Brooklyn, New York

Studio360 did an interview with classical pianist Simone Dinnerstein this week that got me thinking. Dinnerstein recently released a very successful version of the Goldberg Variations, a well-known piano work by J.S. Bach. Glenn Gould famously recorded this piece in 1955, and then again in 1981. Both of Gould’s versions are stunning in their own way (I prefer 1981), and there are plenty of other great performances to choose from as well.

Kurt Anderson asked Dinnerstein about “the burden of the past”; with the weight of such huge performances over her head, how did she make the piece her own?

Dinnerstein talks about how hard it is to forget the performers that came before her, that she had to stop listening to everything else and just focus on the music. Influences come through—they are there in your bones—but it is possible approach a piece in a unique way and create something that’s never been heard before.

I feel like I might be at that point where I am the sum of my influences, but I haven’t taken the leap of synthesizing it into something of my own. I feel a bit too plugged in to the world at the moment; every day I learn something new, see something that changes the way I think about my own work and leads me off in a new direction. On one hand this is great—I am nowhere near through learning everything I need to learn, seeing everything I can see. I am inspired and awed by the work of contemporary artists and by the work of the past. On the other hand, I think that looking at so much work, studying so intently, may be preventing me from taking that leap to creating something new, that is truly my own.

I think the answer is to unplug for a bit and just focus on the work. I will continue to post updates, but they will be fewer and farther between for a while.

Bronx, New York

I continue to wander the wilds of New York City searching for a unified theory of landscape photography. Recent experiments with exposure and depth of field have yielded many interesting failures, but only a few successes. I feel I may be at an important turning point: shrugging off some preconceived notions of what makes a good picture and more clearly able to see into the landscape for what it is.

It is when I get to one of these points, which seems to happen every six months or so, that I realize just what a steep hill I have to climb. I still don’t have a strong conceptual framework for what I am doing, I am just striking out at random and hoping for some good luck. As I feel more confident in my abilities as a photographer, I feel entirely less confident in my abilities as an artist.

I’ve realized recently that when I am looking at others’ work, I have become more critical of the thesis of the body of work as a whole than I am of individual photographs. It is not so hard to make one excellent picture. I have stacks of pictures that I think are quite good, but they don’t really make sense when viewed together. These photos have become useless to me—examples that I know how to use a camera, but little more.

Lately my work has become more stylistically and thematically cohesive, but I still have no thesis. Judging by my own criteria, the work fails. I am not sure I will be able to figure out the “why” behind this landscape work any time soon, but I know I need to keep taking the pictures.

In the meantime, I am setting a small challenge for myself: to create a short but complete series of new work by March 15. I have no preconceived notion of what it will be about or what form it will take, but I am hoping that the process will offer insight into some of the questions I’ve been asking myself.

Self Portrait, Sleepy Hollow, 4x5 Pinhole Photograph

There are the obvious visual clues as to the camera I am using here: the distorted wide angle, the vignetting and blurring of the edges of the image. The pinhole camera also lacks a viewfinder, which means that you have to look carefully when planning your picture and be willing to accept that things won’t always go the way you expect them to.

By far, though, the most important factor in pinhole photography is time. In taking these photographs, I would sometimes sit for close to an hour, reading a book, waiting for an exposure to finish. Having so much time away from distractions—having time just to think—is much more important than I’ve realized and very conducive to making art. I am not really ready to talk about some of the ideas that have been coming to me on my journeys out into the woods, and I have no idea if those ideas will translate into photographs that are worth anything, but the process alone has been enlightening.

I think these images are interesting, but they feel like a side-trip rather than a destination. Sometimes diversions are exactly what we need to realize where our focus should really be.

Self Portrait, Sleepy Hollow, 4x5 Pinhole Photograph

Prospect Park, 4x5 Pinhole Photograph

I have been holed up in my basement for the last two weeks, coming up for air only occasionally. I’m pretty sure my wife has forgotten what I look like by now. I’ve been hard at work developing my process for palladium printing with digital negatives. It has been hit-or-miss so far: these test charts represent only about half of the total work I’ve done in the darkroom. Some of the charts are getting close, but I’m still not really happy with any of them.

I am printing my digital negatives on Pictorico OHP using the QuadTone Rip software I discussed in my post on inkjet printing. Ron Reeder has written a good how-to guide on using QTR to control the ink deposition and contrast settings for digital negatives. The problem is that QTR isn’t very well documented and testing is very much a trial and error process. As I get closer to correcting one variable, all of the others seem to move around. Like herding cats, as they say.

In a fit of desperation, I went ahead and bought Mark Nelson’s Precision Digital Negatives e-book. It was not cheap, but I have read some of Nelson’s articles in various books and magazines and have gotten recommendations from other alt-process printers. PDN seems like a more systematic approach to calibrating the digital negative process. I have learned a lot in my first few weeks of printing, so even though I am starting out with a new calibration system, at least I am not starting from scratch. I think I will be producing my first palladium prints by September.

Oh, and I broke my first Puddle Pusher last night. Doug warned me that would probably happen, I should have ordered more than one!

Plate burner exposing a digital negative on Pt/Pd paper

All of my equipment and chemicals arrived last week, so I’m finally able to get started in the darkroom with platinum and palladium. So far I’m just doing exposure and calibration tests; nothing to report except that things seem to be doing what they’re supposed to be doing and that I’ve got a lot of work to do.

My wife and I went to Baltimore this weekend to visit friends (Mr. and Mrs. Curmudgeon), and I came across some great photography books in a used bookstore in Hampden. The copy of Winogrand’s Public Relations in the window drew me into the store, where I discovered two more fantastic books: The Photographic Art of William Henry Fox Talbot, and Unclassified—A Walker Evans Anthology. Needless to say, I bought all three.

Here’s my favorite photo from the Talbot book. This image is more than 150 years old and yet looks so modern to me:

Photo by William Henry Fox Talbot

We also made a quick side trip to Washington D.C. to see the Richard Misrach show at the National Gallery. The show is only open for two more weeks, I highly recommend it if you can make the trip. The next trip we’re making to D.C. is in January, when Robert Frank will be at the National Gallery, and Frank Gohlke will be at the Smithsonian. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for an Obama inauguration.

Thanks for your interest in my “Taking a Picture” series. Just as a note, I have continued improving my digital workflow and some of these notes are now out-of-date. Feel free to drop a line in the comments or contact me directly if you would like more information on my photographic workflow.

I’ve been planning to sit down and write this for quite a while, but I’ve been keeping very busy with other things. The fact that it is currently hailing outside has given me the chance to spend some quality time indoors, though. Much like my previous post on scanning, I am going to try to avoid going into excruciating detail on every step of my digital printing workflow, because I don’t think it will be worth reading for most people. The general ideas are more important, and I am glad to answer any specific questions in the comments or offline. That’s not to say this won’t be a very technical post, and a long one at that. Please remember that I am giving this final print away to someone who has commented on one of the posts in the series, so feel free to drop a line even if it’s just to say hello.

Black and white inkjet printing felt like a very daunting subject when I first approached it. Two years ago, I had a low-end HP inkjet printer which made acceptable 8×10 color prints, but was absolutely lousy for black and white. It was impossible to get profiles for non-HP papers, and there was practically no information about archival permanence for the paper and inks I was using. In short, I wanted to create black and white prints on matte paper that looked as good as or better than what I could produce in the darkroom, and I wanted them to last a very long time. So I took the plunge into the deep waters of selecting a printer and building a solid black and white digital printing workflow.
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If you’ve ever been frustrated with the clone stamp or the spot healing brush for removing dust and scratches from scanned film (both tools distort grain and destroy details), you may want to give this technique a try. This tutorial is optimized for black and white film, but it works well for color, too.

Some details will be hard to see if you watch the embedded version. This video was recorded and edited in HD, so if you click through, you’ll get the whole picture. Any feedback on this post is welcome, I haven’t done many of these and would like to know if they’re helpful.

I have been a fan of images printed on platinum and palladium for quite a while. A well done platinum image seems to float right off the paper; it’s some sort of magic having to do with the physical characteristics of the materials along with the slightly modified contrast (especially in highlights and mid-tones) that gives platinum images a very special look. As with most everything else photographic, you have to see the original prints, as reproductions tend to be a bit more flat and lose that 3-D effect.

Norwest Center, by Keith Taylor, platinum print, 2006.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to see as much original work on platinum as I’d like. It seems that most gallery shows I go to these days are all about BIG! COLOR! photos with very little new black and white work and only a tiny percentage of that being printed with platinum. Because of it’s dreamy and somewhat “old fashioned” look, it often appeals to sentimental types, and it’s not hard to find really overdone work in platinum as well. But there are a few contemporary artists who really nail it, and it’s exciting to see.

I bring this up because I am finally going to take the leap and start printing some of my own photographs in platinum/palladium. I am doing an independent study with Doug Schwab at Brooklyn College in the fall to learn how to make platinum/palladium prints from original 4×5 negatives as well as digital negatives from scanned medium format film.

I’m going to Sicily for a couple of weeks in June and I should be taking a lot of photos. I’m hoping to get started on a small addition to my darkroom for the necessary supplies and equipment when I get back, and after that, we’ll see what happens!

Links to a few contemporary photographers who are working in platinum and palladium:

Beth Dow
Keith Taylor
Craig Barber
Ronald Cowie
Alejandro López de Haro

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.