Today, I got the dates for my solo exhibit at Framations. It will be July 10th through August 5th, with the exhibit reception held on Saturday, July 14th, from 6-9pm.

To say I’m excited is the understatement of the century!!!

The show today went very, very well…. despite buckets of rain. Depending on where you were, we had between 1″ and 3″ of cold, cold rain. Fortunately, most of it abated during the set and tear down for the show. That made it a little easier to transport my prints to/from the truck and gym of the school.

In all, there were about 50 vendors, selling everything from used electronics to jewelry to bath products. Many of the vendors, as expected, were dealing in home wares of some kind or another, although there were a few dealing in frames and signage. And, despite the weather, there were plenty of folks stopping in to look. Seems like I spent most of the day chatting about my images and photography in general. My dad would’ve been proud — I certainly seem to discovered his “never met a stranger” atitude, especially when it comes to my work.

This morning’s sunrise was gorgeous — one of the best I’ve seen in a long, long time. It even challenged the skies I’ve seen in Negril and at the Grand Canyon.

It’s funny how that kind of sight affects me. I see the glorious beauty of the sunrise, or a storm, or the freshly fallen snow, and the big questions start hitting my brain…. Why am I not out there in it, photographing it, capturing it, and enjoying the sights, sounds and smells of the great outdoors?

Should I decide to change careers at some point in the future, I’ll be hard pressed not to be out there, taking it all in from within, wrapping the Big sky around me like a blanket, rather than merely watching it through the window near a cube I happen to occupy.

My darling daughter moves from the realm of the ‘tween to the empire of the teen today. I talked with her, and it sounds like she is making the transition gracefully, and hasn’t yet acquired the attitude that so many teens are portrayed as having. She has a great head on her shoulders, and I believe she’ll probably spare us much of the angst-riddled trials that others endure.
Then again, she take after her father, and comport herself across her teens with not the most gracious of travels. It’s a wonder Mom and Dad didn’t put me on the sidewalk more than once for some of my antics!

Snow again today, and loads of wind to blow it all over the place. We’d plans to go to Mardi Gras, but the wind and snow kept us at the house. For me, that translated to a chance to try some experimental (for me) photography.

I set up to capture some snowflake images on my sensor. At first, I tried a hand mirror. This was a great surface, flat and untextured. But…. (isn’t there always a “but”?) the snowflakes reflected inside the mirror, creating a double image of them. This really didn’t work as well as I thought it would, so I moved to something else. I got one of my old black “pleather” camera bags, and set it outside to let it get down to temperature. Unfortunately, it didn’t work very well either. The snowflakes never did quite sit well on it — I guess that material doesn’t lose it’s heat as quickly as the surface glass from the mirror — and the texture was distracting.

I think the right answer might be a smoked piece of glass. If it’s dark enough, I could even build a mount to mount the glass in, and ensure the camera’s sensor plane is parallel to the glass surface, which would allow me to take shots with the camera pretty wide open, without having to worry about the depth of focus interrupting the shot. Incorporating some focusing rails would probably help this out too. In fact, that contraption could be used for other kinds of macro work involving relatively stationary objects. In other words, no bugs.

I also took a quick ride down to Creve Coeur Camera to pick up some close-up filters. I haven’t used these in a long time, but I thought they might be useful to get closer to the tiny cold-air snowflakes we had. They did help some, and would’ve probably been great for the snow we’ve had recently. This snow, though, was comprised of tiny, tiny flakes, and I just couldn’t get close enough to come even remotely close to filling the frame with them.

The solution to that problem is, I suspect, a new macro lens. Canon makes a 5x lifesize lens, the MP-E 65, which appears to be an amazing lens. As I told Beck the other night, I think you could read the serial number on a bug’s eye with that thing. I also thought about extension tubes as a possible solution. Especially with my macro lens (an f/2.8 lens), I oughta be able to pull off the use of tubes pretty easily.

More stuff to practice, for sure, but a noble start of some pretty cool stuff…

Late into last night, whilst doing my best snow-dance, I continued fighting the good fight against bad print from my Epson R1800. After a flash of brilliance, I think I have discovered the problem at hand.

Paper.

I’ve been using Red River papers exclusively, and I have absolutely loved them. They’ve been inexpensive, seething with good quality, and flawless so far. For some reason though, my stack of 4×6 UltraPro Satin seems to have stopped carrying a good image. I don’t know if there’s some kind of tolerance issue from the beginning to the current point in my box of paper, or if there’s some other kind of gremlin at work.

I went through a quick flirtation with Ilford papers on my journey with the R1800, and still had some Ilford Smooth Gloss and Smooth Pearl papers around, and decided to print on both of those, along with some Epson Premium Semigloss paper.

And guess what? The prints were stunning.

After dozens (literally!) of prints on the Red River papers to try various print settings, and expending a ton of ink on head cleanings, my problem wound up being the very media I was printing on. Note to self for next time I have some printing challenges, eh!

Now, I still believe that Red River has great papers — I’ve had nothing but good luck with them until this little bump in the road. Until my 8½x11 and 13×19 Red River papers start showing problems, I’ll probably continue doing some printing on them.

Quite deliberately, I decided on the way home this afternoon — an adventure in itself, given the snow and ice — to stop a Creve Coeur Camera and pick up some Epson papers to play with. Quite by accident however, I ended up buying matte papers. Typically, I print on luster coated papers — I like the sheen, and despise a full-on glossy paper, so luster’s where I have headed.

I got home, opened the new package of 8½x11 heavyweight matte paper, and cringed when I saw that it was truly matte — not just flat gloss, but no gloss. Urgh. Well, I had it here, it didn’t cost that much, and I hadn’t played with matte papers since DLWS at Yosemite in November ’05. So I ran my troublesome little image, expecting to not like it, and…

I loved it!

Something about that paper just punches, way harder than anything else I’ve been printing on. Guess I’m glad I bought that box of 13×19 Epson Enhanced Paper!

So the love is back… for now. Like lovers, printers can be tempermental, and the timbre of the relationship could change just like that! But tonight, on the eve of Valentine’s Day, my Epson and I have kissed and made up, all thanks to the mediation of a little box of paper.

For a week, the weather dudes and dudettes have been proclaiming snow in the forecast, with the magnitude being everything from small amounts, to a full-bore ice storm, to dogs-and-cats-living-together. Today was the day to check their report cards, and see whether Mother Nature would play along.

The rain began yesterday, and it rained and rained and rained, with the temperatures hovering teasingly just above the freezing point. As it ends up, the cold part of the storm was late, arriving right during rush hour this morning. Beck and I went in to work together, and it was pouring rain. Within an hour of getting to work, we had full blizzard white-out conditions. That’s just about the most dramatic switchover I’ve ever seen.

The snow continued to fall, and I made a command decision to head us home just after lunch. There’s a bridge between work and the house, and getting trapped on the wrong side of that due to road closures makes the 17-mile drive grow by at least a factor of three, and in this weather, it could really mean the difference between getting home, and spending the night in a hotel along with gazillions of other workers trapped on the wrong side of the river from their homes.

The drive wasn’t too horrible, but a great many folks had obviously either stayed home (the smartest move) or hadn’t yet made their escape from their frozen workplaces. No matter — we made it home safely, albeit slipping and sliding all along the way, and that was all I was shooting for.

So how much snow did we have? We it really depended on where you were. We have about 7″ on the surfaces where the snow didn’t blow quite so much. Not much farther south, there’s only a few inches, and NE of here, the snow is still coming down heavily. Tomorrow’s commute is still in question, but Smokey did well in the snow and ice, and made me once again affirm why I drive an SUV. The little-truck-that-could will probably get another chance to prove his mettle tomorrow during the re-frozen remains of today’s storm.

Could be fun!

My love affair with my R1800 is beginning to be taxed. For several weeks, I have been fighting a banding problem when printing my prints. It is consistent, and a pain to deal with. I have cleaned the heads, aligned the heads, powered the printer off overnight to soften any ink residue, and have burned through almost a full set of ink cartridges.

The printer is still under warranty, and that’s good, but I need to be getting prints ready for an upcoming show in July, and I can’t afford too much downtime in trying to resolve this with Epson. So far, aside from the cleanings and alignments I’ve done, I’ve also gone through the guided self-help troubleshooter on the Epson site. It had no answers, so an e-mail to their customer support team has been sent.

Stay tuned for the rest of this saga…

Over the next week or so, I’m shopping around for a new theme for the ol’ Deauxmayne. Don’t be surprised if you see if look a little different occassionally, and sometimes for longer than just a few minutes!

Today we had the strangest looking snowflakes…. You could see the form of the snowflake clearly, but they looked like they had collected more ice on the the way down. None of them were particularly large — although they tended to fall as clumps sometimes — but they were fat.

Strange stuff.

I hadn’t tried to shoot snowflakes with my macro lens. I keep thinking that I need to build an enclosure to shoot them — nice background, flat surface parallel to the camera focal plane — but today, I just used a red umbrella that they were falling on. What I discovered is that my lens, despite being 1:1, simply doesn’t reproduce the snowflakes as large as I would like. Ideally, I’d have each flake fill the frame. Based on today’s flakes, I’d need something closer to 3:1.

Definitely more practice is needed…..