carl_weese

Steve,

 

I haven't run into film sag with 7x17--though it's true I generally

shoot with the camera back aligned plumb, I have done

close-ups with the camera pointing down from time to time. A

problem you could mistake for 'film sag' is film "pop" which I find

7x17 quite susceptible to. This happens most often when cool

dry film holders from a case or pack are shot in warmer, moister

atmospheric conditions. As in, shots in early morning as the sun

rises and makes interesting mist in the woods as it warms the

air and ground dew. The only solution I know of is to pull the

slide, wrap up the camera, and give the film a minute or two to

deal with the bellows-full of damp air. If you don't wait, you get a

ripple of soft focus somewhere, not necessarily in the

center.---Carl

The 165mm Super Angulon gives wonderful results, and while

big and heavy, it certainly is portable. My standard 8x10 outfit

consists of the SA, a 240mm Apo Sironar S, and a 14"

Commercial Ektar, 8x10 Deardorff camera, and three filmholders

which all fits easily in an f.64 packpack, without the side pockets.

The pack isn't a feather, but there's no problem walking miles

with it. For multi-day hiking expeditions where you need food and

camping supplies, the SA could be counterproductive.

If you hope to work in Pt/Pd in the future, by all means start out

using pyro. A negative developed to a high contrast level in PMK

pyro will print beautifully in platinum, and also will print well on

variable contrast silver paper or on a soft grade of standard,

graded, silver paper. As long as you use reasonable care and

always wear gloves tray development in pyro is simple and easy

and delivers negatives of unsurpassed quality. Negatives

developed in standard HQ developers (D76, HC110, etc) for

printing in silver will be too low in contrast to print successfully in

Pt/Pd.

Scott,

 

I've just put up a show of my work from a nearby forest reserve

with a river. The trick to "seeing" a subject like this may

be,mostly, perseverence. I've been spending time in the park

since 1974, but the thirty pictures in the show were made from

1996 to the present. That's twenty-two years of just looking,

before six years of shooting.

 

From a technical standpoint, switch to negative film. Shooting

forest subject matter with the limited tonal range of transparency

film is putting a major hurdle in your way. I wasn't happy with my

forest work until I began printing it in platinum, from 8x10, 7x17,

and 12x20 inch negatives. Nothing else, technically, could

convey my vision of the subject.---Carl

Can you just push or pull the bellows out of the way? On my 810

Deardorff, with a lot of rise and a 14" lens the bellows "sags" and

cuts off the top of the groundglass. I just stick my spot meter

between the camera bed and the bellows to hold them up out of

the way. Works fine, as long as I remember to do it.---Carl

Two pieces of heavy plate glass will ensure excellent contact for

silver-printing of 8x10 negatives. For contact printing on

hand-coated papers, ie, Pt/Pd, cyanotype, etc, a spring back

frame of vacuum frame will be preferable. On ordinary double

weight silver paper I've found the plate glass sandwich entirely

satisfactory up to 7x17 inch negatives.

Emile,

 

It takes a specialist to be sure (if even then) but what you

describe certainly sounds like "Fair Use". You aren't reproducing

the dolls, you're placing them in a tableau of your own creation.

As long as your photograph is a "substantially different work"

from the original, it's not an infringement. It would be much more

tricky if you were using them in an advertisement for some other

product: in that case you could run into either copyright or

trademark problems.

 

If you put a Mickey Mouse doll in an ad for a brand of milk or

cookies, you'd need permission for Mickey's "endorsement" of

the product. An art photograph showing the dolls on the shelf in

a child's room would almost certainly be protected

expression.---Carl

I've found that there is a critical difference between this formats.

For some reason, the 20" length "needs" to be put on the wall to

appreciate, while the 17" length can look good on the wall or

held in your hand, as in a portfolio. Without scientific testing I

have had a quite a few people try this, with agreement. Worth

noting that 17 inches is the width of a typical magazine spread. I

don't know which is chicken and which is egg, but 17 inches

does seem to be a cutoff in what we can take in comfortably

holding a print by hand. This has led me to use a set of cameras

in 810/717/1220.

First, yes the photographers back then were using large cameras,

making large negatives. However photogravure is not a contact process.

The first step is to make a film positive from the in-camera negative,

and this can be made by enlargement or contact. Sheet-fed photogravure

is still used for very high quality editions of photographs by

contemporary artists as well as issues from past masters' archives.

Yaakov, Jorge is on the right track. If by "submit" the galleries mean

a more convenient form for a first print, that is one thing. Most work

is submitted first as slides (copied from prints of course) so the

gallery can decide if they want to take the time and trouble to look

at a presentation of actual prints. CD's are beginning to take the

place of slides, and some galleries will look at a website to see if

you might be a candidate for them, but convenience is the issue there.

*But* once they are interested in your work, your presentation of your

pictures, size, print medium, is basic to the work itself. If they

don't want to show prints the size you think is best, then they don't

really understand your pictures. Make a distinction between a

convenient presentation to introduce yourself, and the display for

sale of your actual work. Except in rare cases (Gene Smith, as noted,

made copy negatives from a few terribly difficult prints and then made

more prints from these large copy negatives) you would not want to

substitute copies--digital or otherwise--for real pri

You need the bellows totally clean or you'll have a nightmare of dust

on your negatives. Worse, the debris may mean that the material is

disintegrating. Extend the bellows, vacuum out all the particles, and

then check the bellows for light leaks. Good luck.

If you dilute selenium toner with a washing aid, as is sometimes

recommended, it will have zero shelf life. Dilute it with plain water

and it will last until it wears out. Filter as needed.

Full size Chevy pickup truck with high cap. <s>

 

I have a camping backpack that will hold my 7x17 inch Korona with a

couple film holders. Keep looking for a pack with the right

dimensions. I have yet to find a pack that will swallow my 12x20

camera which lives in a heavily padded case from Strebor. Camera,

couple lenses, three film holders, focus cloth, all fit easily. But

it's heavy and awkward, even with a shoulder strap.---Ca

As mentioned, diluted red dye could work. Since you are contact

printing, you could also 'dodge' with pieces of translucent tissue

placed on the glass of the print frame, or by hand-drawing a mask with

pencil on tracing paper. However, if the weak shadows show up in a lot

of negatives, you should simply give more exposure

Interesting to see a number of responses that favor only partial

correction of convergence. The notion that buildings should be shown

with sides parallel--without converging--is just a convention

inherited from drawing/painting and standard single vanishing point

perspective rules. Of course when we look up at a building, the sides

*do* converge to our eyes. But there's a tradition that they shouldn't

converge in a picture. The choice of whether to show this convergence,

remove it, or compromise somewhere in between is a pictorial choice

for each picture, each photographer. Nice to see it presented as such

instead of a right/wrong, correct/incorrect doctrine.

 

That said, when doing large format work I almost always use a

perfectly vertical camera back, and accept the rendering which

includes the visually wonderful effect sometimes described as "ship's

prow" when strong rise is used with a short lens to photograph a

building seen at a diagonal in the horizontal plane rather th

The View Camera Store usually has HP5 Plus in 7x17 and other banquet

camera sizes in stock. Bergger also has their BPF200 in all sizes.

That's a good price, and ten boxes isn't bad as these things go. In

Middletown?? Surprise. Anyway, I'd be interested in a box or two at

that price. Let me know if you get enough others to fill the ten box

order.

Steve,

 

That's good news. Which Ilford film did you get? HP5 Plus has been more available than FP4 Plus in the past.

Another approach is to mix only the A solution in advance. To make working solution, dissolve six grams of sodium metaborate per liter of water and add 10ml of solution A. I pre-measure ziplock packets of 18 grams (to make 3 liters, my usual quantity for a development batch) and keep a stack in the darkroom. Much easier than trying to dissolve the highly saturated B solution stock.

The great thing about the sliding panel is that it lets you fine tune your rise/fall framing without messing up any tilt you may have used. I generally set the standard high, low, or in the middle as appropriate for a subject as an automoatic part of opening up the camera. Then a touch of the sliding panel fine tunes the framing. This makes setup very quick.

Another possibility: I use interleaving paper/tissue. A 20x24 sheet

folded in half protects a 12x20 negative nicely.

Michael,

 

You wrote

 

As monitary renumeration goes, I see this as an assignment that they never paid for. That is, they are using the

image (without photo credit) as if they hired me to go out and take it for them. As I stated, this type of assignment

typically goes hand-in-hand with the assignment of all rights for promotional literature to the architectural firm.

So I don't really see this as a single use issue, but as an issue of the assignment of these general promotional

rights.

 

That's why (I think) the value should be based on the day rate that I am planning to change, because they would

have had to pay me that amount (or at least a 1/2 day rate) to get me out there to take the photograph for them.

Doing that would have given them the right to use the image for any and all promotional purposes they would like.

 

Ignoring copyright for the moment, from a business practices standpoint your analysis doesn't work out right. This is a single use issue (with potential for more uses). Pragmatically speaking, it's unlikely they would *ever* pay for a day, or even half day, assignment to get a picture to use on a postcard. I don't know if I'm getting the point across, but you've got the cart before the horse in your analysis of what this useage is worth. When a client does everything right and pays to use a photograph in a minor way, that's what they pay for, that minor useage, not what an assignment would have cost. Heck, that's why the use of stock pictures is so popular, because it's so much cheaper than paying for assignments.

PS: Does anyone know how to keep this software from cutting off the

end of messages? Adding extra characters and/or returns does not help

at all.

Michael,

 

I'd like to go back to your initial question and answer a couple

points. First, there is a serious issue of use without permission

here, but the issue of compensation is nearly moot because you're

talking about, well, a bumpkus useage. Architectural firms are

notoriously the cheapest of commercial photograhy clients, and

postcards are the absolute bottom of the heap in photo useage value.

Someone suggested a value here of $800-1000. I believe that's wildly

unrealistic. You'd be lucky to get $800 for the whole delivered

package--a box with several thousand finished postcards. The photo fee

would constitute a small fraction of that.

 

Whenever a photograph is used without permission all photographers are

damaged, however slightly and indirectly. So it's always good to

follow up, but I think you'd be best served by approaching this as a

matter of acknowledgement, and concern that the problem isn't repeated

in the future. On the compensation end of it, there isn't enough value

in this use to risk the slightest ill will for yourself or your

emp

Eugene,

 

The problem was that you said Michael didn't "have a leg to stand on"

which is incorrect. Copyright notice on the print is also not required

(though it's a good idea). However, I didn't recommend Michael get

aggressive about this: the use in question wouldn't pay for a

lawyer-letter, much less a court case. A low-key approach as several

have recommended makes sense here. That's not because of any weakness

in his position concerning rights and improper useage, but because of

surrounding circumstances and the tiny amount of "damage" that could

be claimed.