matt trent | archives
Print store open for business
So, after an embarrassingly long (6 month) wait, I can finally announce that I have photos available for sale online. My photography has always been a borderline neurotic (ok, just plain neurotic) labor of love, and I'm always hesitant to put things up for show unless they're perfect. There was much humming and hawing, and adjusting of curves and color casts, and checking of proofs to make sure everything was in it's right place. Before I get on to any of the details, I present:
http://photos.matttrent.com
(but, keep reading below, there's a contest)
It is my goal to replace my aging Nikon D70 this year, and I'm hoping to partly fund that with a few print sales. In order to even hope to get a start on this, I need get this a bit more exposure than my limited online presence can provide. So, I'd like to ask for everyone's help in passing the URL along to friends, or anyone else you think might be interested. I know that publicity doesn't come for free, and I'm prepared to offer a reward for people's efforts.
So, I'll offering coupons for a free 8x12 or 8x8 print for the top 10 sources of traffic to the print store. The timeframe will be from today (Monday, Feb 02) to Monday, Feb 09, inclusive. At that time, I'll announce the winners here. Blog it, Twitter it, stick it on Facebook. I appreciate any and all link love (whether online or offline) I get.
While I'm somewhat partial, I don't think folks will be disappointed. The prints are very good quality. There are a number of different options out there, and in the end I decided upon Zenfolio because it had the highest quality of prints of any of the services I evaluated. And, I mean very high quality. For anyone that has seen the 2 prints above my futon, I've tweaked the current offering to look considerably better. They look gooood.
The current selection is just a preview of things to come. I wanted to start with a set that was both representative of my tastes as well as something chosen by my friends, who are my customers, after all. I took all the input I received from the various people who took the time to vote on the photos I have available on Flickr and added a few more to the mix that I either had a soft spot for, or thought would be a good test of the printers' abilities.
It's a start and I hope a good the waters. It took me an incredible number of hours of proofing and retouching to get all the photos to the point that I'd be proud to have the hanging one someone's wall. Over the next few months, I plan to expand the selection. I also have some plans for photo tours of the Lower Mainland and Pacific Northwest in general, expanding my theme of minimalist landscapes. Aside from that, I am beginning to collect the next set of photos to fill in the partial series of photos I have up there already.
The entire thing has been a learning experience, and I'm still sorting through all the bits. If you like something on my Flickr site that you don't see here, drop me a line at site+photo@matttrent.com and let me know. Check back for more excitement.
Published in XLR8R
I got a photo published in XLR8R this month. The issues containing the previous photo in my stream of my friends is out now. I'm not only happy my photo is in there, but that they opted to use my tone adjustments as well.
Webpage for issue: xlr8r.com/magazine/119
Full PDF (it's on page 53) media.xlr8r.com/files/magazine/pdf/XLR8R%20119.pdf
Photo voting recap
Well, it took me a bit longer to get back to this than I planned. I've been working away trying to close up projects before I go on an extended leave. I wanted to share the results of everyone's voting on my photographs.
First and foremost, thank you all that participated.
Overall, people tagged 84 images with printmeplease for consideration to be printed. The top image received 10 votes, and will definitely be touched up and included in the set first available for print. There was a mix of photos I'd selected myself, and ones that I hadn't. It proved to be an interesting experiment showing the difference between my tastes and those of my friends. Surprisingly, the two images receiving the most votes were not images that I'd selected for inclusion.
Content-wise, there are some other interesting stats. There was an almost exactly even mix of color and black and white shots across the set of all photos that received at least one vote. However, 10 of the top 13 photos (those that received 4 or more votes) were black and white. Of those top 13, 7 were landscapes, 6 were architectural/urban, and 1 was a nature/abstract. Nothing particularly surprising there. I do generally prefer black and white, and enjoy taking landscapes / abstracts. No shock my best work comes out in those subjects.
Without further ado, here are the top voted photographs, separated by how many votes they received. Below that are links to the remaining vote tags.
Slingin' party photos fast and furious
Oi. OK. Finally caught up on all the photos I've been supposed to upload over the last months. Here we have
- Bloodsound 001
- Dubforms 7
- Our Sound
- All systems
- Royal Platoon return to Shine
- Venetian Snares
- Dubforms 9
Phew. I think I'm taking a break after that.
Help me choose photos to print
So, a couple months back, I finally replaced my old CRT with a swank new NEC LCD2690WUXi. The condition of buying such a high-end monitor was I had to promise myself that I would use it to further my photography. Specifically, I needed to use it to retouch some of my best photos photos and make prints of them available for purchase.
As a first step towards bigger plans, I envision having an automated made-to-order printer online. This way, all the photos I make available for purchase will be available any time, any day, and no one has to wait on my procrastination, or unavailability due to excessive workload or travel. I've been doing research on various online printing / fulfillment services, and this goal seems feasible. The purchase options, customer service quality, and other such metrics can all easily be evaluated through my own investigation and reviews on forums. The bigger issue (for me) is ensuring that the quality of the prints is up to my often-obsessive standards.
Numerous test prints have been ordered from different vendors. However it's difficult for me to judge the quality of the print without knowing what the original photograph was supposed to look like. All I can do is compare the image on the paper to what I think the image should look like. Things I judge as deficiencies might simply be differences in how the photographer chose to depict the shot.
So, my first order of business is to establish a canonical set of images that will serve first as my test-cases to evaluate the quality of online printers, and later as the first photos available for purchase. I already have a number of them which represent a sampling of my work in mind, but I'm not technically the intended audience. It is you, dear reader, who matters the most, as I hope you and your ilk will consider purchasing copies of my prints. While I can only guess which ones you'd consider hanging on your wall, you know with certainty.
So here's the deal -- and where you come in -- to help vote on which photos will make it into this first set to be available as prints. So, between now and June 15th (incidentally, my birthday), head over to my Flickr Photostream and tag images that interest you. There's a thousand-odd images over there, but I don't think all of them are really appropriate for print (or at least not at first). I'm mostly focused on my landscape, architectural, and abstract photos at the moment. I'm not really considering any of my club/concert- or bike-related shots at this time, so please skip those. Your best bet is to check out the Potential Prints set I've set up to collect the ones I think are likely candidates, or my Most Interesting set.
Shamelessly stealing this idea (and next 2 paragraphs) from James Duncan Davidson, when you find a photo that you'd seriously consider hanging on your wall as a print, tag it. The tag to use is printmeplease.
If somebody else has left a tag and you really want to second (or third) the vote, then by all means do so by leaving a printmeplease1 tag (or printmeplease2 tag ... you get the idea). These additional tags are very helpful to me to indicate interest. It is abusing Flickr's tagging system a bit, but it works well enough.
If you don't have a flickr account, and don't want to sign up, you can also just email your votes at site+photo@matttrent.com and I'll enter them for you. Just, please, send me the URL of the Flickr page to make it easy for me. Don't try to describe the photo and leave me to guess exactly which one.
After that, I'll collect the top 10 to 20 of my and your favorite photographs. Each of these will be lovingly retouched, using the full capability of my new monitor to really tune the quality. These photos will then be sent to the various online printers to evaluate their quality. Printers that don't make the grade will be cut, as well as photos that don't measure up when viewed in print. Eventually it will converge to the final set of photos and the final service. Then, the fun begins, and the prints can start rolling.
I've gotta say, I've been putting this off for a bit. It's a bit nerve wracking to actually try and attach a pricetag to something you're so emotionally connected to. It's one thing if lots of people say they like your work, but a completely different level finding out if they're willing to say the same with their wallet.
So, here it goes. Please take the time to vote if you're interested. I'd really appreciate it.
Edit (2008-06-04): Seems some of the oldest photos uploaded didn't have permissions correctly set so everyone could tag them. Should be fixed now.
Edit 2 (2006-06-06): If your interested in tagging any, I set up a dummy account people can use
log into flickr as:
username: account.blank@yahoo.com
password: defaultentry
PhotoCamp @ MooseCamp 2008
Alright. Sorry it took me so long to get this up. I've been alternating between being swamped with work and playing outside in this wonderfully sunny and mild weather we've been having.
For those not in attendance, I gave a short overview at PhotoCamp on what I did to create some of the black and white shots from my trip to Sicily last year. I did a very rapid overview of what it takes to mimic black and white film in software using the DxO Film Pack, some B+W Photoshop actions I'd found, or my own hand-done methods. After that, I showed the original Photoshop files of several of my photographs, and went step-by-step through the combinations of masks and Curves/Levels adjustment layers to tweak the intensity and detail in different portions of the photos.
In my opinion, cameras should capture what you experience, not light. While the end result of my photographs doesn't correspond to the actual photos that fell on the CCD very well at all, it does a much better job capturing what I felt at that moment.
Links:
PhotoCamp @ BarCamp 2007 talk
This year at PhotoCamp, I gave a short overview of the concept of computational photography, how it stands to impact digital photography in the years to come. Along with my talk, Andrew Ferguson discussed the ins and outs of blogging about photography, and Duane Storey gave one of the best non-technical overviews of HDR imaging I've heard. Kris Krug moderated, and I think a good time was had by all.
Here are my talk slides. I tried to not ramble incoherently about something overly-technical this time, and tried to keep the message clear, and show off something people can go home and try today. Even if the full magic isn't there, they can get a peak and kick the tires.
The story goes something like this: Due to the complexity of darkroom techniques, and the limitations in what kind of image manipulations we can perform optically while exposing the print from the negative, we have come to view the light that falls on the piece of film in the camera (or the sensor) as the final image. In the old days, it was either impractical or impossible to perform much alterations to the image, so it wasn't attempted.
Digital photography requires computers. No matter how hard you rub the CF card on your monitor or printer, you'll never get an image from your camera to appear. For all intents and purposes, your computer is a giant brain capable of applying a vast number of image manipulations photographs.
There is all this computation available, and the most that people can think to do to their photographs after they are taken is to adjust the white balance.
Given this idea, I demonstrated DxO Optics Pro, the RAW processing software I current use. Optics Pro is one of the better steps in the direction of computational photography available to end users. They meticulously measure all the combinations of digital SLRs and major lenses and can correct the optical distortion and noise automatically. All of this can be done with existing tools, but the idea is that it's automatic and just happens when the image is downloaded off the camera.
Finally, I ended with wavefront coding, a more advanced application of the same basic idea. With wavefront coding, a special lens is used produce a blurry image that is recorded by the sensor. However, this blurry image has several interesting qualities to it. 1) The blur is invariant of the distance of the object and 2) the blur can be corrected in software. The result is an unblurred object with unlimited depth of field, without stopping down the lens to a small aperture, which can be very useful.
It's a very interesting area of work, and a large component of my PhD research. I can't wait to see and share more about it in the future.
PhotoCamp, BarCamp 2007 style
I should have posted this a week ago, but as I state in every post, I'm too busy for my own good, and too lazy the rest of the time. This is pretty much straight stolen from Kris, with some additional commentary by yours truly.
This weekend is BarCamp Vancouver and I'll be heading up a PhotoWalk on Friday night and a PhotoCamp on Saturday. Here's some shots from last years late night photowalk at BarCamp.
PhotoCamp itself is a mix of presentations and open discussion on a number of topics, mostly chose on the fly. I believe this is the 5th in the series of them, and the 3rd that I will be taking part of. Previous editions have seen a healthy mix of areas from photographic technique, digital workflow, practicalities of preparing images for display, and more abstract technical concepts.
I'll be giving a 15 minute or so talk again this time around. I'll be giving a short presentation of some of the assumptions that people have made on how photographs are taken, and how these assumptions are no longer valid when moving into digital photography. Then, given these new possibilities, I'll discuss some possibilities of how this can influence new directions in photography and give some simple examples of how this is starting to work its way into software. This time around, I promise it'll be much more practical knowledge, and I'll even have a demo to prove it.
If you're interested in photography, cameras, or just want to take a cool walk through East Van... it would be great to see lots of you out there. Here's the details. Get in touch if you have any questions.
PhotoWalk
- signup on FaceBook
- meet at WorkSpace
- 11pm, Friday August 17th
PhotoCamp
- signup on the Wiki
- @ Workspace during BarCamp Vancouver
- TBD, Saturday August 18th
Sadly, I don't think I'll be making the photowalk, as I'm going to see Tipper, who is quite possibly my favorite musician, play instead. Last years was good fun. You should go, even if you won't get to see me.
Daft Punk
So, once again, I'm way behind on stuff. Big surprise, I suppose. There's been so much running around between work, school, preparing for travel, and trying to have a life, that even the things I've made a concerted effort to include here have fallen by the wayside.
Anyway, I got to see Daft Punk perform live in Seattle a couple weekends ago. Basically, I don't even know where to begin on this. The show was quite possibly the most amazing concert I've ever seen. With out gushing too much, Daft Punk has been one of my favorite acts as long as I've been listening to electronic music, and I've always wanted to see them. Combining an amazing musical set with what I can only describe as a full visual assault of lights and LEDs all synchronized to the music (and apparently triggered directly from their live PA rig), they produced nothing short of a religious experience for those in attendance.
But, rather bore with dry descriptions of what the show was like, I've tracked down the best videos of the set I could find online. While they pale in comparison to actually being there, they give a much better description than any of my words. The photo above is one of the few that really gives an impression of how bright and saturated it was actually there. I didn't take any photos myself, was too busy dancing.
Summer Travel
Trying to continue my semi-monthly update schedule, I bring you where I'm going and what I'm doing outside the confines of Vancouver for the rest of the summer:
- Seattle from July 29th to 30th -- A surgical strike to see Daft Punk
- San Diego from August 4th to 9th -- SIGGRAPH graphics conference
- Los Angeles from August 10th to 14th -- Visiting friends
- Washington, DC from August 24th to 25th -- On the way to Sicily
- Sicily from August 25th to September 4th -- Sightseeing with the family
- Washington, DC on September 5th -- On the way back from Sicily
As always, if you happen to be any of these places at the same time, get in touch with me at site+travel@matttrent.com. The details are also on dopplr.com, if you're on that. If you aren't, I have invites. Additionally, there is BarCamp in Vancouver August 17th to 18th. But that's the subject of another post.