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Good friend Anand Desai sent me couple of his images recently. More details here -

http://www.prashanteju.de/Color_Cast.html

that digital is as good or better than 35mm is a given now. However medium format and larger film still rocks. It is particularly true of portrait-photography (more so BW). To keep it simple for the same angle of view a classic portrait in MF is 150mm, equivalent 85mm in small format does not have the similar depth of field, then there is also an issue of tonality…and shadow details.

It is my unfulfilled dream to make a flying license (Flugschein). Chance came upon me twice, however I did not grab it with both hands. These images are from one of the lessons and from test-flights for DLR. These are very old negatives so pardon the scan quality.

Well, good news for photographers who display their work by means of a website.

•  Type about:config in Firefox 3’s address bar and press Return. The configuration settings will appear.
• In the Filter field, type gfx. The list of settings will shorten to show just those related to graphics, ie gfx.
•  If the Value for gfx.color_management.enabled is False, double-click anywhere on that line to toggle the setting to True.
• Quit and relaunch Firefox 3 and you’re in business. You can confirm that colour management is working by viewing the photos on this page. If all four quadrants of the first photo are a seamless match, then colour management in your copy of Firefox is up and running.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html

Believe it or not, I’ve lost all my raw files from my Paris trip in 2006. I only (and by chance) have 16bit tiffs of the best rated images and 8bit psds (I only had Photoshop 7 at the time) of about 60% of the tiffs. This was my 4th trip to the city and my most productive in terms of time invested and number of images made.

Bottomline - back up !!!

• On the road I take many memory cards with me. I plan to purchase 4gb cards so that backing them on a dvd gets easier. But then putting those many eggs (I mean photos) on one card is risky so I stick to 1 or 2gb cards. I safely store these cards. They are virtually indestructible and with Photorescue almost any problem can be solved. You can carry heavy P5000 or something similar but we are talking about people on budget.
• At home download all the images to your pc/mac, make a back-up copy on a DVD (make sure it is written correctly, this is how I lost my Paris files). And make a copy on an external hard drive. And then only re-format the card.
• If possible add another drive and keep it in your office or somewhere else. You can use sync-toy or something similar to sync the data. Always make sure it is done correctly.
• be happy.

Here is one example where you can see the effect of correct camera profile.

Shot with D80, 18-70/3.5-4.5 at 70mm, iso 100. Both files have got the same raw adjustments except the camera profile.

It is well known that the rendition of warm colors lack certain ‘pop’ when you use digital camera with default profiles. I have recently created profiles for digital cameras and will be offering them for a donation of 5Euro/camera profiles. Two profiles will be sent to you as a pdf file which you will need to input in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom, one for outdoor use and another for images made with studio strobes.

As of now am offering profiles for the following cameras -

Nikon D80, Canon Powershot G9 and G7, Canon EOS 350D and 400D.

I may add Nikon D300, EOS 5D profiles later. More details soon.

My first semi-commercial* shoot was a great fun. Tanita is a big fan of Harry potter and Tomb Raider, like me. After some portraits we set on to do some ‘fun’ images that the 14 year old enjoyed the most. This is the one I liked the most.

I mostly used D80, 85mmCZ, and couple of flashes for the shoot. Couple of images were also made using medium format square camera and black and white film.

*Semi - because there was no pressure, dead-lines, or any goal as such. And I know the family for some time now, Commercial - ‘coz I earned a penny or two (actually a euro cent or two).