Posts tagged photography

Epson struggles

Photography

Recently, my trusty DVD printer (yes, it prints DVDs and CDs almost exclusively), the Epson R290 keeps telling me the yellow cartridge is on empty and refused to print. I usually stock cartridges so that was not a show-stopper. A minor detour for Asian readers: your yellow ink will finish the fastest so if you’re not OCD like me on ink, at least keep a spare yellow cartridge somewhere. Not very scientific I know but every printer I use has always depleted the yellow ink first. This also happened while I was shooting two hundred-plus families at Mid valley for the recent focus on the family’s photo contest. All three printers ran through their yellow cartridges with an average ratio on 1.8 to 1 other color cartridge. Asian skin tones perhaps.

Incompatible yellow cartridge?!

Anyways, replacing an ink cart is a two minute operation… until I get an incompatible/non-original cartridge error. Okay, my carts are all Epson originals. Pop the cartridge out, cleaned the contacts, pop it back in. No go. Okay, next yellow cartridge! Still no go. Power-off, disconnect power cord, replace with empty cartridge, etc. Nothing works. So, after one hour and two brand new yellow cartridges, the stupid thing still tells me the cartridge is incompatible or incorrect and I need a 81 or 82 cartridges. That what it says on the box and the cartridge!!! I know why manufacturers do this. They literally are giving the printer away and making back their revenues on the consumables. This is a fact. I used to work for a printer giant (two letter acronym, US company, Palo Alto, you get the it…) and the printer group always makes money. They may not hit targets all the time but they never lose money.

How many new cartridges do I need to buy?

What to do? I’ve got a couple of customer DVDs to print! The next lowest ink level was the light-cyan cartridge. So, let’s replace that and see if I need to replace my printer. Pop the cart out, pop the new cart in and damn. It works like it should. One day later and a short trip down to Low Yat Plaza, yes, Epson inks are kinda hard to find… especially the higher end inks and this is like entry level IMHO. So next step, replace the yellow with the newly purchased cart and finally it works!

Hmm, I think I’ll be looking at a Canon printer next… provided it prints DVDs as good as my Epson.

Finally, all six inks working…

Small camera conundrum

Photography

The digital camera industry today is churning out point & shoot cameras like no tomorrow. There are new models released by major manufacturers almost every six months. The real deal is that I find them so boring. Tweak here, tweak there. Raise the megapixel count or put in this silly feature. Nothing really appeals to me despite that I’ve been looking for a small camera since Chinese new Year this year. That means in the last six months, I’ve not found something that I really like.

What could I want in a small camera? My DSLRs churn out amazing image quality and superb full HD movies. Actually, I want a camera I can carry with me 24×7. So what’s the current toss-up? Canon’s SX200IS and Panasonic’s TZ7 (ZS3). At this time, the TZ7 is a strong contender and I’m about 90% sure of getting it. Until of course recently, Panasonic just unveiled a bunch of new compacts. The FX60 looks strong as well. Since Canon usually releases around the third week of August and that’s not very far away, I’ll give myself another month before I jump into the fray 🙂

Panasonic’s excellent TZ7

Diane & Kar Kean

Photography

From an early start (5am), from Kota Kemuning to Taman Maluri, Cheras, this was one fun packed wedding. How can we forget all the fear factor challenges, or the highway car chase on the Kesas highway to the wedding toasting and “yam sengs” mixed with Michael Jackson’s Beat it! While the best laid plans go awry, we’re glad that overall things went very well and we could even save the dinner march in as we had the Canon in D CD in our car!

WA work in progress

Photography

Have been working on reworking many of WebAperture’s functionality. Here, the Album Admin functions get redesigned… Of course just a single image – don’t want to reveal too much but more importantly, I am going to circulate among some key members for their feedback in terms of usability.

Shooting Tethered part II

Photography

For Canon users, shooting tethered usually means USB cable (or WFT transmitters) and EOS Utility. While fully functional and usable, the only thing I don’t like about the EOS Utility is it will exit (and sometimes still stay in RAM) when you disconnect your camera. While perfectly fine for single session of shots, it doesn’t make sense at least when you occasionally need to disconnect your camera. What is actually needed is a checkbox that says “Don’t exit on Lost connection” and if it’s checked, it should stay around and try to reconnect when the USB cable gets reconnected.

However, now I’m experimenting with DSLR remote in terms of wedding photography. Using a manfrotto lightstand and tripod head adapter, I can actually mount my camera in some location that’s hard to reach or out of bounds when ceremonies begin. Live-view coupled with a laptop with ad-hoc wireless running and my iPhone, I should be able to capture some unique angles and shots. The only drawback I guess is that I need another camera body and lens.

Shooting tethered, Direct printing and more

Photography 1 Comment

First off, apologies for the lack of entries for quite a while now. I’ve been busy with way too many things. Of course the last two weeks also bring a lot of changes for me personally.

One big event this week is Kodak’s retirement of Kodachrome. The thing about this is it tells everyone how old I am. It does show also when I got into photography… I didn’t use Kodachrome much due to limited labs processing them here in Malaysia but I tend to use it’s newer siblings, the Ektachrome series. There are some nice links here.

The other product I’m playing with right now and yes, it does have promise is DSLR Remote from OnOne software. Yes, I do think it needs to do AF but besides that, it’s pretty cool and I think I’ve got quite a few new uses for it once my Manfrotto camera clamps arrive! Canon really needs to drop the price of their Wi-Fi transceivers (more later)! And of course I’ll say it here again: OnOne software really needs to move their plugin suite to 64-bit. Like yesterday. 32-bit is so Windows XP 🙂

Anyways, back to topic:
Over last weekend’s Focus on the Family event, I found out for the first time that the Direct Print button on my 5D Mark II actually had a use. Of course finally Canon’s listening and the Direct print button doubles up to use as a toggle to get into HD Movie mode but prior Canon cameras don’t have luxury. I still think it should be fully programmable though. Anyways, printing direct from Camera is cool for once and it does streamline the workflow… Shoot, connect camera, select image, hit print, swap camera, shoot, repeat the process. Easy!

However, the problem now is that in public events, that’s not as sexy as a big widescreen monitor. I’ll probably try this approach with the orang asli trip next… instant prints. Everyone loves that! So the next day, I lugged my laptop with a 22″ wide-screen monitor along. Using the EOS Utility software, I ended up shooting tethered. The Capture Preview window was maximized on monitor 2 (external display) but the main display (laptop) was showing Adobe Bridge. Of course with Bridge CS4, you can have a second synchronized window so that can be toggled if the family wanted to preview the shots taken and select the best one for printing. Otherwise, the Capture preview was nice to show people what was the camera shooting at that time. So, short of having wireless USB, I think Canon ought to halve the price of the WFT-E4 transceiver! When I’ve more time this weekend, I’ll post a more detailed description of the work flow and software used.