admin

John Watson is the original founder of Photodoto. If you're interested in what John has been up to, you can browse his personal blog.

ScanCafe: Scanning is complete!

By John Watson
0 comment

Ready to review emailThe negatives I sent to ScanCafe have been scanned! For those of you who haven’t been following along, ScanCafe is a negative scanning service I am testing anonymously with a shoebox of wedding negatives I’ve had lying around since 1997. I sent my negatives to them on November 9th, scanning in their India facility began on November 30th, and the scans were ready for review on December 14th.

Last week I received an email from ScanCafe letting me know that my scans were ready. But when I went to the site, only about half of the negatives I sent in were scanned! That was scary. My initial reaction was that they’d lost half of my negatives. Unfortunately, I can’t give high marks for customer service since it took about 4 days before I could get an explanation. This may have something to do with communication between ScanCafe headquarters and their scanning facility in Bangalore, but I’m just speculating. Ultimately, the missing negatives were scanned. Here’s the explanation I received from ScanCafe:

First of all we apologize for the delay in responding to your issue. We just receive a confirmation from our Imaging center that all your images (189) are now uploaded to your account.

… Continue reading ScanCafe: Scanning is complete!

ScanCafe negative scanning progress (Nov 30)

By John Watson
0 comment

Scanning progress continues. The process may be going slowly—although, I personally don’t care… these negatives have been in storage for 12 years—but ScanCafe does an excellent job of keeping you in the loop. They let me know that a technician had opened my box and was actually starting to scan my negatives.

ScanCafe progress

I got this email today:

We have assigned a technician to digitize your images and in the process we found that you have sent in negatives to us that needs to be cut into strips of 1 to 2 images in order to process them. Kindly confirm if you are fine with cutting the negative strips so that we can process your media. However, if you do not wish to cut them, we will not be able to scan them and therefore will ship them back to you as is.

I sent them medium format negatives in strips of 4 frames. I told them to cut them—carefully—as needed for the scanning process. I really appreciate that they asked first although it would have been nice if they’d also mentioned it on the ordering page.

… Continue reading ScanCafe negative scanning progress (Nov 30)

Photo organization: How Geoff does it

By John Watson
0 comment

Photodoto reader Geoff Coupe sent in some very helpful and detailed responses to my plea for help regarding my Great Photo Organization Project (which is still proceeding although I haven’t updated the sidebar in a little while). Here are his excellent responses to my questions (and you can read more on his blog). Thanks, Geoff!

If you’ve got a great system for organizing and archiving your growing photo collection, share it in the comments or email me a guest post for publication here. Maybe we could make a regular series of it… Thanks!

Question: As soon as I tagged my second photo I realized that I need a common taxonomy for my tags. I can’t tag some photos “Bird” and others “Birds” and still others “Winged beasts.” I need to pick a definitive tag and use it for all of my photos. How do I decide? Should all tags be plural or singular? Does it matter? Also, while I’ll be the main user of the archive for now, one day my children or grandchildren will inherit my collection, so the tags will need to make sense to other people besides myself.

… Continue reading Photo organization: How Geoff does it

Slow Photography

By John Watson
0 comment

Douglas Gayeton’s Slow: Life in a Tuscan Town (Welcome Books) is pornography for the Heat-reading set. It is the Slow Food movement brought to art (it even has its own dinner tour). It is a series of portraits of a rural town in Italy where Gayeton lived, worked, cooked, fell in love, and took pictures—tons of pictures, many of which were then stitched together and inscribed with captions, names, anecdotes, and recipes to tell his story of assimilation. It is also, to be frank, a heavy-ass tome—Peter Mayle would probably throw it against a wall out of envy, if he could pick it up. —Slow Photography – The Morning News.

Check out the slideshow in the interview. Each of Gayeton’s photos is made of dozens, hundreds, of individual photographs combined together in a technique not unlike that used by David Hockney. Each image is a collaboration with the subjects who worked with him for weeks on the writing that overlaps it.

… Continue reading Slow Photography

ScanCafe negative scanning progress

By John Watson
0 comment

ScanCafe logoFollowing up on my previous post about scanning some old negatives with ScanCafe. I dragged my feet and didn’t send them in until this past Monday. I was able to snag a 20% discount though so my total estimate for scanning 200 medium format negs came to $204.20 ($0.99 ea + $0.19 ea for TIFF format + shipping, etc.).

Before I sent my scans to ScanCafe, I also sent several of them to Brian Auer at Epic Edits. Brian, film scanning expert extraordinaire, scanned them using his CanoScan so that we could compare ScanCafe vs doing it yourself.

ScanCafe charges you half  up front, ships your negatives to their overseas scanning facility, lets you pick the ones you want online, then sends it all back to you. Just got an email today saying they’ve received my negatives—the process has begun. They estimate they’ll have my scans ready to view by December 27th (yes, it takes a while).

ScanCafe Order Status

I didn’t tell them I was a writer for a photography blog and I’m getting my own negatives scanned at my expense so that I can provide you with a realistic and objective view of how their service works.

… Continue reading ScanCafe negative scanning progress

Is film photography for you?

By John Watson
0 comment

Back in the long ago time, there was film. Sheets of chemicals and magic that transformed when they were struck by rays of light. And it was good.

But it was also kind of a pain in the ass because you could only shoot 24 or 36 frames at a time before you had to change the film. And you had to carry around lots of film in bulky little cans. And you couldn’t preview or delete your shots. And sometimes you’d find that you shot an entire roll with the wrong exposure but you didn’t find out until you got the film back from the developer a week later. Good times.

But some say there is also a certain quality to film photography that hasn’t been replicated by digital. A special and ineffable charm, difficult to express but instantly recognizable. And, contrary to what you might expect, there are quite a few new-to-film photographers out there, drawn to film by the novelty or the look or the antiques or the desire to practice arcane arts on the verge of becoming extinct. Film is Not Dead,

… Continue reading Is film photography for you?

Free photo editors for Linux, Mac, and Windows

By John Watson
0 comment

Can’t afford Photoshop? Can’t justify the expense? What do you need in a good photo editor anyway? To me, the absolute essential features necessary for any photo editing app are:

  • Layers and layer masks (alpha editing). These features let you selectively apply edits and filters to portions of the image that you control.
  • Painting tools. Brushes in varying sizes and hardness. For painting masks, mostly.
  • Curves. Essential. A curves adjustment tool lets you control color, color saturation, contrast, brightness, and black white points. Curves is often the only tool I use.
  • Color adjustment. Hue and saturation adjustments.
  • Channel mixer/B&W converter. Some way to make black and white photos.
  • Filters. Blur and sharpen. You don’t need page curl or lens flare.

Without further ado, and in alphabetical order, some free apps that fit the bill:

Aviary Phoenix (Web app–All platforms)

The only web/online app in the list that supports layers and masks. “From basic image retouching to complex effects,

… Continue reading Free photo editors for Linux, Mac, and Windows

Top cameras and lenses used by the White House photography staff

By John Watson
0 comment

I was browsing through The Official White House Photostream on Flickr today. The photographs are excellent. Pete Souza is the Chief Official White House Photographer for President Obama and Director of the White House photo office.

I noticed that the EXIF data was available for just about every photo and it contained lens information. Naturally, being a programmer/photography geek, I decided to download the EXIF data for all 1,433 photos (as of today) and find out which lenses the White House photography staff likes best. Here are the results:

Cameras

Camera # of photos
Canon EOS 5D Mark II 1074
Canon EOS 1DS Mark III 31
Canon EOS 5D 23
Canon EOS 1DS Mark II 2
Unknown 303

Lenses

Lens # of photos
EF35mm f/1.4L USM 439
EF50mm f/1.2L USM 179
EF24-70mm f/2.8L USM 166
EF135mm f/2L USM 136
EF24mm f/1.4L II USM 69
EF85mm f/1.2L II USM 34
EF70-200mm f/4L USM 16
EF70-200mm f/4L IS USM 27
EF70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM 20
EF28mm f/1.8 USM 10
EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM 5
EF135mm f/2L USM +1.4x 3
EF300mm f/2.8L IS USM 3
EF70-200mm f/2.8L USM 3
EF24mm f/1.4L USM 3
EF16-35mm f/2.8L II USM 2
EF70-200mm f/2.8L USM +1.4x 2
70.0-200.0 mm 2
EF20mm f/2.8 USM 1
EF35mm f/2 1
EF70-200mm f/4L IS USM +1.4x 1
EF200mm f/1.8L USM 1
Unknown 310

… Continue reading Top cameras and lenses used by the White House photography staff

Photo contest vs. mass consumerism

By John Watson
0 comment

A buddy of mine is running a photo contest with a cause. Dave is living with just 100 personal possessions in an effort to raise awareness of the problems caused by mass consumerism.

The 1st prize winner will receive $100 plus $100 donated to the Plant with Purpose Trees Fund in the winner’s name. All winning photographs will be printed, matted, and displayed in the lobby of Rohr Hall at Point Loma Nazarene University for two weeks in December.

The theme is: Challenging Stuff. Mass consumerism is a way of life. Photos should challenge assumptions about consumerism.

I’m one of the judges along with photographers Scott Bennet and Marcus Emerson. The contest is free to enter and helps a good cause. Please check it out.

… Continue reading Photo contest vs. mass consumerism

Negative scanning with ScanCafe

By John Watson
0 comment

After a bunch of failed attempts with my ancient el cheapo scanner, I’ve decided to have a bunch of old medium format negatives (120/220) scanned professionally. I’ve all but decided on ScanCafe—haven’t pulled the trigger yet. Great prices… $0.99 each for medium format negatives. But even better, they’ll scan all 200 negatives, let me review them, and then I only have to pay for the ones I actually want—with the caveat that I have to buy at least half.

Interesting twist: they send the photos to a facility they’ve built in India. That’s how they can get a technician to scan and personally inspect/retouch each negative at such low prices. Downside: looks like it might be around 8 weeks before I see my scans (and get back my originals). But, these negatives have been sitting around since 97 so it’s not like I’m in a hurry.

I’ll let you know how it goes. Have you used ScanCafe or any other professional negative/print scanning service?

ScanCafe – Photo Scanning, Negative Scanning,

… Continue reading Negative scanning with ScanCafe

Popular Posts