Thursday, January 24, 2013

Short Stuff, plus Blog Notes

Star, North Carolina

I see that this is the last of the pictures from the Southern Loop of The Giant Road Trip that I've set up "for the blog." So tomorrow I'll be posting something else. In the meantime, we're having a real cold snap here. Morning temperatures have been around 5° (that's about -15° C) and today it never got as high as 20°. A side effect of this is that our very old and not renovated house, with its ancient steam boiler, gets incredibly dry. Not only is it costing a fortune to keep the place from freezing, it's also shutting down work I want to do. Even with humidifiers running the Rh in my 'digital atelier' is around 24%. Forget using the printer. Anywhere under about 40% the roll paper becomes so stiff that it can't feed properly. Not only do you get defects in the prints, the printheads could be ruined by paper strikes. At least I almost finished the Kickstarter Rewards prints last week, with just a couple packages waiting for prints.

Can't print? Well, get going on scanning all those 8x10 and 7x17 negatives from the drive-in theater project. Nope, at this humidity level, the negatives are absolute dust magnets from static electricity. Anti-static brush, anti-static cloth, the dust just moves around while clinging to the film. I don't want to take the (clean until now) negatives out of their sleeves.

So what I've been doing is working on monochrome conversions of my digital captures of the DI theaters. This is still a little frustrating because I can only work on-screen. I keep catching myself wanting to grab four pictures to run through my 6.5" proof print batch action to place on the 4-up template...but I can't run the printer. It's supposed to be even colder tonight.

3 comments:

lyle said...

...dry, winter days, can't get the paper to work. sounds like platinum printing! maybe the gravure guys have it right, just soak the paper before you use it?

Rich Gift Of Lins said...

You've quite a collection of these objects now! It's good to read that in these days where everyone seems to be content with viewing images on iPads, phones and screens, you (like me) still feels the need to see a printed version. I am never happy until I feel content with the small proof print in my hand regardless of how good the image looked on my expensive and carefully calibrated monitor.

Carl Weese said...

Colin, for at least half of my time as a photographer, prints (or reproductions in magazines or books) were simply what photographs were: there weren't any on-screen or web photos. For me, the print is still "the real photograph" and the web presentation just an inferior reproduction. The irony of course is that far more people see my pictures as online presentations than as actual prints. Whatcha gonna do?