Ben was a well documented kid. We have lots and lots of images to choose from. Literally yards and yards of albums and file drawers full of negatives. Opening up a flat file is like opening up a treasure chest.
When inkjet printers first hit the market in full force we were still doing a lot of printing. And by "we" I mean the collective we. I think photographers huddled together and spoke about printer technology in the mid-1990s far more often and intensely than they did about cameras or lenses.
Like many photo nerds I had several printers including one Epson 1280 that I had converted to using only gray and black inks. For every print I got that I liked I got five or ten that were horribly flawed. When I moved to the Epson 4000 the prints looked better but clogging arrived with a vengeance.
I don't print much anymore because there's really no place to show and nobody asking for them. I keep a big printer near the desk and bang off the random print for myself but really, the printer mostly gets used for very mundane things like printing out invoices. But even there it's a rare event as nearly every client is happier to get PDFs.
I loved the photo of Ben above and made prints on various paper stocks. The one I like best came from a dye sub printer. Probably a Fuji. I found a copy today and put it on my "new" copy stand/communications device and fired off a frame.
Funny to stumble across images from 20+ years ago and to remember how simple things were back then: family, work, love, sleep and food. Nothing else to really worry about. How charming!
2 comments:
I used my Epson 1280 for Black Only/BO printing around 2004. I did not use gray inks in the other slots, just the black ink cartridge. It took a little fiddling around, but in short order I got it to produce consistently great results. I printed on mostly Red River matte papers.
It’s funny you bring this up because I’m downsizing around the house at this very moment. And when I say “downsizing,” what I mean is that we’re getting rid of everything! We're keeping just enough to travel around the USA in a van conversion. The hardest part of the process is letting go of the boxes of old pictures of my children, many of which were printed as BO on the luxurious papers mentioned above.
Most of them live digitally on a few external drives, and the best of them have (more than likely? fingers crossed) been uploaded to Google Photos over the past few years...almost 80,000 of them! For many of the odds and ends digital and film prints, where I’m unsure if they’ve been uploaded to Google Photos, I put them in a white box and snap a picture of them with my iphone where they will automatically upload to Google Photos. Until summer of next year the High Quality upload is still free against your storage. It will be interesting to see Google’s pricing scheme in a couple of years when they start charging for them all.
This process is exhausting and it makes me mad that I did not develop a better workflow in the past to stay on top of things better.
These days I don’t take as many pictures as I used to. The kids are grown up. I ditched my Canon cameras and L lenses. The iphone is all I use these days.
Another beautiful portrait. I am fascinated by how much the "grain" in this image enhances and beautifies the print.
Jon Maxim
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