Academia Portrait.

I love going on vacation with one camera and, at the most, two lenses.  You learn that camera and those lenses forward and backward.  And if you're really in the game you'll limit yourself to one kind of film.  Digitally is wonderfully convenient.  But sometimes, at least for my brain it's too convenient.  There's a digital camera I wish someone would make.  Kodak almost did it for a brief time.  I want one that shoots squares.  Only squares.  Not something I can over ride or change.  Just square all the time.  And I want it to shoot in black and white.  I know I can set that combination on a number of cameras but I know equally well, and more importantly the bossy part of my brain knows, that I can change right back to a different combination.  My brain works better when it's forced to work with inflexible tools at hand.

The year this was taken, 1993,  Belinda and I had planned a trip to Florence.  As we sat in the airport in Dallas, Texas the television played some breaking news.  A car bomb had just exploded outside the Uffizi Gallery.  We arrived the next day......

Hasselblad 500 CM with 100mm f3.5 and Tri-X.

Technical note:  Someone asked in a comment if I would share my scanning workflow for the black and white negatives.  I'd be glad to.  I have an Epson Perfection V500 Photo Scanner on my desk next to my little computer.  It came with film holders for 35mm and medium format.  I blast the dust off the glass and the negative with some compressed air and then I go straight into the Epson Scan software and set all the typical controls.  16 bit grayscale.  Sized to 10 by 10 inches @300 dpi if I'm eventually aiming for the web.  24 by 24 inches at 300 dpi if I'm aiming on making a print.  I turn unsharp masking to low and turn off any of the grain enhancement and dust removal controls off.  I make a preview, size it, hit zoom and look at the way I've cropped the image in a bigger window.


Then I go into level controls in the Epson Scan software and set white and black levels and the corresponding output sliders until I have what I want, image wise.  Then I scan and save as an uncompressed tiff.  It takes all of four minutes for the smaller size and about nine minutes for the larger size.  Then the image gets opened in PhotoShop CS 5 where I use the healing tool to spot the image.  I do my final sharpening in PS CS 5, usually (point)1 radius at 300% (unsharp masking) followed by a quick, "sharpen edges."


I used to think you had to get drum scans to get good images but once I was doing a big show of black and white images from a 1995 trip to Rome and I sent out twelve images to be scanned for something like $80 each.  I hated all the scans.  And this was from a famous scanning house.  They were too highly sharpened, to saturated and kinda dirty.  I knew I could do better.  I bought an earlier version of the scanner (I think the 3200 Perfection) and scanned the stuff over again on that $300 machine.  The lab I used to output the 24 by 24 inch prints with a Lightjet printer were very impressed by the scans and so have many other photographers.    There is a print of the Russian Girl on the Spanish Steps in Rome above my desk and it's as perfect as any enlarger print I've ever made.  Many times the high priced equipment is only necessary for the underskilled user.  Practice scanning and, like cameras, you can use just about anything to get a good image.


If I'm going to web I reduce to 1200 pixels wide and run the save to web in PS CS 5.  Always as sRGB files.  In fact, I use sRGB for everything except my Costco prints.  Those go out with the Costco profiles for specific printers embedded in the files.


Then I put the negative back in the protective sleeve or page and sit down and write the blog.....