With a little extra care you can choose effective colors for the broadest possible audience.

In January, my son Patrick and I made the trip to the Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico for a chance at getting some beautiful photos of the tens of thousands of birds that travel the Pacific Flyway, an avian superhighway that runs from Canada to South America. Besides the Sandhill Cranes and Snow geese, we had […]

Return to “Review: HVC Color Composer.” Albert Henry Munsell (1858-1918) developed his color system as a circle with ten segments, arranging colors at equal distance and arranging them in such a way that opposing pairs create a neutral gray (Figure 1). He organized the hues of his hand-painted swatches according to the three variables: hue, […]

Movies were born when Auguste and Louis Lumiere (and ultimately Thomas Edison) projected a series of still photos in rapid succession, causing the viewer to perceive motion where there was none. Matching the projector’s speed with the speed of the camera made the motion lifelike. Undercranking (running the camera slowly) and overcranking (running the camera […]

After the enthusiastic response to my homemade teleprompter story, I’ll share with you another gadget I recently constructed. I needed to convert a reel of 16mm film to digital video for a historical documentary I am working on. There are commercial services that will convert film to video for a fee, usually priced per minute […]

It was Thursday evening and I needed a teleprompter. I was making a video about panoramic photography, and for the scenes where I speak directly into the camera I looked like a cross-eyed newscaster. While trying to read cue cards on a stand in front of the camera, my eyes were cast downward, and that […]

I have bought a good number of scanners in my lifetime. The biggest, and most expensive was a Crosfield 646IM 30×40-inch drum scanner. This cost about $300,000 (plus the construction and accessories to make it go). Since that monster, I have bought and sold a number — I can’t remember exactly how many — of […]

6804136. That’s the serial number of my first Nikon F camera, purchased new in 1968 when I was a senior in high school and that number is imprinted in my memory (see Figure 1). It was my first professional camera, and I used it for years to record images all over the world. I still […]

One of the courses I teach at California Polytechnic State University (also known as Cal Poly) is Advanced Typography, an upper-division course for students in our Graphic Communication program. The class consists of a two-hour lecture and a three-hour lab each week. This past quarter was my second time teaching the class, a course that […]

Each year I find my way to Chicago to attend the Graph Expo or Print trade show (the names alternate annually, but they look like to same show to me). My reasons are numerous. One is to see what’s new in the printing business; another is to chat with clients and associates in the trade […]