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.

We will be closed July 3rd and 4th in observation of Independence Day. The two day closure is a holdover from our days at Eastman Kodak when we always got a really long weekend.

God Bless America.

Hailing from Texarkana, Texas, Matt Lyle joins us to take over the role of Customer Service Specialist. (Wendy is moving into a full time production role.) He’ll be the voice on the end of the phone and the fingers typing at the other end of the orders_at_deltaquest and dqiservice_at_mac accounts.

Matt and his wife, Kim, recently relocated to Chicago for the weather, ummm, rather so he could attend classes on comedy writing at Second City in Chicago. He graduated from Stephen F. Austin in Nacogdoches, Texas and has been heavily involved in theater in his home state, working in diverse roles at various theaters including the Dallas Children’s Theater and Bootstraps Comedy Theater.

Matt’s been with us a week and is already settling in well. Welcome aboard!

This is a painful (and belated) post to write.

Les Ibarra, who joined us eight and a half years ago, has left to pursue a career as an electrician with Alcoa in Bettendorf, Iowa. Les has been an integral part of DeltaQuest almost since its inception in September of 1998. The result of a conversation with the woman who cut our hair (I used to have some) and despite some reservations, we hired him in desperation in late 1999. Amy and I were absolutely buried with work and had a baby due in April 2000. Pretty soon 20 hour days weren’t going to be an option any longer. Basically, we needed a “body”, any body.

Les turned out to be pretty much the ideal employee in every way. Organized, polite, courteous, and always willing to stay late and do whatever it took to get the work out, he was truly superb.

I’ll never forget racing downtown to old the UPS office on Jackson Street in his late model beater of a Cadillac in the winter of 1999, as if we were John Belushi and Dan Akroyd in the Blues Brothers so we could get there for the last air drop off at 10:30. We slid to a stop in front of the departing UPS truck, blocking him in, leaped out of the car and practically threw the packages at him. Another set of orders on their way in time for the holidays. Whew.

Then there was the clog in the main drain the night before we were to move to Forest Park. Five hours, 50 gallons of water on the floor of the brand new space below ours and buckets full of overflowing black stinky muck later, we had the clog cleared. As it turned out, this was merely a portent of things to come with the move. But through it all, Les was there, ready and willing to do whatever it took to move things forward.

So ends one leg of many in our continued journey.

Best wishes, Les, to you and your (hopefully) soon-to-be-growing family.

We’ll miss you.

Last week we pushed a rather large job through the lab. “How big was it?” you ask, in unison.

Nearly 28,000 4×6s, 2,000 3×5s and 2,000 wallets. Aside from one glitch, the printer performed flawlessly, kicking out almost fourteen 262 foot rolls of 12” paper in about six hours.

Processing and cutting? That took a bit longer. Here’s a link to some pictures of the work as it made its way through our place.

We paid for the printer’s good behavior when we printed all the regular work the next day, however. The ribbon in the dot-matrix back-printer decided to jam, leaving Les, Henry and Wendy with hundreds of feet of prints with no labels.

Using Lightroom, I acquired 39 Nikon D200 Raw files (from the server) as TIFF and saved them to my local drive. It took 00:01:28. The raws were roughly 9mb each with lossless raw compression.

At the same time, I had 22 other applications open, including Photoshop and InDesign (and I was doing work in InDesign during the acquire).

If somebody wants to upload 25 or 50 files from one of the big chip Canons or Nikon D3, I’d be happy to benchmark.

I ordered my machine with the stock ATI graphics card, but I would upgrade to the next level nVidia if I had it to do over. Mostly because the ATI was bad and I spent two weeks screwing around with a machine that crashed all the time.

UPDATE: The ATI 2600XT video card in my replacement Mac Pro went bad after two weeks. I’ve ordered an nVidia 8800 which will hopefully show up today. Its not as much fun to run the Mac Pro remotely from a Powerbook.

Just before the end of 2006, Lewis and Annie Kostiner organized and funded a photo session for the members of the Brown Women’s Hockey Team. Michael Lutch was the photographer, Annie handled the styling, we balanced, acquired, retouched, output and finished the prints and Lewis got the coffee. The end result is more than two dozen portraits of the Brown Bears that hang in the hallway on the way to the locker room at the Meehan Auditorium in Providence.

The prints are done on glossy paper with a 5 mil high gloss overlaminate. They are mounted on 3/4” Stand Out boards.

Here is the poster we printed for the National Fatherhood Initiative’s Annual Gala. 300 were distributed. Lewis Kostiner took the photography and the NFI designed the layout.

More of Lewis’ work can be seen here.

Whew. Now that I have a working Mac Pro, things are cruisin’!

Talk about fast! Nothing, I mean nothing, that I have thrown at it slows it down. I can be acquiring 50 images to tif in Lightroom, encoding a DVD with iDVD and surfing the web with ten other applications open and there isn’t even as much as a hesitation.

I’m sure this doesn’t help my ADHD, but here’s why I love a Macintosh. These are the two screens connected to my machine.

Count the white dots next to the Dock icons. When was the last time you had 23 programs running simultaneously on a PC? And five of them are resource hungry Adobe apps – Lightroom, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and Bridge. And I can switch to any program INSTANTLY. No lag.

All I’m sayin’ is, “Yeah, buddy!”

My apologies for the long period of “blog-silence”. Things have been a bit discombobulated around here. I finally ordered a new Mac Pro on April 11th. It arrived a couple of days later… and had a bad ATI video card. Sometimes it would work. Sometimes it would kernel panic. A lot.

Here are the gory details for those who might be so inclined to wade through them. This is the email I sent to xlr8yourmac.com as they track such things.

I took delivery of Mac Pro eight core 2.8 last week. Stock model, but CTO because I added Mac OS X Server. Upon receipt I used Disk Tools to reformat the drive and installed OS X 10.5.2 Client (Server is for another machine) from the DVD (I let the DVD check run to completion). ATI 2600 driving two displays – Eizo CG210 and Apple CD23.

I installed two 74gb WD SATA Drives and Striped them for scratch disk. Also installed a 180gb SATA Drive. Additional 8gb RAM from OWC. Installed Adobe CS3, LR, iWork, etc.

From the first night, the machine has given me trouble; kernel panic when I arrived the next day. Random kernel panics for next day or so. Day Three, I’m cranking on some LR editing and it panics. I reboot and begin running check on my LR catalog. Kernel panic. Reboot. Panic right after login. Reboot. Panic at login. Rinse, repeat.

I pulled all three drives and the extra ram, disconnected a couple USB devices (APC UPS, CF Card Reader, Epson inkjet, Eizo display control) and a FW800 drive. No change.

I figure something must be corrupt on the disk so I do an archive and install. After moderate use the rest of that evening, the machine remains running until two days later at which point it KPs during the night.

Through all of this I noticed a high-pitched whine that would kick on and off randomly. I eventually traced it to the fan on the ATI board. Sounds almost like an impact wrench running from across the street.

Call Apple. Reset PRAM (a ha! forgot about that trick). On phone for five minutes and the fan noise doesn’t kick in at all. No KPs. Hang up phone. Whine starts, but no KPs for balance of day. Next day it starts all over again. This time, I tried pulling the APPLE RAM, thinking maybe it is bad. No change.

Call Apple once again. Reset the SMC. At this point, the machine would stay running for more than five minutes or so. They have me run Quick Hardware Test (which is accessed via holding the “D” key down when booting from OS DVD). Finds nothing. Let the extended test go for forty minutes or so. Nothing. Disk Utility finds nothing.

After some friendly cajoling they are sending a replacement machine. I really didn’t think that an erase-and-install was going to make a bit of difference.

Meanwhile, I’ve ordered an nVidia 8800 card that should arrive tomorrow. I got this so I could test my theory that it is the ATI board causing the trouble. If so, and this fixes it, I will have a working machine sooner.

UPDATE: Turns out I ordered the WINDOWS nVidia board. Back it goes to Amazon….

Have a go at this neat little test that X-rite put together. At the lab, Henry won with a “0” (the best possible score). Wendy, Les and Matt all got “8”. The better your display, the easier it is.

Great article by James Duncan Davidson about the color temperature of light. [via Daring Fireball]

The Washington, D.C.-based National Fatherhood Initiative chose one of Lewis Kostiner’s images for a poster. DeltaQuest produced 300 of these posters, which will be handed out at their annual Fatherhood Awards Gala at the end of April.

We can’t reveal the image that was used, but you can see some of the wonderful work Lewis has produced for the organization on his website in the “Fathers” section of the Image Galleries.

We’ve added an incredible new mounting option to our product line.

LiquidMount™

How does it work?

First we reproduce your image using the stunning Kodak Endura Metallic paper. Then a piece of 1/4” Plexiglas is cut to size and the edges buffed to a brilliant shine. After being meticulously cleaned, one side of the Plexi is coated with an optically clear adhesive and the emulsion side of the print is bonded to the acrylic. A thin sheet of styrene is undercut slightly and applied to the back for protection.

The result: a sleek, contemporary piece that appears to practically leap at you. The luscious depth of the Metallic paper is enhanced creating an image that appears to float just beneath the surface of clear fluid.

Finished pieces can be displayed on an easel or a wall-mounted picture rail. For a print that is ready to hang, you can add the GatorFloat™. For this product, we bond a piece of undercut 3/4” black Gatorfoam™ to the center of the back and embed a stainless steel loop. Your piece can then be hung from a simple nail in the wall.

Have a closer look at some samples on this gallery page.

Ok, so how many labs can claim not one, but TWO of their customers as “stars” in the upcoming Johnny Depp film about John Dillinger?

Nick Berard of Berard Photography in Madison, Wisconsin and Brian McConkey of Brian McConkey Photography in Chicago are both extras in the film “Public Enemies”.

Here’s Nick at filming up in Columbus, WI last week, along with a shot that Nick took of Mr. Dillinger.

Looking right at home outside the Crown Point, IN jailhouse, Brian chills before his next take.

What a stud! How can Johnny’s groupies tell them apart?

Check out this YouTube video of Matt on the job! Go, Matt, go! (How does he make those girls look so good?)

It doesn’t look a whole lot different, but another piece of functionality has been added. You can now upload images and create web proofing “albums” on the site.

To try it out, log in from the home page using your DeltaQuest user name and password and have a go.

We’re proud to be sponsoring Audrey’s seminar “Children as an Art Form” at the 2008 Wisconsin Professional Photographers Association.

(Scroll to the bottom of the page for Audrey’s information.)

Here’s a shot of Audrey during her seminar demonstrating how she inspects every print she gets from us.

Heather and Rick KingenSmith are a remarkable duo (and longtime DeltaQuest customers). They photograph some incredible weddings in Chicago and elsewhere in the U.S. and abroad.

Their work from a recent society wedding is just their most recent job to garner national exposure as the lead feature in the Winter 2007 Issue of Inside Weddings. Check it out!

In 2005, they were featured in this issue of the magazine.

And in the Winter 2006 issue as well.

While your surfing, have a look at their recently redesigned website.

Lewis Kostiner, photography professor-turned-real estate mogul, is documenting the construction of North America’s tallest structure, The Chicago Spire.

The Chicago Spire was conceived and designed by world-reknown architect, Santiago Calatrava. Lewis is using his recently acquired Leica M8 (along with his cache of stunning Leitz lenses, some of which are more than 30 years old) to photograph everything from the meetings to the earth moving to the pouring of the concrete.

Lewis originally came to Chicago from Montreal by way of Providence, Rhode Island to earn his Masters Degree in Photography from the Institute of Design at IIT. He taught photography for ten years at Columbia College before he ventured into real estate. Check out more of his images of the construction on his website.

We are privileged to be reproducing a number of images from Stephen Green’s archives for the banquet room at the new Harry Caray’s restaurant in Lombard, Illinois.

This past May, Matthew Kosterman, Chief Executive Geek, was honored to be asked to exhibit his work at the River Forest Library, in (of all places) River Forest, Illinois.

The exhibition consisted of 16 black and white prints. Primarily of children, the prints were all made from digital camera files captured over the past five years or so. Matthew is also descendent from two carpenters and enjoys woodworking in a small shop in his home. The frames are all handmade of black walnut, finished with hand-rubbed tung oil and wax.
For more detailed views of the images, see the Inspired Impressions website.

Audrey Wancket of Wancket Studios, Spring Grove, Illinois, pretty much cleaned up at March’s APPI convention.

In addition to scoring a mind-blowing 100 on her print, titled “Shadows of Sleep,” Audrey took home the following awards:

• Best Portrait
• ASP Regional Medallion Award
• Kodak Gallery Award
• Highest Scoring Image by a Certified Photographer
• Top Ten Photographer
• Third Place Portrait

This print has also been selected for the PPA Loan Collection.

Not only did she score 100 on her “Shadows of Sleep” print (shown in an earlier “News” entry above) at the APPI convention in March, Audrey Wancket, of Wancket Studios, recently had three prints chosen to be included in the PPA’s permanent Loan Collection.

She also amassed her 200th Merit. Here’s a preview of “Beauty and the Beasts”.

Congratulations, Audrey!

Here’s the preview of “Senorita Maria,” Audrey Wancket’s THIRD image chosen for the PPA Loan collection.

The Chicago Cubs’ publication, “Vinelines,” chose a novel gift for subscribers this year.

The publication is giving each three-year subscriber an 8×10 print with a personalized photograph of the Wrigley Field Marquee. On the Marquee are the words “Your Name Signs with Cubs”.

Each month Stephen Green, Team Photographer, spends thirty minutes or so photographing the names as they roll on the Marquee. The images are sent to us, where the color and density is optimized. Each image is output on Kodak Endura paper and prints are sent to a fulfillment house for mailing.

When the Oak Park, Illinois – based Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust had an event at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago last November with world-famous architect Tadao Ando, they wanted to showcase the myriad of ways their organization touches the community.

They turned to us to produce more than 30 large format mounted prints that were suspended from pipes, creating a ‘hallway of images’ for guests to view as they entered the event.

Many thanks to Stephen Green for the image of the entrance to the hall.