It is one of the things that becomes ever more apparent once you reach a certain age is that time seems to fly by ! You start on January 1st and all of a sudden by some miracle, it is August or November and yet another year has taken flight. In this sense it seems strange that I realise that it is almost a year since I relaunched this website in its current form, it must be time for another upgrade I’m sure.
Part of the purpose of running a website like this lies in the commitment to publish regularly and benchmark your progress or, lack of it ! I cannot say that I have reached too many of my self imposed goals in this past year but then again perhaps more than I imagined at outset. Additionally as I have been engaged on pushing forward, those goals have changed and evolved as general ideas have become firmed up and altered in the light of experiences.
Not sure how the second year will go but so far so good.
On a Mission
Although people who don’t follow religious affairs may not be that aware, across all Christian denominations there is a dire shortage of clergy and as a consequence there is quite a bit of shuffling around of those that are active. At my local church it has resulted in us losing our Parish Priest who is needed more urgently elsewhere so we were looking to put together some suitable mementos of his time with us in the parish and photographs figure prominently.
So on a Sunday morning, armed with my Canon M6 MkII fitted with an 11-22mm lens which is equivalent to roughly 15.5-35mm in full frame terms and my Canon 5DS with a 17-40mm lens – the 5DS is full frame, I was busy taking pictures of our clergy and the congregation.
Output
Fortunately I had a few weeks to plan the “Farewell Card” and decided on doing it A4 finished size which meant being able to print at A3. As far as doing all my reprints for my walls, I hadn’t got round to printing out those that need an A3 printer and it was this exercise that made me realise that I hadn’t printed anything A3 for likely 6/7 years. So I got my old Epson A3 printer powered up and after a lot of coaxing got it running and outputting some prints.
This of course is where I hit a problem. There have been a lot of software upgrades to the Windows operating system over these past 7 years and this printer is over 20 years old so that whilst I could still get a printer driver for it, I couldn’t get any software for tuning up my prints in terms of colour depth and that good stuff so all a bit of a bummer really.
Normally you can happily rely on the actual printer software to handle the colour rendition and failing that, it is possible to calibrate output from your graphics software, this however involves quite an amount of trial and error along the way. In addition and because the printer was so old, no matter what I tried in terms of calibrating the output reliably worked, it was just a nightmare. I looked at putting the prints I wanted out to a local print shop which is not cheap and you always need a few sets to play with plus, you are at the behest of other people as far as what you get and when you get it !
Plan B
I budget my spending very carefully as you have to in these times but I realised that there was really only one choice – buy a new A3 printer. Replacing this printer then became a priority so I set out to find the cheapest but ‘best bang for your bucks’ model. Historically in inkjets I have tended to stick to Epson printers but this time the best deal was on a Canon A3+ printer that Amazon had in stock so I ordered it up and it arrived the other day.
Although one might ask, ‘what else do you expect’ from a brand new printer, I was strangely delighted with the first few prints I ran out from it, they were excellent and totally effortless to produce compared to many days of struggle with my old one. In the end I got the farewell card printed, bound and assembled plus a framed picture all dusted and done so now I can turn my attention to reprinting my larger wall prints.
