Technical Notes

Various geek-level techie notes in case anyone's interested.

Well, OK, just 'cos I love talking about this stuff. :-)

Why Kodak Photo-CDs annoy me.

Photography websites

My camera is a Canon A-1, a lovely little beast with lots of exposure control modes, ranging from fully automatic to fully manual, and which is built like a tank - very useful when scrambling on the wall. I mean, obviously I didn't bash it around, but it was good to be able to put it down on rough ground without worrying too much about it.

I just used the A-1's standard 50mm lens for all my photos - no wide angles, no telephotos, no zooms. This meant I had less to carry and didn't spend any time swapping lenses. There were some cases where I took photos knowing I'd have to crop them down to the interesting parts back home, but that was no problem - especially for these electronic versions, courtesy of The Gimp.

I used a polarising filter for almost every photo I took. They're very handy for bringing out colours (in particular the blue of the sky) and for cutting down glare off water. I basically just stuck it on the front and forgot about it, only taking it off at the end of the day when I needed all the light I could get.

I should also mention the two Kodak Max "disposable" cameras I took with me. I was thinking evenings and indoors: I don't (or rather, didn't) have a flash for my A-1, and anyway when you've had a few drinks you don't want to faff about with an SLR and a flash - you want to point and shoot. The results are here and here.

Unfortunately I overestimated the power of the flash, so a lot of the photos I took with these babies didn't come out as well as I would have liked - in particular, this one should have been a lot better. :-)

Film

My favourite film in the world at the moment is Ilford XP-2. This stuff is cool - you can process it either as black & white or as "normal" colour film, in which case it comes out sepia. I took two films of XP-2, and at time of writing, I've uploaded one of them. Love it.

Camera buffs: here's an interesting article about pushing XP-2 to other ratings.

I shot five rolls of Fuji Reala Superia 100 - most of my colour photos, in fact. Definitely no complaints, although on reflection perhaps 400 would have been preferable. I did shoot one roll of 400, borrowed from Louisa, but I'm not sure which one it was! Probably this one or my tenth one (not uploaded yet), but I'm not sure...

I shot one 24-frame roll of Kodak Gold 400, from Julie in exchange for a Fuji I'd given her when she got caught short. I haven't uploaded that film yet. The two disposable cameras I used for the evening films (here & here) also had Kodak Gold, at 200 ASA I think.

Oh yeah - and when I left for China I had the tail end of a roll of bog-standard Boots 200 ASA, and the results weren't half bad, actually.

Tripods

Tripods - they're great. When light is low and you need a long exposure, or if you want to do a self-timer shot with yourself in it, or there's a waterfall you want to take a 30-second exposure of to get a lovely soft effect, a tripod's your man.

I took two with me to China, but only got to use one of them. My main "proper" tripod is actually a video camera tripod - a Ferguson Videostar. It's nothing amazingly special, but I picked it up at a car boot sale for 20 quid, because I knew I wanted to take one to China, I couldn't spend too much money, and it looked OK. Pretty big and bulky with a nice leather case, I never intended to lug it with me on the wall itself, but hoped it'd be useful for early mornings, sunsets, etc.

Alas, it didn't make it to Beijing until two days after we did, and sat in the International Lost & Found at Beijing airport until we passed back through on our way home. I'll tell the story properly in my diary - Eric deserves a big mention for his help - but the long and the short of it was that taking it was a complete waste of time. :-)

That left me with my mini-flexipod (pictured right) - a handy little pocket-sized tripod for tight spots, and very useful it was too. I used it for a few long exposures (example) and several self-timer shots with me in them (example). It wasn't perfect, but it was much better than nothing, and weighed so little I hardly knew I had it on me.

Processing

Decisions, decisions

It's easy to forget about processing - you focus on taking the picture and don't tend to worry about how it's going to be handled later. If you're truly hardcore, you develop them yourself, but I haven't got there yet, so I had to rely on a local processing lab. On the whole I was pretty pleased with the results, but as we'll see I made one big mistake...

I came back from China with eleven rolls of 36 photos, and one roll of 24. I knew I'd want to put a lot of my pictures up on this website, but scanning in up to 420 photos by hand didn't sound like fun. Fortunately, it's possible to get processing labs to produce CD-ROMs of JPEGs when they develop your films (or subsequently, but it tends to be more expensive), so I looked around Cardiff for somewhere offering this service. I really wanted "normal" CD-ROMs containing just JPEGs of my images, but all I could fine were Kodak Photo-CDs, which are slightly different and less than ideal, for reasons explained below, but they were the best I could find, so I went for it.

I also chose to get 7"x5" prints, instead of the standard 6"x4" - what the hell, this was a once-in-a-lifetime trip (actually, I hope it wasn't), so why not splash out? This was my biggest mistake: see below.

It cost £108 to get my twelve films developed both as 7"x5" prints and on Kodak Photo-CDs, but I gritted my teeth and told myself that's just the price of greatness. ;-) A week passed, and I got my photos back from the lab. I was pretty pleased with the results and got on with building this site and uploading my pictures. Only later did I realise my mistake...

Why 7"x5" prints were a really bad idea

The worst thing I did was ask for 7"x5" prints. This was a really big mistake because the "aspect ratio" of such prints meant I actually lost parts of my pictures!

A rectangle's aspect ratio is the ratio between the length of it's long side and the length of it's short side. For example, a square has an aspect ratio of 1 (both sides are the same length), a 6x4 rectangle has an aspect ratio of 1.5, and a 9x3 rectangle has an aspect ratio of 3. Important point: a 12x8 rectangle has the same aspect ratio as a 6x4 rectangle - it's got four times the area, but the aspect ratio is the same. This means that if there was a picture on the 6x4 you could directly project it onto the 12x8 without losing any of it and without distorting it at all - it would just be bigger. Make sense?

OK, so... When you take a photo, it exposes a rectangular area of film, which gets turned into a negative by the processing lab, and enlarged onto paper, making the actual print you put in your album. The negative is precious, because it's the best thing to use if you want reprints or enlargements later. It has a certain aspect ratio (about 1.5), and most of the time we print onto 6"x4" paper, which has a very similar aspect ratio to the negative, so everything on the negative comes out on the print, without distortion.

Unfortunately, 7"x5" has a different aspect ratio - more like 1.3, which means that when you get your negative enlarged onto a 7"x5" print, you'll always lose part of the image! For a great example, take a look at my photo of the chain bridge at Simatai. Notice that the sign at the bottom is slightly cropped. Well, the negative has the entire sign in view, and some of the pole it's fixed to - I didn't just take a careless photo. The print is even worse - you can only just see the top of the sign. Every single one of my prints has this problem to some degree - it's just lucky that on most of them you don't notice it.

How insane is that? Why don't they just make the paper bigger? Beats me - apparently "that's just the way it is". This is something I really should have known about, but I didn't, and it's very annoying that nobody warned me when I submitted my films for processing. Apparently it's even possible to say "I don't want to lose any of my picture", and they'll print a slightly smaller version, with borders, but no cropping - that would have been fine, but why wasn't I told about the option?

So there you go - that was my biggest mistake. Next time I'll pay even more and get bigger prints with a proper aspect ratio, or maybe I'll ask for the bordered 7"x5" prints - I don't know. At least my negatives are OK, so I can always get enlargements of favourites.

Why Kodak Photo-CDs annoy me.

The Kodak Photo-CDs have been very useful and undeniably saved me a lot of time, but nonetheless, I find them slightly annoying.

First, it's annoying that I didn't have any choice in the matter - I know of somewhere in Haslemere that does non-Kodak CD-ROMs, but couldn't find anywhere in Cardiff that would give me my photos on CD-ROM except if that CD-ROM was a Photo-CD. Boo hiss, monopolies suck, etc.

Second, it's annoying that they don't make the most of the space on the CD-ROM. I have twelve Photo-CDs at home with my scanned images on them - but the actual image files on all twelve CDs would fit on a single CD-ROM! This is annoying because smaller files mean lower quality. On an 800Mb CD-ROM containing 36 images, each of those images could be up to 22Mb in size - absolutely huge! Instead, we get paltry 200 to 800 Kb files instead, which are not bad but not as good as I would have liked.

This is a quibbling point, because for the website each image is shrunk and saved as a much smaller file anyway (typically 30 to 80 Kb), but on the principle that if you put crap in, you're bound to get crap out, it's vexing not to have the very best to start with. Seriously large files might be too big for some people to handle, but then why not provide two versions - a big one for fanatics like me, and a small one for sane people? It would, at least, make more efficient use of the CD-ROM. OK, starting to sound like a flag-waver now, so I think it's time to stop. :-)

Photography websites

photo.net is probably the best photography website on the net - it's a very successfuly online community of photographers, sharing experience, tips, photos, and comments on each other's photos. Highlights:

The learning section is a great place to start finding out about the real guts of photography - excellent stuff.
The gallery picks out a few recently uploaded photos at random. You get a real mix of stuff here - very inspirational.
Photo of the week picks out one photo per week for discussion and admiration. Same comment as with the gallery. :-)
Travels With Samantha, a "book about the summer I spent seeing North America, meeting North Americans, and trying to figure out how people live" by the prime mover behind photo.net, Phil Greenspun. Well written, and with many, many great photos.
It's also got a really good search engine, so if there's anything photographic you want to know more about, that's a great resource. Examples: canon a-1, ilford xp 2, great wall china.

Photography in Malaysia is another cool site, with lots of great stuff. Highlights:

A not-half-bad glossary of photographic terms.
A page of general photographic resources including some cool articles about, eg, how Hasselblad got involved in NASA's moon missions, and how Japan came to lead the world in camera manufacture.
A picture of the week page, although it looks like it hasn't been updated since 1998...
Of particular interest to me, all sorts of stuff about my camera, the Canon A-1 - including the manual, which is very handy as I don't have a copy. :-)
Loads of other bits I haven't properly explored yet!

Ben Kreunen's Photography Tips is definitely worth a look - quite a few tips and some really good photos. Interestingly, the photos are presented as PDFs, so you need Acrobat Reader to view them.

Finally, cameras.about.com is about.com's attempt to say everything there is about photography. Of course, they fail, but it's worth looking at if photo.net doesn't have the answer. Most annoyingly, you have to put up with pop-up adverts for online casinos and the like - grrrrr!

More as I find them... :-)

Technical Notes

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Photographic equipment