The Monomagician

And what a week! Politically anyway. Not just from the perspective of what’s just happened in the US, but at work, the issues I mentioned in my previous post just won’t go away. I think the best strategy is to keep a low profile. Once the project goes live on December 1st, there will be so much back-slapping that whatever caused the original issues will have been forgotten.
Still on to more interesting things… I made three black and white prints using Permajet’s Fibre-based glossy paper this afternoon. It’s a thick, luxurious paper with a slightly textured finish. I used the Permajet ICC profile for the 3800 and the prints were spot on! Nice deep blacks, plenty of shadow detail. I would have taken hours to produce these in the darkroom. One was a scan from a very old negative taken with a Bronica ETRSi and 50mm lens.
The size of the negative meant that the scan resolution was relatively low and consequently there wasn’t much work to do in the cleaning department. It took a while to get the print to look “just so”…here’s an electronic version. Let me know what you think…

Wind-blown grasses and young oak trees in Savernake Forest, England

I’m in two minds as to whether use this shot for tomorrow night’s “Trees” competition at Shrivenham Camera club. The alternatives are:

Avenue of trees, Coate Water, Swindon

or

Horse Chestnut, Lydiard Park, Swindon

They all look lovely as prints. The last two by the way, were taken with a Leica M8 and the superb 28mm Elmarit ASPH lens. I treated myself to this lens in September and I have been blown away by it’s sharpness. It has become the ‘body cap’ on my M8.

The Horse Chestnut is my favourite of the three. This was quite a tricky shot, as I was shooting into the light. Rather than use the camera’s meter, I opted to use a hand-held meter and take an incident reading.  It took very little post-processing in Lightroom to produce what I believe is a “fine” print.  There were no blown highlights and there’s oodles of details in the shadows.  This is definitely one for the wall!

Why is it that large organisations feel the need to involve all sorts of people in issues that frankly, they have no understanding of and can add absolutely no value to. Why also do these people then feel the need to “get to the bottom” of a problem. Not necessarily to learn what the root cause was, but to find out who’s to blame?

There are times when I detest working for a large organisation and not surprisingly, today was one of those times.

You can imagine how happy I was when lunchtime came around and after a quick sandwich, was able to take a walk outside with my Canon G9. The light was pretty awful. Yesterday was what I call a ‘glad to be alive day’ owing to the crisp air and blue skies. Today was an altogether greyer affair.

Just as I reached the end of my walk around the perimeter of my workplace, I spotted a single leaf stuck in a chainlink fence. The camera was out of my pocket in a flash. I had in mind a monochrome image with the backlit leaf standing out from the hedge behind and the tones and hardness of the chainlink fence contrasting with the delicacy of the leaf.

The exposure was made with -1EV worth of exposure compensation to tame the highlights at the top of the picture. I didn’t want to go any lower as I wanted to keep the noise levels down to a manageable level as I was already shooting at ISO 200 to make sure I could use a decent shutter speed.

I processed the image in Lightroom. There’s quite a steep curve - partly to emphasise the mid-tones and also to lower the values of the darks tones and shadows. I also played with the contrast a bit to harden the image and accentuate the chain link and make the leaf stand out a touch more. Finally, I tweaked the green and yellow channels to bring out the leaf a bit more.

The final image is shown below.

Leaf in Chainlink Fence.

If you want to see more pictures a week taken in 2008, please visit Mark’s Picture a Week Pages

I felt much, much better for my walk and knowing I had a reasonably good shot in the bag made the afternoon a much more pleasant proposition.

A decent swim after work helped too!

The final print, made onto Permajet 271 Oyster paper shows a full range of tones and there is plenty of detail in the leaf structure.
I’m in two minds as to whether it’s worth putting on to fibre paper. I think I’ll mull that over with a glass of Speyside Single cask whisky.

Or evenings, more like…The 3800 has been in place for six days and has had a fair amount of use by us both.  I saw my mate Phil Malpas at work this morning. He’s had a 3800 for almost a year and hasn’t had to change the inks yet.  He’s not exactly frugal with his printing either.  So it looks like it was the right decision from an economic perspective.

I cannot fault the image quality.  We’ve made prints on Epson Premium Glossy as well as Permajet’s Oyster 271 paper.  Both look great with colour and black and white images, but for me, the Permajet has the edge by virtue of its whiter base.  The Epson paper is positively creamy compared to the Permajet.

As I write this, I’m making my fourth A4 print on Permajet’s Classic Fine Art Fibre Base Gloss paper.  This is a 295gm² fibre-based paper.  The output is simply lovely.  I am chuffed to bits with the quality of the prints.  I want to try a couple fo the prints at A3 or even A2 if I can afford the paper.  It cost £1 per sheet at A4.  A pack of 25 sheets of A2 Classic Fine Art Fibre Base Gloss comes in at £94.95.  Not cheap, but in the immortal words of the Loreal adverts, I’m worth it!

To top it all, I even managed to take some pictures this lunchtime with my Canon G9, which I hope will have potential for my Picture a week project.