Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Poster Child
Here is my former co-worker and current wonderful customer, Joanna, showing off the last of three poster-size enlargements I had made for her. They were all photos of Thai umbrellas hanging from the ceiling in Bangkok Delight, a restaurant around the corner from where Joanna works.
To me, the fascinating thing about this one is that it comes from a photo I took last November with my Canon A40 two megapixel consumer-type point-and-shoot camera! Now, if you put your nose right up against it, you'll see that it's not as sharp as the ones two blowups of the same size that I had made from my six megapixel digital SLR. But of course you don't put your nose up against a 24" x 36" print when you view it, you're a few feet away. And at that distance, as you can see from this photo, it looks just fine. The important thing, of course, is that Joanna liked it.
In Photoshop Elements 2, when I opened the original file, it measured about 6" by 8" at 180 dpm resolution. I resized it in increments of ten percent to about 26" x 36", a trick I found in The Photoshop Elements Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby. Onscreen, it looked much better than when I tried to resize it all in one step. Kelby didn't say why this works, and I don't know either, but it really does work!
By the way, I had this print, as well as the other 24" x 36" prints, made at a place I consider to be a photographer's best friend, Severna Park Photo. The people at SPP are friendly and knowledgeable, and unlike dealing with chain stores like Ritz, you'll see them season after season - SPP seems to be like a family, with little turnover. Dealing with them is such a pleasure. If you can find an "old-fashioned" photo shop like Severna Park Photo in your neighborhood, consider yourselves lucky.
Off to Florida
I'm packing my old-man shorts, Hawaiian shirts, and white belt and shoes... Sandy and I are visiting our longtime, wonderful friends Roz and Joel Ehrenpreis, who now live in Sarasota, Florida. Fun in the sun and lots of girls-versus-boys games of Password and Clue - Joel tells me he's developed some new techniques for cheating (a time-honored tradition.) We'll be leaving tomorrow afternoon and returning late Monday night, so no blog posts for a few days. But with any luck, I'll have some good subtropical photos when we return.
Wishing you a happy Fourth of July ... G-d bless America!
