Words and pictures from Silicon Valley by Chris Gulker
From the monthly archives:
This snap of Farrah Fawcett just happens to have a tonal range that maps nicely to the capabilities of my Canon scanners: the crop fits pretty well, too. Wish I had used the Nikon or Leica for more of my pix in the 70s… then, again, naaahhhhh…
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This shot of Dee Dee Bridgewater shows the problem of trying to get square-format Hasselblad pix through an 8.5×14 scanner. It’s also difficult to place the original upside down on the scanner and get it accurately positioned for maximum image capture. Pic is much better as a square…
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Both my older Canon Lide scanner and newer MPC530 multifunction device make relatively decent-quality scans, but the biggest crop area I can get is 8.5×14 inches – which results in losing image area as seen abbove. The original has black space on both sides of the light circle, and more room top and bottom. It’s a square print from a Hasselbald 2.5×2.5 cm negative (Tri-X pan) …
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I’ve been pleased with the quality of the 10-MP pix that come from my Christmas present, a Lumix DMC FZ50. This is basically the same camera that Leica sells as the V-lux 1 for $1000. So, I set it up recently as a copy camera – using 20 bucks worth of clamps and reflectors (that I spray-painted white) from the hardware store (including 100W-eqivalent daylight-balanced fluorescent bulbs on sale for $.99).
At issue is speed – my 11×14 scanner takes 45 minutes to make a hi-res (around 40 MB) scan, and its atrocious software offers almost no interface for cropping, dpi etc. It just offers screen res or hi-res, and at 45 minutes per hi res, it will take years to scan in all my Kodabromides.
In contrast, I can scan a whole box of prints in 45 minutes with the Lumix set up as a copy camera: quality is what you see above. The image capture is not very different from what the scanner gets – shadow detail might be a bit better – and I’m guessing a preset or 2 in Lightroom coud batch-fix the copy pix to an acceptable level (like getting the black and white points set), at least for web display. The real answer is a high-end scanner… or send all the prints out to a scanning service, maybe offshore?
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Here’s a scan, a section of an 11×14-inch print done with a Canon Lide scanner. I can’t remember if I did any post-scan manipulation, but this strikes me as the quality you typically get from a decent (but not high-end) desktop scanner. Midtones are captured quite well, shadows are a little murky and highlights are (here, anyway) OK.
I should find this print and re-shoot it with the Lumix set up as a copy camera to see how quality differs. Most of my contemporaneous prints from the 70s are 11×14-inch Kodabromides, hence the need to scan or otherwise capture 11×14.
I have an 11×14 print scanner which delivers similar quality, but it is very slow, and has poor, old (win 2000 era) driver software for both Mac and Windows – and the manufacturer (if they’re still around) won’t release scanner firmware details, so it doesn’t even work with VueScan, the Swiss Army Knife of scanner software. That’s Samuel Arkoff, the ‘B’ movie king BTW… Yet more on copy vs. scanner TK…
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So, we’re hoping to recover a little of the ‘dark time’ that disappeared last weekend, with Linda in Chicago, and spend some time working on photography this weekend. One project is to get my 1970s portfolios online (in glorious black and white), which is also an experiment with Google apps. I’ll be building a micro-stock site, but also thinking about putting up reviews and tutorials as podcasts and/or words-and-pictures stories. I’m using Lightroom to manage various scans et al., and experimenting with using the Lumix DMC FZ50 as a copy camera (more on that in a bit). Learning this stuff can be fun… pic above is the LA skyline some 30+ years ago, likely shot from the roof of the Occidental Building…
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So, having taken control of my steroid/edema situation, I’ve been very frustrated that, this week anyway, the plan wasn’t working. I’vr ramped down the steroides, which should make me stronger, but the reverse has been true this week.
Today, I got my latest blood test back and it shows unusually low platelet count. My oncology nurses think it’s a timing thing, and that the last round of chemo corresponded with my platelet lifecycle, which wiped out more than usual numbers, producing an anemic state. Oh well… best laid plans…
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Felt very lucky to get this – another shot of pretty graffitum Long Neck – from the train day before yesterday. The ‘baby bullet’ I ride is usually going around 60 MPH (I think), the train windows are’nt particularly clean mid week, and I’m shooting into the sun when headed south to San Jose. This particular morning the train slowed a bit to take a fork – not normal at this spot – and that helped. I’m also making a mental map of the spots where Long Neck appears along the tracks in the hopes of being able to get ready for a shot.
Nevertheless, the Lumix DMC FZ50 and its Leica DC Vario-Elmarit 7.4 – 88.8 mm (35 – 420 in 35mm format), set to 4-photo ‘burst’ mode at about 90mm (35 format) managed to get one frame as we sped by (a ‘hail Mary’ situation if ever there was one). A little image processing cleaned it up, and voila, Mr. (or is it Ms.?) Long Neck graces the blog again…
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Yesterday I blogged about the frustration when a fella finds himself in ill-defined territory, at least from a RTFM perspective. So it’s nice to have spaces where you can be organized and more or less in control. Dotcom Garden is, pour moi, one such space, and ongoing tinkering with the systems and organization of my home office (aka gulker.com World HQ) is another.
Our father’s day gift – a 2nd Apple 20″ Cinema Display – is now fully integrated with 2 Minis, a G5 tower, 1.5 TB of storage (including a NAS array) secure WiFi and wired networks et al. A DVI KVM switch makes it easy to pop my cool MacBook Pro (thanks Adobe!) onto the system for WFH mornings, evenings, (and currently) Thursdays and Fridays. A home Polycom phone and Adobe Connect technology are the final work-from-home touches.
As soon as work is wrapped up, a click of the KVM and we can be editing photos (we’re using Lightroom to work through 600 snaps we brought back from our Paris and Sud Bourgogne trip) or learning how to do audio for podcasts. I can just leave a given log-in where it is until I have time to return, which is cool until Leopard ships, with it’s ‘Spaces’ feature. And we’ll still have some advantages by being able to dedicate a machine to things like media processing, where you need cabling, CPU horsepower etc….
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Well, us nerdy guys, you, know, the RTFM set, figure that, if you give me the manual, I can figure anything out. One little problem I have at the moment is that my body didn’t come with a manual (although the 13 drugs I’m on are heavily documented), so I’m kind of figuring out things as I go along.
I started keeping a diary of meds levels, charting how I felt on a scale of 1 to 10, weight, blood pressure et al. 2 months ago. My oncology team flipped out when I showed them the docs: hardly anybody takes that much responsibility for their own care, it would seem.
So, I’m trying to figure out the thorny connection between weakness caused by the steroids, and problems caused by the edema, or brain swelling caused by last December/January’s radiation therapy. I’m hoping I’ll get stronger as I very slowly ramp down steroids (I think I went too fast last time I tried a less well-documented steroid change, and wound up in edema-land), though that has been a bit of an inconclusive process so far. I would love to get back to how I was feeling in France 3 weeks ago… maybe I need to back to France to feel good again? 
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