2024 Personal Photography Projects

[OldMacs4Me]

To reduce the need to clean print heads in between print runs leave it switched on in standby mode.
You save a lot of ink that way.

Thanks.

My past experiences may be outdated. As I recall the Epson printers ran the head cleaning routine at the beginning of the week regardless of the number of prints done over the previous week. As a result I waited until I had enough prints ready to somewhat offset the cleaning process. If it was one or two printing was put off until more were ready to go.

 

[Apple fanboy]

Thanks.

My past experiences may be outdated. As I recall the Epson printers ran the head cleaning routine at the beginning of the week regardless of the number of prints done over the previous week. As a result I waited until I had enough prints ready to somewhat offset the cleaning process. If it was one or two printing was put off until more were ready to go.

The ones I’ve used don’t do this. But we hardly use ours. I have an Epson 7880 at work that’s not been used in about 4 years. The ink to fill it would cost 4 figures.

 

[coolguy4747]

I bought a Mamiya 645 camera last month and just got my first 2 rolls developed (waiting for negatives to come back). Using this more (and also probably doing more 35mm) is on the agenda for 2024. For those who get film developed externally, do you use mail-in labs or local? Any particular recs? I'm doing a bit of haphazard testing; I got 2 rolls of way expired 35mm developed at Reformed Film Lab and just got my 645 done at The Darkroom. Might try someone more local next time, to hopefully get negatives back faster.

 

[OldMacs4Me]

I bought a Mamiya 645 camera last month and just got my first 2 rolls developed (waiting for negatives to come back). Using this more (and also probably doing more 35mm) is on the agenda for 2024. For those who get film developed externally, do you use mail-in labs or local? Any particular recs? I'm doing a bit of haphazard testing; I got 2 rolls of way expired 35mm developed at Reformed Film Lab and just got my 645 done at The Darkroom. Might try someone more local next time, to hopefully get negatives back faster.

I'd certainly consider developing my own B&W. If you do go down the rabbit hole and decide to develop color negs, learn lessons from the past and increase the time in the bleach bath and fix bath. This will assure all exposed silver reverts to the unexposed state and is then completely removed from the film. BTW Developer time, temp and agitation patterns are critical for C-41 process films.

 

[coolguy4747]

So far I don't feel compelled to develop my own film, and B&W has never called to me, but this could all change at some point. I had previously decided I have no use for film, but now I seem to be getting pretty invested, at least for right now. Right now I feel too anxious and too impatient to get into the chemicals 😆

 

[OldMacs4Me]

Failing that I am examining two alternatives. One is the Epson 8550ET printer which still has software to match my old versions of OS-X. I don't for a second believe the 6000 prints per set of colored inks however if I can get 3-400 8x10s and perhaps 50 11x17s that should complete the project. After that I would abandon or sell the printer, as I would not be using it enough to make it worthwhile. Any feedback good, bad or indifferent on this printer???

It pays to read the fine print. Further investigation shows that the Epson guesstimate was grossly exaggerated. Run all at once it might deliver 275 11x17s. Less howver many prints lost to head cleaning cycles over a longer period of time. Epson was talking 4x6 reduced quality prints. Inks are not exactly cheap at ~$150 for the complete set.

Still that works out to 30¢(+) for an 8x11 print for ink, plus ~50¢ for good quality photo paper. That compares to LDs price of $8/8x12. More or less break even, given the cost of the printer and the anticipated number of prints.

 

[mollyc]

I bought a Mamiya 645 camera last month and just got my first 2 rolls developed (waiting for negatives to come back). Using this more (and also probably doing more 35mm) is on the agenda for 2024. For those who get film developed externally, do you use mail-in labs or local? Any particular recs? I'm doing a bit of haphazard testing; I got 2 rolls of way expired 35mm developed at Reformed Film Lab and just got my 645 done at The Darkroom. Might try someone more local next time, to hopefully get negatives back faster.

I develop my own bw film at home. Color film I send to my local lab and pick it back up in a day or two (they process 3x week). I hope to start doing color development at home later this year, but will probably still send out really important rolls to the lab. I've had a couple of mishaps with bw film, which hasn't really been a big deal because those rolls typically have been more experimental and not important. Ideally I'll get to a point where I do all home development, but I'm a ways away from that just now.

The larger problem with home developing is the scanning portion, which can take a lot of trial and error to get a good workflow and can be kind of expensive to get started. I scan with a camera and macro lens, which I owned prior to hopping into film. If you have no macro lens or scanner, your startup costs will be high. But I scan a lot as my daughter also shoots film and I've more than recouped my scanning setup at this point (since I already owned a macro lens and good camera).

 

[mollyc]

We also have a giant thread about shooting film if you want to read through that. 🙂

film thread

 

[Ben J.]

My first project in 2024 is to make available my photos online for anyone to download. Mainly for family and friends, but also it will work as a way to easily find/show them when I'm away from home, and to have everything under one easy-to-remember web adress.

I've been trying to find the perfect solution to this for years, and if not perfect, I've come up with a good plan. In short, I have a basic google account that costs me almost nothing, and gives me, among other things, 200GB of cloud storage, and a very basic online blog creation tool and a simple blog adress.

I'll not be blogging about what's for dinner. It's for sharing the links to my audio archive from many years of recording my band and other artists, my family/friends videos, my Youtube channel, and photos archive. The first three have been in place for some time, but it's taken some time to figure out the arrangement of my photos.

I have been a Lightroom user since it came out, and I have everything there. Including scans of my slides, prints, old family albums back to before WW2, and of course the digital era. I've created a LR collection called "PHOTO library" and sub-collections and sub-sub… you get the idea. These LR collections contain just references to the images. So I spend alot of time organizing these collections for the web site, as that's their single purpose. My original photos folder hierarchy is untouched.

I have a folder on the mac called "PHOTO library" and when I'm happy with a collection in Lightroom, I export its content to a sub-folder there, as full-sized jpgs. To update the "PHOTO library" on Google Drive, which my blog links to, I use my backup app which is Carbon Copy Cloner, to sync the two folders; the one on my mac and the one on Google Drive. (Just like iCloud, Google Drive Desktop uses a folder in ~/Library/Cloudstorage to keep copies of everything I upload, but I'm OK with that, I'll just right-click on it and select "Discard downloads" when I'm finished with the uploading.)

I haven't done the math, but maybe 15.000 jpgs of about 2-4MB each - around 40-50GB? And I'm hoping easily manageablefile sizes will make people download stuff and help with longevity.

 

[Flowstates]

During the holidays, whilst perusing through an alpine used-books store. I had the pleasure of finding an old 1920's Swiss Tourism press Release, filled with 20-odd high quality prints of what are "Picturesque views" from our landscape.

I'd love to find the exact place where those pictures were taken to replicate them (Might also do some maths to figure out Focal Lenth ... ETC).

Anyways, a good excuse to hop on a train during the weekend and get some reading and photography done.