Colour matters

Last week, I had a paying gig at a wedding reception. (The wedding had been held the month before in Las Vegas.) I was there to mainly do candid shots of the reception guests; but before all the guests showed up, I suggested we do some quick formal portraits.

There was only one problem; the only clear area of the venue was a dark corner. It being early evening, there was also sunlight coming into the room through high windows. Although the sunlight wasn’t illuminating the room or the corner where I was shooting, the decoration was sufficiently light for there to be some reflected light scatter. I was working with on-camera flash, with a diffuser, and at first sight the pictures looked useable.

I hadn’t reckoned on the new kit back at base. I’d only completed installing a new monitor the night before, and I hadn’t been pleased with the colour balance on it. My previous monitors had never given me any problems in that area; what little colour variation I’d noticed between pictures as displayed and prints I’d made had been well within tolerances; so when I looked at this monitor’s display and gone “Yuk!”, I’d gone straight to the Windows colour calibration script to try to make things less worse. It’s not an easy script to work with – their grey scales were particularly difficult to balance – but I thought I’d got it something like OK and certainly close enough for the reception photos.

Well, when I got home and put the pictures up on the screen on the Sunday, they looked pretty bad. Obviously, my colour balancing hadn’t cured things. Moreover, trying to use the colour adjustments in Photoshop didn’t really work. I tried adjusting the skin tones by taking some magenta out of the red channel, but the pictures very quickly showed up the scattered evening sunlight, making everyone look jaundiced.

I had arranged to deliver on Tuesday evening, so on Monday, I sat down in daylight and re-calibrated the monitor. This time, I thought I’d got better results. And the rest of the evening’s pictures looked OK; once the guests started to arrive, I’d moved out of the dark corner and the light was quite good, with flash working as fill-in whilever the natural light was strong, and with a smooth transition to full flash supplementing the room lighting as darkness fell.

Tuesday morning, I turned to the printer to make the complementary sample prints I always give customers. The first one of the formal group pictures rolled off the printer, and it was dreadful. Everything was wrong about it. Obviously the colour balance on the monitor was still wrong. The candid shots were OK; only the formal portraits were unacceptable.

I quickly set to and re-did the pictures. It took up a morning I was going to use making prints for myself and for resale, but there was no alternative. After a morning’s work, I had results which I felt were acceptable. The client was satisfied, too.

So the moral of the story is this: don’t ignore colour calibration. Just because it’s been satisfactory up to now, never assume that things will still be good enough for a special job, especially when you’ve had new kit. Never assume that the factory settings represent some sort of “middle-of-the-road” value (or , for that matter, that the kit will work straight out of the box. I once was off the Web for a fortnight whilst I tried to track down a mysterious modem fault, which turned out to be a £3.99 connector I’d brought new from Maplins failing straight out of the box). Always try to get a shake-down period with new kit. Always assume that the more high-profile the job, the more the tendency for things to go wrong. It’s the Law. Sod’s Law.

And if I ever get a job at that venue again, I’ll suggest very strongly to the client that they get there half an hour early, and I’ll get there half an hour before that and set up my studio lights.

Colour calibration kit is on its way to me even now. That’s one mistake I won’t make again.

Meanwhile, here’s a picture that might show a rather basic Dalek spare parts dealer…

 

Thou shalt not covet the Things of The Shop

 

Hay stack

Last weekend, we took ourselves to the final two days of the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. For those who don’t know, Hay-on-Wye is a small town on the border between Wales and England which has become a major centre for second-hand books. You will appreciate then that this is a dangerous place for me to visit, though to be honest I came away with comparatively few books. Having said that, I did spend quite a lot of money on old photographs, including a rather fine hand-tinted view of a German city which I at first thought was Berlin, but which could quite easily be Stettin (Szczecin). More research needed.

The idea of the exercise was to see two of our favourite authors – Philip Pullman and Iain M. Banks. I also got tickets to see Vanessa Redgrave, but traffic on our way put a stop to that. Trying to drive through Hagley and Kidderminster on a Saturday morning is one of the forms of purgatory not imagined by Dante. The situation is made worse by ultra-cautious drivers who, not wanting to get a speeding ticket (or another speeding ticket) drive at 5 mph below the speed limit almost everywhere. What should have been a two-and-a-half hour drive took us nearer three-and-a-half.

Bandemonium

This gave us time for a first wander around the town, sampling local produce and listening for a while to a local group of musicians, Bandemonium. Think Bellowhead but a bit more jazz/light classic oriented. Hay itself is a strange mixture of the rural and the touristy, especially during the festival; there are street musicians, people handing out flyers for philosophy lectures and the urban elite rubbing shoulders with ordinary punters, farmers and just plain tourists. It also has to be said that the town does not appear to be immune to the recession; one shop had recently changed hands and was in the process of getting rid of its stock at £1 per book.

You can find everything in Hay...

Still, we saw Philip Pullman in interview. He was eloquent, and thoughtful, and inflammatory, and angry. His inflammatory statements were mainly reserved for C.S. Lewis, whom he despises (much to the horror of some of his audience, who mainly hadn’t noticed that Lewis’ Narnia books are thinly veiled Christian allegory, though I suspect that to be the least of his crimes in Pullman’s eyes); his anger was reserved for the Coalition Government’s actions in allowing councils to close down libraries to save money (though not very much of it) and suggesting that they could be run by volunteers. That was a more popular viewpoint.

Philip Pullman in interview

I did something I very rarely do – bought one of his books and queued up to have it signed. I’m normally content to not get autographed copies, though if I have a choice between signed and unsigned, I’ll choose the (pre-)signed one. In fact, I hadn’t intended getting my copy of The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ signed, but by the time we were ready to leave the festival site, the queue had gone down so much that it was worth spending the extra 5-10 minutes to get the autograph.

Recession hits Hay?

As we’d booked late, we weren’t staying in Hay, but in Kington, a small town about ten miles north. Only the well-heeled can afford to stay in Hay – not so much because it’s necessarily expensive, but because the festival programme comes out so late that those of us who have to pick and choose who we want to see – especially if they aren’t headliners – need to go through the whole programme to decide which events to go to. By which time, those who can afford to take a whole fortnight out of their diaries have already snapped up all the best places. Still, that meant we got to stay in the Burton Hotel in Kington, which was a gem! Easy to find, friendly staff, a room so clean it almost sparkled and a wonderful local produce breakfast made it well worth the trip.

After a wander around Kington the next morning, we went back to Hay for more bookshop exploring, and then a visit to Giffords Circus, another Hay fixture. Their show this year is “War and Peace” – yes, a circus rendition of Tolstoy’s masterpiece, complete with what to my untutored eye looked like authentic Napoleonic-era uniforms, cavalry charges, the Russian winter, the Great Comet of 1811, plus acrobats, jugglers, a clown (without makeup) and a trained goose. Anyone who is going to be anywhere in the West Country anytime up to the end of September should try to get to see this.

Iain M. Banks

Then our final event was the Iain M. Banks interview: it was actually the final event of the whole festival, with the exception of the wrap party with Bob Geldof performing (and for a while, it seemed as though his sound check would be a constant background to Iain). Whereas Philip Pullman was erudite and all the other things I said, Banks was his usual madcap, entertaining self. Billed as an interview promoting his latest Culture novel, Surface detail, it turned into a general discussion of his writing, his life, the Culture and his science fiction. And this was the reason for our going – because at this “literary” festival, we were seeing Iain M. Banks and not just Iain Banks. The literary world tends to be a bit sniffy about science fiction, and for no good reason. Just because some of the key works of the genre aren’t necessarily great writing is no reason for feelings of superiority; there have been enough bad novels published that aren’t science fiction for there to be a distinct outbreak of pot-kettleism in the haughty dismissal of the genre that some writers and commentators hand out. And Iain M. Banks is the perfect antidote to this.

(Funnily enough, we saw him again two days later, in Birmingham. The Birmingham Science Fiction Group are celebrating their 40th anniversary this year, and arranged for Iain to come to give a public interview in conjunction with Birmingham library. Interestingly, his talk in Birmingham duplicated very little of what he said at Hay, which in itself is quite remarkable. So many authors on a promotional tour would come out with the same material at every venue.)

All in all, a good weekend. The only downer was that as we were coming back on a Sunday, our favourite chip shop in Leominster was closed. And there were a few bookshops we didn’t get to see. A good excuse for another visit…