My friend Edward and I saw the Joel Meyerowitz show of his large ground zero images at The Tremaine Gallery in Lakeville, Connecticut and we were both impressed by the way the images were mounted and hung. The above video shows the process.

This isn’t something I want to do with my own images; I prefer traditional matting and framing and enjoy the process of doing it myself, but this mounting system was perfect for the large scale ground zero images in this show.

[via Zapong]

Sometimes the end justifies the means: putting up with poor design might be justified because the product does something well in the end and its worth putting up with an unpleasant user experience to get there. My fuse for this sort of stuff is getting shorter it seems and I’m guessing that a piece of this is that I collect and use things that are very well designed and a joy to use so when things are poorly designed that unpleasant experience stands out.

One of the important issues at play here is that many people don’t know where their own lack of knowledge (they think “stupidity”) ends and poor design begins so they are reluctant to call it out for fear it’s just them being less than smart. This is no doubt one of the main reasons people put up with poor design: they think it’s them, not the product. Another reason is: if everyone else loves product x and I find it less than wonderful, maybe the reason is me. Put these two together and it’s a recipe for the perpetuation of bad design.

The Fuji FinePix X100 camera is an example of this: Beautiful camera, takes excellent pictures but the firmware/menu system is so poorly designed and buggy that it undermines the whole experience of using the camera. I’d have attempted to buy this camera had I found the menu system well thought out. Many are acknowledging the poor menu system but tolerate it because the camera makes excellent images. I get this but my ability to do that is diminishing over time.

Our Sony HD TV is another example of it. The picture quality is so amazingly good I love the TV but god help you if you need to get into its menu system to do something like attempt to turn off the startup sound. Why can’t the menu system be as beautiful as the picture? It’s like this piece of the design was a last minute afterthought. I still haven’t figured out how to turn the annoying startup sound off after a year with the TV.

My latest experience with this and the reason for this post is my experience yesterday attempting to update the printer drivers for my relatively new Epson Stylus Pro 3880 printer. I knew I’d bump into some upgrade issues when I upgraded to Lion and almost all of my applications and utilities have handled this beautifully with no hassle at all. If you missed the above linked to post on the new printer, the end of it discusses problems I had with Epson’s installation process: their use of the now ancient Installer Vice corrupted my already installed profiles.

So, the other day I tried to print with the 3880 from Lightroom now running under Lion and nothing happened. No problem, I attempted to use the Print/Fax system preference pane to look for a new version of the driver but non was found (my HP laser printer updated itself in 10 seconds this way).

When I went to the Epson support site looking for help with this I found a confusing list of updates.

Note: the only mention of Lion is in the sidebar under News and Alerts. If you follow that link you get this:

Mac OS X 10.6 drivers are compatible with Mac OS X 10.7

Well, I already had those drivers installed so this isn’t true and I couldn’t print. But, what Epson failed to mention is that there was a new version of those drivers without a new number up at their site. Amazingly stupid. They have the new number listed on the download page (v.6.60) but under it they say the driver is compatible with: “Macintosh OS X (v10.4.11 – v10.6.x).” Why the hell didn’t they give the driver the version number 7 is beyond me and why not list OS X v.7 as the end point of the range?

Sigh.

I downloaded the update and of course it installed with Installer Vice. Given that it was just the driver with no profiles I chanced using Vice again and amazingly it worked.

But, my god, how and why do people put up with this? They put up with it either because the ends justify the means or because they don’t know any different: they don’t have enough experience with well designed products to know one when they see one.

I have the very same issues with another product a Dymo LabelWriter Printer. The printer is amazingly useful and I can’t live without it, but the software that runs it is crap. I put up with it because my handwriting is terrible and I don’t want to hand address envelopes but my god, each time I update this awful software it’s like pulling wisdom teeth. How and why do people put up with this?

No doubt there are personal learning and operating style preferences at play here: some people find one set of experiences easy, intuitive, no problem while another set of people might find those very same things hard, unintuitive and impossible. But, I do believe that those of us who recognize good and less than good design need to vote with our wallets and simply not buy stuff that doesn’t work well. At the very least we should give detailed feedback to the likes of Epson and Dymo so they know what they’re doing wrong.

Rant off.

Instagram is a fun iPhone app for taking and sharing images.

[via OliviaTech]

I find it interesting that many of my online photographer friends don’t print their work or if they do they outsource printing to a lab. I find the printmaking end of photography just as interesting and enjoyable (and technical) as the picture taking end and getting a handle on this part of the photographic process is useful, even in this world of online sharing of photographs. Yes, in theory one could be a successful professional photographer without ever making a print: licensing, micro stock, etc. but there’s something about making objects, not just files, that’s appealing, at least it is to me.

So, with that in mind, I recently bought an Epson Stylus Pro 3880 Large-Format Inkjet Printer for a few reasons:

1. Pigment based inks and their improved archival characteristics. In theory, given archival paper and a good ink-paper mix and archival framing materials a print made with this new printer can last 200 years compared with the 100 years the (Chromalife 100) dye inks the Canon Pixma Pro 9000 uses.

2. Larger prints: My Canon Pixma Pro 9000 can handle 13″ wide paper (13″x19″), the Epson 3880 can handle 17″ wide paper (17″x22″).

3. More resolution (dots) and wider color gamut from a better print head.

4. Larger ink tanks should mean cheaper printing (I have yet to calculate this but others have and hopefully it will be the case).

First, let me say that this is a much bigger printer than the Pro 9000: it’s wider, weighs more, and is built quite solidly. While there are aspects of its physical design that I find less than perfect, it’s a mechanical upgrade from the older printer: this is a serious tool, probably the lowest end of the high end “professional” ink jet printers. Once out of the box one person can handle it but in the box I needed my wife to help me get it up the stairs to the office.

Setup

Setting up the printer was easy although it was loaded with packing tape as this iPhone photo shows.

The CD that comes with the printer containing the Epson driver and paper profiles had an installer that wanted to run Rosetta to do the install (an emulator for earlier Macintosh processors). This did not make me feel great about what I’d just bought and its compatibility with my system. Given the number of professional photographers who use Macs and Epson printers this surprised me but these days it’s possible to buy things like this that have been in the pipeline long enough so the software will need updating once set up. Apple certainly sells computers that need an immediate software update once they’re set up. So, I went online to the Epson site looking for answers.

Epson Stylus Pro 3880

Going to the sidebar’s pulldown menu: Get Drivers and Support (terrible web design) I come to this page:

Support for Epson Stylus Pro 3880 Ink Jet Printer

Given that I had no driver installed to update, I opted to download Printer Driver v6.60 which installs a printer driver with version number 6.5. Odd don’t you think? Make note those those of you who know how Macintosh software has been installed over the years, Epson is using InstallerVice which is an older installing technology.

After the driver was installed I connected the computer and printer with a USB cable and chose the printer to see what options the driver had built in. Everything seemed to work fine software-wise so I went on to the next step.

I ran Lightroom and decided to make a test print of one of the pieces I’m working on for an upcoming show and which I have many Canon Pixma Pro 9000 test prints of for comparison. Epson gives you some sheets of what they call Premium Luster but I wanted to print on the same paper I’d been printing on on the Canon printer, Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, a 100% cotton rag paper that has a nice feel and which I’ve been using successfully for many years.

Profiling profiles

I went up to the Hahnemuhl web site and found a profile for the 3880 and their Photo Rag paper and downloaded it and dropped it into the folder: richard/library/ColorSync/Profiles where my other self-installed paper profiles live.

For those who simply hit print from any program with any paper installed, then wonder why the color isn’t quite right or is way off, one piece of the equation that is worth looking into is paper profiles. Each high quality paper has a set of profiles, usually made by the paper manufacturer to help each printer print for the particular characteristics of the paper. Each of Canon’s various papers they sell under their brand has a profile and when you install the driver for the Pixma Pro 9000 all of the standard Canon profiles get installed along with it. The names of the profiles correspond to the names of the papers so choosing the correct profile from Lightroom, Aperture, iPhoto, and in later systems from Pages and other software is easy. Just learning about and controlling this piece of color management in printing is the difference between frustration and joy in fine art printing.

So, I had experience not only with making prints that looked close to what I saw on my computer’s screen but I also had experience installing profiles for Canon’s printer that come from paper vendors like Moab, Red River, and Hahnemuhl.

After downloading the Hahnemuhl Photo Rag profile but before I printed, I decided to download some Epson profiles for their various papers that did not come with the generic bunch installed with the driver. I went to this page:

ICC Profile Downloads for the 3880

Note that there are two versions of each profile, one for Windows, one for the Macintosh. Why is this? Because instead of just giving you the ICC profile (OS agnostic) to drop into your user/library/ColorSync/Profiles folder, they package them in an OS specific installer which (hopefully) installs them in the right place. Not only does this suck because it takes the user out of the loop, but it sucks because said installer is ancient and as I found out later, messed up my profiles.

All of this downloading and installing just didn’t feel right to me. I don’t like it when installers spray files into my system and don’t tell me what’s going where. My experience with ICC profiles is I download them from the web and they might come with a pdf explaining printer settings for best results, and giving me a place to put them (usually in the aforementioned user/library/ColorSync/Profiles folder.

I put my suspicions aside and decided to make some prints. I have 8.5″x11″ paper from Epson, Canon, Hahnemuhl, Moab, Red River and others so I had enough paper to do some serious experimenting with.

I connected a second USB cable to the Canon Pixma Pro 9000 and printed some tests on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag (using the Canon profile for that paper).

I then used Page Setup and chose The Epson 3880 and the Hahnemuhl Photo Rag profile for that printer, put a piece of paper in the printer and printed.

I must say, the 3880 has a higher quality sheet feeder than the older Pixma Pro 9000 and it grabbed the paper and did its thing.

I took one look at the print and my heart sank: it was so far off the mark it wasn’t useable as wrapping paper.

I went back through my settings and changed a few things and printed again. Same thing, way off the mark.

Twenty sheets of $1 paper later and I’d made no progress and was frustrated.

I decided to print some of the paper that came with the Epson printer, Premium Luster and noted that in order to do this test the inks had to swap from Matte Black to Photo Black. This is a known piece of the process of having multiple types of black ink in the printer and is far better than older Epsons where one had to swap cartridges each time one switched from glossy/luster paper to matte paper. I wasn’t concerned about this because I print mostly on matte paper but a bit of ink is still used in the swap so I did not want to do it often in my now flailing looking for an answer to my question about the crappy prints.

The swap finished and I printed the same image on the Luster paper and it too sucked.

This was not good and I emailed my friends Karin and Brad who have the older version of the printer, the 3800 to ask them to weigh in. I also scoured the web (as did Karin) and we came up with this single piece that gave me hope that this was not a user problem on my part:

Solving Recent Profiling Issues With Apple Computers Epson Printers and Photoshop

I don’t use Photoshop but there are hints in the post that let me know that Epson has issues playing nice with other software, especially later versions of Mac OS. I read the piece and many like it and put it to rest for a few days.

ColorSync Utility to the rescue

On returning to the problem I decided to run a utility which comes with Macs and is in the Utilities folder: ColorSync Utility. To be honest, I’d never run it before. I don’t make my own profiles and don’t know much about color management more than you’re reading here, but I thought it might have some diagnostic feature like Disk Utility and I was in luck.

ColorSync Utility has a feature called Profile First Aid which scans all installed profiles and gives feedback on whether they’re installed and formatted correctly for use on your computer. I ran it and lo and behold the Epson profiles were damaged. I used ColorSync Profile to repair them (it took a few tries) and when they came back clean I quit and ran the print test again.

Amazingly, the Hahnemuhl printed perfectly, looked spectacular and I was happy. I tried each of my papers and then tried the Epson papers and they all printed perfectly.

Then, to attempt to verify the problem, I went back up to the Epson web site and re-downloaded one of their profiles that needed installation with InstallerVice. I re-installed it and then ran ColorSync Utility to see if it had broken things and it had. I repaired things again and was printing fine again.

Bottom line, Epson needs to hire a Macintosh developer who knows how things work to update this process.

I later went up to the Red River Paper site to download profiles for their paper I use, specifically their Polar Matte and Aurora Fine Art White both of which I use to print notecards from Pages. The profiles download fine and were easily installed (by me dragging them) in the user/Library/ColorSync/Profiles folder. Simple. No broken profiles, ColorSync Utility found no problems. Notecards from the new printer are spectacular.

Take a clue Epson. You make a fine printer but you need to get your software chops in order. You owe me two days of time and about $100 worth of paper and ink.

Dye vs pigment inks

For those of you considering something like this I want to warn you, a well processed and printed fine art print from a good printer that uses dye based inks will have a slightly different look from the same image printed with pigment inks.

When I held up my test prints of the same image done with the Canon Pixma Pro 9000 vs. the Epson 3880 many folks (including my wife who sees my work regularly) chose the Pro 9000′s prints. Why? Because dye based inks have a bit more pop, a bit more vibrancy, and while they may not have the color gamut that the pigment inks have, the pop is what some people like in this high contrast/high saturation world of online photography that’s been photochopped to death. I’ve watched high contrast, highly saturated images get pushed up to flickr explore for years. There’s nothing wrong with this but to be fair to a new technology, one ought to reset one’s expectations and consider more than just pop and saturation in a comparison.

Pigment inks may be a very slight bit duller on the surface although when you just look at the pigment print by itself it’s fantastic so this is not a problem, just a point of comparison.

For most people just getting into printing at home, I recommend starting out with something like the Canon Pixma Pro 9000. It makes spectacular prints, is a workhorse, is easy to set up and use and will print up to 13″x19″ paper which is big enough for most people. I have no regrets about getting the Epson 3880 but I doubt many new to printing would want to go through what I just went through getting it up and running in my workflow. If setting it up were my first experience with this stuff I’d sell it and outsource my printing to a lab.

IXXI looks fascinating to me. Not sure if many or any of my images could stand being blown up to wall size or if I could stand seeing them that big, but I think I might have to try something like this.

I bought a new printer and unpacking it is quite incredible.

I figured it was about time I bought a better fine art printer for larger prints (up to 17″ wide) with pigment inks. I have a show coming up and I’m starting to print, frame, and put it together so before I got too far into it I figured I’d bump up the printing. Stay tuned for my take on this printer vs. my old workhorse Canon Pixma Pro 9000 MK 11 (a nice dye ink printer).

This issue of Wabi Sabi is my collection of images “fireworks from below” shot in 2008 on the 4th of July in Danbury, Connecticut. I’m pleased with what MagCloud has done with the printing and hope you will be too.

The 24 page magazine can be browsed and purchased here: Wabi Sabi, issue 2: Fireworks from Below

There is no markup, the cost of production is the cost of the magazine. If you have the MagCloud app installed on your iPad you can view the first two issues of Wabi Sabi on the iPad at no cost.

For those who missed it, here’s my post on publishing the first issue: Wabi Sabi, Issue 1.

Blurb, a popular self-publishing company based in San Francisco, has tried to assuage that fear by planting a pop-up store, its first, in the middle of SoHo in New York. It will be there until the end of the month, complete with displays of finished books created by real customers.

Nice documentary on The Impossible Project which is the new, reinvented Polaroid.

[via Daring Fireball]

Totally stupid. Give me a ###ing break CBS.

It’s a great magazine. I bought a copy right away and it’s well designed (I disagree with Carr that the layouts are “somewhat rudimentary”): the design reminds me of The Whole Earth Catalog which was a lot of fun to read. 48 Hrs, is also a lot of fun to read and I highly recommend ordering a copy before it gets taken down or the name gets changed.

48HR: Hustle at MagCloud.