Photography and more
Archive for January, 2009
Ian's Climbing Wall
Jan 18th
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?
RAID Drive Upgrade
Jan 18th
I’ve run out of space again on the drive for my pictures. Maybe I should use the delete key more often or use less layers in Photoshop files. Or save to TIFF when a print is finished.
I have one drive that is dedicated to pictures and about two years ago I bought a RAID system after almost losing all my pictures one weekend. I went from three copies of everything to one after having two new drives fail in one weekend. It was a scary weekend. The new drives had been purchased on sale for a very low price. It turns out they were refurbished. I returned the drives and upgraded my computer with a RAID system two days later. Things have been good until lately when I started running out of room again.
This weekend I am replacing the four 160MB drives in the RAID with four 500MB drives. This will increase space for pictures from 465GB to 1.4TB. As long as I don’t buy that Canon 50D with the 15MP images the upgraded RAID should last for several years. At least the RAID is cheaper than having film developed so I shouldn’t grumbled about the cost (but I do anyways).
The process for upgrading the RAID is taking much longer than I expected. I thought it would take one day but it will take two days. The first step is backing up all the data on the old setup which took seven hours using an USB drive. You don’t notice the backup time when you are doing automatic backups at night. I disconnected all the old drives but I didn’t remove from the chassis while moving the cables to the new drives. I labeled all the cables and drives with a marker to avoid mix ups. I won’t remove the old drives from the chassis until I know the new drives are working successfully. I have had problems in the past with upgrades and I don’t like to finalize the physical installation until the data is successfully transferred in case I need to roll back to the old drives.
After connecting the new drives I needed to configure the RAID controller to recognize the new drives. This is done at bootup and only takes a few seconds. Then the RAID had to be formatted. This is a very long process. Formatting started at 9:00 am on Saturday and it was only 75% done at bedtime. Fortunately it was complete this morning. Now the data is being restored to the RAID and I expect this will take another seven hours. I’ll have lots of time for other projects today while I am waiting.
Another important tip: Keep the cat out the room with the computer. The case is open and wires are hanging out. Hank, our cat, thought this would make a great play toy. Having cables yanked out during the restore will probably add two days to the process.
Profiling a Projector
Jan 17th
At the Photo Guild we have been projecting digital images for several years. Last year we purchased a Canon Realis SX6 projector to replace our old projector. This projector supports up 1400 x 1050 resolution and AdobeRGB. We had the projector profiled in September at the start of our fall season but we had many complaints about the colour of the projected images.
Recently I received an upgrade to my spectrophotometer at work including a license for creating ICC profiles for projectors. This was an excellent opportunity to test the new spectrophotometer.
To create a good projector profile it needs to be profiled with same setup as it will normally be used. To accomplish this, Elio Dolente, the current president of the Guild and I booked the auditorium at the Museum of Natural History where the Guild meetings are held. One the problems we have is that members borrow the projector and change the settings and then the profile is no longer valid.
The Guild has a MacBook Pro to use but most of the members use PCs and our competition software only works with Windows so we use Windows XP on the Mac. Windows can only support one monitor profile while Mac OS X can support multiple profiles for monitors and attached projectors. Windows has to be setup so it knows which is the primary monitor and the profile is loaded for this monitor. The Mac uses an nVidia video card and we had the nVidia control panel loaded in Windows XP. While this helped, it took some experimenting to understand how the nVidia driver worked with the monitor and projector. We eventually determined how to make the projector the primary monitor and it also fix some of the problems we were having with screen resolution. The MacBook is 1440 x 900 and the Canon projector is 1400 x 1050.
After setting up the laptop we setup the projector. The projector supports sRGB, AdobeRGB, movie, presentation as well as many custom settings. We reset the projector to the factory defaults and tested sRGB and AdobeRGB. We decided sRGB was the best choice for our base setting. Once these choices were made we profiled the projector. The results were much better than our previous results.
At the next competition the reviews were excellent and the members were pleased with the results. We still had 3-4 images where the reds are over saturated but I need to check these images to see if it is a problem with the projector or the images. I suspect it is the images as 95% of images had excellent colour.
New Colour Tools
Jan 17th
In December I received a new X-rite EyeOne IO spectrophotometer and Profile Maker 5. I’ve had an EyeOne for several years but the IO comes with the robot arm which automates the process of creating ICC colour profiles. The license also the modules to create profiles for CMYK and RGB printers, monitors, projectors, cameras and scanners. I’ve been testing it on everything here and will be able to other full services to Xerox customers this month.
One of the first things I calibrated was the Ultra Premium Lustre paper I use with my Epson R1800 inkjet printer. This is a great paper for creating archival prints but I always got a slight cyan cast when I used it for creating B&W prints. The prints are very neutral now with the custom profile I created and I am very pleased with the results.
We have an HDTV and we will be hosting a photo evaluation night later this month. I plan to use the HDTV to display the images and of course I had to profile the TV. The TV is usually connected to my Macbook Pro using a DVI to HDMI cable. While the results are better there is still some over saturation in some reds. There is a VGA connection on the TV and I plan to try it to see if I get better results.