• Went to see some Hiroshi Sugimoto prints at the Hirshhorn; hung out in that rarely open gallery upstairs, with the curved leather couches and the view of the mal mall.
• At Ate a tasty sandwich at Taylor Gourmet; drank too much soda.
• Killed some time at the Portrait Gallery looking at the Norman Rockwell exhibit; the man was a modernist.
• Went to Inception; Christopher Nolan has identity issues

I seem to have started my SOFOBOMO fuzzy month the other day. Looking over a roll of scanned film, I noticed that I’d taken a couple of picture of these sets of numbers written on utility poles and sign posts around the neighborhood. The numbers are all over the place, all over Eckington, all over DC, and who knows where else. I’m a sucker for patterns and for those inconsequential bits of the world that elude explanation. If I was a sophisticated conspiracy theorists (or if I had a GPS equipped digicam) I’d be mapping these things out, but I’m not and I don’t, so I won’t, yet. Maybe later.

I doubt this book will be interesting to anybody but me, but part of the fun of SOFOBOMO is the way the arbitrary restrictions of the event create an opportunity to do things that break the other conventions of photography and narrative. When SOFOBOMO rolls around every year, I tend to have tons of ideas for fairly conventional book projects, ideas that I never seem to end up using. The whole endeavor is so ridiculous that approaching it from the perspective of a conventional photo narrative seems like a invitation to folly, so the most ridiculous ideas seem the most suitable.

I still need a title though. I’m thinking “Untitled Numerology,” but that may not stick.

Look for the rest of photos in my SOFOBOMO 2010 set on flickr. More as they come off the scanner.

96 today with heat index of OMFG-its-going-to-be-miserable. Have I mentioned we don’t have central air? Window units all the way.

Photo courtesy of headsticks.com

It’s been about nine months since I’ve done much blogging. In that time, I’ve moved to DC, sold my car, started a new job, been promoted twice, been to lots of museums and a few plays, bought an iPhone, ate some good Korean food, updated to WordPress 3, wrote a new theme and shot almost 100 rolls of film. It’s been busy, and I’m not going to spend my whole day off going into the details, so here’s the current state of the art in brief.

Cameras and Lenses

I still carry my M6TTL almost everywhere, usually with just a single lens, most often the CV 35 1.4 SC, but also the Biogon 35 F2 or the Hexanon 50 F2. The 28 and the 90 mostly stay on the shelf.

On the weekends, I sometimes shoot with the Beast, a Mamiya C330f with an 80mm F2.8 lens and a sticky shutter. I wish it had a built in meter, but I’m getting better at guessing exposures or using the M6TTL for metering. I saw someone carrying a Mamiya 7 II the other day; those have meters in them, right?

I also shoot occasionally with an Olympus OM2 and 50mm F1.8. The OM2 replaced a dead OM1 with a sticky mirror. I like it enough that I often think of buying an OM4 and that ridiculously over priced 40mm F2.

Tamrac straps on everything, the kind with leather pads and quick release buckles.

Film & Developer

The last three to four months I’ve mostly been shooting TMY2, about 30 rolls of it so far, but I’ve also shot a couple of rolls of Provia 100 and other odds and ends that have been at the bottom of the film bin for too long. I’m developing with XTOL stock almost exclusively. TMY2 developed in full strength XTOL forgives many exposure errors and scans with very little apparent grain. XTOL is pain in the ass to mix up, but a batch stored in eight 600ml Nalgene bottles lasts 16 rolls of 35mm, so mixing it up is at least an infrequent chore. There’s half a bottle of Rodinal on the shelf for emergencies.

DC’s tap water doesn’t leave hard water stains on negatives, so I’m not even using filtered water anymore except for the final dunk in PhotoFlo.

Scanning & Post

I’m using a Nikon Super Coolscan 9000, still the most expensive piece of photo gear I’ve ever purchased. I’m scanning to 16 bit greyscale tiffs using Vuescan’s Tmax 400 Pro preset. Crucial detail; the crop buffer is set to 10%.

Some quick curves, sharpening and adding a border completes the post work. A flickr pro account gives me unlimited space, so I export a jpeg large enough of to make a 6X9 print and archive to flickr for safe keeping. Near-line storage goes onto a pair of mirrored WD drives. Working files get backed up with Timemachine.

Printing

My Epson R2400 died from neglect months ago. I’ve replaced all the inks, but the magenta stills says it’s empty. I’ve considered getting it fixed or just replacing it, but I never printed that much anyway apart from infrequent bouts of misguided discipline. As an alternative to home printing, I’ve just assembled and ordered my first blurb book. We’ll see how that goes.

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, D76 1:1

Back in a week.

M6TTL, Lens Unrecorded, TMY2, D76 1:1

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, Xtol

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, D76 1:1

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, Xtol

I’m starting over, scrapping the Paris photos and nearly completely rethinking my SoFoBoMo project. The Paris photos just weren’t working for me. I never quite like my own travel photos anyway. They always seem to have a momentum that belongs to someone else, as if the vacation is taking the photos instead of me. All the novelty of travel overwhelms my sense of my own style. I’m much more successful in a place I know.

So, vacation photos out, here photos in. The roll from the first half of this week has 20+ photos that I’d be happy to put together into a book. Hopefully I’ll find the balance of 35 on the half-shot roll in the camera. I should still be able to finish in time, but this reminds me of a university essay; three weeks fooling around, chasing tangents and banging my head against the wall, only to scrap the whole thing and rewrite in a fit of energy in the last few days.

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, Xtol

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, Xtol

It took me less than a week to get all the film developed and scanned, so I’m a bit ahead of schedule. This was my first opportunity to put the Coolscan 9000 to the kind of daily use it takes to really get to know a piece of equipment. Somethings I’ve learned:

• You can have VueScan ring a bell when it is done, useful when you feel like leaving the room to read book.
• Click the box for Fine mode unless you want to find banding in your scans.
• The Coolscan 9000 is much more capable of dealing with full density negs than the ScanDual IV was, to the extent that I’ve started to correct my long running habit of under-developing.
• The two strip 35mm holder is great for big scanning projects. Yeah, it doesn’t hold the negs completely flat, , but I’ve only found one scan that showed obvious results of field curvature, and I suppose you could always rescan with the glass carrier later.

I’ve now got two weeks to put the book together from the raw scan files. Apart from one roll that I dropped while hanging to dry, the negatives are remarkably clean, so the post processing is just inversion and curve work, and I’ve already made my first pass at that while scanning. I’ll need to make a second and third pass, and go back and redo some of the conversions from the first pass, but here is what I’ve got so far:

Contact Sheet PDF

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, Xtol

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, Xtol Stock

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, Xtol Stock

Kate and I are back from our vacation to Paris, where I started my SOFOBOMO fuzzy month. I’ve now got a pile of film to scan and develop, 10 rolls, four more than I had planned on. I’ve already developed four of those, and the scanner is humming along beside me as a I type. In addition to the usual Raw scan files, I’m also having vuescan output a JPEG with the TMax preset. These JPEGs are dark and low contrast, but they let me quickly eyeball the whole roll without doing one by one conversions of each frame. Hopefully these will help with the editing process, which if all goes well I should be able to start next week. Until then, I’ll be developing and scanning.

M6TTL, CV 35 1.4 SC, TMY2, Xtol Stock

M6TTL, Lens Unrecorded, TMY2, Xtol Stock

This might be the last post for a while. I’m off to Paris for week on Friday, and there isn’t much in the photo queue between now and then. I will be starting my SOFOBOMO fuzzy month while on vacation, so more on that when I return.

M6TTL, ZM Biogon 35 F2, TMY2, Xtol Stock, Coolscan 9000

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, Xtol Stock, Coolscan 9000

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, Xtol Stock, Coolscan 9000

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, Xtol Stock, Coolscan 9000

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, Xtol Stock, Coolscan 9000

Nothing like a 30 inch monitor to completely isolate you in the world of work. You can just fall right into that thing.

M6TTL, 50 Hex, TMY2, Xtol Stock, Coolscan 9000

M6TTL, ZM Biogon 35 F2, TMY2, Xtol Stock

M6TTL, ZM Biogon 35 F2, TMY2, Xtol Stock, Coolscan 9000

M6TTL, ZM Biogon 35 F2, TMY2, Xtol Stock, Coolscan 9000

M6TTL, ZM Biogon 35 F2, TMY2, Xtol Stock

M6TTL, ZM Biogon 35 F2, TMY2, Xtol Stock

M6TTL, ZM Biogon 35 F2, TMY2, Xtol Stock

M6TTL, CV 35 1.4 SC, TMY2, Rodinal Stand

M6TTL, CV 35 1.4 SC, TMY2, Rodinal Stand

M6TTL, CV 35 1.4 SC, TMY2, Rodinal Stand

M6TTL, CV 35 1.4 SC, TMY2, Rodinal Stand

M6TTL, CV 35 1.4 SC, TMY2, Rodinal Stand

M6TTL, CV 35 1.4 SC, TMY2, Rodinal Stand

M6TTL, CV 35 1.4 SC, TMY2, Rodinal Stand

M6TTL, CV 35 1.4 SC, TMY2, Rodinal Stand

M6TTL, CV 35 1.4 SC, TMY2, Rodinal Stand

M6TTL, CV 35 1.4 SC, TMY2, Rodinal Stand

TMY2 in Rodinal stand is . . . uh . . . interesting?