Bloggage!

Every day in the Photo Lab we see photos with Red Eye in them, most often in photos taken at parties and other night time shots. Thankfully the kiosks which customers use to submit their orders do have an editing feature where the customer is offered the opportunity to remove any Red Eyes in an image.

Unfortunately however this feature is not particularly good and can lead to leaving black marks over people’s faces. Unfortunately this is because most filters work the same way, by detecting areas of bright red associated with Red Eyes, and trying to correct this by darkening the area. This can lead to someone with rosy cheeks (a common thing at a party) can fool the filter into thinking that these areas are in fact Red Eyes and leaving them with black marks over their faces.

Red Eye is caused by the light of the flash being too fast for the pupil to react to, so the pupil stays wide open when the flash is fired. The light from the flash enters the eye and reflects off the back of the eyeball before it travels back through the pupil before exiting the eye. The red colour that the camera detects is from the large quantity of blood in the eye behind the retina.

The best cure for red eye is to ensure that it does not occur in the first place, either by increasing the lighting in the room so that the pupils constrict and allow less light to enter the eye, or by using the red eye reduction feature built into most modern compact cameras. These red eye reduction features work by firing the flash three or four times before the photo is taken, this also causes the pupils to constrict and vastly reduces the red eye effect.

If you have a bounce flash for an SLR, aim it at a nearby pale surface so that the light bounces off this surface and illuminates the subject, or if you simply place the flash away from the camera so to the subject it is at a different angle from the camera. Both of these methods will cause the light from the flash to enter the eye at a different angle from the camera lens and thus be reflected out of the eye away from the camera lens, getting past the red eye problem.

Of course there is a much simpler solution available, have the subject look away from the camera.

The Red Eye effect can however be a good thing in certain circumstances. Leukocoria is an abnormal white reflection from the retina, instead of the usual Red Eye. This is can indicate cataracts and a whole host of other problems including Retinoblastoma in young children. Retinoblastoma is a cancer of the growing cells in the retina and affects mostly children under the age of five. In photos of young children spotting a white reflection in the eye early enough can mean the difference between effective treatment being administered and surgical removal of the eye. For more information on Retinoblastoma please take a look at The Childhood Eye Cancer Trust Website.

One of the more common things I come across in the photo lab is people scoffing when they hear our prices and then claiming they can print whatever they want cheaper at home. I never really bother arguing with them because I know from my personal experience that they are wrong.

Modern Inkjet printers have progressed a long way in the past few years, but the commercial printers available in your local supermarket are still not a match for the minilab traditional Silver printing process. However professional inkjet systems are of a better quality of print and the lifetime of the prints is usually as good as traditional Silver printing, if not better (www.wilhelm-research.com), but the downside is these systems can run into thousands of pounds.

Traditional Silver printing has been shown to last in excess of 100 years however most inkjet prints will tend to fade after 5 years or so, and even quicker if left in a sunny place such as in a frame on a wall. One way to increase the lifetime of inkjet prints in your commercial printer is to use the manufacturer inks as opposed to the cheaper refilled cartridges as these tend to print less pages and fail to work more often than manufacturer inks. (http://www.hp.com/sbso/product/supplies/printer-ink-refill.html)

So one day whilst bored at work I decided to work out how much it would actually cost per print to print your images at home and then compare this to the cost of printing prints at the supermarket minilab I work at. The Prices used in this were taken straight from the shelves on the 19th of November this year and for comparison the prices in the minilab at the time were:

I decided to compare the prices of two different types of printers, a good quality photo printer, which would produce a decent quality print and would be a relatively common level of printer for people to use to print their images photos on at home, as well as a cheap and nasty version, choosing the cheapest printer on the shelf and calculating the costs for that as well. Both using the Manufacturer cartridges to get the best possible prints from each printer.

For both the methods I used an assumption, from my personal experience of printing inkjet prints, of 100 prints from a full set of cartridges before the first cartridge(s) need replacing. As a lot of the time more than one cartridge will run out within a short space of time and more often than not most if not all will need replacing soon after the first one requires replacing.

However I also found on the Canon website a .pdf document with their recorded average page yield using an international standard for measuring page yield, including an estimated yield for the black cartridges. So I recalculated the costs again using the Canon figures to see the difference they made.

I think that the numbers above really do speak for themselves, it just goes to show that the people who scoff at the prices in store really don’t seem to know how much it costs to print their prints. I have put all of this together into a PDF File as well for downloading and sharing.
InkjetPrinting.pdf

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When going away on holiday most people still tend to choose disposable cameras, and concequently we do get a lot of people coming in and having their cameras processed in the Photo Lab. I can only assume that people don’t like to take their expensive cameras with them on holiday if they are going to be going out every night and don’t want to take the risk of anything going wrong, such as having the camera damaged or stolen and loosing an £100+ piece of equipment as well as all their photos, with a disposable camera it is cheap to replace and not a big deal if it goes missing plus disposables can give you a bit of excitement whilst waiting for the film to be processed to see what came out.

One of the main problems we get with disposable cameras are people buying very cheap cameras and the photos not coming out as well as they could have done if the customers would have bought a more expensive one. A lot of disposable cameras nowadays are recycled, we operate such a scheme where I work where we send off the camera bodies once the films have been removed and they get repaired and restocked with film before ending up on the shelves again.

The only downside to this is that to keep the costs down, quite often the films used in the recycled cameras are the cheapest things the manufacturer can get hold of and not of any recognised brand. The most common films found inside the disposable cameras seem to be named after countries, specifically “Italian” and “German” films seem quite popular with the recyclers.

These films are not of a good quality usually and quite often clearly contain rejects from other companies such as Kodak or Fuji, and more often than not are contained within a recycled canister which will have the original manufacturers details covered up by a sticker. To really emphasise how cheap these cameras can be, once I even saw a film canister which had half a film still inside it, with another half a film stuck to the original with tape, all in the name of saving a bit of money.

Sometimes however, depending on how cheap the recyclers are, they do put into the cameras the cheapest films they can find, the 12 exposure films. These films are more often than not clearly rejects from the companies who make the “German” and “Italian” films, with dents, holes and tears in the films and rips in the perforations which allow the film to be pulled through the camera.

These films are usually also a pain to process in the lab as they are inside a standard 35mm cassette and normally our “film pickers” (a tool used to extract the tongue of a film from the cassette) are unable to retrieve the tongue and we have to “crack” the film, or in other words break open the cassette in a dark room and place it inside a dark box used for test strips before processing it.

Now based on what I see, your average customers’ 24 exposure disposable camera that they take away on holiday will usually have 10-15 photos that come out as intended. If you scale this down to the 12 exposure disposable cameras you are paying 4 to 5 pounds for 5 or 6 photos, which works out being very expensive.

However the next thing the recyclers do is to seal the cameras back up again, by using what feels like miles and miles of black electrical tape as opposed to the proper base caps for the cameras. Now this isn’t always 100% light proof unlike the base caps and sometimes light does have a tendency to leak in, causing red marks or streaks to appear on the prints when they are printed. Which needless to say customers do not appreciate whatsoever.

One way of spotting these recycled disposable cameras is the price tag, usually they will be offered as a cheaper alternative to the standard Kodak/Fuji disposable cameras, and to cover up all the black electrical tape used in the recycling process the cameras are wrapped in a cardboard sleeve usually with bright colours to appeal to kids.

One of the other problems we seem to get with disposable cameras is that people don’t tend to use the flash, this is a major problem, but I will cover this in a later post. Suffice to say for the moment it is a good idea to use a flash indoors, even if you think the lighting is fine, as long as the subject is a good few meters in front of you to prevent them from being over exposed and just white in the photos.

The only other type of disposable camera we get are the underwater disposables sold by many shops, when people take them abroad with them, they are expecting to be able to go off and take stunning photos and are quite disappointed when they get their prints back and are unable to tell whether that grey mass is the seabed, the coral reef, or simply someone else’s back.

The main problem with the underwater cameras is that their shutter times are longer than conventional disposable cameras due to the lower levels of light found underwater and so most of the photos people take do end up blurred to a degree. A lot of people do also seem to take their disposable cameras to darker depths of the sea and end up with either very dark photos or no photos at all.

In conclusion:
– Stick to recognisable brands of disposable cameras, such as Kodak, Fuji and even supermarket own brand cameras are of a good quality.
– Avoid any cardboard covered cameras.
– Check the number of exposures on the film within a camera before purchasing and avoid anything with less than 24 exposures in total.
– Try to use the flash whenever possible in poor lighting conditions.

If you want me to write a post about a certain subject, please feel free to Contact Me

Some of you people who read this Blog know I work in a local supermarket and specifically in the Photo Lab, which I do enjoy as a job but does bring a few confrontations with customers every now and then, which a colleague of mine in a nearby store has covered very well in his blog http://www.lifeonarolloffilm.com which I highly recommend, as a read as it gives you an insight into what runs through our minds on a daily basis.

But what I plan to do in this new category “Photo Lab Tips” is to try to give you some advice about how to improve your photos, and hopefully improve your enjoyment of your photos, by pointing out and explaining how to correct many of the common mistakes and problems I come across on a daily basis in the Photo Lab. If there is a topic you would like me to cover then please feel free to Contact Me

In a seperate message I would just like to add that it is now my aim to keep this blog updated with a new post at least once a week, but I will do my best to post as frequently as I have decent content!