Behind the scenes, after-hours, and the Mill Hill Saloon

Just a bit of off-time, that’s all.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Duke and Parson 4×5

One more for the road.  This was also shot at the bowling alley during the Christmas party, though I didn’t really feel that it went with the others.  I try to print a copy for each subject though I didn’t see either of these guys last year, so this picture along with a few others that I had spares for, are all hanging up in our office.  I’m glad I work at a place that appreciates what I do.

And here’s the alternate because I almost always make one:

So that’s it as far as large format work goes.  I did have a few more that I’d developed before the COVID shutdown near the end of March, but I never was able to get them scanned…I also have 12 more sheets waiting to be developed.  It will take a while before I’m able to get that done also, but my photo instructor promised to let me back in to finish all that up when this thing is all over.  This post was just waiting at the bottom of my queue but since tonight is this year’s “Christmas” party it seemed a fitting time to publish.

Kodak cowboy diptych

If you ever wondered just what I looked like while I’m taking pictures of all those cowboys and jeeps it would be something like this:

Except we wear vests as well; I took mine off to show off my new shirts.  I’m becoming a bit of an aficionado of well-made clothing (side-effect of owning a few Nikons?) so have started taking a few style shots here and there.

Not optimized

MAKE YOUR PHOTOBLOG GO FURTHER

Evidently I’ve been a bit of an ignoramus when it comes to running this site!  I’m doing more research now.  It started with this post which I thought I could possibly do without seeing as it is some old information.  But looking at the first photo there (called “weboptim”), I realized there was probably more I could do.  So thanks to this article for helping me do that.  I’ve been using Affinity Photo for nearly a year and like it a lot, it’s a great alternative to Photoshop that doesn’t cost too much and you can own it…compare to Photoshop which makes you pay a monthly subscription to use.

But I realized that my photos on here, while not necessarily large, were certainly not optimized for the Web.  And here’s what I mean:

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One is what I’ve been uploading before, the other is after tweaking the settings, and I can’t say I notice the difference, but it’s taken what was a 3MB file down to less than 600kB.  I think this site just got some new life, but it’ll take a long time for me to go through and fix all my pics.  But if you’ve run into space issues on your site/blog I hope this will help.

Of course this comes after I’ve gone through the last few years and pruned some shots I thought were not up to my usual standards of excellence, but at least I can say I’m smarter now than I was a few days ago.

Summer 2021 on Ilford XP2 Super

After not being able to use the UCCS darkroom last year during the pandemic, I decided to patronize my local camera store a bit more, which has included buying/processing color negative film almost exclusively.  One thing I didn’t want was to be stuck with even more rolls of black & white that will either take a lot of money to be developed or will sit in my freezer until I can get back to developing at the university.  I still wanted to try to continue my current photo project for just a little bit longer and for that I decided to go chromogenic black & white.  Here are a few of the shots I took over the Summer:

I shot just a roll or two of BW400CN before Kodak discontinued it and man do I wish that Kodak would bring it back but I’m happy and thankful that Ilford is still here for us.  I would not say that XP2 is a worthy replacement for Tri-X but for what I needed I think it works well.  One thing that I noticed was that it behaved very much like a color negative film in that I think its true speed is not 400 but 200, so I tried to overexpose when I could.  The shadows can fall off really quickly and yet it is so flat when scanned.  That’s mostly good because I have never been thrilled with how black & white is scanned by the lab; it’s usually way too contrasty and if the exposure isn’t exactly perfect you’re losing quite a lot of information.  I prefer to scan myself at low contrast and dial it in on the computer, something that XP2 does nicely even when lab scanned.

I will eventually go back to Tri-X when I can develop it myself but for what it is and what I need right now I’m pretty happy to continue shooting Ilford XP2 Super.

End of my rope

Site update: My inability to edit my photos is starting to catch up with me.  For the last 7.5 years I’ve been posting whatever I wanted with wild abandon.  That is coming to an end though, because I’m getting dangerously close to my upload limit.  I had about 200MB of space left, though going through some of my larger posts with some judicious editing has helped stretch that to almost 500MB so far, more to do.  As I look back on things I posted 2-3 years ago (and even in the last few weeks) there are definitely extemporaneous images in there and I’m being gentle right now but some need deep cuts.  I’ve gotten rid of a few posts altogether, deleting the corresponding pictures.

Hopefully this will help me going forward post more on-topic (and I can judge as well how much my readers enjoy certain posts by the number of likes).  And I hope that in the future I can become a better editor/curator of my own images.  Thankfully I’ve nearly always uploaded images in a standard size (watermarked) of 1500×1000, it was really to protect myself from people who might want to steal my work, but those smaller (by today’s standards) sizes have helped storage space on WordPress from becoming too much of an issue before now.

But what it all comes down to, is that The Resurrected Camera as it is here, has an expiration date.  I can’t afford to buy a yearly plan from WordPress to get more upload space (already do that for my professional site), and don’t think I see the numbers of visitors to fund it with ads or whatever, in fact I have no idea how to even set that up.  I’ve avoided Instagram for years but my photo instructor said that a professional Instagram account just for photographic work was really beneficial, and I’ve had so many people wonder why I’m not on there.  At this point I think it may be unavoidable.  So I’m not sure when I’ll stop uploading images here, or if this blog will take a different turn in the meantime.  Don’t panic yet, I have 500MB to go and have ~20 unpublished posts in the pipeline already.  But the days of this WordPress site are numbered…