Home Is Where The Art Is

I began taking pictures for a living in the middle of 2004 shortly after I bid farewell to my 13 year career in I.T. A lot has changed in the nine years I’ve been in the creative field — camera technology has improved by leaps and bounds, a far cry from the very first DSLR I owned, a Canon EOS 300D, and personal computers are now incredibly powerful and a lot more affordable than they ever were before. Yup, a lot has changed in 9 years but the one thing that has remained constant is that I work from home — I am my “own boss” as Butra Home Concept magazine put it.

Welcome to shimworld, the home of Jan Shim Photography. Everything to do with the final image — online and offline — happens here. This studio only handles archiving and editing work, no walk-in portrait or baby session like some of you might imagine. As my work mostly involves shooting at the client’s location, not much actual commercial photography goes on here. I do occasionally bring small items home to photograph when it’s a more practical option to do so.

The heart of studio is an ASUS Republic of Gamers Maximus V GENE, unlocked Intel Core i7-3770K 4.6GHz liquid cooled by Corsair H80 cooler, Corsair Vengeance™ DDR3 OC Edition 1866MHz 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 2GB, Crucial M4 128GB + 256GB SSDs housed in a SilverStone Fortress FT03 chassis. See comments on Facebook.

It’s a cozy office just big enough to accommodate everything I need to run my photography business. Own boss also means doing everything from replying emails, marketing, quotation, invoicing, payment collection (when electronic transfer isn’t an option) by myself.

Read also: Adobe Lightroom ‘Parallel Processing’ Speeds Up JPEG Export by 50%

Two stacked SanDisk ImateMate USB 3.0 card readers to handle simultaneous Compact Flash cards downloads.

Colour accuracy is a critical component of photography and owning a good quality IPS panel LCD monitor is only half equation. The other half lies in colour calibration to ensure colour reproduction, brightness levels are accurate and consistent.

Although prints are not a core business I demand nothing less than high quality prints when I do need them. For that I trust my Canon PIXMA MG6370 printer to deliver vibrant and consistent quality every time. (click on image for more info)

No mention of photo editing rig is complete without giving credit to the mouse that we hold and click countless times per day. My favourite are these — Razer Abyssus — one for the desktop and another attached to my Dell Studio 17 laptop.

Calibrating the Dell U2711 Wide Gamut LCD with a Spyder 4 Pro

If you have just bought a Dell wide gamut U2711 LCD and have tried calibrating it over and over with a Spyder4Pro but you’re just not getting the results you had hoped — white doesn’t look quite white — try the method that works for me. I have found the factory tuned sRGB to be slightly cool (a tinge of blue). I have read through a dozen web sites  to get a better understanding of what Gamma, White Point and the rest of the jargon mean.

Update July 26, 2014 Absolutely thrilled to have prints from the Canon MG6370 match the screen in every detail possible without the need to independently calibrate the printer.

Update March 8, 2004 I had the monitor re-calibrated from scratch but this time I had both White Point and Brightness set to “Native” and that produced a consistently accurate result. I checked this against the grayscale chart below and was able to better discern the last two shades of gray. I’m happy with the new setting. 

Straight to the point, if you have a Spyder4Pro and you’re not seeing proper white, try setting White Point to Native and do a Full Cal. I leave the monitor in AdobeRGB mode and Brightness at 20, Contrast at 50 (factory default). Using Datacolor’s recommended White Point of 6500K just doesn’t turn out right for me, and because white isn’t right, grays appeared with a very slight greenish tinge.

I’m overwhelmed by the wealth of information available on colour management and in particularly, calibrating with the  Sypder3 hardware. I’m particularly interested to hear from owners of Spyder4Pro who have successfully calibrated their U2711 in a Microsoft Windows 7 environment, and the settings used.