Remembering early inkjet printers. Another trip in the time machine.

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!

Portrait of a painter. Circa 1979. In the painting studios at the Fine Arts College. University of Texas at Austin.

I came across a box of prints today and it was like firing up a time machine. I find that I have deluded myself all these years with the mistaken belief that better and better cameras and lenses were somehow vital to realizing a vision of some sort. How woefully misguided I have been. 

This image was shot with an ancient SLR camera; the Canon TX. It was a totally manual camera in every regard. The film is, no doubt, Kodak's Tri-X. I'm sure because I was so underfunded in those days that I could only afford film that I bought in bulk rolls and spooled into 35mm cartridges myself. 

The lens was a well used 85mm f1.8 Canon FD. I bought it from a photographer friend who needed to sell it in order to pay his tuition.

I made the original print in the Ark Co-op Darkroom on some sort of wonderful double weight paper and here we are 40+ years later and the processing is still holding up well; no yellowing beyond the original tone of the paper.

The camera doesn't matter nearly as much as being completely infatuated with the subject. Which continues to this minute. 

If you can't make good images it's probably not about the quality of your gear but perhaps you are just aiming the equipment at the wrong subject.

Looking through boxes of old prints is a nice way to spend a cold, short, rainy day. Ah, we were so young and thin in those days.