News & Blog

I recently created a YouTube video with some of my portrait images from the Philippines. I thought this would be a unique way for people to see some of my images and of course get more exposure on YouTube. The quality is of course the best it could be for YouTube, but I think it came out alright. I plan to make some more of these slideshow videos if I get some positive feedback. Let me know what you think of the video by leaving a comment. Thanks.

After a few months of planning and organizing I finally sent off around 1500 slides and negatives to be digitally scanned. I feel relieved, but anxious at the same time to see the final digital images which will eventually be added to my stock gallery. These images are mostly from my travels to Latin America, the Philippines and Malaysia.

During the past few months I have been trying to locate all of my old slides and negatives from friends and relatives houses around the country. I have also been looking into purchasing a new Nikon ICE scanner to turn these slides into a digital format. After a lot of research and reading on-line reviews, etc. I decided to use a scanning service called ScanCafe, which is based out of California. I don’t remember how I came across this company, but I think I must have found them while reading a review or in Google. The moment I saw their professional looking website, I bookmarked it and have been reviewing their services and company for over a month now. I must say to this point I am very impressed with my interactions and use of their service. Not only do they have the most affordable prices in the industry, but they are very professional and customer service oriented. Their website is top of the line and shows you exactly what stage of the scanning process they are in for your order. Although, I have just today sent my slides to them, I can tell the next eight weeks will be worry free.

My wife preparing slides to be sent to ScanCafe.

How Scan Cafe works: Basically, you send them your slides and negatives and eight weeks later they send you a dvd with all of your images. Besides having great prices, the best thing I found was you don’t have to keep or pay for all of the images you send them. You only need to purchase a minimum of 50% of the actual amount you send in. This is a great advantage…you don’t have to sort all of your negatives and slides before hand. Just send everything in and select the ones you want later. They make all of your images available on-line for viewing and selecting. I’ve included a chart below to show the entire process.

The standard price for a 3000dpi slide scan is $.24 and $.19 for a negative. I opted for the professional scan which is $.09 more per scan and adds another 1000dpi to the resolution (4000dpi). These are the best prices that I was able to find on-line, by a long way. You may be wondering why they can have such low prices? Well, it’s outsourcing. They send all of your originals to Bangalore, India to be scanned. When I called their office in California, the women said they send everything over by Fedex in a large bundle, so nothing gets lost. They have 24hour security at the facility there with over 400 workstations. It seems like a good operation they have going and I’m not worried at all about losing my slides or having them be so far away. I’ve sent many international packages via Fedex and have never had a problem. You can see some more information about their Bangalore facility here.

Like I said, I’m still at the beginning of this process, but I look forward to seeing the final digital images and I’m excited to have found such a great service. Be sure to check back in a few months to see some of these images in my stock gallery.

A box full of my slides and negatives getting ready to be shipped.

Wired.com has periodic photo contests with a wide range of themes. Viewers can vote on all the submitted photos and the top ten rated will appear on Wired.com homepage. The current theme is summer.

“Summer is finally here, and we under-sunned desk turds want to see what fun looks like. Remind us what it is to be young and capable of joy again with a skillfully captured frame.”

See photo contest details and submit a photo!

This is short tutorial to show you how I make quick edits to some of my underwater photos. Most underwater pictures will have a green or cyan color cast that needs to be removed and light/detail that needs to emphasized. This process is very easy to do using Photoshop and can take less than three minutes per photo.

Original image (left) and image after quick edit in Photoshop (right) - It may be hard to see the difference in the two photos if your browser doesn’t read embedded color spaces.

First, I make a duplicate layer of my background to work with.

Next create a new blank layer and go to: Image>Adjustments>Color Balance

This is where you can remove most of the color cast that underwater photos will have. Generally, I will increase my reds and decrease my blues. Just play around with the sliders until you are happy with the result. *Keep in mind - you will also be able to reduce your color cast later using Selective Color.

Next highlight your duplicated background layer. This is where I use a third party filter called Nik Filters. Open Nik Filters from your Filter menu and select Sunshine. Try selecting the four Light-Casting Algo to see which one looks the best for your picture. I generally use A or D(off). Click Ok.

Most of the time the Sunshine effect is too much for the photo and looks unnatural. Most often I will highlight my Sunshine Layer and reduce the Opacity to my liking.

Next create a new blank layer and go to: Image>Adjustments>Selective Color

Here you can take more control of individual colors within your image. I find for underwater images you need to increase your magenta (within the Cyans) and also add some yellow. The best thing to do is to experiment with all the colors and all the sliders. See what works best for you.

The last thing I do to my underwater images is increase the contrast. (You will need to flatten your image before doing this or merge your background and sunshine layers together).

Highlight the flattened layer and go to: Image>Adjustments>Contrast

I will generally increase the contrast of an image with the amount depending on the picture itself.

That’s it. This is one way to quickly improve the quality of an underwater image.