Pictures from the RBC Series at Martock on March 7, 2010. One of the flight time pictures will be published in the next edition of the Hants Journal. It was a beautiful sunny, warm day and the snowboarding course was created the same person who built the snowboard course at the Vancouver Olympics. Martock is high enough to create a full size Olympic course.
You can select pictures by image number and post a comment.
Martock Gallery on Flickr. Select full screen in the bottom right for the best view.
I get many PDF files from customers that won’t print or produce unexpected results. So how do you investigate and fix these files? I use preflight in Acrobat Pro.
Many things can cause problems; unexpected colour shifts, missing fonts, low resolution images, Pantone colours not supported by your rip, b&w documents that generate colour click charges. All these problems can be discovered and many of them can be fixed using the preflight features in Acrobat Pro.
This is an excellent video from Adobe TV that provides an overview of preflighting in Acrobat Pro 9.
Photographic Guild of Nova Scotia will be presenting a Digital Photo Basics Workshop on Saturday, September 19 in the Burke Auditorium at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. I’m the organizer for this event and I will be hosting one of the field sessions in the afternoon. The topic for my session is “How to Use Off-Camera Flash”.
You can find out more about this event at www.photoguild.ns.ca.
Original Image and Framed Print
Every year Xerox is a major sponsor for DND Family Days. DND hosts an annual carnival for the families of the Canadian Armed Forces at the Halifax Dockyards. The carnival includes fair rides, farm animals, displays, boat rides and more.
As part of our sponsorship we do free family portraits for the families of the forces personnel that attend the event. Over two days we did 1389 family portraits of ~4200 people. We always have lines up for the photos and we even had some come on saturday morning when it was raining. Many people comment on the photos did for them in previous years.
How We Did It
One of side of our booth is the “studio” and the other side is the processing area. I brought a backdrop from my home studio and we had two bails of hay for people to sit on as the event had a western theme this year. We also had some cowboy hats. Two Alien Bee AB800s with umbrellas provided the light and these were connected to my camera using Cybersync triggers. The Cybersyncs were very reliable and we didn’t have a single misfire.
Family Days Studio Setup
We used my Canon 50D with the 18-55mm F2.8 lens. I think every picture was sharp over the two days. Fast focusing is very important when shooting kids as sometimes you only have a fraction of second to catch the pose. Knowing the child’s name really helps to get their attention. The camera was tethered to a Macbook Pro using a USB cable and Canon’s EOS Utility. The EOS Utility generates a preview and this was displayed on a second monitor attached to the Macbook. Each image tranferred to the Macbook in 1-2 seconds and displayed automatically on the second monitor. This was a crowd pleaser!
The camera was set to medium resolution and high quality JPEGs. This was lots of resolution for a 8 1/2 x 11 print and everthing processed faster. All the camera settings were registered to custom function C1 and duplicated on C2. This made it very easy to restore the camera settings when inexperienced photograhers hit the wrong dial as we had several people shooting.
EOS Utility was writing the images to folder which we monitored using Adobe Bridge. This worked very well. When I was creating and testing the workflow I tried to use Lightroom but I encountered some limitations with Lightroom. It could automatically import images but everytime an image was imported it would interupt what anything else you were doing in Lightroom and this quicly become frustrating. I couldn’t set a default aspect ratio for cropping and I had to Export images and use a Photoshop Droplet (action) to create the frame. I decided to use Bridge and Photoshop.
Cropping Pictures on the Macbook Pro
Pictures were selected in Adobe Bridge and opened in Photoshop. Each image was cropped manually and then an action was run to size the image, add the frame and print two copies. We printed two copies as we received many requests for an extra copy for Grandma or someone else in the family. Additional copies were available on request. Of course all images are printed on a Xerox Phaser printer using Xerox Elite Silk 80lb cover.
Tecthered shooting was very efficient and we had no line ups for prints this year. We were able to do each photo session in 10-20 seconds and completed prints were done in 1-2 minutes. Of course we had line ups for photo sessions all day.
Summary
It was a great event and a lot of fun for everyone. It generated a lot of good PR for Xerox and I expect we will be back again next year to support our troops.
The Team - Dan Benoit, Korinne Maclellan and Myself
Every year I host several seminars on various topics. This is list of upcoming seminars I will be doing. It will be updated as the details are worked out for each seminar.
Colour Theory and Management At Xerox Canada
8:30 am July 14, 2009 at 237 Brownlow Ave, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia
I am a colour consultant at Xerox and we offer seminars on colour management and workflow to our customers every year. This seminar is designed for professionals in graphics arts. The intended audience is prepress and production people who need to know how to setup colour management workflows and solve colour problems. You can contact me at peter.steeper@xerox.com for a complete curriculum. This full day seminar is $395 per person and group discounts are available.
X-Rite I1 Pro and ColorChecker
How to Photograph Flowers
Saturday July 4th, 2009
Daylily Daze
Hammonds Plains Baptist Church, 1839 Hammonds Plains Rd.
9:30 to 3:00 pm
Seminar is from 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
Mardi Gras Parade (Pink Daylily for Photographers)
My wife belongs to several garden clubs and I usually give several seminars every year on this topic. My presentation will be one hour in length sometime during Daylily Daze hosted by the Nova Scotia Daylily Society on July 4th. I’ll update the start time when I know.
I will be doing a live demonstration of how to get the best results with your flowers. It is suitable for both point & shoot and dSLR camera users. I’ll have a few tips for photographers on how to preserve their marriage by not damaging designer daylilies. (I didn’t know they were that expensive!)
Digital Photography Basics
September 2009 - More info to come
This seminar is hosted by the Photographic Guild of Nova Scotia. This was very successful last year. It will include theory and practical hands on. Watch for more details.
Printing for Photographers
April 2010
Hosted by Truro Image Makers Photo Club
This seminar is how to turn your images into a high quality print on your inkjet and other types of printers. I’ve been very succesful in print competitions for photographers and printing is what I do at Xerox. More information will be posted before the event.
Tags: seminar training
How good is your colour perception?
Xrite has a colour perception test on their website. You can test yourself to see how well you can distinguish hues. Xrite Hue Test.
Are you colour blind? Try this test for colour blindness.
We have just returned from the Tour de Bloc where Ian was competing in the Men’s Open at the national bouldering competitions. He did very well and placed 11th in Men’s Elite and 36th in the Men’s Open. This was his second time at the nationals and we expect he will be competing in the nationals again next year. His friend and mentor, John Bowles, placed first and will competing in the Bouldering World Championship in China this year. I have posted lots of pictures of the event at Flickr. The event was held at Allez Up in Montreal which is an excellent climbing gym with 48 foot walls and a bouldering area.
Wow what a day! The weather was gorgeous on Saturday and there was big crowd for the Slush Cup. It was planned for Sunday but Martock changed the day to Saturday as the weather forecast for Sunday was doubtful. Ian was planning to participate but he had to work on Saturday. I was invited by Dave Savoie of the Ski Patrol and the management at Martock so I had great unobstructed access inside the fence. Of course I was close enough to get wet but I managed to keep the camera dry.
This was my first major event with my new Canon 50D and it worked very well with my 70-200 L lens. You can see all the photos at my photostream on Flickr.
If you want to buy a print of any image you can contact me at pbase@petersteeper.ca. Print sizes are 5×7, 8×10 and some of the images (depending on the amount of cropping) can be printed at 11×14.
Testing the Wall
We were able to work on the clmbing wall today and we completed all the woodwork. Ian has to fill the cracks and he has found some paint to create a gritty surface so the wall has the texture of rocks. Skateboarders use a type of paint with grit in it for painting their skateboards and Ian will be using it on the wall. This gives them a non-slip surface on their skateboard.
Now that the framing is done, Ian just had to test the wall.
Hanging from ... boob holds??
Showing Off
I’m going to Newfoundland this week so Ian will be finishing up the climbing wall.
My stepson Ian has been climbing and bouldering for many years and he is a climbing instructor at Dalplex. He had a very small climbing wall in his bedroom in the old house but now we have enough space in the basement to build a larger wall.
We started on the wall over Christmas when some of the materials we needed went on sale Kent. We have the walls built and both slant out from the bottom to create a challenging climb for Ian. Today we are building the corner that connects the two walls. The corner involves a lot of compound angles. Ian is the calculus expert but for some reason I am working out all the angles. So why am I paying his tuition?
Tags: bouldering, building, climbing, construction, Ian