Well, time for another update again already! It's been a frantically busy time for us, and for a lot of you as well from what we can tell! First, good luck to those of you undergoing final assessments, or preparing end of year exhibitions - hopefully the hard work will pay off and you will be well rewarded for your efforts! For all the students actually finishing their degrees - it's been a pleasure working with you and we wish you the best of luck as you enter the workforce, or leave for travel in far away places!  Don't be a stranger!

Right, on to the news - quite a few changes here, in preparation for next year, which will be another big one for Image Science. Next year, starting late January, my partner-in-all-things Amy will be coming on board full time here at Image Science. She'll be helping out with pretty much everything, and will be expanding the retail and printing sides of the business significantly. So, please make her feel welcome! Phil will also be with us into the new year on an on-going part time basis, so the office will be busier than ever and this will help us keep our turn around times to the current levels, with 95% of all jobs this year completed in 24 hours or less (although we still make no promises and quote 2-3 days as our 'official' turn-around time).

Having both Amy and Phil to help me will mean I will be able to do a few new things (not least of which my own photography which has been a little too much on the back burner this last year due to the overwhelming success of Image Science). I'm also going to be co-teaching the Digital Fine Print course (with Silvi Glattauer) at RMIT, which is very exciting. If you're in second or third year at RMIT, you might want to consider taking this elective - it's a very practical and focussed course about one of the core skills of Photography, so will be well worth your time. Frankly I think fine printing should be taught as a non-elective first year course, it's so essential. You'll get exposure (excuse the pun) to all sorts of things you probably haven't seen before, and almost certainly the quality of your work will substantially improve in tangible ways by the end of the course.  And if you're not at RMIT, you can still do a condensed version of the course, at your own site/home - see here for details.

Now, on to other non Image Science topics.

First, apologies to those of you whose exhibitions I have been invited to and missed - please don't stop sending the invites, as most of the year I actually have some time to attend them - but October is a crazy month here as all the students get their folios ready (think we have scanned/printed at least half of all the folios from the colleges this year!).  Hope they went well for you!  If you'd like to get a link to your exhibition in this newsletter (no promises on when it will actually appear though - it's a very ad hoc newsletter) - just drop me a line. 

I know many of you have been waiting for the article on Photoshop performance, and it's 90% finished, however we hit the busiest time of the year and I just haven't had the spare minutes to finish it off.  It's on its way though, and in the meantime there's some thoughts following on the age old LCD/CRT debate (all but finished now that CRTs are no longer being made), that leads into some thoughts on prints/print quality/screen matching - all that!

I took the plunge and got myself an Eizo 2110W the other day - and I don't regret it a bit.  First LCD I have used that is clearly better than any CRT I have ever used.  It calibrates beautifully - with the best shadow detail I've ever seen, and is sharp as a tack (DVI connection).  They're expensive (about $2000), and to be honest the Mitsubishi 210B 21" LCD we also have is 90% as good and half the price, but that final 10% is really very pleasant and well worth it if you're using it on a day by day basis.  5 year warranty too, so the maximum cost of ownership should be $400 per year over the 5 years.  Pretty reasonable for the quality, I think.

One thing I have noticed with the new screen is that soft proofing is, oddly, both more accurate and more difficult than ever before.  More accurate because of the incredible shadow detail the screen offers, but more difficult because the contrast ratio of this screen is so very much higher than paper!  These new screens have contrast rations of 1000:1, way, way beyond the contrast ratios of any print, and so getting ones mind to translate between the two mediums is quite difficult.  The screen displays, with uncanny precision, the correct colours, and detail where there will be detail, and no detail where there won't - but the distance between these tones (i.e. the contrast) on screen is far beyond the print so the impression of the final print can be quite different to the impression one gets from a casual glance at a soft proof.  Turning on 'paper white and simulate black ink' and viewing against a completely neutral background can help but the sudden drop in contrast can be quite hard for the eye to deal with and often doesn't hit the right perceptive buttons (for me, anyway).  One thing that can help is to calibrate to luminosities MUCH lower than these screens offer straight out of the box - I use 120 cd/m2 but out of the box it was set to about 270!  To hit 120 I have the brightness set to 14%, and not only is this is much more comfortable to work with, it also has the added bonus that my screen will last significantly longer as I'm not driving the backlight as hard.  Also, I won't be blind in a year from looking into the equivalent of the sun.  This is a good thing.

<(BTW - If anyone knows how to change Photoshop's full screen background colour from black to a mid grey could you give me a bell on (03) 9348 9808 or reply to this email!).

Also, as I understand it, the 'paper white/black ink' switches in Photoshop aren't actually part of ICC profiles, so exactly how and what Photoshop is doing there, nobody really knows and the accuracy, even in ideal conditions, is somewhat questionable. 

Which brings me to a topic I've been giving a lot of thought to lately, which is the eye.  The human eye is a greedy, fickle, difficult thing.  It's something to remember - there is a critical difference between creating art and viewing art, and our ever-adaptable eyes can cause us to make big mistakes when we're working on our images.  When we create a work, we (hopefully) think about the image, shoot the image, then edit the image, usually working for a minimum of several hours per image.  We're aiming to create something worthy of attention (and perhaps even dollars).  The problem is, sitting in front of a work for hour after hour, it is easy to lose the ability to really see the work as others see it.  As we sit in front of the image, our rods and cones saturating, our eye wants ever more - more contrast, more cleanliness, more saturation.  Its what leads to the mistake, made time and again, of over-saturating our images, of boosting our contrast, of sanitising and sterilising and making barren our images of all that is imperfect. 

It comes back to the need to create depth, to create subtlety, in our images - because depth is the difference between a passing glance and lingering look.  It's the difference between an image I like, and an image I love - and can live with on my wall for years.  It isn't important what the image is - whether its a portrait, a landscape, or a surrealist vision of a distopian future, the point is that we're aiming, fundamentally, to create something people want to look at, and something that will reward the time spent looking at it. 

Stewing in our own creative juices we often forget to think about the key issue - what it is like to see the image for the first time.  Not just first impressions, but how the eye wonders through the unknown image, how the story of the subject unfolds in front of us, how our brain and our heart engages with the image and gives it a unique existence, a life that exists only between the image and the viewer for that (hopefully long) moment in time the image holds our interest.  But I'm getting very prosaic.

The key technical point I am making, in a round about way, is the importance of taking regular breaks when working on images, to refresh the eyes, and consciously trying to see our image the way it appears to other people viewing the image.  And to take a step back from 'cheap thrills' in photography - things like excessive saturation and boosted contrast, and super high gloss prints.  Longevity in images, I think, comes from subtlety, detail and story. 

One other thing that has caught my attention lately is the sheer gloominess of the currently vogue photographic/retouching techniques.  You know the type of thing I mean - and if you don't, find yourself the latest batch of AIPP award winning images (they'll be on show in the Block Arcade from Wednesday Nov 9 for a couple of weeks I think) - and you'll soon see what I mean.  It's very much as if someone has written a new Photoshop plugin and handed it to 90% of the winners.  Dark, gloomy, pool of light images with unnaturally warm, saturated skin tones. 

Thank God for Matt Hoyle's images - the ones that won him a well deserved Photographer of the Year - they give me hope.  He used a completely different palette - almost pastel like (can anyone say 'colour negative - I miss you so'), and some absolutely great subjects.  And those images rose to the top in the judging which means things must be mostly on the right track but unfortunately there are too many images in the awards that are just boringly competent examples of the latest vogue techniques that really just don't stay interesting.  And when they all have the current gloomy look, it makes for a very somber set of images, a set I'd rather not spend too much time with. 

That's it for this time - happy clicking and hope to see you all soon around the traps!

Cheers

Jeremy Daalder

Director,

<Image Science