Found the Jeff Mitchum Gallery

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I was walking around Los Gatos last weekend and I discovered the Jeff Mitchum Gallery which has a mix of high-end furniture and panoramic photos.  The furniture is very comfortable (and attractive) but the photos are really stunning.  He shoots only panoramics in color (on film) and offers them between 5 and 8 feet wide.  You can see lots of the photos on his website but the computer screen doesn't really replicate the experience of seeing a well-lit 8 foot wide print hanging in front of you.  There's something to be said about the power of a perfect, large, bright print standing right in front of you. I also found that he has a book called "Seasons of Light" which is one of the nicest printed photo books I've ever seen.  His website says it uses a "state of the art publication including UV Spot printing for archival quality preservation of all of your favorite images."

The UV Spot process creates gorgeous glossy prints on matte paper pages which is a really neat effect.  The pages are probably 15 - 18 inches wide and make a really nice presentation of most of his work.  I was looking at the book for about 10 minutes thinking to myself that if it cost $100 or less I'd buy it in a heartbeat.  It's just my luck that it costs $175 so I ended up walking away without a copy.  :-)

Perhaps I'll save my pennies and head back there sometime to pick it up.  The books really is so well done you could cut the pages out and have have about 90 frame-worthy prints for only a couple bucks a piece.  A horrible thing to do to a $175 book, but that's one of the first thoughts that went through my head when I started to thumb through it.

FTC Disclosure: Since the original publishing of this post, Jeff and I have spoken a few times and he's provided me with a copy of the book.  I will _not_ be cutting it up!

Since I now have the book and have taken a little more time to look at it, I can add some more detail.   Hopefully in a later post...

Smart Objects in Adobe CS4

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I'm working on another book project that involves editing a lot of photos in Lightroom and importing them into InDesign.   There are lots of cycles of importing into InDesign, looking at the images, deciding on an edit, making the edit in Lightroom (brightness, contrast, etc.), reimporting into InDesign, etc.   It would be really cool if you could export a photo from Lightroom  as a Smart Object into InDesign. You can export as a smart object into Photoshop.  Why not InDesign?

After playing around more, it looks like the Smart Object communication between Lightroom, Bridge, and Photoshop doesn't exactly work the way I was expecting.  I've got some learning to do here but I think this could be really cool.

Thinking of buying a photo printer

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I'm finally thinking of getting around to buying a photo printer.  I do most of my printing at Mpix.com but I'm getting frustrated with the slow cycle time of the print - ship - see results - adjust colors - reprint cycle.  I think it's time to bite the bullet and bring printing of small images (probably only as large as 8x10) in-house.  I look forward to tweaking colors and printing endless 4x6's until it looks right and then taking the resulting file over to Picture Element and saying "make me a big one like this". I've heard such great things about Epsons and such horrible things about Canons that I think I'm going to go with an Epson.  After shooting a Canon SLR for a couple years I can only imagine the anti-photographer workflow their printers must have, and the original experience of Michael Reichman over at The Luminous Landscape seems to bear this out.  (Note:  He did have a much better experience with the newer iPF6100, but still...)

So the next questions are:

1) How big?  8x10?  11x17?  16x20?

2) What quality?  Each brand seems to have at least two choices in each size.

3) Is Epson going to announce anything for PMA next month?

I'm currently thinking of an R1900, a 2800, or maybe something as extravagant as a 3800.  I'm doing all sorts of spreadsheet calculations to figure out what the break-even point on each of these printers is (based on usage) and trying to do as much research as I can.

One nice little nugget of web info is Eric Chan's excellent Epson 3800 FAQ.