A few loose ends...

Winter has arrived in Northern California - November 1 & 2 we got some much needed rain,
and everyone has pulled the rainy weather wardrobe out of the back of the closet,
where it has been parked since last May.
Last Sat., 11/8/08, was another stormy wet day.
It gave me some time to gather a few loose ends & thoughts...

Why have my posts recently been heavy on darkroom, & light on digital?

In 25 words or less? - because the new camera I bought last Xmas has been a disappointment.
Four years ago, I got a really simple Canon Powershot A-40, image size 1200x1600 pixels. No camera raw, just jpeg's.
It was the first time I have been able to collect 'source material' in color, the way I have been able to w/ B&W since about 1974 or '75.
So for a few years, I just 'messed around' with it - I know color is very different from B&W, and I figured it was going to take me a while to figure out what I wanted to do, in color.
By the end of last year, I figured it was time to 'move up' - I don't have the funds for anything really top o' the line, but I thought that a Canon Powershot SX 100 capturing 2400 x3600 pixels would be a big improvement, it's 4 times as many pixels, right?
Is it a big improvement?
Wrong. No. Bummer.
The 2400x3600 pixels just don't have the sharpness, the saturation or clarity that the 1200x1600 pixel shots do.
This camera does all kinds of things I have NO interest in - movies? audio? panorama stitching?
Please! I want a camera that is JUST a camera, and is focused on, and designed to do that, well - to hell w/ all the rest of it.
Lense quality seems to be the last thing on manufacturer's agendas - when I shoot a copy of a montage print, w/ the aforementioned camera, just by laying it on the floor, and holding the camera 3 or 4 feet above it, the barrel distortion is outrageous - the straight edges of a 16x20" piece of paper bulging out, like my print ate at MacDonald's for month. And 'super-sized' every order. Kinds reminds me of the quality of low end zoom lenses, when they first arrived in the mid 70's.
I don't expect a 300$ camera to rival a Leica, or my Pentax 6x7, but hey, c'mon, it should be a bit better than this.

That's why I've been slacking a bit on the digital end of things.
So beware when buying a digital camera!
'Mega pixel' size isn't really a measurement of quality.
It all makes me love film!... my Pentax 6x7, and simple Yashica D, that much more.
I've always been inspired by things other than what that goes on in the 'photo' or 'art' world.

Three books you should read, IMHO, before you die:


Songlines - Bruce Chatwin
I have a copy of a paperback edition, all 294 pages of it.
The first 162 pages are an account of the authors travel in Australia.
From page 163 on is "'From the notebooks' - This is the best part, and truly 'the heart of the matter',
when it comes to his writing.

http://www.brucechatwin.co.uk/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Chatwin
http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=7782
http://archive.salon.com/travel/feature/2000/03/01/chatwin/index.html

Secrets from the Center of the World - Joy Harjo, & Stephen Strom
A very small book of text/poetry & photos that packs a big wallop, it's about Navajo country, the four corners area in the US southwest -
I have a hard time deciding whether I should put her or Bruce Chatwin first - Let's call it a draw, OK?
She is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, and her Native American mindset
shines through in everything she writes.

(From 'Secrets from the Center of the World')
"Anything that matters is here.
Anything that will continue to matter in the next thousand years will continue to be here.
Approaching in the distance is the child you were some years ago.
See her laughing as she chases a white butterfly".

http://www.joyharjo.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Harjo
http://joyharjo.blogspot.com/

The Snow Leopard - Peter Mathiessen
...an account of his two month journey along with naturalist George Schaller in 1973 to Crystal Mountain, in the Dolpo region on the Tibetan Plateau in the Himalayas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snow_Leopard_(book)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Matthiessen


OK, OK!.... make that 6 books:

Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey

On Anarchism:
"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey
http://www.abbeyweb.net/
(The subtitle on this page reads:
"Enter at your own risk. Carry water. Avoid the noonday sun. Try to ignore the vultures. Pray frequently.")


Assembling California - John McPhee

(("No more eloquent nor dearly human writing on geology can be found than in the works of New Yorker writer John McPhee. In Annals of the Former World (including Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, and Rising from the Plains), his enchantment with the subject…offers an entirely new prospect of how our earth became what it is, as well as where it might be going. McPhee's completion of the Annals comes with his most compelling book on the subject, Assembling California, a delicious field manual on the creation of the Golden State going back a few hundred million years."
--Peter Stack, The San Francisco Chronicle))

In 1978 and 1979, John McPhee also began his wider series of related journeys, traversing North America at about the fortieth parallel, using roadcuts of Interstate 80 as windows into regional geologies, and incidentally profiling the lives of the geologists with whom he travelled. A continental tetralogy, gathering under the title Annals of the Former World, began with Basin and Range (1980), and continued with In Suspect Terrain (1982) and Rising from the Plains (1986), and is now completed by Assembling California.

http://www.johnmcphee.com/
http://www.johnmcphee.com/assembling.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McPhee


House of Rain - Craig Childs
(or anything he has written - I doubt you'll be disappointed - I wasn't.)

http://www.houseofrain.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/27/garden/27childs.html

You may need to register as a NYT regular?, but it doesn't cost a dime,
it's the best damn newspaper in the U.S..... and they won't spam you.

The next four entries/posts?
ALL 'darkroom'!!! I promise!

Darkroom - The Coffee Shop

The 'coffee shop' sign was shot in Blythe, CA. in 2003. Seemed like it was one of those desert towns where most everything is closed by 7 PM.... but they 'leave the lights on' - that's the tag line to much Motel 6 advertising, which I kinda like.
The table setting at the bottom was done as some sort of restoration/exhibit in the Marin Headlands, Fort Cronkite, in about '96, '97, at one of the military barracks there.
I exposed the table setting first, from bottom, up, dodging out the top to '0'.

The coffee shop sign is sandwiched w/ a sky, and blown into the upper half, once again dodging back the bottom to '0', and of course a good bit of overlap between the bottom & the top.
There was no great soul searching on this one, it was about the nostalgia many of us have for old fashioned diners and the neon signage they use to lure you in off the road.
(It was also about a *really good cup of coffee* and the time and space to enjoy it.
Have you ever seen David Lynch's most marvelous foray into prime time TV, 'Twin Peaks'?
Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlen(sic?)) is always ready to enjoy a good cup o' coffee, strong & black, please.
Amen!, I can go for that anytime, too.
Well, I'd have to add some sugar & milk... hope Dale wouldn't be offended.)

"What makes this hang together as a montage"?...... well the concept, for one - coffee shop + table setting...but beyond that, it's about light - the light falling on the table makes perfect sense with the glow coming from the sign - the table setting was lit by a window that is above and out of the frame.

Notice the long time span from when I shot the table setting, until I shot the sign - about 6+ years!
Also notice that it is drop-dead simple, almost as simple the very first montage image I ever did successfully in 1984:

One thing I've been aware of for a long time is that the most important part of montage printing is not the technical printing details/techniques, at least not for me.
First of all, you have to have the right negatives/'source material'.
After many years of doing this, I seem to have developed a sixth sense about
what I want to commit to film.
Then, you have to connect them, as a print possibility - I spend a lot of time going over & over my proof sheets, making small drawings/tracings, and planning... thinking...& dreaming.
Yes, dreaming...
Neither of these has anything to do with technique, or technology, whatsoever.
It has to do with what goes on between your own two ears.

The best analogy I've been able to think of about this ('what goes on between your own two ears') is:
Jimi Hendrix could pick up the same Fender Stratocaster as anyone else (no doubt Fender has sold many, many hundreds of thousands of these), but when he played it, it didn't sound like anyone else ever had, or has since then.

Another thing this print has inspired me to do, finally, is to print on a matte surface paper again so I can hand-color one of the 3 or 4 prints I usually do of an image. I used to do hand coloring a lot, don't know why I put it aside, exactly.
Ilford's matte surface is very nice for this, but they seem to have stopped making it in RC, which is a whole lot easier for me to deal with than fiber, maybe that's why.
I also chose the Ilford Matte 'cause it's a very smooth, non-textured surface, and I'm finding that scanners are not kind to surface texture - they all seem to 'side-light' whatever you plop on the glass scanning bed. Sometimes that can be interesting...but when it's not? it's a total pain in the ass to get rid of the resulting texture. And I want to be able to scan/'digitize' everything I do at this point.
Anyway, a 50 sheet box of Ilford Matte Fiber is headed my way, from Freestyle Photo, in L.A.
It ain't cheap - 165$ for the paper, + shipping, but I think it'll be worth it.

Larger view of the image:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_DkRm_07_08/CoffeeShop.html

...there's also a comparison of a B&W print, and it's hand colored version.

And if you'd like a preview of the next few darkroom images?....
www.bobbennettphoto.net/2008/index.html