Back in the Pod Again, with Roger Overall

Woodbury, Connecticut, tests for making digital negatives for platinum printing

Photographer, videographer, podcast personality at The Documentary Photographer Podcast, and wonderful interviewer, Roger Overall, in County Cork, Ireland, was gracious enough to interview me for the third installment of The Documentary Photographer Podcast, back in the spring of 2012. He even more graciously took time out of his busy schedule last Friday to do an interview for a new 'cast, #21, triggered by the TOP Pt/Pd print offer.

Of course we caught up on what happened on the Giant Drive-in Theater Road Trip, which was just about to launch at the time of our last talk. The discussion ranges from logistics of a really long road trip working with large and ultra-large format cameras and the needs of the, ahem, film—as well as digital capture, in the heat wave and drought of that year (it's worse now), moving on to the problems of doing a large edition of prints in the Pt/Pd process, referring to, of course, the current TOP Pt/Pd print offer. We got into quite some detail about how you integrate digital tools and procedures into a traditional process (see illo).

Before that, on the road trip front, we talked about the irony of finding yourself carrying five forty-pound cases of equipment into an insecure but air-conditioned hotel room because the secured/alarmed car is turning into an oven at four o'clock in the afternoon when the shade temperature is 104° F and there is no place to park the car in shade!

We discussed how, in Buena Vista (I coach him how to pronounce it properly), Colorado, I found the Comanche theater, on a plateau at 8,000 feet, with mountains rising all around it, and it was over 100°F at five o'clock in the afternoon. Climate change is here.

If you have an hour to kill, there are worse ways to do it than listening to Roger's podcast with me. ANY of Roger's podcasts will be worth your while, because he is such a good interviewer that I will vouch for any one of his intervening 'casts sight unseen, even though I haven't caught up, because he's simply so good at asking the right questions to find the interesting discourse.