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Friday, July 18, 2008
MENCAP SNAP! AWARDS
• Mencap Snap! Awards! – MENCAP held a prize-winners' party for their SNAP! Awards 2008 at the Proud Gallery in London's Camden last month. SNAP! is MENCAP's annual competition for photos of or by people with learning disabilities, sponsored by Fujifilm and supported by the Sorrell Foundation. Gold, Silver and Bronze prizes were awarded in six categories, and winning photos may be viewed here.
[pictured above is Chinese New Year, a SNAP! winning entry from Kwok Man] [add comment]
• Green & Yellow giants Raise Prices! – The two surviving giants of the traditional photo industry, Fujifilm and Kodak, have both announced massive global price hikes in film and paper. The increases are blamed on factors including global commodities costs – particularly of oil, but also of silver. They become effective by July this year.
Photographers and photo labs are facing a double whammy: not only are analogue materials going up, but most manufacturers' synthetic papers have gone up too. These are used in dye sub printers, photo kiosks and booths, and in ID photo systems. Even the cost of inkjet inks is going up! The increases are as high as an eye-watering twenty per cent in some cases! In the UK these rises can be exacerbated by the weakness of the pound against the euro, which adds to the cost of transferring continental stocks into this country.
• Photo Printing Guru to Speak at Summer Show! – Neil Taylor, the man behind minilabhelp.com, the outstandingly successful self-help Internet forum for photo labs, is expected to appear as guest speaker at the Fujifilm Wide Format and Canvas Printing Workshop being held at the www.photomart.co.uk SUMMER SHOW in London on 18 June. Neil, a highly experienced photo printer, will be telling wedding and portrait photographers why they shouldn't hold back any longer from doing some of their own printing in-house on wide format inkjets. [expand story >>>]
www.minilabhelp.com is run on a not-for-profit basis, as a service to the mini-lab community, by founder Neil Taylor. Neil is a former mini-lab owner who traded as BT Photographic. He was a good ambassador for the Noritsu corporation in that time, and sat on the PMA Photo Marketing Association's Minilab Advisory Panel. Since he started www.minilabhelp.com the site has grown into the main independent on-line forum for mini-lab folk. Neil will have a lot to share with photographers at the SUMMER SHOW about the practicality of doing enlargements and packages on inkjet solutions such as Fujifilm's GreenBox.
• Fujifilm: Bertus Vos will Present at Summer Show! –Fujifilm UK have confirmed they are committing Bertus Vos, formerly of FujiHunt (and before that of the South African Air Force Phototechnical Establishment), to the www. photomart .co.uk SUMMER SHOW in London on 18 June, 2008. Mr. Vos will present Fujifilm's GreenBox wide format and canvas printing solutions. In particular he'll demonstrate the Fujifilm ESP software RIP, arguably the single most distinctive component of Fujifilm's GreenBoxes (which are bundles built around Epson and HP printers). Photographers still sceptical about doing their own enlargements on inkjets should definitely catch this workshop! Mr. Vos will be showing a number of "photo paintings" he printed on canvas for the British Travel & Tourism photographer, Ian Brierley. [expand story >>>]
ESP is a Fujifilm software RIP. ESP stands for Easy Studio Print. Mr. Vos was kind enough to let us video an off-the-cuff presentation of the RIP at the SWPP show in London last January (2008). You can watch his presentation in the YouTube clip below.
Besides its main purpose of colour management, Fujifilm have incorporated many features into the RIP to make it easy for photographers and photo labs to do a lot more than just print.
It uses an easy five step print procedure.
The first step is to open your image library. Thumbnails of all the images in your image library folder will appear along the bottom of the ESP screen, and you'll be able to scroll through them.
The second step is to choose a predefined photo pack. Photo packs can be a layout of multiple images of one size, or they can be a mix of different size images. You drag your images onto the photo pack layout. Images may be used at their original size, or new sizes can be picked for them from presets. If you drag a portrait image onto a landscape format photo pack, it will be rotated automatically. You can make a photo pack from multiple instances of the same image – at different sizes if required – or you can make a multi pack of many different images in a variety of sizes. Where a single image is used, you only need to drag it onto the photo pack once, and all the place holders in the pack will be filled with the same image. Any zooming or cropping you do on the image in one place in the photo pack is automatically replicated in all other places.
(The ESP RIP is also ideal for printing schools packages, where hundreds of different images can be imported onto the photo pack, and the RIP will lay them out across as many sheets as necessary to print all the images.)
The third step it to apply any of the editing features, such as Full Size or Size to Fit, Rotation, Mirroring (vertically or horizontally), or Cropping into the image.
The fourth step is to choose your media profile (in other words, the media that you are going to print on). The ESP RIP will help to prevent you printing onto the wrong media, putting your job on hold if the wrong media is loaded in the printer.
The fifth step is choosing how many copies you want, whether to show crop marks or include job labels, and whether to use Auto Nesting (which automatically rearranges your photo pack to make the most economic use of media). Then you just choose Print!
The ESP RIP has a comprehensive photo pack editor that allows you to edit the presets or create your own.
So in summary, the ESP RIP – as well as delivering the essentials of colour management – also gives you a tool to do page layout with, and nesting to save paper.
The ESP RIP is just one of the inclusions that make Fujifilm GreenBox wideformat packages a complete printing solution, and not just a printer. Fujifilm GreenBox is a complete wide format printing business in a box. It's as simple as that. Sit down to the Bertus Vos presentation at the www.photomart.co.uk SUMMER SHOW in London on 18 June, 2008 and learn all about it! [add comment]
• BIPP Appoints Ex-Fuji Man Honourary prez! – The BIPP has appointed Graham Rutherford, retired director of Fujifilm Professional, as Honourary President. Mr. Rutherford will take over from the departing Paul Dyer. PhotoWeek! understands that the BIPP Honourary Presidency is an active role similar to that of a non-executive company director. [expand story >>>]
Graham Rutherford is widely credited with the very effective work that Fujifilm did in the UK to establish their brand with professional photographers here, a heritage the corporation still benefits from to this day. During his time at Fujifilm he did a lot of work with the BIPP. He is the father of both the Fujifilm Student Awards and the Fujifilm Wedding and Portrait Awards. Statements reported by the BJP suggest that as BIPP President, Mr. Rutherford will put emphasis on the regions, and on the organization's role in photographer training. [add comment]
• FREE TICKETS! –www. photo mart .co.uk in association with Fujifilm has 20 tickets to the HP Magnum Printing Masterclass, worth £50 each, to give away FREE! to PhotoWeek! readers. John Grayston of Fujifilm tells us all you have to do to claim your tickets is call www.photomart.co.uk on 0870 011 5761 and ask for a no-obligation quotation for a Fujifilm HP GreenBox wide format solution. Photomart will include a 3% discount on the quotation, and will send you tickets to the Masterclass. [expand story >>>]
The HP/Magnum Photography and Printing Masterclass will be held on May Day in the BFI (British Film Institute) on London's South Bank. It will feature well known Magnum photographers Donovan Wylie (featured in The Genius of Photography) and Chris Steele-Perkins (author of The Teds photo book).
Fujifilm HP GreenBox wide format solutions are bundles based on HP printers, combined with a Fujifilm RIP, training CD, colour management tools and media. They're everything you need to implement in-house wide format enlargements and canvas printing in your business, without having to make it all up yourself!
Booking a no-obligation quotation with www.photomart.co.uk will help you to decide which GreenBox solution might be right for you, and will secure you a 3% discount valid for as long as the quote is valid – as well as get you your free tickets! Offer closes April 30, 2008. [add comment]
• Fujifilm Green Commitment pays off ! – The Fujifilm Group, which believes in sustainable development and has a green policy, looks set to finish this current financial year with bumper profits again. Fujifilm Holdings Corp. announced net profits for the nine months to end December 2007 that were double the previous year's. [add comment]
• Dry Labs Debut at FOCUS ! – The FOCUS on Imaging show is in full swing right now at the NEC, and one of the themes this year seems to be dry lab. Noritsu and Fujifilm have hardware-identical models on show, and Kodak is showing its Apex system. Apex is based on what Kodak have always called thermal technology (dye sub to the rest of us), while the Noritsu and Fujifilm systems are industrial inkjets. [expand story >>>]
"Our new Frontier DryLab 400 is an inkjet lab", John Grayston of Fujifilm tells PhotoWeek! "It prints up to 10"x36", it's very quick, and it's a very easy process. The price is expected to be about £15.5K and we're aiming for a cost-per-print that's closer to wet lab costs than dye sub ones."
Lewis Martindale, Managing Director of www.photomart.co.uk (on stand M-2 at the show) told us his company would supply both the Fujifilm and the Kodak solutions: "Whether the future is wet or dry, inkjet or thermal", he said, "that future will be delivered by www.photomart.co.uk"
Graham Hill of Kodak assured us that his corporation's new Apex lab, although the technology is thermal, should deliver a cost-per-print comparable to wet lab. The media used in the new Apex lab is different to that used in dye sub instant print kiosks, and presumably costs less to produce. [add comment]
Hi! I'm Simon Towler. I'm the Editor of PhotoWeek! – the UK's free weekly email newsletter for the photo trades! And THIS is our BLOG!
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• Mencap Snap! Awards! – 
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