What Colour is Snow?

This week we've been grinding our way through a set of images supplied by a long-standing client. He's very organised and every so often we get a chunk of his family photos. This week we got the holiday photos. A mixture of prints, slides and negatives.

The mix of holidays covers annual summer holidays, mainly to sunny beach locations plus many winter skiing trips. Final count was nearly 4,000 images. We had to use our Kodak s1220 for the print scanning, the Nikon 35mm slide scanner and our Epson V700 flatbed.

For the majority of images we got great results from all the material. The summer shots were pretty good, lots of deep blue sea and sandy beaches. The ski shots were much more difficult, and after a while we began to be fascinated by the variation in colour that we could see in snow. The Nikon scanner got the snow white the majority of times, on slides and negatives. Similarly the Epson was spot on, in no small measure due to the special snow scene setting in Silverfast.

But look at the prints - many of which were derived from the negatives we'd scanned. If the source was white right, I assume at one point the prints were too. Maybe it was poor washing or chemicals in processing, maybe it was the ravages of time (although the prints had been kept in their original paper wallets), but snow ranged from a light shade of grey through to a very mucky grey. Hardly any white snow.

If you've ever done any scanning you'll know this is a major problem. Sure, the correction is simple, you can normally rely on those one-click correct functions in iPhoto or Photoshop. The real problem is the variation in greys and the absolute volume of the task - we're talking hundreds of images to be corrected. It is in most circumstances a massive task.

Thankfully Kodak have a Retouch function, a one-click fix for any number of colour issues. Just hit the button and away goes the s1220 software busily bringing all the whites into line. So when the full project was finished and the files merged together as the client wanted we could see what colour snow really is, and it doesn't matter if the image came via negative, slide or print. Snow is white.

Where in the world is s1220?

During the dull bits, for example while the s1220 is doing its thing to restore colour to a batch of photos, I amuse myself by thinking where I'd try to sell photo scanners if I were Kodak rather than a humble photo scanning service in the UK.

This week I read a tip about using website statistics to identify a target market. So I've just done a bit of digging into who actually reads these posts, and who I assume have an interest in Kodak, s1220 or photo scanning. So if I were Mr Kodak Intergalactic this is where I'd be heading.

USA. Ok, not much of a trip for people based in New York State but US interest outweighs the rest of the world put together so maybe your biggest market is on your doorstep. Or maybe the good folk of Rochester indulge odd moments of boredom thinking "where in the world would I open a photo scanning business".

Next, with very similar stats, come Japan, Germany, Turkey and the UK. The big surprise for me in there is Turkey. On a par with Japan and Germany - wow.

Then, another fair step behind, come an odd couple - China and Iran. China I can sort of understand as I know for many years even the poorest Chinese citizens have cherished photos so maybe they've been writing ad copy for Kodak in their duller moments, But Iran? Really? That is one place I'd love to visit and maybe there's market potential there to justify First Class air.

Finally there are the guys letting the side down. At less than 1% of the interest shown by Uncle Sam come the triplets of Canada, Netherlands and Australia. Frankly, we think you should be doing better. I'd justify my trips there by telling Kodak Inc board that the population there need a good talking to and Bondi Beach is the best place to shout.

But finally, finally, are those who don't appear. Mainland Africa? South and Central America? Middle East? Far East?

Clearly this is too much for even Kodak Rochester to handle. Next week we have a few big jobs on, lots of photo restores, so it must be down to me to fill in to help out Kodak. Just send me the plane tickets and hotel vouchers - I'll hit Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia. My address is on the 1Scan.co.uk website.

Bored? Nous?

"You must be bored to death by these" said the young lady as we were loading her photos into the back of my car. Around 10,000 prints, all in wallets, each one carefully named with a Post-it note.

Wedding, art college, h-moon, b'day - and so on. Yes, we get loads of those. Then the holidays, this couple have been everywhere; not just the obvious European or North African tour resorts but all over the world. South America, Australia, Hong Kong (might have been a work assignment, lot of social gatherings), Thailand, Antarctica, New Zealand. This week we've been round the world a couple of times. Bored, no.

Then we had a batch of brilliant photos sent in by a major motor cycle racer. Fantastic shots of colourful bikes in a range of impossible positions. They zipped through our s1220 in no time and I though I'd have a bit of fun with the auto rotate function. You may know our photo scanning service returns print scans correctly oriented, could the computer sort these out?

No, sorry Kodak you failed on that one, but it's hardly surprising. A racing 500cc bike goes round corners on its side. It's only one of the laws of physics that stops the rider falling off. In some of the photos the rider is just inches from the tarmac. Then we add in a number of shots of airborne bikes popping over the brow of a hill and you have a massive mix. Hardly any of a normal bike and rider pose.

I wasn't surprised to find the s1220 thinks there's no difference between a bike on its side and one flying through the air. And sometimes a bike in the air above bleached concrete gets turned up side down. Boring, certainly not.

I've been musing about what it takes to close business. In the case of the large order I was loading into my car it was offering to collect them from the client. sadly too few people trust the mail these days and bundling up thousands of prints for mailing is a real chore. In another case it was mentioning our parallel CD ripping service, so we got 179 photos plus three CDs so our client could make a slideshow with favourite music as a soundtrack.

So all together its been a far from boring week. Thanks Kodak, thanks s1220, and thanks to our clients. Much love.