Over at The Strobist, David points us to a flipbook portfolio by George Lange. The presentation is cool, but… (drumroll… it’s time for hard, self-analysis, and a little mantra chanting…)

It’s photography like this that absolutely makes me know this is my first, best destiny.

I cannot believe the incredible use of light and creation of moods of which this photographer has command. It is truly amazing. And it’s not that there are famous folks along the way — I mean, that’s cool — but it’s the evoking of emotion that stuns me. Admittedly, the flipbook presentation is cool, along with the music, but I still come back to the photography. Stunning just doesn’t give it enough credit, but I don’t think I know the adjectives to describe it.

Go, take a look, and see what you think. For me, this is one doozy of a portfolio and presentation, but the wallop really comes from the images themselves and what they made me feel.

And after all, isn’t that what photographers are supposed to do?

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.

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.

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…

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…..

OK, so I’m just an average Joe in an average house in an average city. For me, 15 minutes of fame are hard to come by. However, this morning when I looked in iTunes, I noticed that the Photo Talk Radio podcast had been released with the following description next to the first segment:

Now that’s cool!

I couldn’t talk about this before the announcement this morning, but Crystal has won another award.

A week or two ago, I submitted Crystal and Fall’s Dance to the folks at Photo Talk Radio for their monthly HP Monthly Photo Contest. The winner of this contest wins an HP Photosmart 475 Photo Printer. This is a slick little printer that prints 4×6 and 5×7 images, and can be run from batteries for work in the field — real nice device.

So I sent my images in, and kinda forgot about it.

Well, Thursday night, I got a call from Michael A. Garcia and Howard Lipin congratulating me on being selected as the January winner of the contest! To say I was floored is an understatement! I talked with them for more than half an hour, talking shop, and talking about what would happen next.

This morning, along with Gary Bernstein, they announced the win, and interviewed me on their internet radio program. What a thrill! Now, off their site, there’s a link to Crystal, as well as a link to the redesigned Colin Wright Photography site. My web server logs are showing that there’s a bunch of folks looking at my site as a result of this exposure — cool!

While this is all great, there’s an even cooler aspect to this. HP will get a copy of Crystal, and has rights for a year to use it in their promotional materials. I sure hope that happens!!!!

If you’d like to listen to the archive of the show, you can find it by clicking here. My piece is in the first part of the show, so it should be easy to find in the sound files. I think the archive of the show will be posted sometime tomorrow or Monday — enjoy!!!!

Woo-hoo!!!!

Last night, I spent some time trying to get my Nik filters to work in Photoshop CS3 on my MacBook. This, to no avail. As I did my research this morning, it appears that until they are released as a universal binary, CS3 won’t load ’em. Bummer. That means that work “on the road” is limited to whatever CS3 has included… at least for a while.

However, I was able to get them running on the PowerMac, and they seem to function like I’d expect. I’m gonna try to beat on CS3 on the G5 and see if the performance is any different over there as compared to CS2. I’ve read that the difference is only about 20%, so I don’t know if I’ll notice the difference, given the lackluster way I use Photoshop. 🙂