Well, we just got back from our big weekend. Actually, we weren’t supposed to be back for another two days, but I’ll get to that. Saturday was my first wedding by myself. Paul wouldn’t be there and the photography was completely under my control. I have to admit I was a little nervous about doing it. I wasn’t really worried about “getting the shots”, meaning to get the photos I needed to have the wedding covered from a technical basis, I was more worried about the level of “coolness” I would get. I was sure I could get it done and get what I needed but I was really hoping to have a portfolio piece at the end. I think I might have done it. It was all the way up near San Antonio so there was quite a drive involved as well. The wedding went well with the exception of some timing glitches and my flash unit breaking down mid-cake cutting, but I had a backup and it really wasn’t any big deal. I had gotten there early enough to scout out some interesting looking spots near the church for backgrounds and so I was ready to go when the bride eventually got ready an hour late. The reception proved a little more challenging. Everything was outside and it was dark and wooded around the site. That meant I was going to have to blast things with full power from my flash and even then I’d get a subject in the foreground and pitch blackness behind them. I think I over worked my poor little Quantum QFlash to death because of it. It was fine up until the cake-cutting and then the battery suddenly went from full and happy to empty and really pissed off. That was fine, I had backup. I shot with the 550 for a little while and put the quantum in it’s recharger to catch a breather. The rest of the evening was pretty mundane. They had a rather small crowd, only about 70 people or so, and they were quite content to sit around and drink beer and talk. That was fine with me, I needed a little break. At that point it was 11pm and I had been on the road, driving up there since 10am.
After the reception I headed back to the motel where Lauren was waiting for me. It was a crappy, rundown little hole of a place but it was free so I couldn’t really complain. The plan was to stay there another night or two and enjoy San Antonio and the area. That plan had counted on the hotel room being acceptable and it wasn’t. Of course all the other places in the area had been booked solid because of the retarded NCAA basketball series in San Antonio that weekend. I hate basketball. Never was there a more pointless and overrated activity. I will give it “sport” status however, unlike Nascar, but we’ve already talked about that. Anyway. So, instead we decided to drive back and have some fun around here. Tonight we’re heading down to Kema, this boardwalk/restaurant area thingy. I plan to have myself a tasty steak and kick back and relax.
Later.
I have a quick megapixel question…we were using the digital backs the have in bergen which i’m told give like a 11 to 14 mega pixel quality. The digital “negative” we got from that was about 300dpi of so which wasn’t enough to blow it up to a printable 18×24. We ended up getting a 4×5 color positive taken and scanned at like 4000dpi which was plenty. My question being do they make digital cameras that can produce the dpi necessary to make large prints? and you never told me about the band you found. and i’ve had splinter cell for a week now and still haven’t had time to play it. grrr talk to you later
There’s a few things to remember when using Bergen’s famed digital backs. First, they bought those 4 years ago, I doubt they’re 14mp. Second, when you get a negative burnt, those morons at Photoworks wouldn’t know what they were doing if their lives depended on it. I bet you dollars to donuts that they took you image and resampled the crap out of it to fit it on a neg at 300dpi. Also remember that no self respecting digital printer would print at 300dpi. 300 is fine for Kinkos, but just as an example, we print at 1440dpi at our studio. Also, DPI and actual photo paper can’t really be compared. Real photo paper will always have a tighter grain than the negative, so any serious enlargerment will show, especially something as large as 18×24. The route you took, making a 4×5 and scanning it, was definatly the best route. As for your question, they sure do. We use a Canon EOS D1s. It’s a true 11.1mp camera. Now, remember that a MP rating is useless unless you actually do something relating to it’s rating. The term “mega pixel” is just a big buzz word but is a good starting place when you looking at equipment. What you really need to look at is the resolution (square messurement – AxB) of the image. Our camera takes something like a 4064×2704 image, with a full frame CMOS censor at those 11.1 megapixels. The digital back at Burgen may take a 10mp image but it might only be with a 10x10mm CMOS (super tiny). That means that it’s trying to take a whole lot of information and it doesn’t have a big enough sensor to do the job. Its all about how many sensor-thingys they can pack onto a chip. The bigger the chip AND the tighter the sensor packing the better.
Anyway, that was a long ass explination for basically “you did the right thing”. Just make sure you have someone knowledgeable that’s doing the printing. Kinkos won’t cut it. Try finding someone that has something like this:
http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/WideFormat/WideFormatMain.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes
We have the 7600. Note the dpi. That’s the kind of thing you need. You can leave the file at 300dpi even, but if it comes off something like that 7600, which is printing at 2800x1440dpi, it’s going to look fantastic.
Also, the easiest way to size it (and this only applies to Photoshop obviously) is to do you resoltion with the cropper tool. Select the crop tool and put in the values you want in the top, say 18×24 @ 300. Then crop. The tool with have a fixed aspect ration and a fixed resoltion and you’ve essentially solved both size and resoltion issues all at once.
Hope all of that helped.
And, I don’t remember what I was talking about in terms of bands, refresh my memory.
You also NEED to check out SC:PT. It kicks butt.
thanks for the info…I’m still a little confused as to how the mega pixels + resolution works. When we took the picture with the digital camera (we stayed digital to a tiff. not printing to a negative.) it was like I said like 300 dpi at8 x 10 oe something along those lines. When we took the picture for Snap we scanned a 35mm negative but couldn’t get the resolution we needed, so we printed the 35 negative to an 8×10 then scanned that as high-res as we could then blew that up to 18×24 and it still was kinda crappy. It worked for that particular poster, but the new poster needs to be really crisp. Is there an equation that is something like mega pixels x resolution = print at X size at X quality? like an 11 mega pixel camera at 10×10 resolution will yeild an 8×10 digital image at 300dpi? We asked several of the photo professors and they didn’t have a clue what we were talking about. As far as printing goes we are sending it to a place that makes a metal plate then prints off of that. We are getting 750 made. Our contact their said he prefered 300dpi at whatever size you were printing but 150dpi was ok. Anything more than 300dpi and he couldn’t tell the difference. I’m not sure what that all means