AfterCapture is a magazine that is freely distributed to commercial photographers. This tends to generate an ad-centric magazine, and I frequently question the merit of their equipment/software reviews, but greatly enjoy the articles on other photographers, the educational material, and the lessons in advertising (marketing material directed at people in the advertising industry tends to be extremely well designed).

After discovering the AC Blog, it’s almost not worth my time to read the printed material anymore. For instance, check out this article on Learning Strategies for Video Tutorials.

I haven’t thought about the term Satisficing since my days as a programming major at Carnegie Mellon, but the topic came up again and I realized that I lean towards a satisficing strategy most of the time.

In a nutshell: Satisficers are content to make less than optimal decisions, on the theory that most of the time any decision will be good enough, and the cost in time to produce an optimal result is higher than the risk of making an insufficient choice. Maximizers seek as much information as possible before making a decision, with the confidence that the decision will be better than it would have been otherwise.

I realize now that much of my frustration with the people who frequently give me business advice is that they are maximizers and I am a satisficer. But this doesn’t answer the more important question: is satisficing a valid business strategy for the art sales aspect of my business? In the commercial world, photographers usually need to bid on projects, and that seems to imply that maximizers will be more successful.

This tangents into the larger question of whether my career goal is really about maximizing profit. The very term suggests a preference for a strategy which is foreign to me. I can’t imagine many investors would be willing to support a company dedicated to satisficing their profit goals. On the other hand, I’m not a corporation, so does this really apply to my business?

It’s a big question, and one deserving of far more thought than I currently have time to give it.

The kind people at uCertify have put up a link to my review of their Photoshop ACE Prep kit, and are offering a 10% discount to my readers on the uCertify PrepKit of their choice.

If you’re interested in checking them out, please use the following Discount code: “AKUMAR”

Hopefully, I have created a temporary fix for the spam issue I’ve been having. What’s most disturbing to me is the number of people who have told me, “Oh, I saw those on your feed. I assumed you had put them there yourself.” I’m not sure how I should respond to the idea that posting pornographic links on my business blog seems appropriate.

Anyway, I’ve been running to catch up with deadlines ever since Strictly Business 2, and haven’t had time to fully process everything. Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned is how to price my commercial assignments. While this is a long and involved process which rightfully took two full days to describe to me, the first step is the most important step: Your Cost of Doing Business.

In order to make money as a photographer, you need to know how much it is costing you to be a photographer. Therefore, you need to calculate your Cost of Doing Business, and the NPPA has a very useful online calculator for doing just that.

Once you know your CODB, you also need to know what a reasonable amount of time to earn that bare minimum is. Conventional wisdom suggests that a full-time commercial photographer will spend 100 to 120 days “on set.” The rest of the time is spent getting work. Conventional wisdom (and this time I mean it as a sort of pun, as it is the wisdom I learned from the convention I attended last month) also suggests that working more than 120 days is a surefire way to give yourself a heart attack or a divorce.

So take your CODB and divide it by 100. This is the price you should set your “Creative Fee” at, and if you end up working 120 days, you’ve just earned 20*CODB profit.
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I just found the most amazing little chunk of code on my Mac. If you have a Mac it’s probably already on your system. It’s called Art Directors Toolkit.

From the Help description:

Art Directors Toolkit (ADT) is a time-saving tool that helps designers get the information they’re looking for quickly. ADT has evolved with the direction of designers and production artists alike. By combining a multitude of features, this program integrates well with today’s industry-standard applications.

What does this really mean? ADT is a compilation of all the conversion tools you’ll ever need: fraction-to-decimal, unit, page size, scaling, image file size and more. Plus, a host of color theory number-crunchers that graphic designers will love: RGB to Pantone references, a color mixer, and RGB to Hex-code (html) converter.

It also has some text-based tools: font preview, column layout, and a nifty little ruler which you can use to measure anything on your screen.

In other words, it’s an incredibly tiny little program which answers a lot of the questions designers, graphic artists, and digital imagers often have.

If you have a Mac, then I strongly encourage you to open this puppy and take a look. I know it’ll be saving me a lot of memory and time.

Edit: They called me back, see below for the end of the story.

I just went several rounds with the folks at Precision Imaging, over the roll of Kodak Ektachrome 64T EPY that I finally sent in from my trip to France over the summer. While the conversation was frustrating, I noticed that the conversation required a fairly deep knowledge of things which I knew nothing about, four or five years ago.

It’s a tungsten-balanced E6 film, but yields a negative image (E6 is a slide-processing formula). Or at least, the 4×5 sheets of it that I shot two summers ago came back as negatives, and they were processed in E6. I’m fairly sure that the roll of 35mm I shot in France is the same stuff. I certainly hope it is, because the 64T EPY has the unusual characteristic of extended reciprocity range (meaning that you can take exposures up to 2 minutes long without unnatural color shift or the additional exposure math required by all other types of film) and I was shooting that stuff in the dark of night in ancient alleyways.

The problem is that I asked them to give me a contact sheet. First, Cindy called me to tell me that they can’t do contact sheets of slide film. I agreed that I didn’t want contact sheets of positive film, but this film will, I believe, yield negative film. Just process it E6, I told them. If you get negatives, cut me a contact sheet. If they’re positives, just send them back.

Ten minutes later, I get a call back from James, who wanted to explain to me that a contact sheet would require scanning the positives, and that would cost around $60. I spend about 20 minutes again explaining that this film should be processed E6, and I was pretty sure it was going to come out as negatives. I even pulled out the old 4x5s to double check. The conversation got a little heated, and he passed me up to Peter (who I’ve worked with before on some fairly large orders).

At this point, I was pretty confused. I thought James was telling me that no E6-processed film could be contact-printed, short of using cibachrome, which is no longer produced anywhere in the world. This confused me because printing contact sheets is the same process, essentially, as scanning negatives. I know I had scanned those 4x5s, which I was now holding in my hand, and if you can’t make contact sheets off a negative, then you can’t do anything with them at all. But I’m not a printer, and I dislike color chemistry, so it’s possible there was something I didn’t know about.

Peter suggested that maybe they had been cross-processed. I paused at this, because I had been surprised when the 4x5s came back as negatives. Could they check their records to see if they had cross-processed the 4x5s? No, they need not bother, because cross-processing yields a very grainy negative with unpredictable color shifts. The prints I had made were smooth as silk, and Peter LeGrand even called one a “masterful printing job,” which he would never have said about a grainy print (Peter likes to shoot with 16×20 sheets of film, using a camera bigger than my sofa). And while I had needed to do some color correction to remove the harsh yellow colors of sodium-arc lighting from the street lamps, the tungsten-balance of the film had required less color correction, not more: they could not have been cross-processed.

We started from scratch: I’d delivered two rolls of E6 120 film (120 is a type of medium format film, which is used in a variety of cameras to yield images in 6×6, 6×4.5, 6×9 and even 6×12 format, depending on the camera) and one roll of 35mm E6. Did I want all three to be cross-processed and contact-printed? No, the two rolls of 120 were to be processed “normally,” meaning the instructions on the film. These, I assured Peter, would yield color positives, and so contact prints were not desired, needed, or even presumed possible. For that matter, I added, the 35mm was to be processed normally as well.

Peter wondered why, if I knew that, would I ask for contact sheets from the 35mm? I reiterated my experience: two summers ago, on a deadline, I had Precision process a dozen sheets of 4×5 of this film type, and had been very surprised when they gave me negatives, not positives. Was I sure they were negatives? Yes, I was holding them in my hand and they were definitely negatives. Had Precision made contact sheets of them? No, I had assumed they would be slides, since they were processed E6, and so had not ordered contact sheets (a 4-inch by 5-inch slide is a fairly large finished image, and I had planned to display them as they were). Was I sure that this was the same film? We compared information on the 35mm case, the film in my hand, the box of unexposed 4x5s. There were a few discrepancies, but Peter assured me these were the difference between 35mm and 4×5 markings.

Peter was flummoxed. He had never seen a film which required the E6 process but yielded a color negative. I allowed that the discovery had been shocking to me as well, but lacking his experience and knowledge, could not say how uncommon this was (as I mentioned, I’ve worked with Peter many times before, and have never asked him a question he didn’t know the answer to). Peter demurred, he would not call himself an expert in any field, and thought it was possible that there were things he hadn’t seen before.

While this was all very interesting, I suggested that the problem was much simpler than the tangled thread of our conversation led us to believe. What I needed, I explained, was to be able to preview the images before choosing which ones to work on further. Why not process the film and then decide what to do? If they came out as positive transparencies, then they could just send them back to me as is, and I could preview them. If they came out as negatives, then cut the film and print me a contact sheet so I could see what I had to work with. Rather than debating what would or would not happen, when I was not completely certain it was even the same film type (although Peter was), let’s just work with what we get to give me the result I need.

Peter, though, was not completely satisfied. He wanted to know why I would use such a film, why anyone would make it. I explained about the film’s extended reciprocity range, and he agreed that he’d never heard of a film with that characteristic. I did not mention that he clearly had, since his company had processed the original film. He wanted to be certain that the films were the same. He carefully noted all the information I had from the two boxes (the box of 4x5s and the roll of unexposed 35mm which I thought was the same as the roll I’d given Precision), and again reiterated that the 35mm in his hand was the same type as in my hand. He would process the film, and check Kodak’s technical specs, and call me back in a few hours.

We’ll see how it goes. I’ve checked several websites and confirmed that the only Kodak 64T on the market is the EPY, and that my assumptions about its performance characteristics are correct. I’ll complete this post when I know how it turns out, and possibly even write several reviews mentioning the E6/negative concern for the benefit of other photographers who might be interested in using it.

A few hours later, Peter calls me back to inform me that the film came out and it was definitely slide film. That was part of the mystery solved. I looked up my information on the original 4x5s and had them look up the original order. It turns out that those images had been processed C41, meaning they’d been cross-processed! Now I’m the one who is completely confused, because I can’t imagine why I would have asked for that series to be done like that, especially since I’ve never seen what the film normally looks like.

Now I have a completely different dilemma, since Rik Brandt has offered to let me borrow his 4×5 camera, expressly to cut off all my excuses for not continuing that project. Do I process the new film in E6 or C41? Will processing the new film the way it was intended to be processed yield results that won’t be in keeping with the original set? I suppose the only way to find out is to try a few sheets processed as “normal,” and view the results. Of course, I’ll have to get them developed by the guys at Precision, whom I’ve just given so much grief to.

Here’s a useful article from the Chicago Artists Resource website on brand identity, a popular trend in freelance and artistic marketplaces. Although the article is focused on dance troupes, it can easily be expanded to other businesses.

Defining Your Brand Identity: What business are you in? | Chicago Artists Resource

Two particular resources which I keep reminding myself to check out more thoroughly are the oft-discussed Inkjet Mall and Inkjet Art websites (unrelated) which offer a wide variety of papers, inks, and related material.

Inkjet Mall, for example, offers workshops, DVDs and books on high-end digital printing, as well as very reasonably priced Custom Printer Profiling. Just print out their targets according to the directions, and mail the results to them; they’ll email you the customized profiles for your printer/paper combo. Having just profiled my own printer in Verser’s Fashion Photography course, I can tell you from first hand experience just how valuable a custom profile is. My home prints went from completely unusable to better than the Epson 4800s at school, which use the profiles from the various companies.

Let me repeat that. A custom-profiled $400 all-in-one printer/scanner/fax will yield better photos than a $2500 printer using the profiles downloaded from the web.

Inkjet Art offers customized paper sample packages that have been thoughtfully categorized by the feel of the end visual product. Instead of buying a variety of sampler packs based on the company who produces each, I can buy the InkjetArt Canvas Sampler or compare all their Luster papers with one, reasonably priced order. Of particular interest to me is #11, Dual Sided Photo sampler. I’ve been hunting those puppies down with keen appeal lately. They also offer a wide variety of canvas photo papers.

These guys explain the difference between the various rendering intents far better than I ever could.

Color Management: Color Space Conversion

ISO Paper Sizes, and why.

Some of the things you need to learn as a photographer is kind of wierd. For instance, 8×10 photo paper is most common because it’s a multiple of the 4×5 large format film, even 35mm, which sports roughly a 2:3 ratio, is the common photographic medium. Digital images are neither 4×5 or 2:3, but are usually printed on Legal size paper, 8.5 x 11, which has absolutely no bearing on anything in the photographic world, except that most people’s printers can handle a maximum width of 8.5

Still not sure what any of this has to do with the 13×19 paper which has become so popular, or the 17 inch roll paper that’s the largest size the most common pigment printers use. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that 1/2 inch margins yield a 12×18 frame, which is 2:3.