SquareOne Organics, a local organic baby food company licensed one of my images to use for all their packaging and website! The image is of my friend, Karen’s, youngest daughter, Brynne. She’s pretty darn cute!

For about the last two years we’ve been using Redcort Software’s Virtual TimeClock Software. It is probably the most solid piece of software in the lab. It never crashes, and always very responsive. I highly recommend it to anybody looking for a time clock solution that is simple to administer and use, but very capable.

Ron Vesely, Chicago White Sox Team Photographer (oh, and did I mention – DeltaQuest customer), landed the cover of the August 3rd issue of Sports Illustrated with his shot of Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle finalizing history’s 18th Perfect Game!

Congratulations to Ron, Mark and the entire White Sox organization!

Filed in the “Horn Tooting” Category:

A couple weeks ago we were honored to be asked to produce display prints of images created expressly for The Peninsula Hotel’s international advertising campaign by internationally acclaimed photographer, Annie Leibovitz.

We produced, mounted and framed nearly 20 prints, ranging from 28×28 to 48×48. The exhibit is currently being displayed at The Peninsula | Chicago, 108 East Superior Street. It consists of images taken of actual hotel staff and guests at their hotels around the world.

Stop in and check them out next time you’re in the neighborhood….

Stephen Green, Chicago Cubs Team Photographer for the last 26 years, has an impressive exhibit on the Second Floor of the Oak Park Public Library.

Included are 30 images, sized from 12×18 to 30×45.

Well-known Players – Past and Present

Portraits of Current Players

Stunning Images of the Friendly Confines

The above images don’t come anywhere close to doing justice to the prints. If you live in the area, be sure to stop in and have a look. It is on the second floor. Go up the stairs and make a 180º.

All images were acquired from raw files (with the exception of a couple film images) and optimized by us. We then did all the printing and finishing.

Last Friday morning, our dear friend, godmother to our oldest daughter, former retoucher for DeltaQuest and mother of two, Dawn Leigh McCullum, died after a hard-fought, two year battle with cancer.

She and Amy have been friends since high school. Dawn was smart, funny and devoted to her partner and children, Kahar and Aasha. She was a talented photographer with a degree from Brooks Institute.

It’s hard to believe I met her more than ten years ago. We hit it off right away. Amy said it was because we were so much alike. I think it was because she was a cool chick.

Godspeed Dawn. You will be missed.

Ron Vesely, Chicago White Sox Team Photographer, launched his new site this week. Check it out for some amazing shots of professional athletes in action!

A nice article about Cynthia & Dennis, taking pictures in paradise.

As noted in an earlier post, we are also privileged to print the autograph prints for the Chicago Cubs this year. We’ve been working with the Cubs since around 2004, but this is the first year we’ve done this particular job. The prints will be autographed by the players and handed out at Spring Training.

These images show the first batch coming off the processor.

All images © 2009 Stephen Green
All images © 2009 Stephen Green

Go Cubs!

Interesting interview with Apical’s Managing Director, Michael Tusch on the complexity of improving dynamic range (the ability of a camera sensor to capture all the tones in a scene).

[via dpreview.com]

Modest people don’t like to toot their own horn. But then, I’m not modest and nobody else is lining up to do it, right? Right!

I’m proud to say that DeltaQuest was selected this year by the Chicago White Sox to produce several thousand 8×10s. The prints are of the players for the players to autograph and hand out at Spring Training.

All images © 2009 Ron Vesely
All images © 2009 Ron Vesely
All images © 2009 Ron Vesely

We’ll be queueing up a similar job this week for the Chicago Cubs.

We’re honored to be the lab Chicago’s baseball teams can rely on for high-quality, reasonably-priced prints.

Go Sox!

Cynthia Stalker was just voted by the 45,000 readers of the Virgin Island Daily News as The Best Photographer In The US Virgin Islands!

Congratulations to Cynthia and Dennis!

I came across a cool app over the “break” that makes it much more enjoyable and productive to look for stuff on Craigslist. It is called “Marketplace” and you can download it for free here.

UPDATE: Still a great tool, but I believe he is charging for it now.

The question of which colorspace profile to use for working space comes up every now and then. Here’s my brief take on the argument.

We’re probably a little different than most labs (but I’m sure you knew that). It doesn’t really matter what colorspace you use as long as it is accurately tagged in the ordering system so that we convert the image from the correct space to the printer.

The printer profiles are definitely closer to sRGB than to Adobe98. That said, there are a couple of caveats:

1.) Each printer / paper combination produces a different profile (not lustre vs matte vs glossy, but our RR30 and Kodak paper is different from our Epsilon and Kodak paper).

2.) sRGB files seem to be a little easier to correct. The best analogy I can come up with is that of a fulcrum:

Adjustments to images that are in Adobe98 seem have a larger effect on the image than those done to images in sRGB.

The effect is that it (sometimes) makes it more difficult to make small changes to files that are in Adobe98.

All of the above is really moot, however, when you are shooting RAW. The color balance of the image in RAW has a MUCH, MUCH bigger effect than the choice of working colorspace. If an image doesn’t look right coming out of RAW as an 8bit file, its not going to make a damn bit of difference if it is in Adobe98 or sRGB, it is still going to be equally hard to correct and look equally bad.

In my experience, there are many more headaches involved with switching (especially in the short term) than there are with staying with the space you’ve always used. There are inevitably places in the workflow where the change is not made and something (usually something mission-critical) gets screwed up because of it.

You should work with adjustments to the camera calibration and to the hue/sat sliders in LR or ACR to tweak things, rather than mess with such a big change as colorspace.

And with the ability of Lightroom to store different Export presets for different purposes, there is even less reason to change your entire workflow.

Also, keep in mind that the gamuts of displays and paper are always being increased. There are monitors available now that can show the whole of the Adobe98 gamut. And Kodak has introduced paper with a broader gamut as well.

FWIW, I use Adobe98 for all my files (unless they are going to the web, then I convert to sRGB).

You can download a copy of our “official” schedule here.

And I’m not talking about my waistline.

Just a quick post to advise you that prices on paper, finishing and packaging will be going up, effective January 1, 2009.

We thought you should know, however, in order to help you get through the busy season, we are holding the line on pricing through the end of the year. Rather than pass it on to you, we are currently absorbing increases of more than 10% on our paper, chemistry and mounting substrates.

Merry Christmas.

Check out this piece that ABC did on Mark Brown and his gift and talent for photographing children with special needs. Mark is a customer of ours up in the Roscoe Village neighborhood of Chicago.

Fantastic job, Mark!

The “bleeding” shown here can be reduced / eliminated if you drop the Color Noise Reduction value in Adobe Camera Raw (or wherever you are processing your images). At small sizes (8×10 and below) not a huge deal on the prints, but it will look more realistic. At larger sizes, the bleeding will be very apparent.

This is typically a problem with images where the head sizes are small to very small relative to the image size. There aren’t enough pixels to define the detail and the noise reduction algorithm blurs the pixels in the chroma channels, resulting in the “bleeding” of the predominantly red skintone values into the adjacent values.

Image © Copyright 2008 EDI Imaging.

We’re holding an intimate little seminar on Adobe Photoshop Lightroom on Monday. As such, the Lab will be closed.

When rain rolled through Wrigley Field before the game on June 22, Stephen Green was in the clubhouse finishing up a few things and almost missed this shot. They say timing is everything.

I think they’re right.