Month: July 2011

Client Story: Hard Rain Project

HARD RAIN: What’ll You Do Now?
at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew till 25th September 2011

Mark Edwards has used his original Hard Rain Project set of images as the core element of a new project that considers how we can as individuals and as a society can move towards a sustainable future for the Planet.

This powerful exhibition is currently on show at Kew Gardens in London, you can read all about the project and the exhibition here:
http://www.hardrainproject.com/

Kudos to the management of Kew Gardens for allowing some “difficult” images amongst the beauty of the gardens,  in my opinion this raises their profile as a conservationist organisation  and the garden location is exactly the right place for thousands of people each day to consider the issues raised.

Photography is at its best when it combines passion with meaningful subject matter and this exhibition has plenty of both. I recommend you visit the site or exhibition as it travels the world.

My involvement
I have worked with Mark to help prepare the images for printing for both this outdoor exhibition as well as for the book and Audio Visual uses.

Careful colour grading and consideration of Marks preferences for tonality means that the exhibition has a consistency of vision in the printed results.

Image restoration was part of the work undertaken to allow for the enlargement of low resolution images to 1 meter or more, I was always careful to keep the veracity of the underlying image and keep the image pure whilst reducing noise, chromatic aberration and other artifacts that would have impeded the message or meaning of the image coming through.

If you are planning a book or exhibition and have material from multiple sources it will always pay you to have me look at the material and quote on preparing the files for greater clarity and consistency and give greater readability to the work.

Stephen

x-rite do the right thing for potential OSX Lion users

It looks like x-rite have decided to include support for their older hardware (such as the i1 display 2) in i1profiler software (specifically i1Basic) which is designed to run on  OSX 10.7 (Lion).

They have done this after an outcry from users and suppliers who have rightly pointed out to them that not supporting their recent hardware is not the behaviour of a company that cares about its users.

So all very positive, though according the the table in the following link there will be a “nominal” fee if you bought your i1 display 2 before 2011, lets hope they drop the fee and just do the right thing.

http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=264

September is still some way off so don’t update to Lion till they release this, – a calibrated screen is far more important than sliding icons and App store jiggery pokery.

Stephen

Higher capacity Image Storage from Synology

For people who need greater digital image storage capacity than the current affordable 10.9TB Thecus then you may want to have a look at the following solution:

http://www.storagereview.com/synology_targets_photographers_new_ds2411_nas

I would estimate that filled with 3TB drives this should provide between 24-30TB of usable Raid 5 space (36TB unformatted). To put this in perspective thats enough for over  1/2 million uncompressed A3+ Tiffs or over 1 million camera raw images.

Synology have a good reputation for building solid kit so this look like a viable way to accommodate image collections. The 165mb/sec writing and 195mb/sec reading in raid 5 mode means that access to images is not going to be a problem.

As always – this is not a backup solution in itself, copies of all files must exist in some form as the device is a single point of failure (theft etc). What it does provide is fast and simple access to a large image collection.