Your Pictures are here.
Your Pictures are here.
What a happy brand experience. My iPhoto prints are here and they came with this cozy and happy feeling of a letter from Santa. Except it is a letter from Apple, a white envelope with a blue aqua Apple logo on the envelope. Under the apple, in grey Garamond Condensed italic: "Your Pictures are here.". And here they are. The 8x10 prints came in this envelope, the larger prints arrive in a tube. The pictures have their own index print with its own Apple logo and are "Specially printed for Witold Riedel", by Kodak Print Service. Excellent job. The prints are printed on Duralife paper... and are printed by... Ofoto!. Wait a second, wait a second... I have known of ofoto for a while now. They are a Kodak company and they are the photo service of amazon.com. It was easy to make online albums with them, but I somehow never liked the way they then presented the photos online, so I never used their printing service. Until now, obviously. The first assumption can only be that ofoto offers the service and that Apple now uses them and forwards the benefits charging a premium to the Apple iPhoto community. A quick price check reveals however that the Apple iPhoto prices are the same as on the ofoto website. And this is all surprising in all the good ways.
My next step will now probably be to get a better screen in addition to my brave powerbook lcd. The prints came back in colors that are a bit too happy and a bit too saturated in general. It is not the fault of Applešs service, (even though the larger print is even more saturated than the 8x10s.) but the fault of me not paying enough attention to the scans which were still made by my reliable photo shop on the corner.
I took another look at some digital cameras in the sony style store yesterday and I am not going to buy a digital camera yet. My little Leica Minilux, just has a better lens. The resolution depends on the speed of the film, but it shoots at a frame per second and without any compression. I also had the feeling that the lcd preview of the digital cameras slowed me down. It is one thing to focus on the subject and shoot a series of pictures. It is a very different thing and a very distracting one, to have the semi instant confirmation on the lcd screen. Suddenly the screen turns into a semi-reality and reality just races on, in real time. And it is different than filming with a camera and differnt than taking Polaroids. The disconnect is just long enough to be a bit confusing. It is probably just a first impression. More to come.
