On Jun 16, 2006, at 6:46 AM, Tom Reese wrote: > Our photo club currently has competitions in slides and prints. > We're going to combine projected digital images and slides in > future contests in order to provide maximum opportunity for > participation. Members won't have to make prints to enter contests > and they'll save a lot of aggravation and expense. > > My question from other club members is: > > are you having contests with projected images? What resolution do > you use for the images? Have you had any problems?
At last year's Photo Alliance annual "Slide Slam" in San Francisco at the Academy Of Art auditorium, they took submissions for display as either slides or JPEG digital images, 10 photos per photographer. 400 photographs were submitted and set up for viewing. Each photograph was given 10 seconds viewing time on screen. About 260 of the submissions were digital images, the rest 35mm slides. The digital images included scans from prints and transparencies (both 35mm and larger format) as well as digital capture images. The slides also included slide copies of prints and larger format transparencies. A decent digital projector and an Apple PowerBook running iPhoto was used to collate and present the digital image submissions, the Academy of Art's 'professional' slide projection system was used to display the 35mm slides. From a mechanical perspective, the "professional" quality slide projection system was a disaster. It took three hours to get all the slides into the trays. Half the slides were out of focus (causing the projector to stop and focus), or focus-shifted during projection, or mis-oriented in the projector. At least three/four jams per tray slowed down the projection sequences. On screen, the quality of the projected slides ranged from beyond horrible to "OK", nothing was really superb. The slide copies of prints, particularly B&W prints, were absolutely awful, with color prints coming up right behind that. Similarly for slide copies of large format transparencies, they ran from mostly awful to almost acceptable. It took almost twice the time to display 140 slides that it took to display 260 digital images due to this mess and the display quality was pretty mediocre at best. The digital projection system took 30 minutes to setup total. It worked flawlessly, aside from one hiccup when iPhoto quit in the middle of a sequence. (The laptop used had too little RAM and a slow drive, which after 140 or so slides caused crash. The application was restarted and the rest of the sequences ran without further error.) The digital projector was a 1024x768 resolution, high-end-consumer model and did a good reasonable job of rendering. It did a better job on saturated color images and low-key B&W work than on high-key B&W or color work. Again, the scans were the most mediocre images in presentation, with the worst usually being scans of B&W prints ... none of them were properly adjusted to display well in the digital medium. Remember, I have no bias for or against film photography. It was clear from this experience that digital images in projection with a decent projector was a far more reliable display method and took a lot less time in setup and unexpected happenstances. Handling and projecting slides submitted on the spot for the event was an enormous time sink and produced a much poorer representation of the work. --- Discussing this experience with various friends who attended with me, we decided that for our local photo group gatherings we would do the following: - Only two categories for submission would be allowed, digital images in JPEG format and original prints. - For prints, all submissions would be required to be submitted on A3 Super (13x19") format sized paper or matte board. The submitter could choose to format the print to whatever size and proportion they wanted as long as the total size of the print fit onto an 13x19 board. - For digital images, all images must be rendered to fit in a box a maximum of 768x768 pixels in size centered into a total field of 1024x768 pixels, regardless of format proportions. All must be rendered to sRGB colorspace and the JPEG files must all include ICC tags. Hope that helps. Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
