I’ve just finished the first day of reviews and I’m a bit overwhelmed. Four formal twenty-minute reviews. Three informal ones by official roving reviewers. Uncountable sharing of pictures with other photographers.  A presentation at lunchtime that took precedence over lunch. And that just got me to five o’clock. The day finished with all 160 photographers… [Read More]

I’m in Portland, after an 800 mile drive yesterday. Between portfolio cases and brochures (probably way more than I will actually give away), I have an impressive pile of luggage. If I were flying, I would have had to ship things ahead. I checked out my reviewing schedule on the web.  I have a total… [Read More]

This afternoon I grabbed an easel and both stacks—glossy and matte—of the Nighthawks pictures. I set up the easel in a room with lots of diffuse daylight and went through the photographs, comparing the two versions. The first thing I noticed was that I’d gotten the editing right: the images looked quite similar. In fact,… [Read More]

While I was printing the matte pictures, I edited the glossy versions. It didn’t take much. Mostly I added a little contrast-enhancing S-curve that strengthened the midtone separation at the expense of the shadows and the highlights. When printed on the higher-Dmax glossy paper, the midtones looked a little dark, so, if the highlights would… [Read More]

This morning, I opened the collection of Nighthawks images that are tweaked for matte printing and printed them out, one to a page, on a laser printer. I spread them all out on the bed and went through my stock of 17×22 Nighthawks pictures, pulling out the ones that matched the laser-printed ones. I didn’t… [Read More]