2010 May « Red Skies at Night

May 30, 2010

Photo Expo workshop

Filed under: inspiration, photography, workshops — Tags: folio — Eric Jeschke @ 10:25 pm

Key: R20100529-132834

[Hawai`i Photo Expo 2010 Juror Brian Taylor gives feedback to a participant in the Photo Expo workshop.]

Friday was the judging for the Hawai`i Photo Expo and the results will be announced at the opening reception next Friday. I’ll be looking forward to the opening and a chance to see some nice photography, including two of my prints. The framing looked great and regardless of whatever the outcome of the judging will be I’m just delighted to have 2 pieces in the show. I’ll have a report on that next weekend.

Meanwhile, yesterday was the traditional workshop that we have with the juror. Our juror this year was Brian Taylor, and his workshop was primarily a series of portfolio reviews, with a little presentation about himself and his photography at the beginning. The day was delightful and insightful; I almost always enjoy these kinds of workshops. My folio went over pretty well both with Daniel and the group, and I got some helpful feedback on it. Daniel is an accomplished photographer and I think the group was universally impressed with his work. He was also extremely gracious and professional (perhaps a bit too gracious at times, but then again, he’s probably used to running into people at his workshops that can’t take any constructive criticism and get all prickly). Just to have a day to talk photography with some like-minded folks is a really pleasant way to spend a Saturday.

I would encourage anyone with a serious interest in photography to take a workshop sometime. I used to think that it would be a waste of my time and money, but I’ve taken several workshops now and I have changed my opinion on that 180 degrees. Really worthwhile.

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May 24, 2010

More folio activity

Filed under: printing, workshops — Tags: expo, folio, portfolio, review, workshop — Eric Jeschke @ 9:41 am

Last weekend’s effort to get the kinks worked out of my printing process on matte has enabled me to finish my folio for the photography workshop coming up next weekend in conjunction with the Hawai`i Photo Expo. Good thing too because I have a busy week ahead and would have had no time to work on it.

I am pretty happy with the result, given the time constraints I had. I ended up using some matte paper stocks that weren’t quite as nice as I would have liked, but they are decent. I didn’t have time to order more, and living on a sparsely-populated island in the pacific ocean there just isn’t that much in the way of fine-art paper selection at the local stores.

I’m still planning to work on a better folio case, but this presentation case that I got from Office Max was not bad looking, and makes a decent wrap. I have enough photos to do a color one as well, but I don’t think I’ll get that done in time for the workshop, and it would be a few too many photos to bring for review anyway.

The selection process for this folio was an interesting exercise that I’m looking forward to spending some more time doing. After about a week of on and off thought about it I decided that putting together a themed folio would be best, but I need much more time on the selection process than I can give to that right now. Instead I settled on a plan to make several “best of” folios by year. Doing it this way made it manageable, because I could reasonably go through a year’s worth of photography and make some selects in a few days.

I selected somewhere around 50 photographs for the initial cut for Folio ONE 2009. After pondering these for a while I decided to not to mix B&W and color, and not to mix radically different aspect ratios. This led me to select 15 photographs in B&W square format, plus a cover image and a back matter image. Following the very good advice here, 15-17 seems like a good number. Printing on these thicker matte stocks I think I would never go higher than 25 anyway, it’s just too much. Probably if I was going to do something more serious with this folio I’d cut it down even more to the best 10-12 images.

All in all a great learning experience, and I’m looking forward to the feedback (good or bad) at the workshop. I’ll post the online version of the folio following the workshop and a report on that.

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May 20, 2010

Inkjet printing: I’m not alone

Filed under: noted, photos, printing — Eric Jeschke @ 10:32 pm

Key: 20100502-185427

Hot on the heels of my last rant about inkjet printing is this update on TOP about printing under MacOS 10.6. Buggy drivers! It sounds all to painfully familiar right now.

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May 18, 2010

“385″

Filed under: photos — Eric Jeschke @ 10:26 pm

"385", originally uploaded by Eric Jeschke.

Key: R20100417-173338

This fire hydrant fascinates me. I walk by it every day walking the dog in the neighborhood. I haven’t yet figured out how to make an image of it that conveys the special mood it evokes in me. It is so disheveled, rusted, painted on, swallowed by jungle…but it keeps on keeping on, like a trusty soldier at his post.

You are likely to see some more attempts down the line here as I try to capture the “essence” of this hydrant.

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May 16, 2010

Think cool

Filed under: photos — Eric Jeschke @ 10:11 pm

Key: 20091219-123511

Just had to blog this picture because it’s like a cool throat lozenge after my rant about printing.

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What I think of inkjet printing sometimes

Filed under: photos, printing — Tags: hp9180, inkjet — Eric Jeschke @ 10:04 pm

Key: 20091219-130023

I just finished half a day of frustrating print testing on my ink jet printer. I need to produce a folio for a workshop that is coming up and was trying out some new matte papers for which I did not have good profiles for my printer. After a long afternoon of printing, tweaking, googling, making notes, installing a new firmware for the printer, installing a new driver for the mac, more printing, tweaking, googling, etc. etc. I finally came up with a set of profiles that works well with these papers, and was able to use my method of printing the folio on them. But Lord I don’t want to go through that again for a while.

Looking back I can remember what a pain it was getting things working with my usual set of glossy and semigloss papers, but I had forgotten how painful that was and how many test prints I’d had to make to get good results. Once you’ve got the process right it’s nice and repeatable, but my feeling tonight is that we are still a long way from where we ought to be regarding home fine art printing, at least as far as ease of use. It’s like walking through a pasture–you’ve got to watch out for all the crap you’ll step into!

The driver software for my HP9180 is particularly crappy. It produces some nice output, but has some very non-intuitive settings, frustrating interfaces and just plain bugs. Half the time I spent today was trying to get these thicker matte stocks to feed through the straight feeder (so called “specialty media tray”), since they are a little too thick to go through the usual paper tray without causing scratches on the prints due to print head strikes. The printer kept giving me an error message that the paper size was too small for the print, which was nonsense, because I could print the same image on different paper of the same size in the regular paper tray. I finally figured out that any paper type that I selected from the “fine art” papers submenu would cause this message. Choosing a matte paper from a different submenu, changing the tray to the specialty media tray and then selecting the correct ICC profile did the trick, but I had to try several paper types in the alternative submenu to find ones where the ink distribution matched the paper effectively. Rrrrr!

I’ve now owned printers from Epson, Canon and HP. They’ve all had their problems. Where is the dark horse? I outsourced the printing of the exhibition images and that worked out well, but I like to be able to print at home. Still seeking that elusive ink jet. Almost thought I’d found it in this HP, but I don’t think so anymore.

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