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Rangefinder
Magazine The Right Stuff and the Right Skills by Sara Frances Photo studios have just suffered perhaps the worst 24 months of business downturn ever experienced. We have seen our very existence, not just our independence, threatened. With unbelievable good fortune, technology has erupted like a volcano with a magnificent flow of opportunities rolling over the challenges.
The sweeping changes experienced by our industry, particularly in the last year and a half, have stirred the desire to reinvent ourselves as a new breed of business people. When I started working professionally almost 35 years ago, the best and most profitable studios didn’t outsource anything. It was a do-it-yourself paradise, with necessity being the mother of invention. Labs were not the prevalent post-production facilities they are today. The self-contained studio of the past had a film-processing tank, a black-and-white darkroom and a table-top color processor with rudimentary densitometric equipment. There was also a projection display in the sales room, complete retouching and lacquer finish, not to mention fine presentation and packaging, equivalent to that of the best department stores. The attractive sales pitch for outsourcing has successfully urged photographers to “spend more time selling and photographing,” and to “leave processing, printing, finishing and even assembly to the lab.” Individual photographer’s skill sets shrunk because of outsourcing. It became too expensive to print one’s own images—that is, until now, with the Gemini Professional Portrait Printing System by Epson.
The Gemini System has the best quality, speed, archivalness and price that contemporary technology offers. It also gives studios back their independence. For several years, I found myself longing for the artistic control and speed of production I had grown up with as a young photographer. On the accounting side, profitability suffered from the hidden costs of outsourcing delays and inaccuracies. I became so disillusioned that I began to burn out. It was just too hard and too expensive to get first-class work out the door. When my husband, Karl, and I became family and business partners, we knew we wanted to change everything—our studio appearance, the type of work we did, the pricing, the logo, the P.R., the web site. We went digital overnight! Some photographers think digital is about glitzy cameras, but it’s not. We soon found out we should have been asking how to output those digital images. In the summer of 2002 we had never heard of Gemini, but after getting some information from an Epson rep, we knew we wanted and needed the system immediately. Then we got cold feet because Gemini sounded too good to be true. Years of outsourcing had ingrained the belief that only pro labs could satisfy studio needs. Industry talk about the difficulty of making inkjet print accurately further worried us, but once we saw Gemini in action, our fears evaporated. To get back to independence: what photographic artists really want is the technical freedom to cater shamelessly to their clients’ wishes, and to be remunerated for their skills. We want our technology to work seamlessly, infallibly and immediately. In these days of “fast food” as the measure of product desirability, it has become shocking when something is not available immediately. Of the three core client concerns, speed of delivery is currently more prevalent on customers’ tongues than quality or price. Gemini produces all three.
So how do you make the system work? You’ll need a great computer; both Apple and PC platforms work equally well. We favor the Apple G4 dual-processor running the Mac OS X 3.0 (Panther) operating system because we can isolate the workflow by keeping only image files on this machine. We leave the ubiquitous studio tasks to the PC running Windows XP. Also, get a big screen monitor, and make sure it’s calibrated correctly and consistently. Next, if available in your area, a minimum speed DSL or cable modem connection will be an advantage. If not available, dial-up capability is fine. A dedicated electrical circuit for Gemini is also desirable. Room lights should be controlled to provide a darkened, or at least a dim environment. The color and density of the image on your computer screen should not be contaminated with fluorescent, incandescent or even window light. A viewing lamp to judge prints under full spectrum daylight is a must. The brand new Digalite desk lamp is perfect, inexpensive, and it doesn’t create excessive heat at your workstation. Digalite also has a catalogue of replacement bulbs, both plug-in and standard lamp base, to convert a fixture you may already have. Full spectrum, including both infrared and ultraviolet is key, not just the 5600° Kelvin wavelength. As long as you don’t have a brightly colored wall or desk, you can set a Digalite near your computer to verify print quality with what you see on your screen.
That’s all you need to start making fantastic prints from the moment Epson’s technician installs Gemini. The secret of the Gemini is that all the hard work—calibration, maintenance, cleaning and testing is done for you. Monitoring the printers and on-board server computer, as well as accounting, is done for you via the DSL connection. Need help? Call the toll free line for immediate assistance that will fix most problems. There is also on-site, next-day service, should a more serious problem arise. Because the Gemini contains two printers, as its name implies, you are protected from failure with a back-up. It’s all part of the system package. As another part of that package, all the paper and ink that you need is delivered to your door. Nothing is a separate or add-on charge. You pay on a sliding scale for the number of prints you use, which means you neither make capital outlay to buy the machine, nor risk cash flow during slow months if your business is seasonal. Even if we only make 150 8x10 prints during a month, we benefit: Gemini has sped up production dramatically; we have saved most of the soft costs of outsourcing; and our hard costs are a bit less than we would pay a lab. OK, so how do you make a print? Once you’re satisfied with your image adjustments, you open the Gemini print layout software from the desktop. The left side of the software window helps you to select from the library of images contained on your hard drive. The right column gives internal directions to Gemini, such as your client name, crop marks and other “housekeeping”-type information. The center section drives the main business of what you will print, what size and how many. Check off what you want on the menu, and select from a wealth of multi-print package templates. It’s reasonably simple to make your own sizing adjustments, as well. A magazine-style wedding album layout slides right on to a Gemini page with full bleed or full image sizing buttons. Want to rotate or further adjust an image? Of course. What needs to be done to get the right resolution and sizing? Just set the DPI at 300 and Gemini does the rest. How about printing magazine style contact sheets to work as proof books with numbers clients can use to indicate their choices? No problem. Multitasking? Certainly! Once the print command is given, your master computer is free to do something else because it is no longer involved in the printing process. Make a mistake? There are several ways to cancel a job before it actually prints.
We continue to be impressed daily, actually overjoy- ed, with Gemini’s facility. There’s no chemistry, no mess, no environmental concerns. The machine isn’t very big. It’s about the size of a photo copier on steroids. We thought we might be limited by the 13x19 maximum paper size, but in practice, we found that about 97 percent of the number of prints we make for events, publicity, light commercial, children’s and senior portraits (even the new larger wedding albums) fall within this dimension. Clients are fascinated with the technology and want to see it work, especially since we can now photograph a portrait session, show the work, print, and finish a simple order in less than an hour and a half. This is niche marketing without any effort at all.
Pigmented inkjet prints are just plain brilliant; the color is clear, crisp, saturated and completely repeatable tomorrow or next month. There is no variation between the wallets on the same page, or between that page and the matching 8x10. Epson’s pigmented inkjet papers are archivally rated for 75+ years, which meets or exceeds RA4 photographic papers. What about black-and-white reproduction? Ignore what you’ve heard! My friends and I, who grew up in darkrooms, can rarely tell the difference between custom fiber black and white and our Gemini inkjet. Typically, the worst problems with digital conversion and printing your own work have to do with the interface between the image, the computer and the printer. You want to print exactly what you see on the screen, and the Gemini Professional Portrait System has mastered doing just that. The best part? You need to know very little to make the Epson Gemini immediately operational. But by the time you’ve used it for a few months, it will teach you the physics and art of the new technology, and the speed and independence of profit-making will become just plain fun. Sara Frances is Director of Photography of a 34 year old Colorado firm specializing in photography and videography of people for both portrait and commercial applications. Her approach combines academic training in foreign languages, literature, theater and art criticism with self-taught eye and technical skills. Sara finds that digital capture gives her not only “flexibility, immediacy and accuracy, but also an inspirational creative boost” that has put a whole new face on her niche career. She is the author of Elegant Black and White Wedding Photography, published by Amphoto Books. She can be reached at studio@photomirage.com/.
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