I have thoroughly enjoyed taking photographs and displaying them or giving them as gifts. As long as I have used my PC and my Dell 19" LCD monitor, however, the pictures have for the most part matched what I see on screen. Occasionally I will find they are a bit darker than expected. With such a small difference, I never worried about calibrating my monitor.
I recently purchased a 13" Macbook to use while on the go. My daughter, who is two and a half, runs around taking pictures with an old Coolpix camera that I used to use. She loves taking photos of everything she can find. I looked at her camera the other day just to see what photographs she had taken and I was amazed at how good some of them were. I decided to get them printed for her and put them in a small album that she could carry with her and show others.
I uploaded the pictures to the new Macbook and uploaded them to a local photo department. When I picked up the pictures, I immediately noticed that the color was off. Nothing too obvious, but definitely noticeable. My daughter was thrilled, however. I decided then that I needed to look into a way to calibrate my monitor.
I found a very affordable solution at www.bhphotovideo.com called the "Pantone Huey". It is the standard version but promises to not only correct my color problem, but also continually read the ambient lighting in the room so the monitor automatically adjusts. While this might not matter in most cases, but if you do your work, say, next to a window, it automatically adjusts as the sun rises, through the day, and as the sun sets. Pretty cool feature.
It arrives tomorrow, and I'm going to try it out with the HP 20" 2009m monitor I just ordered as well. I'm going to use it as an external monitor, so I'll be sure to post how well it is working.
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CHALLENGE #2
We haven't had a challenge opportunity to improve our creativity in awhile, so I figured now was a perfect time.
Black and white photographs have always interested me. They really force you to look at the actual photo in terms of lines, shapes, tone and so on. Take a bland looking color photo and convert it to black and white and you may find that you have a wonderful photo. Color can hide the intricate parts that make a photo.
I encourage you to see your surroundings as if you were looking at a black and white picture. Look for differences in contrast and tone.
As always, the Flickr group is located at http://www.flickr.com/groups/1225211@N22/.
Have a great day!
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