VoxPhotographs Weblog

With the advent of the excellent (and free) Firefox browser to Version 3.0, PC users finally have improved color management within their browsers. I’ve been using Firefox for years as an alternative to Microsoft Explorer, but the newly released version 3.0 finally provides color managed viewing for the PC - something Mac users have had for a long time on their platform and that has been hard to find on the PC (outside of the Opera browser).

Why does this matter? Well, by having color management built into your browser, the experience of viewing photographs on-line can often be significantly improved. Most importantly, for many sites, color management is the only way to see the photographs with the colors intended by the artist. Certainly on other sites you may not notice a difference, but the differences may be subtle but important on many configurations.

Because this new feature is not needed by everyone and has possible performance impacts (though I have not noticed any myself), Mozilla defaults Firefox 3.0 to having no color management. The excellent Rob Galbraith site provides a small tutorial on setting up your version with color management. I personally used the beta plug-in and it worked like a charm. You can test your system to see if your browser (any browser, not just Firefox) is properly color managed at this helpful page.

In a few years, I would expect that all browsers will have this sort of capability, but I welcome this improvement now to the already-excellent Firefox browser. Give it a shot yourself to see if it makes a difference for your viewing.

- Jim Nickelson

If you follow any other photography news sites or blogs, you’ve probably heard about the new Orphan Works legislation currently being pushed through both houses of Congress. This legislation, depending on how it looks when and if it actually passes this year, could dramatically impact the rights of photographers. There appears to be a split in opinion among the professional photographer associations as to whether this law would actually be a good thing, but most photographers rightly fear new laws that will lessen their rights.

What is this all about? Basically, Orphan Works are copyrighted items (such as photographs) for which the copyright owner/author are unknown. What the new legislation is trying to accomplish is to provide for letting publishers use these orphan works as long as they put forth some reasonable level of effort in determining who the owner is (and thus who should be compensated). If they can’t determine the owner, they can then use the work without having to pay anyone and without fear of lawsuit.

Publishers, particularly on-lines ones, feel such a law is necessary so that they can use public domain works as well as works that they find on-line without fear of being peppered with lawsuits. Artists and other copyright owners fear that publishers will use the new law as an excuse to steal author’s work and have legal cover for doing so. As with all such situations, the devil will be in the details as to how this is actually implemented.

For a good list of links of where the law currently stands, check out the excellent PhotoAttorney website and her update on the law.

What can you do now to protect yourself if you are a photographer? Probably the most important step would be to make sure your work is correctly marked when it is put on-line or otherwise published - put your info in the metadata or on the image, require proper attribution from people using your work, etc. As always, you should properly register your copyrights in your work so that you can have a legal basis for pursuing people who infringe your work (more about this in a later post). You should, of course, contact an attorney for counsel specific to your situation - this is merely generalized advice and should not be considered legal advice or creating a lawyer-client relationship.

Keep an eye out for how this law actually shapes up, as it could be the biggest legal news for photographers this year if it actually passes.

- Jim Nickelson

More and more photographers are moving to the digital darkroom as technologies improve and traditional materials become more difficult to acquire (though are still readily available if you know where to look, of course).  Photographers quickly embraced color printing using digital technologies, partially because most photographers were not doing their own color processing and printing using traditional methods because of the hassle and complications involved.  Black & white has been slower to gain acceptance for a variety of reasons, but at least the technical limitations of digital black & white are disappearing.

While digital black & white printing has gained acceptance slowly, it is now considered by most to be an archival medium with a beauty all its own. I don’t think it will ever replace traditional silver halide photography - nor should it - but it provides many photographers the opportunity to do high quality, fine art-quality black & white work without having to own or have access to a traditional darkroom.  Some prefer the results, some prefer the process, and some may have no other choice.  As photographers, we now have more choices than ever, both for analog and digital processes.

There are many technical approaches for digital black & white printing that are now available and I’ve tried most of them. Most people start by using their color printer and standard software to print black & white images. This method, unfortunately, often dissuades many as neutral images with a color cast are hard to achieve and metamerism (where the print looks a different color under different lighting conditions) is common. The problem with this method is that the system is trying to create a black & white print using multiple color inks, a recipe for inconsistent and unsatisfactory results.

Newer printers (such as the HP printers and the Epson K3 printers) have more sophisticated software that essentially optimizes black & white printing by minimizing the use of colored inks. I often use the Epson K3 inks and can produce very satisfying black & white images (either neutral or toned) with these inks. These methods typically use primarily blacks with only a small amount of color ink.  A great overview of these inks (and black & white digital printing in general) is available at Clayton Jones’ site. This is a wonderful (and free) resource and I highly recommend starting here if you want to start printing black & white digitally. I particularly like his paper reviews, which are a great resource.

Another options is to be special software that will optimize the inks in your standard color inkset for black & white printing. I can highly recommend QuadTone RIP, a fine piece of shareware that overrides the printer software to take out any vestige of color inks - so for the Epson K3 inkset, only the 3 black/gray inks are used. Using this method, you can get prints that I believe are more beautiful and are certainly more archival than those using the manufacturer software and drivers. Since it is shareware, you can try it and pay the reasonable $50 fee if you keep on using it.

You can also replace the color inks in your printer with a dedicated black & white inkset. The two most popular ones are Jon Cone’s Piezography system (from nearby Vermont) and the inksets from MIS. Both have their adherents, but I personally had better results from the Cone system, which can produce absolutely stunning results on matte papers. Both systems require you to replace the inks in your printer, making a dedicated printer desirable (and thus making these options best for those serious about digital black & white).

The best way of learning about all these different methods, of course, is to try them out. If you have had positive or negative experiences with any of these systems, feel free to share them in the comments.

- Jim Nickelson

You may be deluged with requests to enter photo contests — many offering prize money and the promises of exposure once you submit and win. The right photo contest that matches your marketing plan can indeed provide valuable exposure, a line on your CV, and of course satisfaction that your work is recognized.

These contests often require you to give up valuable and important rights in addition to the entry fees. Before entering a contest, make sure you read what rights you will give up by entering or winning the contest. While you will almost certainly have to give up something, many of these contests are little more than a “rights grab” from unsuspecting photographers. Contests often try to own the copyright for submissions or provide themselves with a future (and free) license to use these images however they would like (forever!). For these overreaching contests, the simple act of submission may give them rights to your image forever and without compensation to you.

I was considering a photo contest (not a fine art contest) a few months ago to enter photos of my newborn daughter. Upon reading the terms and conditions, I realized that the act of entry into the contest (not even winning the contest) gave the company all rights in the image, including ownership of the copyright and exclusive rights. Technically speaking, I would not be legally permitted to send the image in an e-mail to her grandparents after entering it into the contest. While this may be an extreme case, many contest provide onerous terms to the photographers in hopes that nobody reads the “fine print”.

A new site run by Pro-Imaging promises to help highlight the dangers from these contests as well as providing a road map for future contests that wish to be fair to submitting photographers. This is a very new program but it will be interesting to see how it develops and whether it can shed light on the practices of these companies.

There may be times when you are willing to trade some of your rights for the potential benefits of winning one of these contest. Just go in with you eyes open so that you know what you giving up. If, say, you are environmentally-minded, you might be willing to give The Nature Conservacy the rights to some of your images so that you can enter their contest. Simply put, you need to decide whether the trade-offs of a particular contest are worth it to you.

If you know of any contests that go too far that you wish to warn others about, feel free to comment below.

- Jim Nickelson

Are you itching to upgrade your digital camera? Feeling pressure to get a new camera with more megapixels? There are many reasons to upgrade your digital camera, but the extra resolution you get from having more megapixels is often not worth the investment.

The camera manufacturers want you to think otherwise, of course - they want to sell you a newer camera. As I discussed last week, megapixels are a measure of the resolution of your camera - meaning how big your file is going to be. Improvements in your prints that you get from having more megapixels, however, aren’t as dramatic as they first appear.

Megapixels are based on an area (height in pixels times width in pixels) but increases in resolution are based on the increase in linear size, not the area. What this means in practice is that 12 megapixels are not twice as good as 6 megapixels - instead, a doubling of megapixels only gives you about a 40% increase in resolution. Going from 6 megapixels to 8 megapixels only gives you about a 15% increase in resolution.

When you are producing fine art prints, every bit of resolution and file size can help produce better prints (and give you more room for cropping). Even a 40% increase in resolution, however, doesn’t show up to most viewers until the prints get large. A new camera might give you many benefits - faster operation, better handling, improved noise, larger sensor size, etc. - but be careful if you think that a few more megapixels is going to make a big improvement in your prints. It will help, but not as much as the Canon’s and Nikon’s of the world would have you believe.

- Jim Nickelson

One question I often receive from fine art photographers is “How Big Can I Print?”. As you might expect, the answer to that question is rather complicated. Factors such as the type of printer, the quality and size of the file, the subject matter of the photograph, the anticipated viewing distance of the finished print, photographer and/or client preferences, and other factors all can come into play in determining acceptable and optimal printing sizes.

Subject matter is one of the more important factors in determining how big you can print. Images, like the one below, that rely on intricate detail are more difficult to enlarge and thus have smaller acceptable print sizes.

Images such as the next one that do not rely as heavily on detail and instead rely more on color, shape, or other aspects of design can often be successfully enlarged to a greater degree, allowing larger acceptable print sizes.

For most subject matter, however, the size of your file from your digital camera or film scan will tell you how big you can print. A standard measure of the amount of enlargement of file is the dots per inch (dpi) sent to the printer (the print resolution). The dots in this case refer to pixels in the original image. If, for example, you have a typical 6 Megapixel camera, your images will be somewhere near 3000 pixels in one dimension (e.g., height) and 2000 pixels in the other (e.g., width). If you wanted to print at 300 dpi, for example, this would result in an image that is approximately 10 inches x 6.7 inches. You can calculate this number for your files simply by dividing the number of pixels by 300.

From my experience, I believe that a print resolution of 240 dpi or higher will unquestionably produce fine art prints that survive close inspection. So, you can modify the formula above and divide the number of pixels in each direction by 240 instead of 300. For the 6 Megapixel camera mentioned above, that means you can easily produce quality, fine art images of 12.5 inches x 8.3 inches or smaller. For a higher resolution 10 Megapixel camera (with about 3870 pixels x 2600 pixels), you can easily produce fine art images of 16 inches x 11 inches or smaller. If you want the highest quality, I would suggest 300 dpi or 360 dpi, but higher resolutions than 360 dpi usually don’t provide improvement visible to the naked eye.

Of course, many images and situations will prove to be exceptions to this rule of thumb, but image size is a good indicator of acceptable print sizes. If the viewing distance for your final print is a few feet or more away (which often happens with larger prints), you can certainly push the print size up as the increased distance will help hide any problems in the print. A 240 dpi or above standard will allow closer inspection of the print, a desirable attribute for many fine art photographers who expect their work to be viewed closely or held in the hand.

Despite these rules of thumb, sometimes it makes sense just to print your image at the size you want and see how it looks. I’ve been surprised many times at how good prints can look even when the original image was “too small”. Experimentation with your own work and printing solution will help you decide what print sizes work best for you.

If you have any questions or suggestions for future topics, please comment below!

Jim Nickelson is an engineer, patent attorney and landscape photographer. He is represented by VoxPhotographs.