Black and White Photography Blog, Vol. I

I may buy the 7800. I just have too many clients asking for larger prints lately. I did send off one to West Coast Imaging to be done on silver rag; but I see that I can pay for the machine easily through a couple of commercial jobs.

The real problem - as always is space. So I’ll be moving things around. In case you’re new to the site, I’m currently with the 4800 (it’s been my baby since it became available).

The 7800 does 24 inch wide rolls, but the actual width of the machine is about 4 feet. It weighs in at a lovely 131 pounds. When I do the deed, I’m going to use some sort of white glove service. My back is not going to allow me to be messing with the thing the way I did when I setup the 4800. I wonder what else I can jettison around here.

The only annoying thing is that although it uses the same size cartridges (110 ml & 220 ml) as the 4800, there are separate cartridges for the 7800 & 9800, i.e. different manufacturers numbers. Probably just the chips are different. Anyway, it means that I couldn’t swap cartridges between the machines.

And don’t worry Buddy - you don’t take up much space.

As I was assembling this new blog, I dipped for the first time into the perl language (which is how Wordpress is implemented). I didn’t have to do anything serious; just sort of understand what was going on in the perl-based templates that others had written and pull pieces of existing perl code from here and there.

The thing that struck me, never having seen perl before, was how similar it was to other programming languages.

You’ve got your loops, your ifs ands and ors. The usual grammar. Pretty much like the basic that I used with my Kaypro whenever that was.

Okay, anyway — the thing is — I was wondering why so many languages to do the same thing.

The only thing I could come up with was history just wasn’t neat. Languages developed for specific needs; and often at the same time in different part of the computing space; and there was a quest for survival. Remember - I go back to the beginning of personal computers and remember dBase II, and how it met it’s demise.

I suppose the strangest language I ever ran across was Lotus Notes (which I programmed in for a few years). There were pieces of syntax that looked like they were from the Lotus spreadsheet. Remember the time when Lotus 123 ruled?

But then everything else in the world was piled on top of it. When the programmers were asked to describe Lotus notes to a new programmer, they’d clasp their hands together and twist them into a pretzel. Ah - but one more fun fact to know - I was a big proponent of notes. It was such a massive kludge.

So what’s the weirdest programming language you’ve used?

[Note: Wordpress is built on PHP - not perl.  I obviously don’t even know what language I’m programming in anymore… ]

On my way out of Kips Bay…

Another frequent question - how do you attach the print to the mat? Here’s an example of an 8 x 12 inch print being matted on 16 x 20 inch mat.

The mats (at least the smaller ones) are pre-cut by Stu-art Mats. Archival Museum 4 ply, white.

They do not arrive hinged. I use Lineco Linen Hinging Tape (I splurge on the Self-Adhesive version) to put the two pieces together.

I then use Lineco See-Through Mounting Strips. What I like about this is that the print can easily be removed from the mat. There is a bit of clear plastic that hold the print to the backing. The fact that it is clear - doesn’t really matter (to me). When the window mat is folded over, it is cut so that the plastic is hidden.

And framing - that’s left to the customer.

Dear Reader,

The b&w prints from mpix just arrived.

The Prints:

They are not nearly as rich as the inkjets I’m doing on crane/museo silver rag. I took
one silver rag print from the closet, just at random for comparison.

The Ilford digital paper (if that’s what it actually is) is thin, i.e. lightweight, and feels cheap (to
me).

I thought that maybe my memory of good RC prints was bad so I also compared the mpix prints with some old Ilford double-weight RC prints. The double-weight RC prints (darkroom) are also better. ‘Better’ how subjective. D-max is less with this paper. As I say, this paper is thin. The blacks are “muddy.” Even if I could get better range, this is still what I’d call ‘consumer’ paper.

I so wanted this to work. I think the way to go, if I go down this ath is to have them done on real fiber paper, still with the lambda process.

Oh well — I’m always disappointed by Print On Demand stuff that arrives in the mail. Remember all I went through with the POD books?

I’m always looking for someone to do the work for me at a reasonable price. — maybe I’m too picky.

Long and short of it: they aren’t good enough for me to sell.

In other words, fine for casual snapshots. Not very good if you’re trying to make your reputation based on your prints.

Of course, if you want to pay - then you can get very good museum quality fiber prints done with the Lambda process. This is always going to cost more than RC prints because of the extra labor involved (archival washing, flattening?) not to mention cost of the paper and perhaps having the print done by what I’ll call a techno-artisan.

Timing: In case you care about such things, I just printed my first 16 x 24 inch print with 4800. Before this the largest print I did was 16 x 20.Settings: b&w driver, file @ 300 dpi, bi-directional is off, 2880 ppi, drying time per head pass is .15 secs, firewire connection.

Total print time = 25 minutes.

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So, I am looking seriously into replacing the 4800 with the 7800. There’s a bunch of things I need to figure out in terms of space. I guess any New Yorker would have that problem.

Also, I don’t even think they use the same cartridges. There’s no way I could keep sets of both cartridges. I’d better check that out.
Also, as far as the blog goes, I decided to use a different theme so that images wouldn’t be squished on pc’s with lower screen resolution.

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Anyway, I printed seven 16×20’s today. The silver rag paper is not as instant dry as say an Ilford pearl, so I usually let them dry out in the open, with an air-can handy to blow off any dust / cat hair that might settle on it while it’s wet, and then they go into various cabinets to finish drying and what I call curing. It’s not that the printing takes that long, but some of these had to be rescanned and then re-photoshopped.

Tomorrow I have about eight 16 x 24’s to get through and then I can get to develop film that’s been piling up.

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UPDATE:  I sent an 11 x 14 file to West Coast Imaging for them to print on Silver Rag with the 9800.  I should have it back in a week or so.  (Today is May 29, 2007)