitchfork was a strict, ‘first three songs’ limit. I still don’t have any idea why this was in place. But the effect put every photographer into an urgent rhythm It also means that you can’t arrive late, or you’ll be shooting from the crowd which could mean being back a couple of hundred feet. Not good. Even with a 70-200L f2.8 lens plus 1.4 tele-extender, you’re basically screwed for any getting any decent facial expressions.

And while this was true for the two main stages, Aluminum and Connector, all sorts of security breaches were happening at the Balance stage. The Balance stage for the last couple of years was treated as the runt of the litter, being off to the side of the main park. Last year, someone had the idea of providing shade for everyone in the sweltering temperature but unfortunately this only created a heat sink since the tent didn’t really let the steam produced by several thousand sweaty ravers to escape. Thankfully this year saw no tent.

All of Saturday, I soon realised that I could rely upon the guys on security at the Balance stage to let me and every other press photographer do their work. At any time, for as long as we wanted. We even got to go backstage where we could hang out with the artists, get a cold drink and very importantly, use their clean porta potty. None of the heavy handed security douche bags from the other two main stages were here. Just the cool ones. Yeah for the Balance stage! And all this sweet dealyness was going great for everyone involved until Dan Deacon played his set last Saturday afternoon, where everything went nuts.

Now remember that the layout goes like this: the band plays on the stage, then there’s a four foot wide gap where the press photographers shoot from, then the front of the crow starts and goes back hundreds of feet. Three distinct zones. But for Dan Deacon, this was way too conventional. He managed to play his set from within the crowd itself, right at the front, up against the fence. Unfortunately, I get only wind of this when I arrived late and there’s a road block of people all jammed up. I start to assert my ‘press pass’ powers and shove my way to the entrance. I then see what the deal is with Dan’s set and also see that all the press photographer’s are now jam packed in the press pit, shooting ‘backwards’ toward the crowd to get shots of Mr. Deacon. Which meant that it was SOL.

Then it hit me! The only place for me to go now is onto the stage! Since no one is using it, I might as well use it to give me a good overlooking vantage point. So I shove my way to the stage staircase with some other later press shooters who have the same idea. And this is where my luck came in. I’d made friends with one of the crew earlier that day and as we all approach, he say’s, “No one getting up on the stage. No photographers allowed.”

“I’m letting only two in. You and you. Go!”

I scramble up onto the stage, I take the closest corner and start to scope out the sprawling mess of activity in front of me and it’s just plain insane. Dan is screaming into a microphone, and completely surrounding him are three thousand people all going nuts hanging on his every word. Immediately below me, in the press pit is the rest of the press shooters fighting to get a clear shot of Dan and his iPod shuffle (no joke). And every second I’m up on stage shooting down into the crowd and Dan Deacon, I’m thinking two things, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing” and “If anyone gets hurt they won’t be found until the morning”.

Total, complete, chaos with a heavy electronic beat in the background. What an experience.

For the rest of the night and all of next day, the security tightened up like a drum and to over compensate for yesterday’s debacle, the security on the Balance stage started to enforce not only the three song limit, but a new ‘four photographer’s at a time’ rule. Great. So you’ve now got three songs, about 12 minutes, spread out over a dozen photographers who now have to take turns. That gives you about 60-90 seconds each.

What do these people want from me?

Since this is not a very sustainable situation and I have a full shot list from this one stage to do, I come up with a new strategy. A strategy that only a rookie like me could have come up with it seemed as I didn’t see anyone else try it.I remember thinking during the Girl Talk set the night before, the people in the crowd are in the best position to take photos since us photo chumps were stuck on the side lines waiting to be blessed with a minute of access. So I said, sod it, I’m joining the crowd!

It takes a lot of jostling, a lot of ‘excuse me!’ and a lot of not too subtle camera nudging to work my way through the crowd and eventually I find myself at the front of the crowd, right up against the low fence that previously separated me from the crowd. And let me tell you, life on the other side is totally different. Rather than fighting for a spot to shoot from, you’re fighting for room to jump around to. I think sometime after getting my fancy schmancy press pass, I forgot what it was like to just be a fan.

For the next four hours, I hung out with three thousand other fans and danced, screamed, jumped and took photos like everyone else, to The Cool Kids, Cadence Weapon, and The Field. The strategy only really paid off when the final show on the Balance stage was kicked in. Klaxons is a English rock band that is apparently making kids krazy everywhere they play. And due to the fact that everyone in the crowd was really, really into the band and going totally nuts when they started their set, security wasn’t letting any press take photos for at least the first two songs. Since I was already embedded as part of the crowd, they happily admitted that they couldn’t stop me from getting my shots of the band.

And while in theory this plan sounded smart, getting in focus shots of the band in near total darkness (shooting at ISO 3200) with the weight of thousands of fans crushing you against a metal railing while supporting 10lbs of camera and lens, is not easy. Eventually they let the press in but by then I was already done and ready to be extracted. Security was kind enough to pull me out of the crush. The night ended on De La Soul on the main stage, but I’m going to remember those Krazy Klaxon fans for a long time.

The artists featured are:
Saturday
Ken Vandermark’s Powerhouse Sound, Califone, William Parker Quartet, Grizzly Bear, Battles, Fujiya & Miyagi, Professor Muder, Clipse, Dan Deacon, Girl Talk, Yoko Ono
Sunday
Deerhunter, Fred Lonberg-Holm’s Lightbox Orchestra, Menomena, Junior Boys, Nomo, Sea and Cake, Jamie Lidell, The Cool Kids, Cadence Weapon, Klaxons, De La Soul

All in all, a throughly thrilling, fantastic, ear drum ringing weekend of photography.

A slideshow of photos from Saturday.

A slideshow from Sunday is now up!

Chicago Botanic Gardens-0771

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

I’ve always found photography to be one of those areas of fascination that is a perfect balance of technical and aesthetic virtues. To learn and practice photography you have to understand just enough technique to be dangerous. Learning a new aspect to your vision or a new aspect of your technical knowledge, invariably informs the other.

I’m sure that one can approach photography from a purely aesthetic and instinctive level, where you discover yourself through a visual education. Or you can come to it from another angle, where you become fascinated with the technical nuances of the tools used. But whatever way your introduction to photography, you won’t spend long in either camp without having to know the other.

For me, my earliest memories of photography came not of photographs, but of cameras. I strongly remember my older brother Len, always having cameras, lens, flashes and other alluringly heavy, metal objects of technical desire. I would play with them on a purely object level, never really caring what they were meant for at that time. I guess that shows that I might always be a designer first and a photographer second. Unfortunately for my brother, my fascination lead to lots of screwed up, misaligned, sometimes broken camera equipment. Just about every time I got my hands of his gear, I’d get something all misfired and half cocked. Ugh. My brother and all of his equipment was my archetype of a photographer and a photographer’s gear.

Over the last 4 years I’ve had a slow progression of confidence in myself as a photographer. Recently, I worked on my most significant photographic project to date and through it I learnt many, many things. Some were about how to interact with people that I’m about to photograph; some were with how to use available light for portraits. But one of the most important things I learnt was being able to say, “I can do this… I could be really good at this”.

Unfortunately, one of the other things I learnt was that my relationship with my camera, my Nikon D70, has changed for ever. I kept fighting with my camera’s auto focus capabilities and poor low light response throughout the trip. And even though I’ve shot thousands and thousands of frames with it until this project I’d never had to use it under pressure. All my previous photography had never been for anyone else’s consumption. What I discovered was that my most reliable photographic tool, my most trusted photo buddy was going to be retired soon… It was time to say hello to my new friend, the Canon EOS 1D Mark III.

Chicago Botanic Gardens-0797

Originally uploaded by georgeaye.

After years of sitting on the fence about having a full size (17″ wide), professional printer, I finally gave in and bought an Epson Pro Stylus 3800. Click here for some gratuitous printer porn.

It’s simply amazing.

But quite honestly, the issue of buying the printer was far less about deciding which printer to buy, but how to navigate my way through the maze of issues that come from matching a print to what you see on screen.

The numerous reviews of the printer pretty much guaranteed that it would be a winner (9 ink carts, 80ml ink capacity, automatic matte and glossy media switching with minimal ink loss, 17″ wide media). The 800lb gorilla in the world of printing is deciphering the fifty plus opinions on how to match a print to your monitor.

Well after a relatively painless few weeks, I think I can safely say that I get it now.

And by get it, I mean, I can get my prints to look pretty damn close to what I see on my monitor.

Here were some of the obstacles along the way:

Q What does calibration mean?
A It means that devices like monitors, printers, cameras etc all are displaying images reliably.

Q What does ‘calibrate my monitor’ mean?
A It means that you get your monitor to take some tests that prove that what colours it thinks it’s displaying are truly the colours it’s displaying. The simplest way to do this is make your monitor perform a few minutes worth of tests, unsurprisingly a ‘monitor calibration tool’, like the X-Rite/Greytag Macbeth Eye One Display 2.

The part of the test that surprised me the most was just how damn bright I had set my screen. No frickin’ wonder all my prints always turned out so dark! I’d bumped up my monitor(s) to twice or three times what it should be.

Q Does the printer need to be calibrated too?
A It depends. (Don’t you hate it when the answer is ‘It depends’. Ugh)
If you have a printer that is from an established printer maker, a la Epson, then there’s a pretty good chance that there will be lots of people out there that will have made it easy for you to not need to calibrate your printer. Now here comes the tricky part. Calibration is really just a slightly more confusing way to explain something called ‘profiles’.

Q I’ve heard of ‘profiles’. What the hell is a profile and how does it relate to calibration?
A OK. Here’s the real meat of this whole topic now. A profile is a set of instructions (for a device) that tells it (the device) how to display a colour. And the clever part is this: it tells it how to display with respect to what kind of device it is. A profile empathises for the device itself.

For a printer to reliably display its colors, the printer has to have a profile which takes into account a few things that are totally specific to that printer. In fact, the profile even takes into account the paper on which it will be printing on to. Which really makes sense, since a matte paper will soak up ink in a totally different way than a glossy paper.

So, for a printer that profile takes into account: the printer model itself, the number of inks available to it, the kind of ink it’s printing with, then finally the paper on which it will finally be printed.

For a monitor, when I talked earlier about calibrating it, I was just glossing over the fact that I was in fact making a profile for it. The profile took into account the kind of monitor it was (laptop LCD, desktop LCD, CRT), the brightness, the gamma point (I still have no idea what that means) and then a set of parameters for Red, Green and Blue output.

Q Ok, now I’m more confused than when I started. What does all this have to do with printing?
A Well done, you’ve now fully entered the maze. The next part will help us now get out.

The reason anyone gives a shit about profiles, calibration and the rest is because it all comes together when you finally press Cmd/CTRL - P.

Q So… what happens when I press ‘print’?
A I am going to assume that you are going to be printing in either Photoshop or Lightroom. I have never used Aperture or really anything else, so bear with me. Both programs have about a million control dialog boxes that appear when you go to print, plus a few that you might not have seen otherwise.

Well there are really only a couple that are important and if you get these set right you’re golden. And rather than hacking my way through the explanation, I’m going to show you the video that I saw that made all my questions fade away. Russell Brown is about as Photoshop as anyone gets and if you can get over the eccentric voice patterns, his explanations are top notch. Here’s where he explains how to print from Photoshop to an Epson printer (an old R2200).

Ok, I’m going to summarise anyway because when I got my head around which parts of these vital dialog boxes meant, it all became a million times clearer.

When you go to print, not only are you choosing which image to print today, you’re also choosing which profile to use for that image. And while it can sound tedious to choose a profile every time, if you’re printing a session with glossy paper, there is really no need to change the profile.

But really after some reflection, I think what is most satisfying is that each time I print out an image, I get a tiny bit more confidence with the system. I get the sense now that each print will be pretty damn close to what I see and that the results are going to be repeatable each time.

So, in very fast summary:

1 Calibrate and make a profile for your monitor. This is the foundation of all your images. If you’re adjusting images in Photoshop/Lightroom and your images are 300% brighter than they should be, all your work is for nought.

2. Get a reliable printer which has lots of freely available profiles. I would recommend Epson as the majority of user generated internet support out there is for Epson printers.

3. Set Photoshop/Lightroom colour space correctly.

4. Choose the profile that matches the paper that you’ll be printing on. This step implies that you’re picking from a list of profiles that are made for your printer. Choosing a profile that matches your paper but not your printer is retarded. The list will be organised for your printer first, then paper.

5. When in the printer’s own dialogue box (the final dialogue box usually before the printer starts printing) make sure to turn OFF the colour management. This makes sure that the image isn’t being ‘managed’ twice.

6. Finally make sure the printer is choosing the right paper stock so it matches up with your profile and the paper itself. This part might sound like the printer is profiling again, but it’s actually much simpler than that. It’s just making sure that it knows how to handle the paper thickness.

Ummm, I think that’s it. Now go print!

Here are some of my references I used to gather all this info:

Russell Brown’s wacky world of Photoshop tips.
Eric Chan’s very thorough Epson Stylus Pro 3800 wiki.
Martin Evening’s Lightroom book.
Scott Kelby’s Lightroom book.