Lumière d’Argent

Lurking around some film forums, I find a number of threads about airport X-rays fears. I would have thought the matter was settled a long time ago.

In a word: they are harmless.

The films will get more rays in the cabin during the flight than from the inspections. Heck, they even get more ray just sitting on the ground.

That’s for carry-on luggage. Checked-in baggage gets scanned by much more powerful rays and they are deadly for film. So, always carry your film with you and it will be safe.

Protection cases are a bad idea. For carry-on luggage the operator just increases the power until he/she sees through the case. For checked-in baggage it will most likely result in manual baggage inspection.

Stephane :: Aug.13.2008 :: Film, Locations :: 2 Comments »

Power Retouche is a collection of 25 PhotoShop plugins that will, in my opinion, appeal to fine art photographers. The collection covers many image corrections and all the ones I have used have proved particularly well tuned. The quality they provide is excellent, up there with the best well known.

They are available individually or as the complete pack. I got the whole lot several years ago. Recently I emailed the author for an update and noticed there are many new ones.

The pic above uses the one called Radial Density. If it was named vignetting more people would understand immediately what it does. I suppose the author called it that way because vignetting is actually something entirely different.

Anyway, that plugin does borders shading (or burning in darkroom-speak) very easy and very well.

The plugins can be used as smart filters in CS3, yet augmenting their power. Click here to see how to activate that feature.

Stephane :: Aug.10.2008 :: Software :: No Comments »

Many things going on photographically:

• got an Olympus E-3 with its seemingly obligatory 12-60mm zoom. Works amazingly well.
• went through a printing session that made me want to shoot some film again (above is HP5+)
• ordered chemicals, film and the few items I needed to develop
• shot very little recently but still have a backlog of the Spring shootings to process

Stephane :: Aug.09.2008 :: Film, Gear, Lens, Photography, Random Thoughts, Scanning, Software :: No Comments »