Kevin Moore

Photographers

A photographer-artist.

I came across Kevin Moore’s work when he left a comment on a piece I had written detailing my open heart surgery on the HP DesignJet printer, which may have brought another one of these wonderful beasts back to the land of the living.

Any photographer commenting here and leaving a web site URL will have me checking out his work and I loved what I saw of Kevin’s oeuvre.

Here are a few words from Kevin on his history and goals:

About Me:
In my photography I am trying (like I think we all are) to be unique, and original. I am also trying to emulate the emotions I feel for my photographs and relate them to my audience through the compositions, tones, contrast, and focal points of my subjects. I will be having my first show including my photography and paint on canvas works here in Seattle sometime in June or July.

I was born in Hope, Rhode Island outside of Providence and am currently residing in the beautiful northwest city of Seattle. I have worked with many mediums and on many surfaces over the years, and am using my combination of experiences in both art and life to express my artistic desires. Not only is beauty in the eye of the beholder, but it can be found in every facet of one’s life. I was going to suggest opening your eyes, but then I realized beauty also lies behind closed lids. I hope you enjoy my works.

Some of my favorites from Kevin’s elegant site:

From the series ‘Smoke and Mirrors’

From the series ‘Civilized Decay’

From the series ‘Civilized Decay’

From the series ‘Manipulated’

From the series ‘Paint on Canvas’

Kevin has limited the number of images on his site and has done a superb job of design. I think you will enjoy them.

Jackson Square

Photographs

Not a square, but quite lovely.

Jackson Square is a small area one block north of the Transamerica pyramid in San Francisco. It’s home to high end decorator, architect and antique businesses. It’s really only a couple of streets and alleyways, not a square, but there are many gems to be spotted there.

Jackson ‘Square’.

All of these were snapped within a minute or two.

All on the Panasonic G1 with the kit lens, ISO 320.

David Hobby

Photographers

The power of the web exemplified.

Perhaps the greatest change wrought by the internet on commerce is the destruction of the middleman. That mostly means the high street retailer. From tires to books to eyeglasses, no store is required. Just a warehouse, a good web site and UPS.

One example of this is in the work of the photographer and lighting expert David Hobby, who levered his redundancy pay into a successful website which addresses photographic lighting and is now making good money from taking his lecture show on the road. Congratulations! Embrace change or be killed by it.

For more from Slate click the picture and be sure to view the embedded slide show.

Click the picture for the story.

Silentuk – Urbex

Photographers

Simply outstanding.

A friend in the UK sent over a link to the Silentuk blog which specializes in urban exploration. The sort of work featured here recalls earlier efforts by a US master of the genre, Jonathan Haeber, and does a wonderful job of creating a record of man’s creations which are otherwise lost to his fellow man.

The reportage they have just done on the defunct Royal Mail underground railway is to die for. An extraordinary effort just to access the system, the high risk of detection and the accompanying superb photography all speak loudly to why we take pictures. They write that the system was originally built in 1855 before the days of electricity and was pneumatically powered! Shades of Dante’s Inferno. Electrification of the system illustrated was undertaken in 1915 and speaks to the great age of civil and electrical engineering.

Click the picture for the story.

There’s one photo in the large collection which speaks to the quintessential English delicacy. Tea. Here it is:

Be sure to visit the Silentuk blog.

Glossy paper

Printing

The touchstone of the photographer’s art.

Its been quite a while since I made glossy prints. In the darkroom days I would squeegee the print, face down, onto a high gloss sheet of chrome-plated steel then heat the thing in a press. If you got things right the resulting print would emerge with an indescribably high gloss (this was before awful RC papers ruined traditional printing) which was also quite incredibly fragile. Any moisture or fingerprints and the surface would be ruined. But the definition afforded the image was beyond compare.

This was not all good, of course. Every imperfection in the image was disclosed, every grain of Kodak’s unbeatable TriX emulsion revealed. Sometimes you wanted that. Sometimes not. And the whole process was a real pain in the nether regions but once you saw an unglazed, normally dried glossy print you never wanted to go there again.

Nearly all the many prints I have made on my HP DesignJet 90 dye ink jet printer have been on HP-branded Premium Plus Satin paper. This paper has a semi-gloss finish, retains detail well and is very easy to use. It has a swellable surface, meaning its pores open when sprayed with ink to absorb the dyes. After a few hours the swelling subsides and the print is less fragile and can be handled easily. Until then the surface is quite fragile. I always handle paper using cotton gloves because any grease from fingers on the surface can result in poor ink absorption, blotchiness and reduced life. Done carefully, HP’s Vivera inks are certified by Wilhelm Research for some 80 years longevity.

Well, take a look what arrived on my doorstep the other day:

Nice things happen to nice people.

The buyer of a hefty chunk of my Canon 5D outfit found several goodies in the shipments I made. A few CF cards, a wired and wireless remote, an LCD protector, a CF-to-SDHC adapter and so on. He had been a pleasure to deal with, none of the usual game playing or nickel and dime nonsense so beloved of buyers of even fairly priced gear, that I felt it was the least I could do. Well, Barry B. dropped me a note saying that he no longer made prints and would I like some HP Glossy? Is the Pope a Catholic? It gets better. The small fortune in printing paper is not only the swellable type specific to my HP DesignJet, it was shipped to me at no charge! There are decent people left in the world …. thank you, Barry.

On receipt the first thing I did was to download the paper profile from HP and make it available to Lightroom. Then I took an image which would really benefit from the ability of glossy paper to render fine detail and ran a test print. In this image I had retouched some overhead wires using Photoshop CS5 and Content Aware Fill and it looked just fine on my Dell 2209WA display. But, oh! boy, the test print clearly displayed my retouching so I had to go back into PS and try harder. That’s glossy paper for you. Every imperfection, every pore, every blemish, is writ large to the world.

A second print – I have no fewer than 125 sheets of 13″ x 19″ to play with so I’m feeling a tad profligate – put all to rights and the quality is simply breathtaking. And this from the Panny G1’s poncy little MFT sensor!

A warning. Before these swellable papers dry, a matter of a few hours, they will show a mottled surface reflecting (!) disparate ink absorption across the surface. Give them a few hours and the surfaces returns to normal, meaning a high gloss almost as good as those monochrome prints from ages ago, but a lot easier to make.

Glossy is not for everyone. It’s hard to display, attracting reflections as it does. It’s fragile and really needs mounting behind glass. It’s unforgiving when it comes to the photographer’s technique. And it needs to be handled with kid gloves …. OK, cotton gloves. But, done right and displayed right, a glossy print remains the touchstone of the photographer’s art.

Why do you think that nice Mr. Jobs insists on those dumb glossy screens on all his computers? Because they plain look better on a casual acquaintance. That’s fine for prints. Not so good for computer screens.

HP Glossy is anything but water resistant, so keep it away from rain drops and the like:

Two minutes under a tap and the emulsion starts to run.