Cameras, film, and processing

Cameras

I used a bunch of different things this summer while making my pictures and my Web pages. Pretty much all the ``casual'' photography was shot with my sister's Pentax IQZoom XL (35-70mm point-and-shoot), which was very nice because it's light. I still haven't figured out all the weird iconic settings on the thing. All my ``art'' photography was done with my Ricoh XR-P, a Pentax-compatible manual-focus but auto-everything-else camera which I got in 1987 or so. I regularly switch between a bunch of lenses (which makes my camera bag fairly heavy, thus the point-and-shoot is a godsend):

Film

The color pictures were shot on Kodak Royal Gold 200, The black and white stuff was all over the place. Believe it or not, most of it was done with Kodak T-Max 3200, mainly because somebody gave me a pile of rolls for free. I also shot a roll of T-Max 400, my mainstay for years, and a roll of Tri-X, just for grins. At the resolutions here, you can't really see the difference at all. On my handmade 8x10 prints, you can see the grain of the T-Max 3200 much stronger than the T-Max 400. I used the Tri-X for my trip home, so the only prints I have from it were made by my supermarket's lab. I hope to find a local darkroom so I can try making real prints from it and compare those to the T-Max.

Printing

What about printing? I had all the film, color and black and white, developed by my supermarket. For the color prints, that was the end of the story. For the black and white prints, I rented a weekend in Seattle's Photographic Center Northwest, which has one of the best darkrooms I've ever worked in. It cost $7.50 per hour plus $0.70 per 8x10 inch fiber print, which I was doing on Ilford Multigrade FB, purchased separately. It might seem pricey, but they had every gadget in the universe: 4x5 Berkey Omega enlargers with Schneider lenses, a compressed air hose at every enlarger, a wonderful vertical fiber print washer, and plenty of wire mesh screens for drying the prints. My original prints have about a one inch white border on the short side and more on the long side. I cropped as closely to the original negative as possible while avoiding a black edge around the pictures. Yeah, black edges are a trendy thing to do, but I find them distracting.

Digitizing

I digitized some of these pictures with a Microtek II scanner we had at Microsoft, but it was painfully slow, and Photoshop 3.0 is flakey on Windows (we didn't have the 3.0.4 bug-fix release yet). Most of the pictures here were digitized with the LaCie III scanner we have at Princeton. It's much faster, but the blue channel isn't properly aligned with red and green (sigh). This makes the color pictures slightly fuzzy, but doesn't seem to effect black and white. The pictures were acquired into Photoshop 3.0 on a PowerMac. After that...

Of course, Photoshop makes it very easy to modify the pictures instead of just spotting them for dust. I mostly resisted the temptation, except in one picture where I removed a food stain from my tunic. Can you tell where it was?

Gamma Correction

This is probably the trickiest issue in producing images for the Web. Computers from Silicon Graphics have gamma correction built into their hardware. This means that alternate black and white lines have the same brightness as 50% pure grey. It also means that all your Web pictures look much brighter than everybody else will see them. I've tried to make my images look as close to correct as I can when gamma = 1.0. Even then, it's impossible to make it correct for everybody.

The real solution is likely to be the upcoming PNG (portable network graphics) format, which has a notion of gamma correction built in. According to the Dr.Dobbs article, you can specify the desired gamma correction for the image, and if the display is something other than the desired value, the Web browser would do the correction. Until we've got that, we'll just have to deal with what we've got.


Dan Wallach, CS Department, Rice University
Last modified: Tue Oct 27 16:45:43 CST 1998