Hans Rupert - Photographer

My name is Hans Rupert, and I’m a commercial photographer specializing in image creation for advertising & design. My commercial portfolios can be viewed at noir. With 25 years’ experience in professional photography ranging from technical slide animation to weddings & seniors, and finally to advertising & design, my photo career so far has been rich. There came a time in the mid ’90s where I had an epiphany about the still photo industry when I witnessed firsthand my Kodachrome slides being sliced apart, oiled up, taped to a scanning drum, digitized on a Barco Creator workstation and then to my horror tossed aside into a bin that I realized that ALL photography would be completely digital one day. At that point, I was only using a PC in my business to run a DOS version of Quicken, so I knew I had a steep learning curve ahead of me.

It was about this this time that I became reacquainted with Stefan Agustsson, with whom I had attended high school. He had recently graduated from SCAD, and was working in the digital pre-press industry. Over the course of a few conversations we decided to start noir.net, and begin to focus on Web site development, and domain hosting, server co-location and dial-up Internet service to the Rockford market – which at the time only had one other ISP. It’s easy to forget that the only other options at the time were those awful CompuServe & AOL floppy disks that came in the mail, and that even with their services, the “Internet” was down the hall, and up some creaky stairs, as it were. The first summer that I finally had my NeXT workstation up-and-running, I remember spending $1,400 in long distance charges to Dallas on my 14.4kb/s modem via SLIP, since out of state long distance was cheaper than dialing in to Chicago for some crazy reason. Ahh, the cost of learning how the Internet worked.

In the course of adding dual T-1′s, muxes for dial-up, Web, e-mail & FTP servers we also added Rockford’s very 1st wireless ISP service from the old Brewery building where our operation was located to Octane InterLounge. We did this via a 900MHz spread spectrum point-to-point radio system, that was very esoteric at the time. Not only was Octane the 2nd “cybercafe” in the state, but to my knowledge it was the only one that had 6 publicly accessible NeXT workstations that supported over 150 individual user accounts across its network at its peak. Needless to say, I became known much more for my accidental IT skills than my commercial photography, but those skills have proved invaluable in the digital photography world.

I established the 1st photo studio in the region to be completely color managed through-and-through. From profiling our light meters, cameras’ sensors, Cinema Displays, inkjet proofers and CMYK pre-press output, my understanding of color spaces keeps our studio work at the world class level – I simply don’t allow guesswork or “winging it” around here. To this day, I’d put our understanding of color plus ability to get predictable & repeatable results up against any photo studio in the world. I guess having to color correct all those Agfachrome slide duplicates with 05cc magenta + 15cc yellow filter packs back at NIU has really served me well.  =)