Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

Calling all cars:

We are currently putting together an advertisement for Synthesis Technology
that will appear in several major music publications. The ad is laid out,
but we need a really good photo of some modules to finish it up.

This photo needs to be high resolution and we need it pretty much ∗tomorrow∗
to meet deadlines. If you are able to snap a good photo and get it into our
hands in this timeframe, please let Paul and I know via private email.

The photo needs to yell "MODULAR!" at a glance.

It needs to be a fairly close shot of some modules, 2 rows high by five
wide, roughly, is a good area to frame, but use your judgment. We would
particularly like to highlight VCOs in the picture, if possible. A few
patchcords would help show this system 'in action,' but not so many that
they obscure the modules or cast too many complex & distracting shadows.

The photo needs to be very high resolution, as the demands of print
resolution are an order of magnitude greater than for web/CRT. Either a
high-end digital camera, or a 35mm photo scanned at high resolution may do
the job.

(I myself have the use of a pretty nice digital camera, but still find it
difficult to take a clear shot of these modules because of the contrast
between the small, fine white writing on the overwhelmingly black panels...
the tricky contrast and lighting conditions wreak havoc with the camera's
pickup, apparently.)

If sending the photo electronically, it needs to be uncompressed, or at
least compressed with a non-lossy compression scheme. This means no JPeG
files. TIFF is ideal, and TIFF using LZW compression is fine, too (LZW is
non-lossy, but you may find that it doesn't help photographic images much,
and sometimes makes them bigger... if you can, try both ways and see which
is smallest, but ∗quality∗ is the chief concern here). GIF files also use a
non-lossy compression scheme, but are limited to 256 colors/shades. Now,
normally that causes a 'solarized' look in photographic images, but this
could be acceptable if you first convert your image/scan to grayscale (using
PhotoShop or whatever) since the final will be monochrome anyway. Again, see
if using GIF helps or hurts file size (since GIF uses an LZW compression
scheme, too, which is the same method used for 'zipping' a file with
WinZip).

I can do final cropping and retouching on the image, so when it doubt, take
it a little 'wide' to give me some swing room.

My email system doesn't limit attachment sizes, and I have a full T-1 on my
end, so the size of the file isn't an issue on my end.

If you have any questions, technical or otherwise, please email me. Thanks
in advance for any help with this.