exposed

My standard practice :

• shoot > hand process > scan small > post images on web > file my negatives

It took me years, with many tries, to get to this point. I think I’m settled with my preference for now of using my high speed film black and white film, processing them at home, scanning each role, editing, quick image adjusting (because of the sheer numbers), and then posting some of them online. What I ended up putting on this picture blog are about 1% of what I shoot overall, and in many cases, just about 20% of my selections if the event was involved. In that case, I would want to make a separate page for the whole event, if time allows. I shoot a LOT, for better or worse, because I’m always going through thoughts, options, and experiments as I go. Sure, it also includes doubts, second guessing, or just simply judging / re-judging the situations. Because of this I’m a little slow on turning up images to share. Since I shoot almost everyday, likely if I spend time with my people, the back end work never seem to get caught up. And this is BEFORE anyone requiring any high resolution images from me that they like.

When an image is requested

• find the negative > hi res scan > file clean up and adjustments > archival prints / FTP

Depends on the size of the image requested, scanning can take about 2 hours, and working on clean up and adjustment can be another 1-5 hours. While I love to give away my time, efforts, and paying into expenses, I can only do this to a very selected few.

Crucial Gear

Cameras
Nikon F5 bodies
17mm-35mm
35mm-70mm
80mm-200mm
occasional
teleconverter
macro lens
Hasselblad Xpan

Film
Kodax Tmax 3200
Kodak Tmax 400
Fujifilm Pro 800Z
Kodak Portra 400vc

Chemicals
Kodak Tmax developer
Kodak Indicator Stop Bath
Clayton Archival Fixer
Kodak Hyper Clearing agent

Scanner :
Eversmart Supreme
Scanning process – liquid mount on to this high end, flat bed scanner capable of scanning for prints from 8×10 to billboard sizes. This means the larger it needs to be, the more work is involved, digital grit work. Scanning alone usually takes a day or two from looking for negatives to finishing the file.

Computer :
MacPro Quad-Core  OS X 10.5.7

Prints

Still in love with my enlargers and darkroom atmosphere, but shooting takes my time away from that peaceful hermit of a lifestyle. I’m now opting to output it from a commercial lab with an expensive machine that can take my customized, scrubbed, and polished scanned files and output them on archival (mostly black and white) papers. I wish they would make more slight toned papers in the future, like the old options of paper types we used to have to play with.