I’m Mr May
January 5th, 2009 Posted in Birds, Competition, Dublin, Good news, Ireland, Photography
A few months ago I was lucky enough to have one of my photos chosen in the Top Oil Calendar competition for 2009. Well the calendars arrived recently along with a nicely framed copy of above photograph and a nice voucher which found a new home quite quickly!
Check out all the photos in the 2009 calendar. I must say the printed versions of some of them didn’t do them justice. I recently printed quite a few photos and thought they came out a lot darker than expected. It looks like the same thing happened for these calendars. Printing digital photos seems to be a bit hit and miss when it comes to the brightness and colours or is it just me?
10 Responses to “I’m Mr May”
By Kevoto on Jan 6, 2009
Congrats – it’s a really nice shot. It must have taken a while to get one that was sharp!
I still haven’t mastered the art of printing photos – it’s interesting that they came out darker for you too because it’s usually the same complaint with mine. I’ve never had photos come back brighter than expected!
By Donal on Jan 6, 2009
Thanks Kevin. I actually got that photo on one of my first attempts and couldn’t re-create it on further attempts. It’s something I try every now and again but the background colours on this are still my favourite.
By Kate on Jan 9, 2009
I did wonder what the rest of the entry would contain when I read the title! Great panning work though, and I agree…the colours are amazing!
So how do you find your 70-200mm lens – do you use it on the 400D?
By ryan on Jan 12, 2009
Well done, great shot!
By Barry Montgomery on Jan 20, 2009
hey donal,
I’m interested in using your photographs for a new music magazine, could you drop us a line at [email removed], much appreciated.
Regards
Barry
By Jamie Lawrence on Feb 3, 2009
Congrats on getting the picture published. I received some of the Top calendars for entering and yours in certainly one of the best shots there.
I had a photo in the guide dogs for the blind calendar last year and wasn’t too happy with how the reproduction came out either…
By Donal on Feb 4, 2009
Thanks Kate, Ryan, Jamie.
Nice photoblog there Jamie!
By evamonkey on Feb 22, 2009
RE colour and brightness of pictures. The issue you have is a common one. The first thing you need to do is accept that the look of an image on your monitor has no bearing on how it will look printed.
The brightness and contrast of your monitor are factory set or may have been tweaked by you, but the truth is, neither will show true colour. Your monitor will also have a colour cast known as temprature, literally tinting images warm or cool depending on settings.
The solution to all this is to have colour calibration hardware. I would recommend a pantone huey or huey pro. This will calibrate your brightness contrast and gamma as well as correcting temprature.
http://www.amazon.com/Pantone-MEU101-huey/dp/B000CR78C4
If you use photoshop you will also have to go into the my programs start up folder and delete the adobe gamma shortcut there to stop it messing with your settings. Hope this helps.
The last puzzle piece is that when looking on screen, you are looking at absolute whites. If the paper you print on is anything less than brilliant white, with a printer capable of brilliant black, you are going to lose a small quantity of brightness and contrast.
By Donal on Feb 22, 2009
Thanks for the input, evamonkey. I kinda guessed that there would be some sort of calibration needed. I’ll have to invest in one of those to get this right.