A cold wet fish for example

Here beginneth the second lesson.

Oops. Getting a bit carried away with beginneths and endeths it seems. How I should have started was “Here’s the second of this week’s two-part post”.
On the other hand, “lesson” is just about the right word. Cos if you’ve religiously followed this blog right from the start and are a bit savvy (mind you, if you were that savvy you prob’ly wouldn’t be reading this in the first place) you’ll have learned lots about all the mistakes and cock-ups to avoid in this ’ere photography caper.

How so? Cos it seems I’m embarked upon a determined effort to make all the conceivable mistakes it’s possible to make… and some that aren’t. And then, cos clearly I’m a bit of a masochist, write about them all. At great length.

Anyway, having dealt with the fiasco of the business cards, we then move on to the second task of the day. That’s not entirely unrelated.

Have to backtrack a bit here though to explain that a few days ago (last week somewhen I do believe) mate and I were invited (indeed, badgered) to put some of our pics into a sort of exhibition type thingie. That’s going to include another photographer or two, a real artist (wot paints pictures) or two, and so on.

Nothing major. A little local affair. That’ll likely not attract much attention. And nothing to get terribly excited about. But its gonna be happening once a month until about the end of the year and, frankly, at minimal cost to ourselves it sounds like a handy little wheeze. And plays rather neatly into other little plans we have. So it’s quite convenient and suits our purposes to ride with it.

However, it does mean we have to get some prints done. And framed. Sort of thing.

Now we, mate and I, have looked into this print business before. In connection with that little venture I mentioned in Part One of this post. And, I have to say, our looking into it wasn’t totally satisfactory. To the point where we’d concluded that the only viable option was to get our own photo printer and do the sodding things ourselves.

Not just any old photo printer either. A goodish one. One that would give us some control over colour and suchlike. Hmm. Not cheap. And, what with both of us being on what you might call the “skint” side, not something to be done straight away. So the whole notion was put on the back burner. Where its been slowly simmering ever since. And likely to carry on simmering for a while yet.

The main problem being that we weren’t terribly happy with the colour reproduction of the test prints we’d had done. They weren’t precisely “faithful to the original” you might say. Or so it seemed to us.

But here we are, suddenly lumbered with needing to get some prints… and get them relatively quickly.

Now a few weeks back another mate (yep, another photography nut) suggested we try the local Kodak print shop. Apparently he’s had quite a bit of stuff done there and been well pleased with the results.

So, in the absence of any better suggestion (or any suggestion at all for that matter), that’s what mate and I have just done… after the rubber stamp fiasco. Trotted some pics into the local Kodak shop and asked for some prints thereof. Explained what we wanted and… “Come back in an hour and a half”. Cheap they were too. Well, reasonably.

Time for a quick amble slow mooch around town then, with a detour via the local Jessops so mate can get himself a new lens cap. Cos, careless oaf that he is, he somehow managed to break his. I dunno. Normal people (like me for example) just lose them. But not him. He has to go and break his. “How the hell do you break a lens cap anyway?” I ask meself. Still, I guess it matches all the other things he’s broken.

So, as I say, a slow mooch around town to see if there’s any pics worth grabbing. Not a lot as it happens.

And we only had an hour and a half anyway. And we had to fit a leisurely coffee into that somehow, as well.

Ninety minutes later and there we are, said prints grasped in our grubby little mitts, scurrying back to our town centre studio… better known to regulars here as The Bear pub. Well, where else would we scurry back to in town?

Ensconcing ourselves firmly in the back yard “garden” we unpackage said prints with some trepidation, fully expecting to find they’re as bad as the first couple of test runs we’d had done at one of those online “print on demand” setups. Not just any setup either, but one that had come highly recommended. Yeah. Right.

And whaddya know? The prints look quite good. Now we haven’t a computer on hand so we can’t actually compare them to the onscreen originals, but the colours don’t seem bad at all. And the whites are white. And there’s detail in the shadow. Overall quite pleasing in fact.

And me, exercising some rather unusual forethought, had brung our original test prints with me from home. So we could compare, sort of thing. Hook them out then, and check those as well.
How very strange. They must have “matured” or something. Cos they don’t seem anywhere near as bad as when we first looked at them. What’s going on?

A nasty little suspicion begins to intrude into this scrambled mess of mine that I choose to call a brain. A suspicion of something I should have thought of straight away, wot with me having a background in printing and graphics and other such arcane matters. But somehow, and quite bizarrely, I hadn’t made the connection to photographs.

Y’see, here we are, looking at pics. Outside. In broad daylight. Natural light, you understand.
Whereas, when we inspected our very first batch of test pics, we were inside. In a room (at my place as it happens). In the evening. With the electric light on. Artificial light, you understand; that just happens to have a sort of yellowish cast to it.

The obvious horrible truth smacks me in the face like a… well, like something horrible smacking you in the face. A cold wet fish for example. An obvious horrible truth that I try, ever so gently in a roundabout sort of fashion, to communicate to mate with the following question: “Er… ever heard of a little thing called white balance?”

There then follows a nice cosy little chat, full of self-berating and liberally sprinkled with words such as “idiot” and “stupid”.

Yep. Viewing pics in the wrong sort of light is definitely gonna make their colours appear a bit “off”. That’s fairly basic elementary sort of stuff. That absolutely everyone knows. Except us it seems.
Just as well we discovered this now, and not after we’d purchased our ever-so-expensive printer. And wasted hundreds of sheets of paper trying to get the colour right. Methinks one of those fancy “daylight bulbs” is gonna have to head the shopping list now. Ho hum.

What all this means of course, in real terms, is that we’re good to go. With a dead handy local print shop. For the time being, until we get that ever-so-expensive printer. Cos although the pics (yes, even the original test ones) are much better than we thought they were, they’re still not quite right. Or maybe we’re just overly fussy.

[Edit 17.06.2010 - Mate's somewhat distorted version, unfairly casting me in the role of some mouthy know-it-all, is here... now he's finally got around to writing it!]