June 21, 2010, 8:14 pm
Conduit Blank or Windy Day at the Beach
It has been a lazy day: much reading of books (Stieg Larson’s excellant “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) and little effort on getting away from the house or finding photographs. Consequently there is only a narrow choice of images for today’s post; more truthfully, this power junction box on the the side of the Taos Cow was the only choice. Looked at quickly it might be an impressionist painting of a beach on a windy day.
Tomorrow we will be more energetic and adventurous, heading down into the Rio Grande gorge. The weather is promising to be more interesting over the coming week too with storm chances rising each day. A 30% chance of rain in northern New Mexico means a 60% chance of interesting skies to photograph somewhere around your horizon – you may not get wet where you are standing but you will have a panorama view of the thunderheads elsewhere.
March 24, 2010, 9:42 pm
Happy Dog!
The results are in and they are good, very good; I am as happy as a dog on the beach! Three days after I placed my test order for a 12×18 print of “Edge of the Unconscious,” a gorgeous, high gloss, print arrived. The 5×7 card ordered at the same time, printed separately, is still in transit but it was always the 12×18 that mattered. [edit: the card arrived the next day, equally good but next time I will select a a white fill border.]
In my earlier Fotomoto Experiment – Part 1 post I incorrectly stated that delivery would be via UPS; my brain had dropped a letter somewhere between reading and writing as it was in fact shipped through USPS – the US Postal Service. Realizing my mistake, I had a brief but horrible vision of my local postal service worker bending the package into a U to fit the parcel box of our communal mailbox!
My fears were unwarrented; even Samson in a full head of hair would have had trouble bending this 18x24x1.5 reinforced cardboard box to fit in a mailbox! The packaging was very impressive and earned Fotomoto high marks before it was even opened. And anyway, the USPS delivers packages to the door in exactly the same way that UPS or Fed-Ex would.
I chose the Fotomoto’s “metallic” paper option since I had no idea what it was; I haven’t followed chemical printing technology in over 10 years. The dynamic range of the print is wonderful with rich blacks, subtle shadows and glistening highlights. Kodak claims 100 year plus stability for its Professional Endura Metallic paper which is as good as I can hope for from my aging Epson 2200 inkjet with archival papers.
My only dissapointment, and a small one at that, is that the print is borderless which is going to make matting a touch more awkward; I’ll have to mount it on paper first. Fotomoto staff have commented in their member support forums that they hope to offer an option for print borders down the line but it is not high on their immediate to do list.
The bottom line is the Fotomoto shopping cart is enabled on both this blog and the large web site that contains it. You can buy a 12×18 of the happy dog above for $45 plus shipping and the $26.75 profit will go to Save the Children or a related charity. I may be changing the charities around a little as this enterprise gets underway but Save the Children is a good choice to start off.
September 19, 2008, 5:32 pm
Into the Surf
You have to be hardy to run into the Pacific from anywhere along the U.S. coast; it’s cold at the best of times. In this case it was at Carmel, California, in the early 90s. The evening light was almost gone – the perfect time for Ernst Haas style motion blur.
The VFXY Photos theme for the week is “Sunsets”; as you can imagine there are no shortage of submissions – who doesn’t have a sunset in their collection. This will be my offering. You can see all the submissions to the current VFXY theme at /photos.vfxy.com/themes/.
This is also one of the images in the recently assembled collection of people photographs that you can find on the main Web site under People.
