Photograph by Brandon Schulman

I don’t know Brandon Schulman, and I had never heard of him before yesterday. I was browsing Kickstarter the other day when I came across his project proposal, which looked interesting to me. I watched the video and visited his website, and decided to donate some money to his project.

Kickstarter is website that helps creative people get funding for their projects. You post some information about your project on the site, and people pledge to donate. The donations are only made once the project has met it’s fundraising goal. Brandon, for example, needs $3,000 to continue work on his photography project. He’s got about $2,500 pledged so far, and looks like he has a pretty good chance of making his goal of $3,000 by December 1. If he doesn’t make it to his goal, he doesn’t get any of the money. Those who pledge are rewarded with photos from the trip—a few 4×5 contact prints at the lowest level all the way up to a complete portfolio of c-prints for a $3,000 pledge—along with the warm feeling that they are helping a photographer fund a dream project.

Kickstarter is a fairly new site, but it seems to be doing well. Take a look through some of the recently funded projects; these are all ideas that are going to become reality because someone like you or me chipped in a few dollars. If you’re interested in getting involved, or have a project of your own that you need to raise money for, it’s definitely worth taking some time to explore the site.

Photograph by Brandon Schulman

Photograph by Brandon Schulman

Westchester, New York, 10x10 Platinotype

An odd-ball experiment: I am selling a 10×10 platinum print, from a limited edition of 7, on eBay. The opening bid is just $10.

I am hoping that it sells for more than that—considering the time and materials involved, I think even the Buy-It-Now price of $200 is a deal. But like I said, this is an experiment. If the highest bid is $10, then congratulations.

Scanning and enlarging Polaroid photographs is fun. It’s been a long time since I did any color printing, too. I seem to have gotten the knack for it again.

This one is going to be for sale at the Brooklyn Indie Market tomorrow. How much should I charge for it?

That’s right, it’s prints! I spent all weekend cloistered in the apartment working on prints for next Saturday’s Brooklyn Indie Market spring re-opening. It’s been a lot of work so far, and I’m still going to try to print up at least 15 more unframed prints before the end of the week.

So, did I learn anything?

Well, printing this much in such a short time really tested my workflow, and I’m happy to report back that it held up pretty well. This is the first time that I’m printing many of these images, and I’ve had to do relatively few test prints to get exactly where I want to be. This is a testament to the amount of work I did this winter really nailing down my calibration, workflow, and printer profiling. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that they look really, really good.

The downside is that I tried to print a few color images (this one and this one, specifically) and was not really happy with the results. I think I have tweaked my workflow in favor of B&W at the expense of accurate color reproduction, which isn’t a bad trade-off for now. Someday I would like to dedicate some serious time to a color workflow, but I’m doing much more work in B&W at the moment.

So things will be quiet until after this weekend, as I finish up this print run and get ready for the sale. I may have one short tutorial coming up this week (not the printing tutorial, just a simple Photoshop video). In the meantime, please stop by and visit me at the Indie Market (at the corner of Smith and Union in Carroll Gardens) if you happen to be in the neighborhood on Saturday.