Alan Dehmer Photography: December 2013

Since the last post, I’ve wet-scanned 9 black and white film negatives on an Epson V750, spot cleaned and manipulated those images to my liking in Photoshop, and then printed 10 enlarged inkjet negatives on my 24” Epson 7600 printer. In each case I used the same gum script I developed last winter through summer using QTR software.

I’m not the least bit color-blind but I visualize in black and white. Shades of grey. Of course, digital images can be made into black and whites at the click of a button, but black and white film also offers the joy of processing film and printing contact sheets. And for me that’s a deal breaker. I love the alchemy of photography.

But I’m no anti-digital camera purist either. I said I printed 10 enlarged inkjet negatives but only scanned 9 negatives. The 10^th negative started out as a digital image, made with a Canon 7D just a few weeks ago.

Foggy morning along the Potomac River in Washington DC, facing the 14th Street Bridge.

The digital original had a gummy look to it and I thought it would be fun to see what gum does to a black and white negative of that image. I printed it on 13"x19" Pictorico OHP.

The last month or more has passed in a fog that coincides with the annual Studio Tour. A late rush of printing starting in the summer and early fall are followed by a few weeks of show prep in October – matting, then milling and constructing frames, then coloring them before assembling all the parts into a finished piece.

And then there’s the two weekends of opening the house and studio up to the public. Twelve hours of show time each weekend that span the entire length and breadth, the ups and the downs that go along with putting your work out there for others to see.

I don’t live in town like the bulk of the 70 artists that participate on the tour. There’s a furniture maker a mile or so down the road. And a water colorist lives a mile or so in the opposite direction. My closest neighbor Scott, a painter, has been on the tour for several years but he didn’t participate this year.

Drive a mile or two in any direction in town and you’re likely to pass 20 or 30 participating studios. Drive a mile or two in any direction out here and you’ll pass more cows and horses than artists.

All of this is to say that I’ve never gotten the kind of traffic that town artists get. On good days, 50 or more people come out. A good day for a town artist means closer to 100 visitors.

This year, I didn’t have that many people stop by over the first weekend. That made for two long boring days. But the second weekend was nice and lively. A good, steady flow of traffic both days and thankfully, quite a few sales.

And then there’s the morning after all of that. That’s the Monday after the second tour weekend. That day starts a little slower than usual. Slow sips of coffee. A little extra reading. And then I walk around the house and yard with a notepad, writing down all the chores that have been neglected for several months. That list is always long. It can run to several pages -- this year's is 3. Checking things off that list is what I’ve been busying myself with the past couple of weeks. ~~Cut, prep and install shelves in bedroom closet~~, ~~Clean solar panels before winter sets in~~, are two successfully completed tasks. Another is: Clean basement. Not as of yet. But from here I'll spread the remainder of the list out over time, with less rush to scratch than three weeks ago.

Along the way, I went through and selected five photographs from Ireland, 5 from my Manbites Dog Series, and 5 of a more local or personal nature to occupy the coming winter. I've just begun the process of making enlarged negatives from each of those photographs. Scanning the original negatives is next up for most of these though I've already got the manbites scans on file from last year's book project. Here they are, ready for inversion to negative.