Our “Consumer/Amateur Photographer” Experiment - Snapshot Prints

Since starting the lab, I have been deluged with requests from snapshooters and other amateur and consumer image makers for less expensive, yet green, 4x6 up to 8x12 prints. Being a high-end custom lab we have been focusing exclusively on discerning and demanding artists, photographers, art buyers/art consultants, galleries and museums. Our museum quality work demands time, labor, impressive color management, skill and only the finest, most archival materials.

We have recently decided to create an experiment - the world’s first virtually 100% green snapshot print service for amateur photographers and consumers (and, coincidentally, they also make great proofs for professionals). We launched the experimental service quietly with the merger and new name EcoVisualLab. We are now offering 4x6-inch non archival prints for as little as $1.00 each and archival prints for as little as $1.50. Larger 8x12-inch prints cost $4.50 each and $6.50 respectively. We’re carefully evaluating the impact on our workload as the process, though not custom and more automated, is still far too labor intensive to be scaled. If, however, demand seems to be great, we’ll look at alternative automated ways of accomplishing this.

To see more, visit http://www.ecovisuallab.com/consumer.html and let us know what you think.  If you like what we offer, please tell your snapshot friends to give us a try. Just not too many of them please!

Museo Papers - The world's most green inkjet papers

I've had a lot of inquiries from people about how they can make their own prints more green. Short of contracting with a local paper company (of which there are few) it's been difficult to find suitable domestic papers. The Museo line of papers, however, is domestic. It's also 100% cotton, acid free, archival, museum quality and unlike many of the most popular imports, has no optical brighteners. Museo is available in a variety of surfaces and weights. Last, it's chlorine free and totally tree free. (This is important because chlorine, mixes with wood pulp to create dioxins - the most carcinogenic group of chemicals known.) For many people Museo has also been hard to find. For that reason, we have created the online Museo Store at EcoVisualLab.com. Visit us at http://www.ecovisuallab.com/museosales.html

We want to know what you think about our new store and other new products we're introducing. Stay tuned....

Rick

Introducing EcoVisualLab

I am pleased to introduce www.EcoVisualLab.com's new blog reflecting the recent merger of EcoVisual Communications and greenphotoprint.com. All of greenphotoprint.com's content is still here but all posts from today will reflect the new company.

In the past, this blog was the "poor stepchild" of our Website but I promise to add new, useful content regularly and I welcome your suggestions for the green imaging, photographic and art-world topics we'll cover.

Thanks for your loyalty and comments,

Rick Colson

Pixels - Our first "guest post" thanks to Tim Gander in the UK

Thanks Tim - You're a lot less pedantic and a lot funnier than I am!

A Fistful of Pixels (First published on February 26, 2010)
You have a digital camera, you have a mobile phone, you know they have a few million pixels in them, but the latest models have more. Do you need them? Will your photos come out better if you have them?

YAWN! The camera manufacturers pixel race has been the most boring competition since the last World Paint Drying Championships held in 1957. Ever more astonishing numbers of pixels in their cameras, but does it make that much difference? This is an idiot’s guide (that is to say a guide written by an idiot) to what a pixel is, and how many you need.

Since film has been outlawed by the Japanese, we’ve all moved to using electricity to capture images of everything from kittens to sunsets. In fact, the entire photographic gamut from K to S is now recorded using digital cameras.

A pixel is basically a tiny diode thing, which records light and converts it into a digital signal which the camera’s electronic brain can store for later viewing on porn sites the World over. Each pixel has a microscopic lens in front which focuses the light onto it, and which stops light that hits one pixel influencing the neighbouring pixel and making your photos fuzzy(er). Each pixel also has three teeny tiny amplifiers connected to it, which boost the electronic signal and record the light as being either red, green or blue.

So aren’t all pixels equal? Well no. You see when a manufacturer makes an imaging chip, they can decide what size the chip will be, and then how many pixels they’d like to pack onto that chip. A mobile phone might have 3, 5 or 8 million pixels on a chip the size of a baby’s fingernail. A compact camera might have the same number of pixels on a chip twice that size, while a professional SLR might have 12 or 18 million pixels on a chip the same size as a “old skool” film negative (35mm).

How this works is by making the individual pixels smaller and bunched closer together for smaller chips, and larger and more spaced out on larger chips. And perhaps surprisingly, bigger pixels are generally better. Smaller pixels packed densely onto a small chip tend to suffer interference, which messes up the photo.

If you want to know what interference looks like, take a photo on your compact camera or mobile phone using its highest ISO setting (this is the chip sensitivity and equates to the old film speeds), or take a photo without flash in a darkish room.

When you look at the shadow areas of the photo, you’ll see digital grain, or noise, and lots of messy red dots which is where the pixels are starting to have a bit of a fight with each other. Those red dots are in fact, tiny pools of blood from the scuffle.

So when you look at a mobile phone that claims to have 8 million pixels, remember those pixels are very, very small compared to the ones in an SLR. And small doesn’t mean more detail. In fact, if you have the choice between 5 million and 8 million on a mobile phone, you really won’t get any benefit from the higher pixel count. It’s just manufacturers want you to think you need the extra pixels so you can take better pictures and they’ll happily sell you the next model up.

Really all you need to know is that around 3-5 million pixels on a mobile, and maybe 8 on a compact camera, is ample for all those pictures of kittens, sunsets and drunken mates.

New technologies are coming through which will make these smaller chips work better, but then the same technologies will be introduced to larger-chipped cameras, and the quality will improve relative to that, so you’ll always be better off with a modest pixel count or a much larger chip.

So there you have it, the definitive, incontrovertible guide to pixels, which will remain current and authoritative until about next Wednesday, when no doubt a manufacturer will announce a 30 million pixel chip the size of a pin head which will capture fine detail in total darkness. The phone they put it in will still drop the signal every time you walk from your car to the front door…

Note: Thanks Tim for permission to republish! You can find Tim Gander at http://www.timgander.co.uk/

Help with image size/print resolution - new non-promotional "White Paper"

As a green fine art and photographic exhibition printer the most common problem we find with customers’ files is resolution - either a file we receive is way to small for the desired print size or way too large, taking up valuable storage space.

Do you ever wonder what’s the best resolution for your printing? How does this relate to image size? It can be a hard concept to grasp. Our newest "White Paper" is a non-promotional document on capture, print and monitor resolution. Send an email request specifying "resolution" to rick@ecovisualcom.com and I'll email you a free pdf.


Rick Colson
rick@ecovisualcom.com
http://www.ecovisualcom.com
http://www.greenphotoprint.com

Eco-Expression: Art for Sustainability - Northeastern University

We were honored to print approximately fifty prints for this two-year traveling exhibition of original international art with an environmental theme. From the Website of the exhibition (with thanks to Kalman Gacs, Curator):

These artworks have been chosen to represent a variety of approaches to thinking about our relationship to the environment and its preservation. Bill McKibben, founder of an international environmentalist movement called 350.org, wrote an essay entitled “What the warming world needs now is art, sweet art.” As McKibben has acknowledged, visual artists are now approaching environmental issues in a variety of powerful ways.  Some of their works are disturbing, while others are comedic or awe inspiring.  Some work to persuade the audience through reason, while some are wild expressions of passion and exploration, more the stuff of dreams and madness.  Both approaches have resulted in artworks that scream out of their frames.

The Shipping Dilemma

Shipping artwork is fraught with perils... damaged work, crushed packages, dog-eared corners, weather effects and packages that just seem to disappear into thin air. Green shipping options are hard to come by and the very nature of shipping itself is energy intensive. 747s, for example, burn about a gallon of fuel for every second in flight and slightly less when sitting on the runway.

There’s a lot of “virgin” packaging used in shipping and most of it is made from tree-based paper products such as corrugate. Recycled containers are available including mailing tubes and boxes but they often carry a premium over virgin materials that most people don’t seem willing to pay. The result is that more than 40 percent of landfill content nationwide is paper.

I just had a client call to tell me that the 30x40 print we made for him was ruined by a crushed “cheap” mailing tube he used to send it to his brother. This isn’t an unusual story. Preserving art in shipment is an art in and of itself. Larger pieces are particularly vulnerable and often require specialized packaging including custom-made crates and reinforced or structurally sound tubes. Sometimes you just have to use something like this in order to protect the contents.

These are a dozen the things we do to ensure safe and green shipping:

1. Use recycled packaging content whenever possible.
2. Reuse, reuse, reuse. Send out durable packaging with a prepaid return label and use it again and again. Even “virgin” materials can be more green if they’re reused.
3. Make everything in your packaging recyclable and accept it back for recycling if the recipient doesn’t know where or how to get it safely recycled.
4. Avoid potentially toxic packaging materials that might wind up in the waste stream.
5. Use what you have on hand. For instance, we often ship using the recycled cores from paper rolls, which are stronger and more durable than virgin tubes.
6. We have a set of PVC tubes with end caps that we use when absolutely necessary in sending rolled prints. PVC? “You have to be kidding,” you’re probably saying. Could there be a worse material? Well, every time we send one of these we include a return, prepaid label and we insist on getting the tubes back for use again. We have yet to have a client refuse. You can do the same with other durable materials.
7. While we’re happy to provide green mounting and framing we often suggest that clients do this locally. Shipping framed art almost always requires extensive packaging including custom-made crates tailored to the content. It also requires plexi rather than glass (which is almost impossible to ship safely).
8. Take a look at your carrier’s environmental record and choose the one you think is most environmentally responsible. (http://www.sustainability.ups.com/environment/index.html is UPS’s green information site.)
9. Just say “no” to shipping. When you can use email instead of printed communications do so. Don’t buy prints unless you need them.
10.  Learn to softproof so you can minimize printing and shipping of proofs and still know what your images will look like.
11. Calibrate your monitor - the first step in a reliable soft proofing workflow.
12. It may sound counterintuitive, but having your shipped goods picked up can actually save fuel if you’re in a well served area with UPS/FedEx/USPS trucks around anyway. If not, driving to the nearest shipping location or drop box is probably the best bet.