I was watching something or other on TV last night around 8 pm when the sound of the Kelsey Park parakeets' chattering burst through the open window. I went out on the balcony to take a look and found that the sun, just disappearing behind the trees in the park, was creating a lovely golden glow. I grabbed a camera and with a 300 mil lens took a few shots.

Later I loaded the raw files into Lightroom, one of which I cropped to isolate this bird sitting on a slender branch. Now there isn't per se any great intrinsic merit in this picture; the reason I'm posting it is that, later in the edit session, I noticed that the crop size was 1516 x 2273 pixels. It occurred to me that this crop was larger than the full image on my first DSLR — the Canon D30 — that I bought back in March, 2001. The resolution on the D30 was 1440 x 2160 pixels; the crop from this picture is only just over 16% of the full-frame available (5616 x 3744 px) on my current 1Ds Mk III! I printed the crop on a sheet of A4 premium semi-gloss and it looks great. This is a full-frame shot of the same bird (with friend) taken a few minutes earlier that underlines just how much improvement in sensor resolution there has been in a few years.

Regular visitors to rogercavanagh.com may know of the Variations Suite: a set of JavaScripts I wrote that are designed to work with Adobe Photoshop. When Photoshop CS3 was released, I received reports from users that the scripts weren't working correctly. As I was pretty busy with the day job taking me away from home most of the time, I didn't investigate these reports in any detail. Also I thought the upgrade charge that Adobe wanted for CS3 (especially in the UK) was over the top; so I resisted the upgrade for some time. It was only over the last Christmas break that I succumbed. I'm glad I did because otherwise I doubt that I would have started to work with Photoshop Lightroom.

Anyway I tried a few Variations Suite scripts in CS3 and found that they didn't work properly — some worse than others. In the last few days, I've got down to some in-depth investigation and discovered that there is another factor at work: the Windows operating system. I'm using Windows Vista and the UAC (user access control) that Microsoft introduced to provide additional security interferes with reading and writing of settings files. I haven't got to the bottom of all the issues yet, but I'll post information about updates and test versions in this section of the blog.

At present, I can say that Watermark Variations CS2 does not work properly whatever OS you are using.

If you have CS3 and Windows XP, some scripts seem to work fine: for example, B&W Variations, Grain Variations and Tone Variations.

If you have Windows Vista and CS3, I expect problems.

If you are a Mac user, the few comments I have had suggest that most scripts are OK.

My own XP system is hors de combat right now; so if anyone would like to comment on their experience with XP and CS3 that would be great. Mac users, too: please let me know what works.

Please feel free to leave comment here, but you will have to register — I got too much spam and suggestions of illegal sexual practices when I allowed anonymous posting before.

I haven't posted a picture for a few days; so here's something seasonal:

Like many people, I keep a selection of reading material in the loo.  During a recent visit, I was browsing the latest edition of Lenswork magazine, reading an interview with Bruce Barnbaum conducted by Bill Jay. This question and answer caught my attention as offering some interesting ideas.

BJ: When you  decide you want to make a really large print — or conversely, only a small print — what influences your creative process that determines this?

BB: Let's start with the small ones. Assume for the moment that everything is technically perfect, and that I could, if I chose to, enlarge to 30x40" with every one of them. First, I look at the spaces — the tonal spaces — within the image. Sometimes a print has an area that has very little tonal variation within it, It might look great as a small print, but the moment you make it large — even just an 8x10" or 11x14" — those areas with little tonal variation become a large, boring space.

Next, my theory is that prints exist at two viewing distances. People will say there's a "standard viewing distance," but that's not how people view prints. Just watch them. People will look at a photograph from back there, and then they'll come right up to it, just a matter of a few inches; regardless of size they will look at a print from these two distances.

I learned this at an exhibit of Ansel Adams' work after he died. There was a wall-sized mural of Moonrise Over Hernandez and on the second day of the exhibit they had to install a barrier because people were literally coming up and touching it. This photograph was about 13 feet across! You can't see a print that size up close, but people came right up to it. I don't know if they're just looking to see if it's sharp, or what. Whatever the reason, there are always two distances people look at a print. Based on that, I always feel it's necessary to look at my images from two distances. Here is my criterion: If I can look at it from a distance and then come up close but find nothing more too see, it's printed too large. It's not giving me any new information when I come up to it.

There's a third idea that's important. The only way I can really explain this is through a musical analogy. There are some pieces of music that are written for string quartet and others that are written for symphony orchestra. I would not want to hear Beethoven's Fifth Symphony played by a string quartet. I would not want to hear most string quartets played by symphony orchestra. Sometimes you need small scale; sometimes you need a large scale. It's purely subjective. Sometimes I just intuitively feel a print should be small, or another print should be large.

Today's picture is a recent one. It's a nice picture, but unfortunately, it wouldn't pass the technical criteria to be printed very large. This little fellow didn't actually achieve lift-off, but I guess it won't be too long.

I've just noticed that Chris Breeze has released an update to his excellent Downloader Pro. Anyone who takes digital photographs and works on Windows should consider this program for downloading, organising and renaming images files. I've been using DL Pro since version 1, this release is 2.1.

Downloader Pro is highly recommended and not only by me.

Today's picture from the archives was taken back in April 2002 with my old D30: