Memorial Day, One

Waterbury, Connecticut

PROFSTINAL INSTALATION AVALIBLE

Waterbury, Connecticut

Blog Notes: Cat Toys

Woodbury, Connecticut

Marshall, our young Maine Coon Cat, is unhappy with the amount of time I'm spending in the darkroom, printing. It is a place where cats with luxuriant long fur are not welcome. To make his case he contrived to move a number of objects from a sideboard in the kitchen to the floor, and then to do some expressive deconstruction of a phone book.

The Printing Continues

Woodbury, Connecticut

Somewhere near a third of the orders from the TOP Platinum Print Offer have shipped. Early orders ran so heavily to The Pike that I've gotten behind on that picture and have to do several Pike-only sessions so we can get back to shipping the orders in sequence.

If you take a close look at this shot you can see the clearing process, where the iron image is removed to leave only platinum-palladium in the paper. The foreground print has just entered the first clearing bath after development and first water wash, the middle print is partway through the second clearing, and the far print is in the wash phase, completely cleared and just rinsing the clearing agents out of the paper fiber.

Sad and Happy Event

Bridgewater, Connecticut

This afternoon we went to a memorial get together for a couple, Bob and Shirley, whom Tina had known literally all her life, and I'd known for a mere 40 years or so. It was a lovely gathering with food and drink for friends and relatives. Bob was a wonderful photographer who worked in the alternate processes—gum, bromoil, manipulated negatives—calling himself an "unregenerated Pictorialist," through decades when that sort of work was very much out of fashion. Much of his archive would today look very up to date with the revival of alternate processes.

So a memorial, but a happy one, a party they both would have enjoyed.

A happy surprise for me was that photographer Bill Eppridge was there. I've known his work forever, but had never before met him. We had a fascinating talk for a couple of hours, ranging from photography to politics and society and back again. He kept spotting something and taking pictures from the hip, shoulder, and at arm's length with a little Canon minicam.

Bridgewater, Connecticut

Blog Notes

Woodbury, Connecticut

The printing and shipping continues for the platinum print offer.

Greenstyle Partyware

Woodbury, Connecticut

Memorial Day Weekend is around the corner and the stores are getting ready.

Morning Dew

Woodbury, Connecticut

Blog Notes: Shipping

Woodbury, Connecticut

The earliest orders received in the Platinum Print Offer have been shipping. Once you get past a number of bafflements in the software, the USPS online shipping system for Priority Mail packages does work a lot better than stamps and hand-done customs forms. Still it just doesn't seem possible to build the packages and produce the mailing labels in much less than 15 minutes per shipment. So it looks as though all of May and June will be devoted to filling these orders.

Working Pictures is going to have to go intermittent during this interval. The idea has always been for WP to come from very recent pictures, not a big long-term archive, and I just won't be producing much new work in the coming weeks. I hope to be back with lots of new work just as soon as this very large job is finished.

Weeds

Woodbury, Connecticut