New York Photography Blog

Seems like a good one for Valentine’s Day.

Times Square Paper Delivery.  Infrared and “faux” HDR

p.s. I’m doing so much color work lately that I changed the blog name.

p.p.s. No sales since I raised the prices.  Still too early to say that’s an issue, but I have gone back and added 5 x 7’s.  Then wait awhile and if still no sale, then I’ll add mats back.  And wait.  And then… well, then I can say that people won’t pay these prices and have to lower them and go back to doing my own printing, unless I come up with some other ideas.

In the never ending search to produce high quality black and white prints from digital files, I have been looking into SilverDigitalImaging.com which offers Ilford Fiber Prints (similar paper as the Ilford Graded Paper I used for years) in both fiber and RC.  Prints are exposed via a 3-color rgb laser and then go through the usual (or what was once usual) chemical baths.

Here’s a PDF that explains the process.

PDF about Silver Digital Imaging.

And here’s a price list for the fiber printing.

I have a bunch of questions for them – which should be answered on Monday when I’ll speak with the owner (I think) Eric.  I really only have a few basic questions, such as what profile to use; and what the turnaround time is.  Just for the record, I haven’t received a print order since raising the prices to accomodate the WCI prices; but it’s early in the game, and one thing that you know about me if you’ve been reading this blog for a while is that I keep searching for solutions until I find something that works.

The benefit of this type of system is that you still get to do all your Photoshop / Lightroom / Whatever tweaking in the digital world, but the prints are true silver gelatin prints; they’ve just been exposed differently than with an enlarger.  At least on their site, sizes don’t go up as large as what WCI offers, so I suspect that even if this turns out to be the “answer” I’ll still be tied to WCI for really large prints.

Many years ago, before Lambda and all that sort of thing appeared on the scene – I had the same idea.  I was still in the corporate world, but I remember sketching out a sort of print head that could take a digital scan and print it on darkroom paper.  Turns out, that at a very crude level, I was actually onto something.  Not being an engineer, I had no idea of how to do this sort of thing but even back then (this is about 12 years back) I thought it should be possible.

Anyway – should be an interesting week.  Their smaller prints (esp. if you do more than one at a time) are fairly inexpensive – and so I put back the 5 x 7 prints on the site, though at a higher price than before.  I’m really into this idea of outsourcing my printing and I’m starting to see that there are options that might actually work.

Website: www.SilverDigitalImaging.com

Well I for one am still going to call it the triboro – though whether it should be Triboro or Triborough I don’t know and even if Lester says it is now the RFK Bridge, a rose by any other name still smells as sweet. Yes – more hdr.  I do finally have enough time to do more shooting and it is a great pleasure.  I go to sleep at night thinking about what I want to try next.  A great feeling.

I may rework this again and try and bring out Roosevelt Island (unless they’ve changed the name of that too).  I can’t quite get this web image to look like it does in lightroom, i.e. it seems lighter there, though it may just be the black background of Lightroom (which I should change I guess).

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY BY MATT WEBER (NEW PHOTO BLOG OF NEW YORK)

Click image for large size

I met Matt a few years ago when he asked me to takes some pictures of his daughter at the Central Park Zoo.  We’ve been good friends ever since.  His old site was was simply not worthy of someone that I consider a major  street photography talent.  (Sorry Matt – you know that was how I felt).

For a few years I was trying to talk him into redoing the site somewhere else. Maybe just a simple blog with pictures.  Every time he heard the word “blog” mentioned, it turned into an argument.  Why…?  Well, he has very specific ideas about how his work should be presented.  The pictures should be BIG. Back then anyway, all the blogs he looked at had small images or thumbnails.  He didn’t like any of the templates he saw.  I told him they could be changed.  At the same time, he was disgusted with his lack of web traffic and thought it was all due to a lack of certain magical metatags.

True, there are one or two metatags that are important, but really you want people to link to your site and come back to see what’s new, and that’s not going to happen if the site is poorly displayed and hard to navigate.

And so finally, I managed to convince him to do a blog at wordpress.com (which is where they host it for you) and it’s free.

And so, a few days ago, while we were discussing (loudly) the possibilities over the phone, he said, wait a minute, I think I found one (a template that he can live with).  It is a fluid template that will expand to fit the size of his pictures, and eventually, he’ll purchase the CSS option for $15 and I’ll be able to change the background color etc.

So welcome Matt into the 21st Century at: mattweberphotos.wordpress.com and let him know how happy you are that he has a photo blog.  And   In all seriousness, he’s a talented street photographer that has not had much web presence.  I’ve linked to his new site, and if you are interested in amazing New York street photography you might consider linking to his new site.  He’s a good guy at heart who has mostly been invisible on the web (if you don’t count his flickr presence) which regularly gets lots of comments and has a following.

Bon Voyage Matt.  May the web be with you.

Lester – don’t tell me that the FDR has been renamed to the Edward Kennedy Thruway.  3 fused shots / asa 800 / 40d / 30mm / middle shot 1/6th of a second, f2.0

Later on I did longer exposures, but these shorter ones turned out better.  Who would’ve known that the light in the foreground had a different color temp. than the rest of the lights.  I’d like to put a large mural of this one on my wall.  Lots of fun stuff to look at, such as the current, that you can’t make out here.  But over the three shots you can make out some a circular current about halfway up on the right.

like this – and may hope not to see anything like it again…

This has the kitchen sink thrown in.  Digital infrared camera, infrared flash! and hdr!  the only thing it’s missing is a manual with a glossary of terms and raison d’etre.  But not to worry, I have some ideas for this technique that won’t read like a heat chart…

One of the great benefits for people like myself who change styles frequently, or at least at some point may change styles for a while, is shooting raw.  It’s just something that pre-digital photographers couldn’t do, or at least couldn’t do well.  It was possible to shoot color and print on special b&w paper (as an example) but you just couldn’t get the same results as if you had shot with your favorite b&w film.

Another benefit of working in digital, is that the tools keep changing.  So long as you began with a raw image, the chances are good that as you go along you’ll find a newly developed tool that again – has one aim – to give the photographer more control over the final image.

Of course, this is also a possible downside to the digital experience.  When we were shooting fine-art b&w, the common technique as espoused by the man – Ansel – was to pre-visualize your final print, and to expose and develop to try and make that final image a possibility.

You would typically use a spot meter, and measure the extremes of the scene: the highlights, and the shadows, and a few other things like the middle tones, and then you’d put your Zone thinking cap on, and think about what you want to achieve; whether the negative tones needed to be compressed or expanded.  In other words, if the tonal range was too wide and you couldn’t get it all on the negative if you exposed for the middle tones, then you might decide to bring the highlights down and the shadows up during the film processing.

Again, when you got to the actual darkroom phase.  Commonly you’d make test prints, and then a working print, and eventually a final print where you’d do a sort of ballet with your hands or cut outs to dodge and burn various areas.  You would need to keep careful notes, with little stick-like figures to remind you about which areas need more or less exposure; and what your time was, and what ratio of water to developer you used, and whether you might have bleached an area or how much toning you did.

If it was a complicated print, you might not be able to completely duplicate two prints.  You tended to do one print several times, so that you’d work in batches so you could remember exactly how to expose the prints.

And then you come to the digital print world, and it is the exact opposite.  First off, given that you are working with a nicely calibrated system, with the same output and same inks, profiles and papers – you really can do prints that are virtually the same.  That is one obvious benefit.

However, in real life, at least for me – I don’t work with batches at a time, and in fact prints that were shot years ago, that you’ve been printing digitally for many years – other options become available, or strike you as your printing the 30th print.

The digital workflow, for the artist, is actually closer to the painters experience than to the old photographers darkroom.  Assuming that the artist is learning new techniques, or even that he/she is changing emotionally, or artistically through the years – that print that you’ve done 30 times may suddenly present new possibilities.  Whether it’s the HDR thing that happened to me, or even if you are still using the same tools – it is so easy with contemporary tools to tweak some area of the image, change the contrast in one area – or sharpen something — the list is virtually endless – that you find yourself making printing changes to the 31st print.

These changes can be subtle, or drastic.  For some people, this freedom is something that you shouldn’t mess with too much.  You had an idea when you originally shot the print, and the idea is to try to stick with the original vision.  For the tinkerers – it’s just the opposite.  You look at the same starting point – and have ideas about how the original idea can be presented more effectively.  There really is no right or wrong for this type of artist.  Just change.

This is all by way of saying that what interests me now, is redoing older prints that were all originally presented as b&w images – and using hdr to do a color rendition, or a different take on the b&w rendition.

I’m often asked – but don’t you miss shooting film.  Not at all. Not only don’t I miss it, but the longer I work with digital output, the more opportunities present themselves.  Sometimes by accident.  Sometimes after a lot of careful planning.  In other words – there really are no “final prints” anymore.  There are variations on a theme.

It’s not that one rendition is better than the previous one.  As I say, I don’t feel any obligation to stick with the original print.  They are just variations on a theme, which is common in the music world.  Think of it as the cadenza at the end of a classical piece of music where the musicians are encouraged to improvise.  The same technique has come down through the ages to become improvisation in jazz.  Play the melody so the audience knows where you are starting – and then close your eyes and run with it.