We’ve just got back in from the last day of the Don McCullin exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. If it wasn’t the last day, I would say go and take it in. It’s been very well put together and reminds me why I used to enjoy gallery hopping. This is the first exhibition I’ve been to in around a year.

The quality of the work on the walls is astounding. To take pictures of that quality with nothing more than a Nikon F, Tri-X and a lightmeter is pretty damn amazing and the situations they’re taken in are equally provocative.

Oh, and a Nikon F saved his life by taking a bullet. They don’t build ‘em like that any more. Admittedly he carried three, which is quite a bit of surface area (and weight).

And a packet of Ready Brek.

But there’s something at the bottom of almost every single exhibition note which caught my eye:

“Hand printed by Don McCullin”

Now take a look at the quality and thought which has gone into many of these prints. We praise McCullin based on the quality of his photographs and his subject matter without taking into account that he’s a master printer. After failing to pass his photographers theory exam in the RAF, he worked in the darkrooms and this really comes through in his work. There’s a single annotated working image in the collection, the iconic “Shell Shocked Soldier” from 1968. Something I’ve noticed from other PJs from the same period is they came back from assignment and dropped off the films with the in-house printer from the newspaper. They then visit the printer later and discuss modifications. Don worked the prints himself, and this comes across in the detail in the images. There’s also a lot of work in a still-life consisting of a vase of flowers and “souvenirs” brought back from Cambodia and Vietnam (sorry, can’t find a link). I stood there staring at it for a good five minutes, just taking in the detail work.

Genius.

Photography – Minolta

Minolta X-300 35mm Film Body
Minolta SRT-101 35mm Film Camera (MC/MD Mount)
Minolta MD 28-70mm f3.5-f4.8 (Minolta MC/MD Mount)
Minolta X-300 35mm Film Body (Minolta MC/MD Mount)
Tokina SD 70-210mm f4-5.6 (Minolta MC/MD Mount)
Minolta 2x Teleconverter
Minolta X Series Power Winder (X-300/X-700/XG/XG-M)

Photography – Pentax

Ricoh KR-5 35mm Film Body (Pentax K Mount)
Chinon 50mm f1.9 Lens (Pentax K Mount)

Photography – Canon

Canon AV-1 35mm Film Camera (Canon FD Mount)
Canon FD 70-210mm f4 (Canon FD Mount)
Canon MD 50mm f1.8 (Canon FD Mount)
Canon 1000F 35mm Film Camera (Canon EF Mount)
Canon 3000N 35mm Film Camera (Canon EF Mount)

Photography – Nikon

Nikon FE-2 35mm Film Camera (Nikon Mount)
Nikon EM 35mm Film Camera (Nikon Mount)
Sigma UC Zoom 27-70mm f3.5 – f22 (Nikon Mount)

Photography – Flash

Jessop 300 TTL Flash (Minolta/Nikon/Pentax)
Cobra MD-210 Flash (Sigma/Olympus/Minolta/Nikon/Canon/Pentax)

Non-Photography

Pioneer TSG1001i 100W 10cm Dual-Cone Car Speaker
Nokia E61 Mobile Phone Dock
Dell Laptop Docking Station

Spread it around! Shout it out from the moutaintops!

http://www.northerngeeks.info/

We’ve even got a Twitter account…

http://twitter.com/northerngeeks

Now my new larger easel has finally arrived, I can announce one of my new projects. “Northern Geeks” will be a series of portraits of geeks in the north, showing them in their natural habitat and “at play”. I want to show geeks are people too.

The final images will be put into an exhibition, put online and be made available as a book.

So I need volunteers. If you would like to be part of this project, please send an e-mail to kian@kianryan.co.uk with the subject “Northern Geeks” or comment on this post. Please enclose a small “geek bio”, and what you do for kicks (this can be something tech related or completely different). Sport, gaming, gardening, gerbil farming, anything. I’m looking to shoot and print in July with an aim to exhibition in August/September. If your natural habitat is a company office, please ensure you can gain permission to be photographed there before applying. All volunteers will be given a copy of the book as thanks.

Go on – be a part of something special.

Otherwise please, please, please drop by Tuesday to Saturday, 10am til 6pm. These are young, upcoming, budding artists who need all the support they can get. Hell, one of them may even be the next Henri Cartier-Bresson or Richard Avedon. The exhibition is being held at the rather fancy-pants Urban Splash location in Castlefield:

Urban Splash (Mooch)
Worsley Street
M15 4LD

I was there today helping put up some of the work, and occupying space at other times. The exhibition looks great, the space is superb and there’s some excellent work on the walls. All very much worth your time.

[1] I may be lying about the cheese.

A portable version of this information already exists for the J2ME platform, and has been in existence for some time. But with the advent of the next generation mobile platforms, there was a gap for a new application to fill the void.

The Massive Dev Chart for Android goes beyond the remit of the original application by providing real-time search facilities for developers and films, providing information for small, medium and large format, and providing crucial extended information where it’s needed.

This is the first in hopefully a line of Android applications from Orange Tentacle and is available in the marketplace on your G1 now.

Later in the day we got the opportunity to recreate some classic photographs. We split into groups and decided to tackle Bailey’s photo of Paul Lennon and John McCartney and Andreas Feininger’s “The Photojournalist”. For your consideration our results and the originals are shown below.

Ours

The Originals

For those interested in the lighting, we used two strobes, one set to flash against a solid white background at 1/32 for both photos, and for the Feininger a single light tightly snooted pointed directly at the model’s face and for Bailey, a single light behind a shoot-through brolly front and slightly left, with black material directly light to absorb any spill (and hence generating the strong shadow on the side of the face).

The hands on sessions were wonderful, and managed to learn a huge amount in the short time we had. The walk and talk by the fashion photographer (apologies for not catching your name) was a multi-part exercise in working with models, making use of available light, fill-flash and textures. All packed into an hour.

In contrast, the “theory” sessions didn’t carry so well. It’s my own view that while sessions like this are important, they need to be backed with practical work to reinforce the learning experience. Slide-shows are all well and good, but people haven’t just brought piles of gear with them to sit in the corner doing nothing. It does appear that pleanty of photos have been taken, you can follow them on Flickr with either the photocamp, photocamp09 or photocampleeds tags.

We enjoyed ourselves, that’s definite and we would love to see more sessions run like this. To that end I’ve got a secret project in mind, which hopefully you’ll hear more about in the next few weeks.

Photographs from Roma and the Vatican. This was the first outing of the “travel kit”: a Minolta XD-7, Vivitar Series 1 28-70mm, Minolta 50mm f1.7 MD, Vivitar Series 1 70-210 f3.5, Manfrotto Modo Monopod and a Crumpler PrettyBoy XL bag.

Lessons were learnt on this trip. First off – always check your ISO before you start shooting. On the switch back from Tri-X (for the indoor shots at the Vatican) to Fuji ACROS, I completely forgot to reset the ISO back to 100 on the lightmeter. Alas, I now have several sheets of overblown film. On the flip side, it does give us an excuse to visit again…

The Modo Monopod also died a death over this holiday. I bought it specifically for this trip because I wanted a lightweight low cost monopod to stick a light body and lens on the top. On the second day, the foot fell off at St Peters, and the day after the lower half of the shaft shattered completely. While I appreciate the Modo kit is not designed for pro use, nor to last forever, for it to self-destruct after a few days of use is completely unacceptable. The monopod is currently with Manfrotto awaiting replacement (and has been for a while).

Click the image above to view the slideshow.

This is harder than it looks for B&W, but so far we’re having success with the combination of an Epson Perfection V700 scanner, Vuescan, Photoshop Elements 6 and the Epson R1900 printer. The pigment inks of the R1900 are a vast improvement on the dye inks of previous generations, and B&W prints look almost passable.

The downside was that all devices required me to be rooted in a single place. Photography is my hobby, and since my home office is also my day work space I don’t relish the thought of being stuck in there every evening waiting for scans to finish (no matter which way you try it, you always end up scanning frame by frame) or waiting for A4/A3 prints to complete (which do take rather a long time). I wanted to be in a position where I could load the scanner with two sets of 120 and sit comfortably in front of the fire, controlling my scanning and other functions from there.

We tried popping the R1900 onto the print server, only to find that we appeared to lose control is sending colour configuration and other settings to the network printer. It was ok, but not great for producing high quality, high accuracy output. As to the scanner, all the solutions we could find (USB over network client/software) were starting at £100, which felt too much to spend on a “convenience”.

I fielded my needs to GeekUp, and Tim Nash replied with the suggestion of a Belkin USB Network Hub. I must admit to being pleasantly surprised.

The Belkin USB Network hub is a thin, discreet black box with five USB ports, two to front and three to rear. A small, unobtrusive green LED no larger than a pin head to the front lets the user know that the unit at least has power. The unit is connected to your nearest switch and if you’re running DHCP that’s about it. All you need to do then is install the client software. Belkin promise us that it’s that simple.

As a bit of background, device over network is something I’ve had to deal with a few times before, usually as a purely client/server software solution. In a previous life I was responsible for maintaining a series of serial ISDN modems connected to a number of machines for the expressed purpose of a certain piece of banking software. The software failed regularly, the modems hung when they felt like it and some days you felt like the universe was simply trying to make your life difficult.

So I was ready for a battle when I plugged in the Belkin hub this morning. I was armed with network monitors, had meters of ethernet cable at the ready, and by jove it was going to work.

I plugged the scanner and printer into the hub, plugged all three into the four-way, and plugged the ethernet cable into the nearly full ten-port switch sat behind my bank of servers. The little light on the front of the unit came on, and I was ready for the battle on my laptop with the client software.

The drivers on the disc proved to be the first stumbling point. Support for OS X was available from the website so I off I went to grab the drivers. “Humm, potential driver hell”, I thought and steeled myself against the odds. The drivers wanted to reboot the Mac. Again, we were ready for hell. We were ready for corrupted Leopard installs, we were ready for network connections to explode on sight, we were ready for anything…

…except for the Belkin USB Hub Control Centre to elegantly launch on start and cheerfully inform me that there was a printer and scanner present and would I like to connect to them. Still not convinced this was going to go well, I was determined there would be problems with the installation drivers for the devices. “It’s not going to be convinced these are local devices”, kept running through my head so I was again surprised when Vuescan happily said “oh look, scanner!” (Vuescan is notoriously fussy over USB devices) and Printers went “cricky! a R1900, best install the drivers chief!”. It couldn’t have been any more painless. And yes, OS X Printers speaks to me in a Penfold voice.

By now, paranoia had set it. It had all gone far too well. It couldn’t carry on like this surely? So far, the Mac was more than happy that a local printer and scanner existed on the system and it was behaving. Almost lulled into a false sense of security I realised that at this point I had forgotten one small detail. Speed. A USB 2 device has a theoretical maximum speed of 480Mbit/s, the wired network could only reach a paltry 100Mbit/s. Of course, here would be the problem! The performance would be so slow, no way in hell would it be sensible to use on a long term basis.

So in went one of my negatives from Rome, and I hit the magic to scan at 3200 dpi (I usually run at 4800 dpi for 35mm). I sat back, expecting this to take the better part of the year. Two pass scanning with multi-exposure. I had you now!

Or at least it would have done if it hadn’t taken around six minutes. Normally I would budget around five minutes for that kind of a scan, with the device attached locally. Admittedly, it’s down by around 1000dpi, but still that’s not a hell of a lot of extra information. It held up well.

Printing was just as pleasant. I printed it out at a measly 6×4 (we’re running a little low on ink). Unlike hooking it up via a print server, it honoured the colour settings, the ICC profile and the other little niceties and printed as I was hoping for first time. Speed was again, not a problem.

It is true that most photographers work in a one scanner, one printer per person environment. But for those instances where sharing resources is needed, the usual provision of network printing tools has always been short of the mark. Inkjet printers lose flexibility when run as network devices. Scanners so far have had very little to no option for being run over a network. Existing USB sharing solutions are designed for large enterprise environments and Geeks (capital G), not those who just want to get on with it. The Belkin Network Hub is small, discreet and provides that “local” effect to get the most out of your hardware. Software solutions charge significantly more for significantly less, and this device means you don’t need to keep a server ticking over to support it all. It just works.

Brilliant.