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Making prints, and some Pics from Italy

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I have done some test prints in a variety of colors and styles with the local photo shop called North Coast Photo. I have tried a few online places that do photo prints and also do large stuff inkjet style, notably Photique and mPix. I had mixed results. Photique’s color correction was off, and mPix did better with colors but some of my photos had problems and one was even physically damaged. I love many of the prints, and was really energized to do more, but it was disappointing to wait a week or more only to have a print I couldn’t mat and frame.

They are old school. Even their ordering software and website have a distinctly Y2K flair to them

Since both places did a great job of my black and white prints, I thought the color issues might be me. I decided to calibrate my monitor and start checking my files for gamut. I sent some calibrated, in-gamut shots of lizards and neighbor kitties and other throwaways to each house for a second round. I still got different results from each, so I decided to see if there was another place to try, not at the top of the duck duck go or various blogs that all only refer you to whoever gives them the affiliate kickbacks. That’s when I discovered North Coast Photo.

This place is barely two miles from my house and has been in Carlsbad for decades. They are old school. Even their ordering software and website have a distinctly Y2K flair to them, neither having been updated in the last 15 years. They do film developing as well as prints, but they aren’t one of these all in one inket printing places that’ll spray your image on a piece of aluminum. They only make an old-fashioned wet process prints and enlargements. Inkjet has many advantages, and most of the online places print on everything because that’s the business model that supports them. But for North Coast Photo, well, that’s not their bag.

The prints I got from the online places were also silver halide — mostly, as I did try the glicee from mPix — so apples to apples. The one difference being that they came on Kodak Endura paper for color and North Coast uses Fuji Crystal Archive. Photique, especially, offers the entire range of Kodak papers, from glossy, to deep matte, and specialty metallic, lustre, and silk textures. None of which I really like, except in the case of Endura matte in black and white looking fantastic for my Chicago cityscape.

The local place is not as versatile, obviously. And they’re not cheaper, in fact they’re a couple dollars more than the online places, even when paying the upcharge for giclee at mPix, which theoretically has better color gamut and longevity.1

But, they’re local. No shipping charge. I can talk to them in person, I’ve actually seen the owner around the Village for years, never realizing this is what that logo on the side of his truck meant. Carlsbad as a whole is a reasonably big city, but the Village, up until four or five years ago when the “fuck locals” attitude of the council and resultant tourist deluge destroyed its character, has always been a pretty small town. The sort of place where I had my own meal off menu at restaurants and would run into people I knew any time I walked down the street or stopped in for a cup of coffee. You get pretty embedded in that kind of community, and recognize one another even if you haven’t met. It’s really nice to be able to get advice if I need it but even more, it’s nice to support a local business. Too many of those have failed this year.

So, for my first test, I sent three images. The first was chosen because I took it the very day I talked to them. I was quite excited with that capture, and wanted to see it in the reals. The other two I just grabbed off of my NAS, and I chose these because they were taken at Terramar, which is walking distance from the lab.

They were done perfectly. Better than perfectly, the waves in the surfer shot are more vibrant than the monitor and the palm fronds in the Palmhenge shot are absolutely tack sharp. I couldn’t believe how good the looked.

The point is, to know this they must have actually looked at the pictures.

None are actually out of gamut, the Palmhenge shot being completely unedited — straight out of the camera, and the soft proof showed no clipping when I bounced it to jpeg — and the jetty shot edited to bring the sky into range, but the surfer shot has difficult light and very subtle details on the waives, and all three are quite close to the edge of sRGB and have more difficult contrast than the shots I sent to mPix and Printique. Yet the results were exactly, precisely, amazingly correct.

But here’s the real selling point. When I went in to pick them up the next afternoon the gentleman helping me had trouble locating the envelope. He asked someone in the back and that person called out “Sunset and surfer?” I said yes and he said “Great pictures” then a girl working a different machine said “I loved the surfer photo!”

This all seems like it is just retail employees blowing smoke up a client’s skirts, but that’s not the point. The point is, to know this they must have actually looked at the pictures. With the damaged photos from one place, and the colors wrong from the other, there’s no way they did the color matching and quality check they advertised. These had perfect contrast, vibrant color, and it was obvious that these people at North Coast had provided the personal services they claimed.

So I sent in a second batch, with the olio of colors. I wanted lots of variety to test my monitor calibration, but also including He’s Big on the Inside, which I had in my test prints from both Printique and mPix. That way I could do a direct comparison. Here are the pictures I printed in batch two.

As with the first order, they are perfect. Bootsy and the green of the truck are the same on screen as in the print, way better than Printique and as good as or better than mPix. I am very impressed, and now I know how well my monitor is calibrated and am confident of what they’ll look like when printed. I feel remarkably lucky to have a service like this only a couple miles from home. I’m going to have to expose a couple rolls of 120 some day and let them do some real, old fashioned work.

One of the images was taken in Venice, and several people have asked about it. Not my favorite image, but I thought I’d share here. First, this is the canal picture in question, cropped 5/4 and printed as an 8×10 color glossy picture.2 The picture is fine, but print itself is glorious. Even after 800 words of rambling praise, I cannot emphasize enough that North Coast Photo’s work is absolutely amazeballs.

Thing is, though it’s not my favorite photo, I am not a good judge of which of my photos are actually good. I didn’t like the surfer shot from the first test trio when I took it, but when I show people a batch of 8x10s it draws as much praise as any of the others. People connect with it for some reason.

That, I understand. It’s the root of why I can’t always enjoy good shots, and like ones people don’t gravitate towards. I have a strange emotional attachment to them, and it colors my perceptions.

Here’s an example. I don’t like Bootsy, who is a horrible dog, so taking a sympathetic portrait of the little asshole is actually an achievement. Everyone loves He’s Big on the Inside but even more pedestrian portraits of that little shithead strike me as good, mostly because I know his personality and I’m proud of hiding it. I like the picture because it makes me feel like I did a good job.

So, for me, the problem with pictures of Venice is that I don’t like Venice. I left with few positive impressions, and never bothered to appreciate what I did there because the whole experience ranged from disappointing to downright unpleasant.

I’m not sure there are any locals, actually. Just hordes of visitors, fresh off a cruise ship, trying desperately to immerse themselves in Venetian culture and history in the two hours before they have to reboard

I visited in November, which should be off season, but the weekend I was there the place was so crowded you could pass out and not fall over. Shoulder to shoulder with tourists, almost everywhere I went, and I wasn’t able to get any sense of the city or of how the locals lived. I’m not sure there are any locals, actually. Just hordes of visitors, fresh off a cruise ship, trying desperately to immerse themselves in Venetian culture and history in the two hours before they have to reboard for the all you can eat buffet and two day sail to Dubrovnik where they get to see that game of thrones castle.

In fact, the only time I really enjoyed the city was on a Sunday night, in the rain. That drove out the mobs of shuffle walking idiots and gave me time to see a bit of architecture, even if I didn’t get any sense of culture. My only positive impressions of the city are dark, wet, and bewildering, which is better than that sentence sounds.

There’s a special joy in getting lost in a place, then seeing what you see as you find your way back. I’ve done this with many cities over the years, purposely wandering off the beaten track with no map, which is how you really get to know a place.

Venice does this better than almost any city. Getting lost is easy. It’s myriad alleyways never go straight for long, and two or three turns into a neighborhood can have you hopelessly turned about. But, then, it’s a small island and all you have to do is keep walking around at random. Sooner or later you’ll stumble into a square, run across the Grand Canal, or just notice a sign on the corner of a building pointing you to the train station.

As I mentioned, I was there in November. During the daytime, the weather was just plain bad for my style of photography with a dark, washed out light and grey skies with very little contrast. Skies are pretty much all blown out in my images, and I was struggling to get in-focus, non-shaky shots every time I tried, often having to use a bollard, bridge rail, or something similar as an impromptu tripod to keep the camera steady for the long exposures times in the dim light. Many of the more iconic vistas were so crowded I couldn’t even choose my vantage, being lucky to find ANY spot on the rail at Ponte Rialto to take an shot. I left feeling like I got nothing of value, photographically. Or culturally, for that matter. I think the best thing that happened to me that whole weekend was finding a place to do my laundry in Mestre Saturday morning.

But I have revisited some of my Italy pictures while playing with more of these photo tools that I am using to prep printables, and I eventually got back to the shots of Venezia. I’ve been messing with desaturating them, converting them to black and white, or just cropping them and letting them be grey and rainy. This is new for me. I’m a light guy at heart, always looking for contrast or a glowing surface, or spots that reveal a piece of a story when the rest might be hidden in a nearby shadow. But if all I have is sickly light and flat, desaturated colors, there has to be something else compelling in the composition.

It has been an odd exercise, and the formerly uninteresting photos have struck me as interesting now, if for no other reason than I remember experimenting with composition when I took them. I guess if the light is shit, the composition is all that matters, so it’s all about converging lines, rule of thirds, and, once in a while, those weird and blurry details hidden somewhere I never looked before.

Here’s a batch of examples:

Obviously not all great art, but better than I remembered in December, after the longest two month job of my life was finished. And at the very least I remember taking those shots down the street while standing on top of a large pedestal in an attempt to get a vantage over the heads of the thousands thronging down that street, so even if you don’t like it, it evokes an emotional response. I can almost smell the rotten fish and mildew from here.

Good times.

1. Silver Halide prints, even on “Endura” and “Archive” paper are good for 40 to 60 years in normal display conditions, depending on who tested them, unless they’re sealed behind UV resistant glass.

2. With circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.

Sunset Tonight

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I have been waiting weeks to get the sunset precisely between these two palm trees from the front porch. It’s NOT quite there, but almost. A couple more days! But I am impatient so I took so pictures tonight.

These are pretty much straight out of the camera.

Full Moon Follies

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I tried some things. They didn’t work. At least I got some decent stills.

Here is the Harvest moon of 2020

A couple from the night before the full moon. 99.5% waxing.

My experiment was to try and get some context. Take shots of the moon with some trees to frame it. It didn’t work. Still learning to see 500mm, and you have to go a looooooong way out before you are in focus at infinity.

Here’s a short hint of what I tried tonight, though.

They’re in an older post, but here are the shots I did last week when the moon was waxing at 40%.

Rose Finches

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Just a couple of studies of the finches that occasionally feed on the berry bush by the driveway. They’ll hang out atop the avocado tree, and often there will be half a dozen in the berry bush, but they don’t stay there for long nor can I count on them every day. As I was taking these, Doug came by and startled them, and they never returned.

The first is in the berry bush, where I finally got one not obscured by the branches. This is actually only the first on the page here, as this series was what I was taking when Doug and Bootsie came through and broke up the party.

A few will pick pine nuts off the dead pine tree in the middle of the yard. The Goldfinches do this, as well, but I haven’t been able to get a really good shot of them.

And this guy spent some time atop the avocado tree. The dark streaks in the background are the power wires across the street, and I haven’t photoshopped these. I just cropped what came out of the camera.

Alas, while this perch is great in that they’ll stay there, it is still difficult to get a good angle on them as the light is from the west and the tree is right on the western edge, against the fence. Trying to get up against the fence always scares them away, but as the summer is past and the sun is moving south, it is easier to get them reasonably lit while standing in the driveway, due south of them.

So, LBBs are hard. There’s a reason for the term “flighty” and these little bastards sure are. They swoop in and swoop out, and choose a different place to perch or feed almost every evening, very seldom where I am when I have a camera in hand.

At least I’m getting some practice exposing birds. Even if I do end up deleting 100 crappy images after I’m done trying.

More 200-500 experiments

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The sun came out this afternoon and the sky was almost blue. Quite an improvement from last week’s smoke and smog. I thought it might be a good time to actually take some shots of birds and lizards with light that worked.

the littler guy is about an inch long nose to vent … and the one on the stump might be a half inch longer.

Not too many examples, but here’s the young guy from the previous post, trying to lay claim to the stump again, and a younger challenger trying to own the steps to the front porch. Note, the little guy on the bricks is just as bombastic as the slightly larger one on the stump, he just does it to the hatchlings. I actually have some video of him showing off for one so small it probably hasn’t even molted yet. A 6 week old bossing around a 4 week old, bossing around a 2 week old. I guess this is the lizard version of shit flowing downhill.

Video later. For now some sample stills. One each, cropped to show how sharp I can get when the sun is shining, and one uncropped to show how much of the lizard actually fills the frame. Remember, the littler guy is about an inch long nose to vent — that brick is only 4 inches wide — and the one on the stump might be a half inch longer.

The one on the stump molted the day after I took the last pictures. So he’s out today in brand new skin and it looks to me like the color around his eye is getting more brilliant. The fact that you can see that with this lens kind of blows my mind. 500mm is quite the reach.

After more pics and videos of the baby dragons I waited a bit for the birds to come out. They like to feed on the berry bushes at the end of the yard nearest the street so I can find them there some evenings. I went out when I heard them chattering to get some shots.

At first I got one or two in the yard, hanging out on the wire above the berry bush and cactus along the fence. I was having issues exposing properly, getting the background more than the bird, but he flew off to argue with his finchy friends before I could switch to spot and try again. There were bluebirds and a goldfinch in the red berry bush so I thought to get into position to see them when all the birds in all the bushes flew away. Dammit!

I took a few pictures of birds on the wires, and even tried to get some in flight, but never got another shot of them in amongst the foliage with the nice green backdrop. Oh well. Here are some samples.

The reason they all bolted? Well, Creamsicle had to take a shit. He was walking up behind me and, though he’s a ridiculously lazy cat who doesn’t hunt much, the birds don’t know that. Lucy is the real hunter and, though I have never seen her take a bird, she has gotten mice, gophers, and more than a few lizard tails.

I think I might back up a bit here. Creamsicle is the orange and white cat that’s always in the yard. Unlike Lucy, who has the black cat habit of thinking I’m her very best friend, Creamsicle has never wanted anything to do with me. He used to see me and run away, in fact, but for the last six months I get his attention when he’s in the yard then just ignore him. Now he knows I’m not going to bother with him so he doesn’t run away. He doesn’t even look at me, in fact, just going about his business. And his business, in this case, is both metaphorical and, well, also metphorical, but in the more scatological sense.

I learned recently from the lady next door, who Lucy actually lives with as opposed to just inviting herself in like she does everywhere else, that Creamsicle is a stray. He just showed up one day so she gave him some food. He comes for a meal (or two) every day now. And generous meals they are, he has gotten rather rotund in the half dozen years I have known him. Creamsicle isn’t his real name, it’s just what I call him because there have been so many cats hanging out in the yard over the years my usual moniker for the cat that is usually hanging out in my yard, “Neighbor Kitty, ” wasn’t specific enough.

In the afternoons, however, Creamsicle “does his business” in the front yard. And by that, I mean he has decided there’s a specific spot in the yard to take a shit.

I kind of wonder how it is that it is so common an occurrence the last dozen years — that a cat has taken residence in my yard — that I need monikers for them. But this has been the case ever since the original Neighbor Kitty at my place in Oceanside. I’m pretty sure they’re trying to tell me something, but I intend to ignore the message for as long as possible.

Creamsicle spends time almost every day sleeping in the back yard. He has, at various times, found a nice place atop the shed, on a rickety wooden bench, or just on a bed he has stamped out of the grass and I can generally see him out the kitchen window when I’m getting a cup of coffee. This is the busy life of a stray cat. Get breakfast, find a nice place to sleep, rinse, repeat.

In the afternoons, however, Creamsicle “does his business” in the front yard. And by that, I mean he has decided there’s a specific spot in the yard to take a shit. Why that spot, and why here, I don’t know, but after I dug up some of the weeds to plant wildflower seeds this winter he chose one of the cleared areas as his new litter box and has been visiting it a couple times a day since.

This afternoon’s visit to the gentleman’s rest facilities completely disrupted the birdwatching session as he came sauntering past me. And sauntering is all he does any more. Maybe an amble, or a trudge now and again, but now that he isn’t afraid of me he doesn’t hurry at all. He won’t even look at me.

Oh well. Birds done, cat pics on deck. I almost think I need to make him scared of me again so he’ll look my way for better photos, but with this lens I decided to get in touch with my inner Marlin Perkins and take some photos like I was watching a lion stalking on the Serengeti.

The day ended with a sunset, for the first time in weeks. These are straight out of the camera, no crop. The view from the kitchen window compressed by the 500mm perspective.

New Lens, Who Dis?

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I got my hands on a 200-500mm f/5.6 lens a few days ago. It’s heavy, and bulky, and big, and kind of enormous.1 But 500mm reach is interesting to me, and I am looking forward to experimenting with it.

I’ve almost forgotten how to deal with auto-focus, oddly, as I’ve been hand-focusing my vintage lenses all spring and summer

I have taken a few photographs to test it. The light in these will look sickly and awful, but that’s because it is. Smoke from the fires, and haze from the sea are making good old fashioned smog like nobody’s business. The air is terrible, and everything has an awful, brown tint to it. While better than it was last week, it looks gross. Like living in Delhi, or east of Los Angeles in the late 70s.

But I took pictures anyway. I’m learning to use this beast, and all of these are hand-held and auto-focused. I’ve almost forgotten how to deal with auto-focus, oddly, as I’ve been hand-focusing my vintage lenses all spring and summer, and I am finding a few quirks. It will hunt quite a bit when trying to get it to grab a lizard, going all the way out to infinity and then having to come back, which isn’t exactly fast. There’s a lockout from 6M to Infinity, I kind of wish it was 5m to closest focus!

It seems modestly sharp when I can get it in focus. The image stabilization works pretty well, allowing me to take hand-held shots at 500mm in marginal light. Alas, what I really got it for was taking pictures of birds in flight or maybe action shots of surfers, but zero visibility and smog kind of throw a kink in that plan, so dragons it is. Maybe we’ll have a blue sky next week.

Until then, behold:

The first gallery is random shots just before sunset from the day the lens arrived. Extremely low light, but you get a new lens, you take a pic. It’s the rule. The telephone pole is nearly 400 feet away, and you can read the markings clearly with a 500mm shot, handheld, in very low light. I took a picture of the sun to give an idea of just how icky it was.

The Stump Dragon was molting on Sunday. Again, light was bad, like it has been all week, but I never seem to see a molting lizard at the same time as I have a camera in hand, so I took some shots. I actually was lucky to get these as I spotted the molt Saturday, when all the scales on the front half were opaque, but it was while he was running to hide in the crack in the stump. Gone before I could retrieve a camera, alas. I would have liked to have gotten pics then, as they look almost like they are covered in fungus or something since the skin comes off of the scales rather than in one smooth shed like a snake.

In the past the lizards I spotted molting would be out of sight for a day or two and not reappear until after they’d shed. But this time I got to see stumpy here changing out of the worn out duds and putting on the Sunday Go to Meeting clothes.

My favorites are the ones facing away. You can see half the skin is old, half new.

Early this afternoon as I was headed out I caught the stump dragon showing off some. There are interlopers trying to steal the range from the stump to the chair, including a tiny but ridiculously brave male who is only three molts in and thinks he’s king of the world. So after shedding the old clothes, it was time to get out there and defend some territory.

For this and the following galleries, I have included both images cropped to refine the composition, and full sized, to give an idea of just how much of the frame these little guys are actually taking. You can get mightily close with 500mm of reach!

Also, nothing is photoshopped. Mostly I clicked “Auto” for sharpening and saturation in Nikon Capture, cropped, then dumped the file to jpg. What you see is what I got.

These first images are just after noon on the brick that sits half way between the stump and the chair — the range the Stump Dragon seems to have claimed the last week or two.

And here’s the young buck. This male has been around about two months, and is still barely more than bite sized. I’ve seen three color changes, so he may have molted three or four times, but that’s all. I actually have pics of him before the most recent molt around here somewhere, but for now the ones I took this evening.

He’s belligerent. Has been since the very beginning when he didn’t even have any color, which is kind of hilarious. Doing pushups and acting all threatening when he’s an inch long. Who knows if he’ll last long enough to make a breeding season after he matures, but for now he’s trying to make his presence known.

He’s also a special challenge as he tends to run around a try to be threatening to all of the others — the Trash Dragon, the Cardboard Dragon, and the Cactus Dragon — so he’ll sprint from one perch to the next, stopping and raising his tail or puffing up his neck before facing a different direction to try and intimidate the next guy. I get a few seconds or maybe a couple of minutes to compose and take some shots, then he’ll start sprinting around and I have to compose and focus quickly, hope I get a shot, then try to follow him to the next place he runs.

Of course, he is only running around and acting tough when Stump Dragon is elsewhere as, again, he’s literally bite sized. He wouldn’t survive an actual challenge.

My favorites are the last two, where he’s posing facing northwest, toward the Garbage Dragon. He’s saying “Rawr! I’m a Dragon! Fear me!” I don’t know if anyone else outside this territory actually cares, yet. It’s not breeding season anymore and most of the others are far more timid than they were in the late spring when they were courting. But the little guy is trying.

The ones with the neck display are facing northeast, for the benefit of the Cactus Dragon, and the ones atop the flat log are facing south, keeping an eye out for the Cardboard Dragon.

The one that DOES care is the Dragon who claims this range. After seeing the belligerent baby showing off on the stump, the full sized Stump Dragon chased him off and hung out there for a while.

Looking good with the fresh new skin! I get it. New clothes, you want to show ’em off to the world.

I also took pics of a hatchling in the evening. I think this is the one I had to escort out of the house a few times last week after a molt. This is a VERY small lizard, likely only two weeks out of the nest, and usually found hiding in the planter next to the steps to the front porch.

So, there are possibilities. It’s not exactly a carrying-around lens, or one of those innocuous do-all lenses that are great for street photography. But I bet I can get a great picture of the moon if the smoke clears out some before it is full again! And, when I get sick of lugging the extra five pounds around I’ll sell it on the e bays and find something else to play with instead.

Until then, “Rawr! I’m a Dragon!”

Rawr!

1 That’s what She Said

Older Photographs

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Since the only things to photograph here while under house arrest were what I could find in my yard, it was pretty much cats and lizards. So I decided to grab some older photographs for a little variety.

Many of these were taken with my old trusty D70. Extremely modest gear, compared to the current generation of digital cameras, but it’s what I had at the time. Like the old photojournalist’s credo “F8 and be there” it’s more important to take a picture than to take the most technically perfect picture ever.

Some were taken with my 7100, which was wonderful in its day, but on my trips to Taiwan and Italy I carried an 18-200 lens that I never bonded with. Just couldn’t make sharp images to save my life though it’s tack sharp with a 35mm 1.8 or even the 18-120 that camera wore as a walkin’ around lens after I sold the 18-200.

So, soon I’ll be adding some portfolios to prove that I don’t just take pictures of cats. And some pictures of cats.

Let’s begin with dogs. First, some photos of a young and handsome Shadow.

And Chopper and Cookie, plus bonus pics of a little smash faced yorkie who lived with a friend a decade ago.

There are occasionally photographs of actual people, too. Though that’s rare. Not much of a people person.

It’s always interesting to see what you get from a sunset. Or a blood moon eclipse. The eclipse was just the best I could do with the equipment I had, but something is better than nothing and I learned the difficulties of exposing for the surprisingly bright moon. F11 and the inverse of the ISO, a rule for the ages.

I took more than a few snapshots while on the road. I stumbled across some from the summer of 2007, where I started in Boston, DC, Chicago, London for a month, Belgium for a long weekend, Germany for a month, then home for a week before Mexico City… that was a busy year.

I have a lot of photographs from the era somewhere, but here’s a smattering. Some from Chicago, London, Munich, and the Mosel where it is always cloudy yet charmingly beautiful. Or maybe that was all the wine.

Then there were pictures of Doug’s little asshole dog. I hate that dog. Ugly as the day is long, but he makes up for it with an awful personality. The picture in the jeep is pure portrait art, though. I’m actually proud of that one.

Of course, there are about a billion photos of Nono. If I was taking a picture in the house, she’d find a way to get in it, so I often used her as a focal point anyway.

I recall once sitting in a coffee shop with a young girl I’d befriended a couple of years before at an open mic at a different coffee shop and meeting her there was pure happenstance. We had discussed photography in the past, and music, and cat memes, and whatever else it is you talk to 17 year old girls about… actually that’s pretty much all there was to talk about. So when she came over to say hello I showed her my brand new camera, which had arrived only an hour before. Her first comment was “I’ll be disappointed if the first thing you took a picture of was anything but your cat.”

I’d like to say I’d disappointed her, but the first few photos here were on the card when she pushed play. The rest are just random pics that were on this hard drive.