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Photobook Prices to Fall?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2012-01-05T15:23:56+00:00

When is a book not a book? Well according to the VAT man, when it’s a photobook. Apparently he’s long taken the view that a photobook is really a special type of photo album, which means they’ve been subject to VAT. However a recent ruling in a case brought by Truprint, photo and photobook printers. it has been agreed that all photobooks should be treated like ordinary books, effectively exempt from VAT. Apparently there’s been a split for many years in the photobooks industry between those suppliers who emerged out of the book publishing trade and those who turned to photobooks from printing snapshots. It was difficult for the latter to compete with the former as the VAT people told them to charge VAT, not an instruction they’d given to their competitors who naturally thought they were in a variant of the book business. Truprint and I’d guess others are now in line for a chunky tax rebate. What does that mean for the market? Maybe prices will fall, maybe not. At least all suppliers will be on the same tax footing going forward.

Christmas Deadlines

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-12-17T12:09:04+00:00

We’re doing everything we can to make sure we meet our Christmas deadlines. One concern is potential delays in the mail at this time of year but we’ve been assured by Royal Mail that Recorded and Special Delivery will be unaffected. Photo Scanning All work with us now will be completed and posted to online albums. We have additional capacity for runs of up to 1,000 images but as next week goes on returning prints will be tight. Images will be available for download soon after scanning. Slide Scanning All work received will be scanned and returned. We could handle additional small tasks, up to 200, but larger projects will be completed in the New Year. Negative Scanning We are expecting a large batch of 35mm negatives which will absorb all capacity up to Christmas. Video tapes to DVD Existing orders and video tapes with us now will be completed. Nothing received from now can be completed before Christmas, sorry.

Divine Composition With Fibonacci’s Ratio (The Rule of Thirds on Steroids

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-12-10T11:56:10+00:00

If you’re interested in photo composition, there’s an interesting article here.

35mm Slide Scanner? Which?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-11-21T22:20:47+00:00

You can’t win them all, although we try. Last week I had a couple of conversations with a client who’d inherited a stack of 35mm slides. He has nearly 200 slides. Of course I said, use us. Save time and bother, access expertise and technology (high price scanners, specialist software) that hobbyists are unlikely to afford. He was doubtful, in retirement he has time, a decent PC, so why not spend his money on a scanner? Today he rang to say he was going to take the DIY route, so - sorry, but .... Could I recommend a 35mm slide scanner? Not wanting to sound like a sore loser I said I’d revisit the scanner market, which I’ve just being doing via Amazon. As the many users of our slide scanner amnesty will know I have a virulent dislike of the many cheap and cheerless scanners based on the insides of cheap digital cameras. Don’t waste your money, I’m pleased to say there are better options available. We use Epson flatbeds, their top-of-range V750 and they’re great although pricey. However Epson now offer a V330 capable of scanning slides and negatives, at £83-50. Not very much more than the cheapo boxes. Plus this unit will scan several slides in one session, helping with the boredom factor. Next up in the Epson range is their V500 at £150. That’s a big step up but you do get Digital ICE, dramatically reducing dust and scratches; and the time you’ll need to invest to get decent scans. I’ve never used a Canon scanner but many who do sing their praises. The lowest price Canon I could see is their 5600F, at just under £100. If the F stands for FARE that’s Canon’s alternative to Kodak’s Digital ICE so you might get decent, clean, scans. Judging by user feedback you might have an issue with Windows 7 though. There - plenty of choice. Whatever you go for, get a decent scanner, not a toy.

Ho Ho Ho

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-11-07T20:53:55+00:00

Hard to believe but Christmas is coming. Took a trip to the High Street on Saturday and saw that even the charity shops have Christmas displays, so it’s time to highlight our seasonal offerings. Again this year we’re offering our Gift Vouchers for any combination of our video conversion, photo scanning, slide scanning or negative scanning services. These are personalised with a message you choose, and we can either send the voucher to you, maybe to include with a Christmas card, or sent direct to the lucky recipient. They’ve been very popular every year and make a great contribution to saving family memories. This year we’re offering a new twist. When you pay in advance for the voucher we’ll give you an extra 10% boost to the value of your voucher, preserving even more memories. If you’re looking for other Christmas gift ideas we have suggestions.

Scan, Service, Services, Photo and 'S'

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-10-23T23:30:34+01:00

Some things I don’t understand and the dark arts of SEO are one. Small example follows. I think 1Scan is a photo scanning service. So does Google, we rank pretty well for that. If you search on that term we’re pretty close to the top. I’m happy. We pop up pretty high for photo scanning too. Seems reasonable to me. I’d expect us to appear high up for searches on ‘photo scanning services’. That’s just an S tagged onto photo scanning. Yet for some reason we’ve just dropped 75 places for that term. Then, we just bounced back. Minus 75, then promptly up 81. Crazy.

Final Cut - Video File Conversion

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-10-16T17:49:10+01:00

One of the services we offer is to convert video tapes to computer files. We can support a wide variety of file types, but about 80% of demand is for Windows compatible files, the balance Mac. I’m pleased to say clients have been very happy with what we’ve been doing over the last four years. Mac clients have been supplied with Quicktime files, based on the MP4 codec. I’ll try to explain that, Quicktime isn’t strictly speaking a file type it is more like a wrapper inside of which is a file with your film. The structure of that file is determined by the codec selected, as I said, in the majority of cases we’ve used the MP4 codec. Then last week I got a call from a client who couldn’t open our files in the video editing program they wanted to use - Apple’s own Final Cut. As a consequence over the last few days I’ve been reading, checking, testing to try to get to the bottom of this, finally arriving at this point. For reasons I cannot understand if a Quicktime file is created using MP4 it can be opened and edited using Apple’s iMovie product but the same file cannot be opened in Final Cut. I think the file type / codec Final Cut is looking for is DV format. Now, we can produce DV files, but there’s a big but attached. Mainly - but, they’re gigantic. A movie converted into Quicktime / MP4 ay just over 1Gb landed at a whopping 66Gb when processed as a DV file. And the conversion took about four times longer. For that reason we’ve made it clear that we aren’t offering DV format files. What’s the solution if you would like to use DV files in Final Cut? Well, you can open these in iMovie and use that program to convert them to DV format.

Scanner Smashing - the movie

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-10-06T16:37:24+01:00

Many people have taken advantage of our Slide Scanner Amnesty under which we credit the value of your old, knackered, broken scanner against the cost of our scanning service. But what do we do with the old scanners? Well, I just dump them at our local recycling centre.
I think some people have been a little suspicious, maybe thinking this is a clever ruse to make a fortune selling old scanners on eBay. They have maybe thought there’s a catch. So I thought I’d shoot a quick Flip camera video showing one scanner meeting its end. A simple, five minute job, or so I thought.
No, you can’t film this at the dump, very camera shy, and anyway there’s nothing to see. Electronic goods are sent away to be stripped down so there’s really nothing to see. Plan B, destroy it myself at home. Place Minolta scanner on lawn, set up camera, grab large hammer. Roll film.
Hit scanner. Nothing. Repeat, still nothing. The force of the blows were just being soaked up by the grass and no damage was being done to the slide scanner. So I dug out an old paving slab and placed the scanner on that. Roll film, hit scanner.
I must have hit that thing ten times before it showed any sign of damage. Eventually the plastic on the casing showed a small crack and a few blows began to break the unit. To be honest I was disappointed, I didn’t get the great drama I’d hoped for. Finally, more than a little frustrated, I just threw the hammer at it. Not a great contribution to modern cinema but at least you can now see what we do with old scanners, and it doesn’t involve ebay.

Best Results?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-09-06T08:06:46+01:00

If you had a choice, we sometimes asked, which would give the best results?
OK, you’ve got photo prints, negatives and slides. In practice we can quickly rule out a choice between photo scanning and slide scanning. It’s exceptionally rare that anyone would have any volumes of slides from which prints had been made, so the slide would be your only source material and you’ll have to go with that.
Photos started out as negatives, so you should have a negative to go with each of the prints. Technically its undoubted that negative scanning yields a better image than photo scanning. Don’t blame us for that, it’s down to a thing called dynamic range. That’s a measure of the spread of colour information a photo or negative can handle. negatives normally have great range, commercial prints much less. So all your colours, particularly the details in the shadows and highlights, get compressed and lost in the printing process. Negative scanning catches that, photos have lost it already.
But .... we can scan photos at a much lower cost than negatives, so most people opt to have their photos scannned.

Bigger Photos

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-09-03T20:57:39+01:00

Facebook has announced it will support bigger photos, up to 960 pixels. More here.

If It's Not Us ...

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-08-27T12:57:17+01:00

Sure, we’d love to scan every photo, slide and negative you care to send our way but you have to be realistic. For many people it’s just too risky putting precious photos in the post. 1Scan is a local scanning service for Essex, north London, Kent and other parts of Greater London.
What if you live elsewhere? What if you just can’t trust the mail? Well you can try Google or maybe a dedicated scanning service directory. Find-a-Scanservice is a directory of scanning services, searchable by type of photo originals to be scanned and location. It covers the UK, Europe and pretty much the rest of the world. Great site and service.
If you want you photos, negatives or slides scanned try us, but if you can’t, now you know where to look.

Photo scanning - tiff or jpg?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-08-17T22:16:48+01:00

We’re often asked by photo scanning clients, which file format should I opt for - tiff or jpg?
Sometimes clients think that one format offers a better quality image than the other. That isn’t the case, scanning quality is determined by the dpi setting. In essence the higher the dpi the better the quality of the scan. So a 4,000 dpi tiff file is the same image quality as a 4,000 dpi jpg.
A tiff file is uncompressed, while a jpg is compressed. The maths behind image file compression is brilliant so for the vast majority of applications the fact that the file is compressed isn’t an issue. In fact jpg files are smaller, easier to email, quicker to open, making life a lot easier for most of us.
If you intend to do a lot of serious image editing a tiff file may be better. You can save without compression until you get to a final image, which you might save as a jpg for distribution. You can edit and save a tiff file many, many times without loss of quality, that’s the advantage.
Professional photographers typically want tiff files although many serious amateurs also opt for tiffs. If you’ve bitten the bullet on the price of Photoshop the extra cost and processing overheads of tiffs are hardly likely to be a barrier.
If you have slides or negatives as a source material tiff files are a viable option. If you’re sending photos (prints) then its unlikely that you’ll get any real advantage from tiffs, which is why we scan prints to jpg files.

Photo Backup

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-08-09T20:36:53+01:00

Yesterday I had a surreal experience. I had to drive to three locations in London, returning work to one and collecting from the others. When I got home I saw TV images of damage to police cars at a junction I’d driven past a couple of hours ago. Then substantial fire damage in a block in Clapham where another of our clients work.
I just don’t think I live and work in areas at the mercy of fire raisers and looters, this is London in the 21st century. But it’s clear how people have suffered, and how much distress people suffer when they lose precious possessions. I have ben struck how high up the list the loss of family photos has been for people in Hackney and Tottenham. What we we do to protect our own memories?
First, it helps to get your photos into a digital format. In physical form 4,000 photos fills a good sized box, once scanned these photos (scanned in high quality) would fit onto a DVD. That disc is easier to store and copy, so a duplicate can be held off-site.
If you have a large number of scanned photos you’d be thinking of storing them on a hard drive. As we’ve seen all too vividly, you need to have your digital image files copied onto a backup of that hard drive, and here’s the point, stored safely off-site. Certainly you could make an arrangement with a friend or relative to store your backup and it’s an improvement. You should also give thought to a professional off-site file backup service. We’ve used Apple’s MobileMe service (soon to be replaced) and Dropbox, both have worked well for us. A couple of weeks ago I signed up for a remote version of Apple’s Timemachine called DollyDrive. This gives me a complete backup of my machine which is stored “in the cloud” so if I should lose my hard drive, or even my MacBook, there’s a complete copy of my system held out of harms way.

Photo Scanning & Photo Restore

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-08-02T08:39:40+01:00

We scan photos. We restore photos. But ...
Will we turn dull winter shots into sparkling summer days? Replace mouse eaten corners from ancient prints? Lift unsightly buildings from a cluttered background? The answer is no, that’s not what we do. What we’re trying to do when we scan a photo or scan a slide or negative is to get the best digital version of what landed on the camera at the time the shutter was pressed. Time takes its toll, dust and scratches are a problem so we do what we can with those.
We want to give you the best scan of the images as it was. To do anything more is not just very expensive but also potentially ruinous, as we don’t know what you want to see until the digital photo scan is in your view. We know how much colour restore to apply through a thorough digital analysis of the data in the scanned image. That’s the best we can do. And we think it’s the most you should want from a photo scanning service.

How can I save money?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-07-27T21:32:49+01:00

It’s not the question we’re asked most often but it does come up from time to time, most often in relation to slide scanning. It goes like this, “I’ve got 5,000 slides, what’s the cheapest you can do?”
Here’s the answer. Any number we quote, when multiplied by a very large number, results in a shockingly large number. The most effective way to reduce the bill is simply to go though your stack, with a lightbox and loupe, and mercilessly cull the poor images. The number you need is probably only 10-20% of the total.
Negatives? Think about getting negatives printed and then get the prints scanned. Cheaper and quicker, and if you really have any great negs then you can have those scanned on our top flight negative scanners.
Prints? Take the same route as with slides, invest your time in deciding which images you actually really, really need scanned.
The answer is not to try to get a poorer quality scanning job done. You’ll be disappointed and might even have to have the whole lot done again.

Photobox Offer

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-07-22T15:40:42+01:00

Since we teamed up with Photobox to deliver photo books for us we’ve had a lot of positive feedback about the service. Not simply the quality of their prints but also their customer service and value for money.
Just received an email to say their current discount offer is being extended for another week. The offer is here.
This is what they’re offering. When you sign up for an account with them you’ll get 40 prints free. Then, whatever you buy (including photobooks) you’ll get a discount of at least 10%. If you spend more you’ll get an ever bigger discount - 20% if you spend over £20, and if you spend over £30 you’ll get 30% off normal prices.
It’s a great summer offer, don’t hesitate.

Polaroid Photo Scanning

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-07-13T20:48:50+01:00

We can boost faded colours, it’s a major part of what we do, and it’s important with slide scanning and photo scanning. These types of original images are most prone to fading and we can do a lot to recover the original saturation and brightness that may have been lost over time.
What about Polaroid? Should we use our software to recover colours?
If we apply these features we instantly see a result, whites snap in place and other colours are clearer. But should we? If you look at an unfaded Polaroid original you’ll see the colour isn’t quite accurate, Polaroids have a distinct colour balance which gives softer, warmer colours. It’s an attractive type of colour and one that’s valued by lovers of Polaroid photography. My feeling is we should leave scans as the closest we can to the colours we see. Unless you’d particularly like us to adjust your Polaroids when we scan them.

All in a day ...

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-07-12T21:19:34+01:00

Every so often, the phone rings, and today it rang quite a few times. A frequent question is what are you doing? Often in a roundabout way, normally to ask if we can squeeze in an urgent job. Today’s urgent tasks are slide scanning for a professional photographer, photo print scanning for a last minute photo album plus a couple of video surveillance tapes for a legal firm in York.
In between gaps in the calls it was heads down to get through a normal days work - today the focus was on two major jobs. The first is a slide scanning project, just over 1,000 slides for a family archive. It’s turning out to be a fiddly job. Most people who shot slides used the same film, in the same camera, with a pretty reliable exposure system. Kodachrome dominates too. This job is different, the photographer has chopped and changed from one film to another and he’s been tough in sifting out substandard slides. So you scan 5,10 or 15 slides, then adjust the set up and off you go with the next set. Still, the variation makes life interesting.
The second job is less demanding, scanning photos is intrinsically easier. They’re all just photos and they chug through our scanner quite happily. This job has a single challenge - volume. This afternoon we crossed the 8,000 mark completing the seventh of eight boxes. So far the results look good and I’m hopeful that we’ll finish this part of the project early Thursday or maybe even late Wednesday. Then we’re into the final leg which is reducing the 300+ folders the images have been scanned into. The aim is to get them all into folders for the various trips and family events specified by the client. We’ve been given a master list of around 75 master folders. Although that sounds like a major task in itself it shouldn’t take too long.
So tomorrow it will be full steam ahead from first thing in the morning until about 11:00 when the postman arrives. Then we’ll break off and hit the urgent jobs that we’ve been promised were mailed today. That will keep us busy until mid afternoon when its back to our two major tasks.
Just a normal day in the office.

iPad and Online Albums

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-05-23T08:18:09+01:00

For clients with photos we scan them and then create an online photo album. This is great for sharing images and we know from stats that friends and family from all over the world (including China, India, Sri Lanka, Canada, Australia and many more) enjoy access to these albums.
One feature of the albums is the ability to download digital copies of each photo. This facility has been used many, many times over the last 18 months. Unfortunately we have run into a glitch with the iPad. While users can use the iPad to view images, because Apple iOS on the iPad doesn’t support Flash, you can’t download directly from the web to an iPad.
The way round this is to download images to your PC then copy the photos across as part of the sync process.

Travel and Landscape Photography

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2011-01-24T20:53:06+00:00

School reunion at the weekend, too many years since we last met up, all too many years since we were young, keen and innocent. Amazed and impressed by what many of my school friends have achieved in particular one your lady, Marion Bull.
She’s become an acclaimed travel and landscape photographer with work published all over the world. When I got back I took a look at her website. There are some great images - take a look - Marion Bull - creative & editorial photography.

Snow

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-12-02T18:23:58+00:00

Can’t remember the last time we had snow before Christmas, but this year we’re making up for earlier mild years. The snow hit us on Tuesday and at varying rates its been falling since then with no sign of a thaw. Today (Thursday) we have about a foot of snow between the house and the hutch.
Post has been delayed, although we’ve had a couple of deliveries today and yesterday its been nothing like normal volumes. Parcel post and courier deliveries have disappeared which is probably just as well as between here and the nearest main road we’ve got a lot of snow. Judging by past experience we won’t be gritted here until tomorrow at the earliest.
We have been able to get through a lot of work, but not as much as in normal days. Might sound wimp but its just been so cold even though the heating has been going full blast. We are hopeful that we’ll be back to full production from tomorrow.

Aperture Updates

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-10-20T23:01:45+01:00

If you have a Mac and use Aperture, either in connection with your own digital photos or with photo scanning, download the latest update to Aperture. I’ve noticed a few problems of late, particularly corrupting images as they’re loaded. The update seems to have fixed this.

iPhoto Trash

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-10-16T10:49:15+01:00

Busy week, photo scanning like crazy. Even did some for clients, not just friends and neighbours. Then there’s the “Could you just ....” which in this case was “knock up” a couple of slideshows. So I spent a few evenings using iPhoto and Aperture to create something impressive. That’s by the by, the point is I suddenly got a message on my MacBook suggesting I was running out of disc space.
Quick run around the usual places to free up space yielded little, then I remembered that neither iPhoto nor Aperture actually delete files from your hard drive when you move them to Trash within the application. If you look under the File menu in each there’s a command which does delete unwanted images. I guess it’s a double failsafe function but one that’s all too easy to overlook. Me included.
What struck me was all the scanned photos that were lurking in purgatory - nearly 3000 in iPhoto and a massive 7000 in Aperture. Now all gone, permanently.

Re-thinking jpg compression

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-10-11T23:09:16+01:00

Mention the term jpg and in some quarters you can hear the disapproval down the phone line. Why? As all too many people know jpg compression ruins photos.
Really?
I will accept that if you want the maximum, in terms of available data, then a TIFF file is better. However we charge more to scan to a TIFF, reflecting the time taken, impact on data storage costs, number of DVDs we burn and the time that takes too. But ask yourself, is it really necessary? Will you really edit your photos that much?
The received wisdom against jpg goes back a long way, IT is a fast moving field. A slide scanned today into a jpg file can’t be compared to one made 5, 10 or 15 years ago. Today’s jpgs are much better than their critics believe, if you doubt it give it a try. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

What can be done?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-09-16T07:47:39+01:00

When it comes to negative scanning the vast bulk of our work is scanning 35mm material, but we do get many other formats - including some that are smaller. It’s a basic rule that the smaller the original the poorer the enlargement (all other things being equal). What can be done to make the best of small source files which appear excessively grainy?
We use a great piece of software that can be used as an add-on to Photoshop and Aperture. This reduces grain and at the same time improves sharpness. It can work wonders on grainy scans, or scans with excessive noise, and it gives good results just using the default settings. It’s called Neat Image, and I believe you can download a trial version at no cost.

iPhoto Ate My Hard Drive

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-08-06T18:45:13+01:00

We scanned a very large number of photos and slides for a client, she was kind enough to say she was happy with the results which she was going to load into iPhoto on her sleek new MacBook Air.
Having done that she wasn’t so happy. She complained that having loaded all the digital images she had no hard drive capacity left. Why?
I did some digging and found out how iPhoto treats the photo loading process. When you Import photos iPhoto actually copies each image from the source file into its own library, our client had taken a two step process. First, she’d copied all our files from the DVDs we supplied onto her hard drive. Second, she then imported into iPhoto. All went well and naturally she assumed the “source” files were those she was seeing in iPhoto. But the whole process had eaten twice as much disk space as necessary.
Solution - simply delete the copes of the photo scans we’d done. Disk usage back to a sensible level.

35mm Slide Scanner Amnesty

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-07-29T12:18:55+01:00

Today we launch a scheme to enable people to turn their cheap, nasty little slide scanners into valuable credit to use against professional scanning. We’re doing this to show people that the rotten results often delivered by these devices (blotchy shadows, bleached out highlights, artefacts, poor quality) is not representative of what a top flight scanner such as our Nikon’s can deliver.
The Amnesty allows a full credit (purchase price incl. VAT, postage) for USB 35mm scanners against scanning services for 35mm slide, 35mm negatives or prints. Details on this page - 35mm Slide Scanner Amnesty.

Unanswered Email?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-07-26T15:06:05+01:00

I’d like to apologise to everyone who sent us an email in the last few months and didn’t get a reply. It seems that several hundred messages got stuck somewhere between our website and our mailboxes here. I’m now assured by our ISP that everything is OK, and I’ve gone through the backlog to apologise.
Please get back in touch via our contact page is there’s anything outstanding.

Backsides?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-07-21T08:41:30+01:00

We’re a photo scanning service, sure, but did we go for the right name?
In the main we scan photos, most of them taken within the last few years. Increasingly we’re scanning photos that have historic interest. This is mainly relevant to the family owning the photos but we hope that as the Historypin service takes off we’ll be scanning photos with wider historic significance.
It’s noticeable that in so many cases the back of the photo is at least as interesting as the image on the front. Yesterday we scanned a collection including a 1927 photo taken at Southend airfield. It’s of an ancient bi-plane; the pilot is wearing a leather flying helmet, he has two passengers - one is bare headed the other is wearing an ordinary hat. They’re all waving at the cameraman. Ready for take off into grey Essex skies, the flight of a life time.
On the back are some notes. This was the plane in which an aunt took her first flight. The name of the pilot was there and indeed it was signed by him. Was this aunt’s first and last flight? Who was the Captain, a jobbing commercial pilot or a retired World War 1 air ace?
We can scan both sides. Maybe we should call ourselves the bothsides photo scanning service.

Historypin - Sunday Times

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-07-18T10:10:47+01:00

Interesting story today in the Sunday Times magazine, p22, by John-Paul Flintoff titled ”Our Ghosts in the Machine”. He covers several approaches to putting historic images on the internet.
Scanning through the article you’ll notice it covers Historypin in some depth, although sadly he doesn’t mention that we’re the official photo scanning partner for the service. The article looks at other ways of adding a historic dimension to modern images and locations. On the opening two pages you can see a great spread of images taken from Historypin which will inspire many people to look at the main site, as of this morning showing 10,966 photos.
Inspired, you might want to join in, I hope you do. If you don’t have your old photos available in a digital form contact us.

How Good is a Scan?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-07-05T09:33:04+01:00

As a photo scanning service it’s hard to explain to people how good a scan is prior to them getting it. It’s also tough to find some measure potential clients are familiar with to express the quality, say, of a 35mm scan.
On Friday I came across the Panasonic stand at the Goodwood Festival of Speed where they were promoting their new Lumix range of top quality digital cameras. Looking in the detailed specification it gave the image dimensions in a measurement that meant something to me. Their top of the range camera delivers 4000 dpi.
They quote the camera as being 12.1 megapixels - so there it is, 1Scan photo scanning at 4000 dpi is equivalent to a 12.1 megapixel digital SLR.

Spy Photos

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-06-30T08:06:13+01:00

Big news on TV last night and in the papers this morning, the arrest of ten people in the USA on spy charges plus all the cloak and dagger world of passwords, message drops and being undercover. Yes, the photos too.
One of the people accused, according to The Times, sent messages back to Moscow inside otherwise open source images available on the internet. So today I’m sure someone will ask me how. The answer is complex and involves an awful lot of maths but it is perfectly possible. This field of mathematics is called steganography and I’m sure there are web sites somewhere that explain how it all works. We looked at it some years ago as a way of embedding data inside an image to enable copyright owners to prove, without doubt, that any given image was “theirs”. We dropped it as there were more manageable ways of achieving the same end.
If you’re tempted to add data to an image (but not encrypted to spy standards) just get to grips with metadata, you can easily add date, place, subject data and even a few personal comments.

Historypin

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-06-24T23:14:09+01:00

It’s a couple of weeks since the launch of Historypin, and our role as photo scanning partner. I’ve been following the publicity Google / We Are What We Do have been getting for this venture.
The response on dozens of blogs has been universally positive, exciting many people imagination about the role of photos to bring people together across generations. Many of these blogs have been by UK publishers but there has been significant interest from around the world.
Historypin prompted a lively debate in Australia about privacy, with many positive ideas about how good the concept is. But consistently people want more photos on the site. Well, the answer is in our own hands - put your photos on the site or better still send them to us so we can scan them for you.

Apple TV and Scanning

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-06-19T15:11:29+01:00

I’ll admit photo scanning is fundamentally dull. We scan photos all day and its only music that keeps us sane. Which is a shame because photos - scanned or otherwise - are such a tremendous source of enjoyment. Music and scanned photos combined are a powerful combination.
Enter Apple TV. Connect it to your TV, log onto your home wireless network, fire up iTunes and very quickly you have a tremendous outlet for your scanned photos, digital images and your favourite music. Using a very simple interface you can look at any of your photo albums (folders on your PC) either on a photo-by-photo basis or by pressing one button, as a slideshow. You can link this to a music playlist in iTunes and in a few seconds a collection of photos on your computer appears as a fantastic display on your lounge TV. Quick, easy and brilliant resolution.
Apple TV also lets you watch internet movies from YouTube, listen to music from your iTunes library, and view videos you can rent from iTunes Music Store.

Yes we can scan glasss

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-06-15T08:06:23+01:00

Amazing phone call yesterday, someone has come into possession of a couple of thousand glass plates taken in the early part of last century. Which prompted the question - can we scan glass plate images?
Technically we can. For 35mm its quite common to get the slide sandwiched between two tiny sheets of glass. No problem scanning those. We can scan bigger images in glass but due to the problem with newtons rings we’d need to do a test first.

Historypin

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-06-04T08:10:21+01:00

It’s official - 1Scan is the photo scanning service for Historypin, a clever new photo sharing service jointly developed with Google.
Yesterday we were invited to the launch event. Around 200 people gathered at the Royal Institution in London for talks about the service and demonstrations after. We tried hard to resist clicking on the page that links to our site, but you can by clicking on the 1Scan photo scanning page.
We have some great postcards produced to publicise Historypin and we’ll be sending those out with scanned work.

Historypin

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-05-30T11:33:48+01:00

From the Ingear section of today’s Sunday Times:-
“As with any digital advance, for every step forward by one company, there are dozens of smaller web outfits eager to enhance and customise the function. Historypin for example is a British partnership with Google that allows users to upload old photos of streets and buildings to create what it describes as a ‘digital time machine’. Call up a modern Street View shot and you can click on a building and drill down through its history, as seen in archive photographs enhanced by text reminisences from the people who worked in them.”

Welcome

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-05-27T21:38:33+01:00

Today we welcomed a new member of our photo scanning team - a new Coolscan scanner.
We need this for several reasons. First, it will help us keep pace with growing business volumes. Second, it adds to our ability to keep scanning slides and negatives should one of the other units fail. Finally Nikon aren’t making any more dedicated 35mm scanners so the chance to acquire one is hard to pass up.

Tiff? JPG?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-05-14T08:13:54+01:00

Simple question - when we can scan photos into either file format, why go for one rather than the other? And this applies to photo scanning, slide scanning in 35mm and medium format.
Let’s get rid of one of the “old wives tales” of photo scanning, that saving a file as a jpg ruins its quality. Well that may or may not have been true a few years ago but I don’t think anyone seriously worries about that now.
The main benefit of jpg files is that they are very much smaller. That can make a very big difference in the time it takes to open or edit a photo. Bigger files rapidly eat up CDs, DVDs or hard drives. Even with a powerful modern PC manipulating a TIFF image from, say a medium format negative, can be a significant task. Maybe OK if you’re just editing one image but suppose we scan 100 or more?
For the vast majority of not only our clients but scanning service users and photographers in general I’d say jpg is more than adequate. If you plan to do heavy editing and you have access to lots of computing horse power TIFF may be the option.

Hi8 to DVD Conversion

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-05-10T07:43:36+01:00

Fateful thing to say, as I did on Friday, “Haven’t seen many Hi8 tapes lately”. Just as well as our global HQ is presently stuffed with VHS tapes we’ve been converting. Two of the biggest tape to DVD conversion projects we’ve taken on.
To answer me we got a batch of Hi8 tapes in the post on Saturday morning, at least the postman was amused to get me out of bed before 08:00. Then on Sunday, thankfully in the afternoon, two calls just to check we’re still converting Hi8 to DVD. Yes, we are.
The other question asked was about taking the converted DVD containing the footage we’ve converted, and then turning that into a computer editable file. Yes, you can do this and you can download free software for either PCs or Macs that will do it for you. We recommend Handbrake, give it a try.
For our own purposes we use paid for software from Xilisoft. They have a gigantic range of PC, Mac software to rip DVDs into files ready to edit or play on virtually any platform including iPods and iPhones. One advantage of Xilisofts offerings is the catch-all term ease of use. Once you’ve got the hang of it you can quickly configure their code to rip DVDs into any format. Then there’s the elapsed time taken to convert a video. A two hour home movie tape can take up to 11 hours to convert if you use Handbrake on a less than modern PC. Even our multicore PCs struggle to get significantly under the 120 minute mark with Xilisoft but my gut feel is its around twice as fast as Handbrake. For us time is money, so Xilisoft got the vote.
If you’re thinking of ringing today yes, we’re still converting Hi8 to DVD, along with MiniDV, VHS-C and ordinary VHS.

Which scanner?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-05-06T09:39:22+01:00

We buy a lot of our equipment through Amazon. It’s the first place I look, not just when buying books but for computer kit too. They won my loyalty for life a couple of years ago when they were endlessly patient with the useless Nikon APS adaptors which shred their gears after one or two rolls of film.
I’ve bought a couple of scanners from them so every so often I get marketing emails telling me which scanners are popular. In fact I got one this morning, so which scanners are popular?
From the top ten six aren’t really scanners, they’re these multi function printers with a scanner tagged ontop. primarily aimed at document scanning they’re easy to sneer at from a “pro scanner” view point. Actually, they produce more than acceptable results. Every so often I read of someone asking how they can scan negatives or slides on one. The short answer is you can’t, to scan slides or negatives you need a light source above the target, which is not how these units operate. Simple photo scanning and they’ll be fine.
Two manufacturers take the other positions - Canon and Epson. Both manufacture what I’d call “serious” scanners but their top end scanners don’t appear in the listings. However the popular units do have the additional light source which will enable you to scan slides and negatives. If you look at the raw specs of these units you’ll get a pretty decent scanner at a modest price.
Why pay more? Well there’s the obvious of getting a higher quality image but beyond that there are two features worth investing in. Speed is the first, you’ll be amazed how long it takes to scan a collection of 35mm negatives or 35mm slides so it makes a big difference if you can do 8, 12 or more in a single batch. Second, the technology that automatically removes dust and scratches which will save you hours and hours in post processing. Epson use Kodak’s Digital ICE while Canon have their own alternative called FARE.

Photo Scanning Volumes

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-05-05T08:03:21+01:00

We get asked all sorts of questions, no problem with that, photo scanning is not something everyone knows much about. But whether it’s really basic (“Can you scan colour and black & white?”) or up to the highly technical (“How do you set a black point?”) one of the most frequent areas of questioning is how many photos can you scan?
At the moment we have a major job on, we’re scanning a family archive for a large family whose fortunes have left them dispersed around the world. We’ve done thousands of slides and negatives, just at the end of last week we started on the prints.
Anyone who has thought about scanning will tell you prints are the worst. Negatives and slides can often be batched up so you can do a strip, a batch of slides or maybe even a whole film roll in one session. But photos are often seen as a one at a time exercise. Yes, if you do that yourself you’ll quite possibly never get to the last photo album.
Thankfully we have a high speed photo scanner in the shape of Kodak’s s1220. Not only does it do a great job (specially in restoring faded colours) it scans very, very quickly.
So next time someone asks me how many we can do in a day I can tell them we did nearly 4,000 yesterday. We could have done more, but 4,000 high quality photo scans isn’t a bad days work.

Kodak - Photo Sharing

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-04-26T21:07:22+01:00

One of our greatest assets is Kodak - of course we don’t own Kodak, we just own some of their scanning technology. One of the best features of being connected with Kodak is the tremendous confidence our clients can have in our photo scanning service because we operate under the Kodak label.
Equally I’d have to say Kodak don’t have the racy, cutting edge image held by some companies. Kodak’s great but they’re not Facebook. But Kodak are about to launch a great new advertising campaign based around the theme of sharing. For us it’s a revelation, and very well timed. We scan photos, that’s the core of our business, but our clients typically want their pictures scanned so they can, yes, so they can share them. Thanks Kodak.

Photo Scanning Service - No1 in Switzerland

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-04-25T10:13:01+01:00

Photo scanning services are international - photos and digital photo files are the same the world over, no need to translate the language, rewrite a manual, a smiling face is a smiling face in London, Lisbon, Los Angeles or Lagos.
We have photo scanning clients from several parts of Europe. We’ve scanned photos mailed in from Belgium, France, Germany and part so Scandinavia ( Norway, Finland and Sweden ). One great feature of billing in PayPal is that we can invoice in sterling and clients can pay in their local currency.
We haven’t targeted our marketing at Europe, we focus our efforts on the UK, but I did notice on Friday that for some reason Google had ranked us No 1 for “photo scanning” and “photo scanning service” in Switzerland. I was surprised as I’d expected those places would go to a site describing photo scanning in French, German or Italian. Thanks Google, it was nice of you.
You can imagine my surprise when the post on Saturday included a parcel of photos to be scanned from a client in Switzerland. Our first Swiss photo scanning order.

International Print Service

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-04-22T08:00:33+01:00

Photo scanning, negative or slide scanning - it is usually done for a reason. I often think of “fancy” applications like acrylic mounted images but in reality the most popular use of a scanned photo is simply to produce other photos. Yes, photo scanning is often a gateway to photo reprints.
What if the people who want reprints are abroad? Well, if you take advantage of our free online album service you can give access to your images to anyone you choose. Once online they can pick the images they like, the size and quantity they need and place an order. Our service has a worldwide fulfilment capacity so they’ll get what they want wherever they may be. Oh, and they can pay for reprints directly.

Photo Scanning - the Olympics?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-04-21T08:08:21+01:00

Photo scanning - what’s so great about that? I was floored by the question, in all honesty ensuring thousands of photos run smoothly through our scanners isn’t the most exciting thing you can spend your life doing. But after scratching my head I came up with some ideas.
First - volume. OK, it’s dull, but we suffer the dullness so you don’t have to. We are great facilitators of thousands of images per day moving from dull old photos to sparkling digital files. And they’re all the right way round.
Second - we revive faded colours. Time takes its toll but with the press of a button we can bring back much of what faded away.
Third - on line albums. Increasingly people are pleased with the online albums we create for them. Looking at the site stats they’re using these free photo albums to share memories all over the world. Yes, and they’re free.
Fourth - customer feedback. We like it when we get positive feedback about the photos we scan. We know that going from a hard copy photo into a digital photo world enables people to enjoy their images in new, creative ways.
OK, photo scanning will never be an olympic sport but it does deliver real benefits to a lot of people, and we help thousands of photos each week become safe from fire, flood and disaster.

You and The Queen on Stamps?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-04-10T19:15:10+01:00

Standing in the queue in the Post Office I was distracted by their rolling display, and something they call Smilers. It’s the most brilliant idea.
You can find out more at the Royal Mail web site (royalmail.com) but in essence you supply an image and they’ll print that image next to a proper postage stamp. You stick them both side by side on your letter, in great colours too. What a brilliant way to add a personal dimension to your mail.

Bridge to Photo Smiles

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-04-05T10:28:52+01:00

We scan through thousands of photos each week and it’s great to know our work is appreciated. Earlier today while looking through our website logs I came across this post on a client’s blog, which is on the Ecatsbridge website..

It is the day of the Portland pairs, the National Mixed Pairs Championship, which is scored by ECatsBridge, so even though it is a Sunday we are here in case we are needed ... which is a bit of a pity as it is a lovely sunny day. So I am dealing with some emails first, but then while I wait and I am going to do a bit of gardening (with my mobile phone at my side!) then spend some time tagging photographs. We got loads of old pictures scanned recently – a great company called 1Scan (http://www.1scan.co.uk/) ... some of the pictures had a dreadful colour cast and they fixed them beautifully. So now I have to get them into some semblance of order so we can find the ones we want !

Photo Scan with Grain Reduction

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-03-22T08:02:04+00:00

We’re in the memories business - we scan photos that mean a lot to people, and in the case of 35mm slide scanning images our clients may not have seen for years. In most cases our clients are very happy with the results.

I wouldn’t say the call was from an unhappy client but it was unusual because the client had a working slide projector alongside a new digital projector so he could see the original 35mm slide and the scan we’d done last week. In the scanned image he could see grain (in the sky areas) whereas in the true projected 35mm image he could see no grain (just an unbroken spread of blue). Why?

A long conversation followed, one I won’t try to summarise. It is an odd fact of high quality digital imagery that scanned 35mm originals often show more grain than appears from a projected image or from a print. It’s hard to get your head around but grain can be more visible in a 4000 dpi scan than in a 2000 dpi scanned photo.

In this case the solution was to run the original scan through a great piece of software I often use for my own images, it is Neat Image. Versions are available for Mac and Windows. It does a great job of smoothing out grain in large areas such as expanses of sky. I emailed the corrected slide over and in a few minutes our client was as happy as we want you all to be. I’ve tried the built-in filters in Photoshop but I think Neat Image is better, producing a less “waxy” effect in skin tones, and well worth the modest cost of the package.

Photo Montage

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-03-16T23:16:34+00:00

Earlier today I spent some time with a client for whom we scanned a couple of thousand photos. Part of the conversation related to his success with photo face recognition using Aperture on the Apple Mac, but we also touched on photobooks and an innovative gift he’d created for an elderly relative.

Inspired by an old favourite family photo he wanted to create a formal looking group shot, with around 15 “people” - I put it that way because these “people” are in fact the same person. The baby, the toddler, the teenager, the young adult, the proud parent are all the same person. It’s a clever idea, it’s based on a number of design elements. The backdrop was to be a photo of the family home extracted from a 35mm slide of the family home, dating back to the 1950s. The individual images of the person were taken from multiple different photos, the intention being to use Photoshop to cut / paste. Off he set, until he ran into problems.

For example, the images had to be scaled. In fact most of the pictures made the subject look about the same size so the kiddy shots had to be shrunk and the adult images scaled up. Then it seemed that these people were strangely floating in space, oddly disconnected with the ground they were intended to be standing on. While it was a brilliant idea execution proved to be far harder then a willing amateur was able to deliver. Oh, and the shot was getting very, very wide.

He had to admit defeat and managed to track down a skilled Photoshop image editor overseas. He took the scans, did some Photoshop magic and created a great composite family grouping of a well grounded set of images of the same person. Complete with lighting adjustment and shadows. The final image ended up being nearly three feet wide, making a stunning wall hanging photo, but also posing a major problem. By this time the birthday deadline was fast approaching and they didn’t want to risk air mail from down under. They found a printer within driving distance of my client who ran off a copy of the print on a massive Epson printer.

Result - a great gift, an excellent bit of Photoshop magic, and an example of international team work made possible by the internet.

We're Back

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-02-20T14:59:37+00:00

Just a quick note to say thanks to all those who rang to say 1Scan.co.uk website was down.

Yes, it was planned although it did take longer than I’d hoped. It’s part of our plan to add photobooks to our offerings and I know this bit of pain will be worthwhile.

Why Aperture 3 from Apple MATTERS

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-02-11T20:55:42+00:00

You may not have noticed but Apple have just announced a new version of their photo organising / editing software, Aperture. You might not use but this is important, I’ll tell you why.

Apple is a market savvy company. Just look at the iPod, those cool MacBook laptops, all that brilliant placement in trendy films and TV shows; Apple knows technology and what people want. So when their flagship product includes a raft of new features it’s worth taking a closer look. Two areas are, in my opinion, are really interesting for you and me, “ordinary” photo collectors and photographers.

Like me you’ve got photos (digital) that you’ve taken recently, another batch that you took using film or slides that you’ve had digitised. Then there might be some family photos you’ve inherited, plus all those you’ve been sent by family members - 1,000 - 2,000?

What’s on them? Yes, loads of landscapes but mainly people - faces. That means that the main questions you ask are who? and where? To help you answer these questions Aperture now offers two features, facial recognition and geo-tagging.

Facial recognition is simple in concept but difficult to implement. The ideal is that you take one image and add the name of the person in the photo. Apple’s software then scans through your image library and identifies all other photos of that person either alone or in a group. Think how long it would take you to do that by hand. Work your way through your key family members and in a couple of hours all your portraits are “tagged”. That means you can quickly identify all the photos in your collection of the people who are nearest and dearest.

Geo-tagging means you can drop your images onto a map and Aperture makes a note of where that photo was taken. Again, a quick and effective way of adding vital data.

Put the two features together and you can brilliantly answer all those who and where questions.

Just now Apple are ahead of the wave when it comes to feature rich photographic applications, but expect it to appear in more products in the coming months.

Scanning Time?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-02-08T08:49:35+00:00

We're often asked how quickly we can scan a batch of photos, invariably the answer is much, much quicker than even the most dedicated traditional scanner operator. Let's take a batch of 500 photos, and a decent scanner being operated by someone familiar with the scanner and its software. Every time a scan is made the lid has to be lifted, photo(s) placed on the glass, and then the scan(s) made and the digital files saved.

If it takes as little as 1 minute per photo that gives a simple elapsed time of 8 hours and 20 minutes. If you add in a few minutes each hour to rest those straining eyes you could easily be talking about 10 hours. Very few people will sit scanning for that length of time, and probably don't have the time anyway. If you could manage a couple of hours a day you’re looking at a week of lost evenings or a solid weekend of grind. Even the most dedicated family member or photo hobbyist will find this a tedious burden.

From recent experience 500 photos isn’t a massive library. Last Thursday we were given a batch of 1100 photos that need to be scanned ready for our client on Tuesday. Yes, it has been done - it was polished off on Friday. DIY that would have been some 17 to 20 hours of work for a busy Mum with a young family. I’d suggest that a scanning bill for £110 is a modest price to avoid all that grind and lost family time.

APS Film Scanning

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-01-31T13:06:32+00:00

I still shake at the memory - a couple of years ago a client asked us to scan about 50 APS films. We had never scanned APS before but I knew Nikon offered an adaptor that converted our Coolscans into APS film scanners.

So at some considerable expense I bought one.

It did three frames before giving up the ghost. I got a second, that did better, almost reaching the end of a film before expiring. The third scanned a couple of films (rather slowly I thought) before it too headed to the great APS graveyard. Nikon, Amazon and their pro supplier in London were very good about it but I ended up wishing we’d never agreed to scan the things in the first place. So I removed APS from our shopping list of capabilities.

As soon as you do that you know the demand will come back even if just to torment you, as it has, consistently. Finding a solution has been very difficult, APS is virtually a dead technology and dedicated APS scanners are yesterdays news. So we scratched our heads and we’ve come up with a solution.

So APS film scanning is back on the 1Scan film scanning menu, and our APS price list. And we now smile happily when APS cartridges arrive in the mail.

Photobooks

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-01-13T20:41:15+00:00

No, we don’t do photobooks - at the moment. But wait ...

Earlier today I met a company that produces photobooks, and I was blown away. They’re a gem of a team, a fantastic blend of traditional book publishing, craftsmanship and decades of attention to the detail of making high quality books.

Yet here they are grabbing new technology in the shape of top quality digital image printing and combining it with their book building tools. It’s a fantastic combination and the books are superb.

I’d love to be able to offer our clients - and those for our free photo scanning service - the opportunity to get their scans made into top quality photobooks. So watch this space.

Alternatives to Scanning

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-01-12T18:26:17+00:00

Had a call from a potential client asking for advice - she had some precious photos that a relative wanted to take overseas. Naturally she was reluctant to let them go, but couldn’t afford the cost of Royal Mail Special Delivery both ways and scanning. What could be the alternative?

We came up with a couple of ideas. First take the photos to a local photocopier and use that to make copies. It’s quick, low cost and if the copier is decent the reproduction should be passable. Obviously this doesn’t deliver digital images it would produce a copy of the images which could be taken abroad safely.

The second option would be to use a digital camera to take a photo of each page of the album. A decent camera will focus quite close so you will get a photo of a photo. The key to getting a reasonable result is having a good camera and getting the lighting right. This cold winter light should give a decent result.

Nikon Woe Gone

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2010-01-05T08:14:34+00:00

The Nikon medium format scanner arrived, and has gone.

It was dead on arrival. That’s the risk you take with secondhand equipment but luckily the vendor was one of the decent people on eBay and we were able to resolve the issue very quickly. But that’s not what I wanted to say. While it was here I contacted a Nikon authorised repair shop and asked for a ballpark figure for fixing it - this is the story.

The unit powered on and went through its POST (power on self test). Green slow flashing lights to begin then a short series of rapid green flashes before returning to solid green. I have been told by the Nikon repair man that any pulse of rapid green flashing during POST indicates a fault. Flashing at the end indicates logic board issues.

My computers could tell a Nikon Coolscan 8000 was attached but nothing could be done to bring it to life.

The Coolscan 8000 has a main computer board holding its logic and that was most likely the cause of the failure. To replace that would cost some £350, plus, £100 labour plus shipping / transport there and back. Oh, and don’t forget VAT now back up to 17.5%. So the repair bill could easily be over £500. That’s not far short of what these units sell for on eBay anyway. Compare that with the cost of a comparable top-flight Epson and draw your own conclusion, I did.

Nikon Coolscan Medium Format Scanner

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-12-15T23:06:41+00:00

We’ve just taken delivery of a new Nikon scanner, the big brother of the Coolscans we have used for the last couple of years to scan 35mm slides and negatives.

Medium format scanning has proved to be a steady source of business for us, and as so many professional photographers used this type of material we need to deliver top quality scans. Thankfully the Epson has done that, but the price is time. Of course a medium format scan into a tiff file results in a big file, and that takes a long time. Getting three or four scans out in an afternoon isn’t unusual, particularly when we use Digital ICE.

A couple of weeks ago we were approached by a pro photographer wanting a substantial archive of M/F slides and negatives scanned. It would be a great project, but at Epson speed it would take a very long time. So that’s why we’ve decided to invest in the new scanner. I’m hoping we’ll be able to offer a better service to our M/F clients.

Google Wave

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-11-28T15:22:50+00:00

Some months ago I applied for a Google Wave account. I had read an article saying Google had created something which was intended to be what email ought to be if it were invented today (not some decades ago when I joined the computer industry). So that’s to be Google Wave - email for 2010.

Well, today my invite came through. I feel like the owner of the first phone must have felt. It’s great technology but I’ve got nobody to call. So instead I’ve been looking at the various tutorials Google have put on Youtube. I’m in part excited and confused. There’s been only one element I’ve completely understood - photo sharing.

For the vast majority of clients for whom we scan photos returning their images by post or courier is fine, but for some it’s urgent. For many our service is the first step on the way to doing something creative with their scans. In many cases that’s an online photo album.

For over a year we’ve been using drop.io - yes that’s actually a web address. There you can quickly create a website onto which you can upload a whole range of things, photos, text etc etc. We’ve used this with great success when people have wanted scans back quickly. What’s more, it is free.

Lately, and mainly in connection with our free photo scanning offering, I’ve looked into more powerful photo sharing functions. I looked at the sites offered by Kodak, Nikon, Flickr and others such as SmugMugs. For the mix of features 1Scan clients will need we decided to go with Zenfolio.

Back to Google Wave. One of the most impressive elements of their demos is the ability to share images in real time. As with any demo, it demonstrates well; how it goes in practice I don’t know. But I’m keen to try. So if you’re a Google Wave-r add me in - jeff.underwood@googlewave.com

Let’s Wave.

Zenfolio

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-11-10T23:19:55+00:00

For the last few weeks we've been working on a major enhancement of our services, and central to that is an online photo storage service called Zenfolio.

What we're planning is to deliver scanned images not just via CD or DVD as we do now but to put clients scans onto a secure website. This will deliver a longterm backup of your photo scans should the CD be lost or damaged, it will quickly and simply allow friends and relatives to view an online photo album containing those scanned photos.

Additionally this will facilitate easy access to a range of gifts customised with your photos - gifts such as mousemats, T-shirts, jigsaw puzzles. And there's also a wide range of standard prints, enlargements and canvas prints.

More soon.

Resolution for Photobooks

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-11-05T20:38:04+00:00

Earlier today we were asked what is the best resolution for a client wanting photos scanned for an online book printing service called Blurb.

Having checked their website they recommend a resolution up to 300 dpi. Our standard resolution is 600 dpi - what should we do?

Actually I think the service would be more than able to print from our 600 dpi scans, but the easier solution is to scan at 300 dpi. Problem solved. So, if you are using an external service and want 300 rather than 600 dpi, just let us know.

Don't, if you value your photos ....

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-10-30T18:22:10+00:00

How do you know that was you, the kids and Aunt Mabel on holiday in 1981? Probably by writing on the back of the print. No problem there - until you reach for a ballpoint, felt tip marker pen, or many other nasty devices.

First, the ink can easily permeate the backing material on the print and react with the dyes that make the image. Resulting in staining and unsightly marks on the photos.

Second, the ink can take a very long time to dry. So if that print is put back in the stack the ink can be transfered onto the face of the print above it in the pile. Same result, another print spoiled.

If you must write on the back of a print (and the temptation is probably irresistable) please stick to the humble pencil. Don't reach for a biro or a marker pen.

Your scan, my scan, one scan?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-10-25T23:25:26+00:00

I could bore for England on the subject of scanning. There are no short answers in my book when it comes to scanning.

But I struggled to know where to begin when I was asked a simple question - why is your scan different to mine? This was asked by a client, we scanned around 500 old photos last week. He was kind enough to say he liked ours better and wanted to know how he could match them should he scan his own images at home.

Well - scanner hardware varies, the image capture and light generating components all have a bearing on final scan. Then there's the software, and the intention of the tech / marketing guys who set everything up. Of course the scanner operator can over-ride the settings. Put it all together and there's an infinite variety of options available.

Here's my take. I think our bulk scanning service offers a warmer colouring than your originals may have. The Epson flatbed is noticeably colder in comparison.

The Nikons are much more objective on negatives, producing an image much closer to the data on the negative. Slide scanning is (I think) giving slightly deeper colours; Kodachromes can be very warm in comparison.

So what? Not a lot really - but please ask us to do some samples for you, using your material, then you can draw your own conclusions.

JPG or JPEG 2000?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-09-23T08:11:08+01:00

We've been asked by a potential client if we can offer scan in JPG 2000 or JPEG 2000 format. The answer is yes.

If you'd like your jpgs as JPEG 2000 then just ask. We've always been able to supply this format for medium format and print scans, now we're extending this to cover all scans. Just ask, we'll do the rest.

The later jpg format offers better resolution on compression compared with "ordinary" jpg files.

Nikon SF-210

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-09-09T07:51:49+01:00

I've ben asked about our experience in 35mm slide scanning using the Nikon automatic slide feeder attachment, SF-210. Typically the question comes from someone who's frustrated with their unit, or wanting justification for spending over £500 on a bit of plastic having already spent the best part of £1,000 on a scanner.

The problem is slide jams. Yes, they happen to us too. The best preventative measure is to watch and listen to the unit, you can hear it as it struggles to feed a slide. Nimble fingers can help it on its way.

The best way to prevent jams is to get the gate adjustment correct via the knurled knob on the side of the slide feeder. Sort your slides so you have a batch of the same thickness and you'll be well on the way to smooth scanning.

Decent plastic mounts scan well, cardboard less so but generally OK. The worst are bent cardboard or card that has become "fluffy" over the years, the thicker card does catch on the mechanism.

People focus on the mechanics of the feeder and yes jams cost us time too. But what costs us more time is the rather hopeless way Nikon's sacnner software handles jams. Resetting that takes much longer and its a noticeable thorn in the side of smooth 35mm slide scanning.

Concentrate

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-09-05T18:53:37+01:00

Sometimes clients ask for advice - the most frequent topics are creating slideshows and assembling photo albums. I had their questions in mind when last weekend we vistited friends (that's not the Royal we, they're more my wife's friends so we went together).

"Would you like to see our photoalbums?" Genuinely I could say yes, and two Bonusprints albums were pulled off the coffee table. I started to flick through the images. Oh dear.

First impression, this is boring. Each page had been crammed with photos, consequently each one was the same size and very square. Now square is hard to compose for, and that did nothing for the images.

Second, this is a mess. What they'd done, and I can see it seemed like a good idea at the time, was get bound all the photos they'd taken this summer. They'd taken a trip to St Petersburg, there was some family celebration, a weekend away in Lille, and a relative held a retirement party. And more.

My brain was in overload, it was just image after image, we jumped from one location to another, from a Russian square to a marquee in Reading. I quickly lost the thread of what was going on. OK, it's easy to criticise but how would I have done it better.

Just concentrate - on one subject. Our Trip to Imperial Russia would have made a great album, and the viewer would experience the warm glow of knowing each page helps you explore a brilliant holiday. They had enough shots to fill an album and I suspect if you go to St petersburg you'll be hard pressed to take a bad photo. Then selectively invest in a few enlarged images. Go on, throw caution to the wind and have a single image on one page. That would have made a big impact.

What of the second album? I'd say the same should apply. Have one album, albeit smaller, for the events they'd taken shots. I would have skipped old Fred's retirement bash, but a few snaps of their kids over the summer would have been worth flicking through.

Next time I open iPhoto to compose a photoalbum I'm going to go for the event, the whole event, nothing but the event.

Kodachrome RIP

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-06-23T07:48:19+01:00

Spent most of yesterday scanning some pretty ancient slides, old and in poor condition is a rotten combination. Thankfully our scanners have some built-in tools that help, notably Digital ICE which is fantastic at removing major dust and scratches. As I chugged through the pile my little heart sank every time I came across a Kodachrome because Digital ICE sadly doesn’t work on this type of film. Scanning 35mm slide, you come across a lot of Kodachrome.

Having a love / hate relationship with the film didn’t stop me feeling a pang of remorse when I read in The Times this morning that after a production run of 74 years Kodak are withdrawing Kodachrome. It seems Kodachrome dates back to 1935 and originally appeared as 16mm movie film but then made the transition to 35mm slide stock. Over 100 million rolls of Kodachrome are said to have been made, and in America a state park has been named after it. The Zapruder film of the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 was shot on Kodachrome too. Somewhat oddly it seems to have been loved as much by professional photographers as by hobbyists. It must be one of the few truly global brand identities ranking alongside that of Kodak.

The Times quotes a 35mm slide as having 20 megapixels of data but they don’t give the source of that, interesting to me as that’s one of the highest figures I’ve seen for 35mm data capacity. Alongside the article is a glowing tribute to the quality, colours and warmth of Kodachrome, positioning it as the vinyl record equivalent of photography.

Paul Simon’s song “Kodachrome” made it to number 2 in the US pop charts in 1973, a song I still have on my iPod and often pops up on the radio. Apparently Dwayne’s Photo of Parsons, Kansas will process Kodachrome until 2010, at which point it’s a final goodbye to what must have been the world’s favourite film.

Totally Incorrect

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-05-16T10:19:06+01:00

When I saw a blog mentioned with the name of Totally Incorrect (www.totallyincorrect.com) I just had to take a look. I’m very glad I did, here’s why.

I’ve been asked to put together some slideshows for clients, two of whom wanted their weddings covered. David Holliday who writes Totally Incorrect also runs a wedding event / photography business called Unique Weddings, so on the main page of his blog he has a slideshow style clip promoting his service. As with any slideshow it’s a simple mix of photos and music. I just loved it, so I suggest you hop on over to totallyincorrect.com to take a look, but first let me explain why I liked it.

First, it works. If somebody did this of my wedding I know my wife and I would love it. We’d look at it time and again.

Second, there’s great inspiration in the shots David has taken. The still life of the bride’s shows, the table top with all the name labels. Would you have thought of taking those shots? I know the shoes my wife wore are important to her - 30+ years down the track they’re still at the back of the wardrobe.

What really hit me was the choice of music. The choice and David’s bravery in the way he uses it. To appreciate what I’m saying you’re going to have to watch all the way through to the very end to know what I mean. My choice for music would be classical, OK I can trot out some sort of logical justification for that but really nothing else ever crosses my mind. David’s choice isn’t classical, although it did sound to me as if it had classical overtones. Throughout it works, it’s a great choice but sorry I don’t know what the track is.

The bravery comes in at the end. He lets the track run through his images right into the very quiet ending. I bet 99.99% of us (me included) would have chopped out the quiet ending. That would be mundane, predictable and safe. David took a bold step and it really works. I bet if you ran that for the bride and groom you would hear their hearts beat as the clip ends.

It’s under four minutes. It’s great - and any one of us can learn from it. Go check it out NOW.

In Case of Fire?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-05-03T17:15:02+01:00

What would you grab?

The American insurance company Chubb Corp. commissioned a poll which found that nearly half would grab a family photo album, while a fifth would reach for money. They surveyed 1,000 Americans and found that 13% would take a laptop, 7% would bring their pet and 2% would pack their jewelry.

One third of respondents said they don't store valuable documents in a fire-resistant safe or at an off-premise location. But 73% said they've cleared their roof or gutters of leaves and debris, and 70% have removed dead or flammable plants and trees from around their homes.

Still, a fifth said they haven't replaced the batteries in their smoke detectors.

Battle of the Sexes?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-04-24T08:24:07+01:00

Facing a long flight to New York recently I went into the bookshop at Heathrow to invest in a couple of books. Just as well I did, American Airlines promptly cancelled our flight so we had four extra hours to kill until Virgin could rescue us and we were on our way.

One of the books was “Fl!p” by Peter Sheahan. maybe it should be Flip but it’s Fl!p on the arty red cover. I don’t expect a modern business book to mention a photo scanning service, and this is no exception, but it does mention the different attitudes men and women have to photos. The suggestion was that men are content with digital images while women want a physical image they can hand around. Not sure that’s true but I can see where he’s coming from.

When we got back Laura, who’d been managing the show while we were away, said she’d had a call from a client whose scanned photos hadn’t arrived in the mail. I had a message to ring their home number, which I did. There was nobody in so I left a message on their answering service. I explained that I would create an extra copy of the CD with their scanned photos and mail it to them that day.

Next day I received two calls within minutes of each other. First, Mr Client who said he’d received a text message from his wife to say what was in the mail. Thanks, he said, for the second CD, but the original package had now turned up. However it’s very useful to have a second copy of the CD which he was going to send to his brother. CD, CD, digital images, thanks.

Then Mrs Client rang, so happy that her original photos hadn’t been lost. How worried she’d been when told they’d gone out a day or two earlier, how she’d fretted she might never see them again, what a relief the prints have now arrived. Prints, prints, prints, thanks.

OK, just one small example. But it does support Peter Sheahan’s suggestion, in this case the woman was keen to get the prints back, while her husband was happy enough with the digital versions.

Jar Gallery

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-02-23T11:25:09+00:00

I like photo prints just as much as anybody, without prints we wouldn’t have a major chunk of our business which is indeed scanning prints for people. But I do like the idea of sharing photos and scanning is very much about being able to share - often across continents.

Prints are there to be enjoyed, yet all too often they live in obscurity at the back of a drawer. I really liked this idea and I’m not too proud to admit I came across it on an American website - using glass jars as photo frames. So I dug out an old marmalade jar, thankfully it had been through our dishwasher (Brentwood Council won’t recycle dirty glass) and just slotted a print inside it. I was lucky as the print immediately slipped neatly into the flat side of the jar, no scissors and trimming needed. I put the jar on the window sill and it took on life with the light behind it.

I then took the photo out and turned it round, of course you want the opening of the jar down to stop it trapping the dust (don’t you?). I was quite pleased with the result, for no cost and about five minutes time. I think if I’d dug out three or four photos I could have made a nice family group. Perhaps if your could line a jar with some protective plastic you might be able to make a decorative and useful present.

When the children were younger I think they’d have enjoyed making cheap but appreciate presents for grandparents, or perhaps this could be one of those primary school projects for Mother’s Day.

DPI - How much is enough?

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-02-12T08:00:34+00:00

From time to time we get asked about something called “dpi” - dots per inch. It’s a technical measure of how much data is used to convert a physical (analogue) image into a digital file. In some ways its easy to answer but often it gets very technical.

The easy answer is “enough”, and if you’re not technically minded feel free to click away now.

For the more geeky among us our basic print scanning service can deliver 300 dpi, 600 dpi or 1200 dpi. Let’s start with the original photos that we scan, they are printed at what is in digital terms 300 dpi. If you want to view images on a computer or TV scanning at 300 dpi will give you a more than acceptable result and will load pretty well in a photoframe. If you make reprints of the file at or a bit bigger than the original the image will be fine.

At 600 dpi you have a much bigger file, if you remember your geometry it’s four times bigger so that will be tougher to load into a photoframe, somewhat slower to load on a PC or DVD player but will deliver prints capable of being enlarged.

What about 1200 dpi? Yes, we can offer this but there’s a big “but”. We’ve done tests, as have a few clients, and in viewing terms on PC, TV/DVD, on Apple TV or similar photo streaming systems, there is no benefit. Technically your files will be 16 times bigger than those at 300 dpi giving you a big jpg file. It’s slow to load and hard to handle. Compared to scanning speeds of 300 dpi or 600 dpi at 1200 dpi you think the scanner has broken down it goes so slowly. For that reason we would typically charge more for 1200 dpi photo print scans. Frankly, it’s not worth the bother.

Yet if you look elsewhere you’ll see we offer very much higher dpi rates with jpg and tiff files when scanning negatives. How do we reconcile this? Well it’s all to do with the size of the original. Take a 35mm slide or negative, that’s very small so to get a decent size image or print a degree of enlargement is necessary. If we scanned that at 300 dpi it wouldn’t enlarge, so a four times enlargement would still only be a modest print (around postcard sized) and you’d need 1200 dpi for that. For that reason our Home slide and negative scanning runs at 2,000 dpi.

Is there a maximum? Well many people have suggested that the maximum amount of data that can be extracted from a 35mm slide or negative is 4,000 dpi. Nikon, one of the foremost names in photography and the maker of our 35mm scanners offer a maximum of 4,000 dpi on both their 35mm and medium format scanners. So that’s why we don’t go beyond 4,000 dpi.

What if the client is adamant in wanting a 4,000 dpi scan of an A4 sized print? I can’t think why it would be wanted or needed but we’re service business and in the final analysis the customer is always right.

Photo Security

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-02-11T10:56:48+00:00

I was scanning photos and listening to BBC Essex yesterday and was struck by an item on the awful fires in Australia. An Essex woman was desperately trying to contact her brother and his family who lived in one of the worst hit areas, naturally she feared the worst.

The tale had a happy ending, the BBC managed to track down the lost brother who was safe and well. Brother and sister had spoken and the brother was interviewed about his experience. What struck me was what he said he’d picked up the moment they got the instruction to evacuate his house immediately. First was a leather jacket (to help protect him from the fire) and third was “important documents”.

Second was his family photos. From a personal and professional perspective I can understand that, but I also have conversations with people planning to digitise their family photo archive, people who would find it hard to assemble all their photos in several hours. So what we would we, thankfully away from the risk of bush fires, do if faced with flood or someother British disaster?

I can smugly say all my photos are safely backed up online thanks to Apple and MobileMe. Digital files can be recovered instantly, even if I lost my computers as long as I could get internet access I could download my jpgs and re-instate my photo library. You could do the same, but you have to act now.

Improving Photos

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-02-02T09:43:28+00:00

Last week we did some scanning, a lot of scanning, so come Friday evening we had watched thousands of images run through the scanners. Some were from professional photographers but the vast majority were from people like me - keen amateur snappers just wanting to capture life’s precious moments. But it was a lot of jpgs, quite a few tiffs and a good few miles of photo paper.

Relaxing weekend, met up with friends and relatives at a christening where the conversation turned to photography. What, was the question, can the ordinary person do to get better photos?

Having stood looking at the photos slide their way into the mouth of Mr Nikon, Mr Kodak and Mr Epson one simple step was obvious. When taking a photo simply move closer to the subject. Doesn’t matter if its and individual, a small group or a formal wedding image, most people just have too much photographic ‘noise’ around the main subject and as a result the picture is disappointing. Is it meant to be a group shot or a view of the church?

If you’re taking a photo just move one or two steps closer to the subject before you put the camera to your eye; if you have a zoom facility zap straight in then gently come out until the view screen shows only the subject. If you have taken the picture already (maybe its been scanned or it’s a digital photo) open it in your photo editing program and look for the Crop function. That will enable you to cut out all the extra, distracting bits that detract from the photo. Cut it out - in this case less is always more.

Photoframe Mystery

jeff.underwood@gmail.com — 2009-01-29T23:21:03+00:00

We had a call from a lady who’d been given a photoframe for Christmas. She asked if we could scan some photos so she could see them on the frame, we went through the technical spec (jpg, dpi level) and she asked if we could do colour (yes), black and white (yes), both black & white and colour in the same batch (yes). And yes we would turn them all the right way round.

She had a very particular requirement, that the photos (of a cruise around the baltic states) appeared in the right order. We explained we could do that. A few days later the photos arrived, neatly labelled with Post-it notes and tied in a bundle with elastic bands. We took great care to scan the photos in exactly that order, put them onto a USB drive and sent them back.

The client rang to say she was happy, but you could hear the but in her voice. The but being the photos looked great but didn’t show in the desired order. Why?

I have a Philips photoframe and that can be set to show images in a random order. We talked on the phone and established that wasn’t the problem. There followed a couple of days of head scratching, lots of trials and a frustrating number of false dawns. Then we managed to find the solution.

We had scanned the photos in the right order, and numbered them accordingly. But our system generates a long file name. When we truncated the file names down to two digits the photos popped up in the right order. And we’d learnt a lot more about photoframes.