Thursday, January 18, 2007

The Pike, Montgomery, Pennsylvania, 2001

By Popular Demand...

...another picture from my upcoming show of Drive-in Theaters

9 comments:

Scott Kirkpatrick said...

any catalog or other printed form of your drive-in projects yet?

Carl Weese said...

No, Scott, not yet. The plan is a full size book. But there's more work to do, and the little matter of finding a publisher. Along with the many theater pictures I've got great interview material. Where the theaters are still open, or former owners at least still available, the interviews are wonderful. Dull people don't run drive-in theaters...

Anonymous said...

Carl,

Will you have any pt/pd prints at the show? Would that be appropriate? I think it would be interesting to see the 8x10 contact and the larger digital - not for 'better' issues, but for how if affects the feeling of the image.

Carl Weese said...

Lyle,

I guess I could have a folio of Pt/Pd prints there, behind the counter, for anyone who wants to look and compare. I haven't yet done that myself. I just finished printing the twenty pictures that will be in the show, and I did it without refering at all to the earlier platinum prints. I want the digital prints to be the best interpretation of the pictures I can make in that medium, not an imitation of the Pt/Pd prints.

Anonymous said...

Carl,

I didn't think about them as being imitations, I was really thinking about how they would look larger, not contact printed and what possibilities in picture making are brought up. On a different topic: I wonder if having a folio there of the pt/pd prints there would confuse the issue with potential buyers, ie, would they wonder which is worth more and all the other nonsense that we have seen in the digital v. analog wars?

Carl Weese said...

Yeah, Lyle, it might cause more confusion than enlightenment. On size though, it's fascinating. In the shot of the Grafton, in West Virginia, there's a tractor mowing a field of hay in the background, with a nice bit of blur to it from the full-second exposure. I don't think anyone has ever spotted it in the 7x17 contact print, but everyone is going to find it in a print 32 inches across...

I anticipated that I would end up rejecting some of the big prints. I figured that some pictures just wouldn't want to go big, but in fact this didn't happen. One 717 dusk shot, a ten minute exposure at f/22, is pretty soft in the corners but I'm not sure it ruins it (the shot couldn't have been done at f/45 at all, I'd have hit infinite reciprocity failure, so that's an inherent limit to working with such a large camera). I may replace that print with something else and only use the picture at contact size.

George LeChat said...

Very nice. I particularly like the sign. For a slightly different take: http://www.hidinginplainsight.mobi/2006/10/god-bless-america_2338.html

Carl Weese said...

George,

In the fall and winter after 9/11 many DI marquees displayed a wide variety of patriotic messages. Quite a few flags were painted on screen towers too.

George LeChat said...

This particular one has been a roadside attraction in Petaluma, California, for many years. Petaluma, as you may know, was the original site of the "morning in America" political commercials. Anyway, I'm going to continue to interpret the one in your photo as a sort of ironic comment on "Closed."

Returning for a second to an earlier point, I think I'm about to embark on an experiment with the Cone K7 inkset, and will let you know how it turns out.