I’ve just signed up for SoFoBoMo — “Solo Photo Book Month” — which invites photographers to photograph and produce a book of photography in one month. Starting now (well, almost).
It’s a great idea. You have 31 days in which to shoot the photos, design the book, create a PDF and upload it to the SoFoBoMo.org website. You can pick the month, so long as it begins after June 1 and ends before July 31. The book must contain at least 35 photographs.
Nothing like a little cheap inspiration to get yourself going.
My book will be 4 Plays/3 Days: Reviewing the Oregon Shakespeare Festival 2010, which I describe as
A newspaper theater critic (one of the last of a breed) spends four frantic days covering the summer openings at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore., where “Twelfth Night,” “Henry IV, Part One” and “Merchant of Venice” (directed by Bill Rauch, the festival’s hot new artistic director) are opening on the outdoor stage. Ashland, a rural town in Southern Oregon, has one of the best regional theaters in the country.
Reviewing the plays is exhilarating, engaging and exhausting for the critics, who come from newspapers and websites around the West Coast to cover the openings.
I head down to Ashland June 11 to watch the plays, write reviews — and take a lot of photographs. The completed book is due July 11.
photo: My desk at the Plaza in Ashland during the February winter openings, 2010
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1 June 2010 tagged daily life, Oregon with no comments
I’m figuring out, at last, how to use digital black and white carbon prints for hand coloring.
Turns out the carbon pigment is well bound to the paper — mostly. So what you need to do is remove the loose particles.
About 30 seconds under cool running water and an all-over scouring with a paintbrush seems to do the trick without noticeably affecting the quality of the print. Most of the ink is tightly attached to the watercolor paper. You can see a trickle of loose ink flow off the page, though.
I then dry the print and give it a spray of workable fixative before painting. That’s a step I would like to skip, if I can perfect the scrubbing; I hate the smell of fixative.
But the scrubbing works.
Painting on the watercolor paper is very different from painting on the smooth, non-absorbent surface of a traditional silver-gelatin print. It will take me a while to get used to the new process.
photo: Twilight in the garden, digital black and white, 2010
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23 May 2010 tagged BW, digital, hand-coloring, landscape, nature with no comments
I haven’t been able to figure out exactly what is going on here — obviously it’s some kind of digital artifact — but I do love the look. This is taken at ISO 3200 in the garden at twilight, shot into the sky.
And good news on the printing front: MIS sent a new ink system, having concluded that the directions I was given with the last one were incorrect, thus explaining the pale, washed out prints I was getting. Putting the right ink in the right slot, oddly enough, nailed it. The new prints, at least so far, are dead on and gorgeous (and even match what I see on the computer monitor). And a side benefit: No profiles to deal with.
photo: Grape leaves by twilight, digital black and white, 2010
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16 May 2010 tagged BW, digital, landscape, nature with no comments
photo: Garden leaves, digital black and white, 2010
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12 May 2010 tagged BW, digital, nature, Oregon with no comments
photo: Grape leaves at twilight, digital black and white, 2010
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11 May 2010 tagged BW, landscape, Oregon with 1 comment
