Outside the dining room window the local landscape has shifted from sun-bleached street to twenty thousand shades of rain drenched green. The forecast for the next two weeks is for unremitting wet. Everyone I talked to today is in a good mood. The grey is making us happy. This is the Pacific Northwest, where we parse our descriptions of overcast in the manner of a wine connoisseur describing a fine Pinot Noir.
I performed a rash of aerobic weeding late yesterday in advance of the front, filling several yard waste containers in about an hour. The dry soil felt like it should be late August. It is the driest winter on record. We have been making plans to shower with buckets so we can flush our toilets, and mapping which parts of the garden could die off. Perhaps the drought is broken, and I can use my darkroom again this year.
I have an exhibit I’m hanging next week, which will be the first showing of my Venice portfolio. I emptied my frames and mats of Ireland and France photos, and learned that I had printed the Venice Portfolio just slightly larger, and I had to recut every mat opening. I now have a pile of 14 prints ready to drive over the mountain to Cle Elum next Friday. I also had 5 prints to mount that Sarah Adams picked out for a show she is curating in Napa. One I had not printed to size previously, so I had to fire up the darkroom for just this image. If you want to be alerted to my exhibits and openings (I have a lot of them this year), sign up on my feedback page.
Speaking of prints, I just got a series of test prints back from Panda Lab from my 20D digital camera onto Kodak Endura paper. Panda is working mightily to make a transition from a strictly custom b/w lab to also offering digital color print output from film and digital. Dana is still getting up to speed on the software for his new processor, and wanted to run some trials on my files. I tried to give him some difficult images to run, ones with lots of deep shadow detail plus extensive highlights. Even without an embedded profile, they look great. He printed a range of outputs, starting with no adjustments, and gradually increasing contrast and saturation. Two out of three files required some degree of intervention. One thing I learned is that every lab that makes C prints from digital files works in SRGB color space. That color space best mimics the output on photographic paper. It behooves us to convert before shipping off files to print, rather than leaving them in Adobe RGB like we’ve all been trained to. Panda is about to offer profiles through Dry Creek Photo, which is a great site to know about to embed custom profiles for local labs everywhere, even Costco outlets. The great thing about working with a small local lab like Panda is that they can customize to your individual likes. They bend over backwards to please, so the trick is to never, ever say, "There’s no urgency on this project. Get to it when you can."
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