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.

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.

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.