Little Round Pond Winter Cattails. 3 shot 'shift pan' made with my 24 ts-e.

Today I'm Wicked psyched to have just met the UPS guy out in the street to receive my new pack of Epson Exhibition Fiber 17"x22" paper. I'm like woot! See, ever since I first heard about this "Signature Worthy" paper, as Epson calls it- I've wanted to try it bad, real bad. I knew I would love it but it's particularly premium expense made it a little hard to justify using. Usually I like to print any 'serious' work on Epson UltraSmooth Fine Art Paper- John Paul Caponigro talked me into that choice and I still love that paper and would still rather print some images on that vs this Exhibition Fiber paper but this week I found a sweet sale on the EEF paper at B+H here: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/528348-REG/Epson_S045039_Exhibition_Fiber_Paper_for.html for about a third of the price that it normally is (99.00 American bucks versus the typical 150.00 American bucks) -so that was a "shoe in". 

The description on the box is: "Designed to have the look and feel of revered silver halide, F surface, air-dried prints, this paper offers the highest Dmax and a wide color gamut for stunning color or neutral black-and-white prints." -Sounds sweet!

Now the one big reason I like the Epson UltraSmooth Fine Art (USFA) paper is that as a matte paper there are never any reflections coming off the print from light sources, it's the most archival of all Epson papers (therefore arguably the most archival of any paper period), there is hardly any texture which gives it massive detail, and I'm really familiar with using it so I can get predictable results. The biggest downside to the USFA I think is that it's really a pretty fragile paper so handling is a real concern and it's only safe after being properly put behind glass. Not to say that the EEF is a paper that I would dance on after making a print on it but it seems to me that the surface is a little more resilient. There is a low gloss surface on the Exhibition Fiber that could reflect light sources (unless it's behind that anti-reflective museum glass) but after making the first few prints the blacks are off the chart and the prints just really have a classic look and feel to them. The one thing that did initially disappoint me (especially in that this is such a premium and expensive media) is that the first sheet I took out of the box did have at least 5 "inclusions" of specks of schmuck in the paper- nothing that is visible after printing the first black and white prints but still, the USFA is 99 percent perfect in my experience so this is a little off putting but sometimes I guess maybe I should just relax and let the world be the world. Nonetheless it's not wrong to expect perfection when you pay top-dollar (yeah yeah it was a big sale but still this is their most expensive paper, so come on!) if Epson were here they would have given me a new sheet that's for sure. Anyways- perhaps I'll talk on this more later but for now I'm going to go fume up the room and make some more prints! Yeehaw! 

Reminder: 30 percent off all my prints until May 1, 2013- get em while they're cheap! 

And have a good one, Nate from Maine, Usa.

Old Coast Maine. Off Corea- Downeast.

All I've been doing for the past two weeks it seems is printing and matting and signing and bagging for the summer season here on the island. I'm trying to get a proper jump on it this year because last year I was a little flat footed out of the gate on the whole bit but this year have a better idea of how to make the most or the best of it. The first thing is that I have three sizes of prints going to the galleries this year: a small 5x7" matted to 8x10 ( I know the ratio is kind of funny but the mat cutter lady kind of lost it in the translation and cut 40 of them like that so might as well go with it) a medium 11x14" matted to 16x20" and the large 16"x20" matted to 24"x28". Thereby a whole new range of price points and wall sizes have been introduced which should make the potential buyer do the super happy monkey dance and help make next winter better than this last. In a weeks worth of time I will have gotten 88 matted and signed prints out the door and into the territory of the art buyer and I'm going to do that twice more before Memorial day so long as I can bear the repetitive and absolutely mundane work of putting prints and mats together. 

Anyways: I figured that as a public service announcement for any of my photographer friends who make their own prints like I do-  whom may have never experienced this particular printing malady (because I hadn't up to this point) this is what a clogged print head looks like:

See how it kind of looks like a negative- that's because my matte black ink wasn't firing. My Epson 3880 has 4 kinds of black inks and what had happened is that because of the super low humidity of winter one of the heads had clogged and it really freaked me out when I first looked at this. I ran a print head check and this was the result:

See how there is a missing segment of the grid pattern at the upper left- that's indicative of the clogged print head. A print head cleaning did the trick after that but I figure I probably burned through at least 20 bucks in ink retesting and recleaning the printer before I was thoroughly satisfied that everything was once again dorey hunky- and that was just running the process through 3 times- but I could see by the ink capacity readouts that it bled a bunch of inks through that process. I have actually heard that some people leave a damp sponge under the plastic dust cover to the printer to help alleviate potential clogs in the dry season- there's just something about that though that strikes me as being crazy for some reason. Nonetheless, hope this helps anyone who does their own printing who hasn't seen this before. In the almost two years that I have been making prints on my Epson 3880 never before had there been a clogged print head. Right then. That's all I've got for today- hope you're well and have a good one- Nate from Maine, Usa.

Cape Cod Low Tide at Coast Guard Beach. Technical notes: 119 seconds at f/11, iso 100, 24mm Ts-e with B+W ND 110 on 5d mkII. Lightroom 4, Silver Efex, Ps Cs5, and back to Lightroom. Have a nice day. 

The '30 percent off all of my prints sale' continues until May 1, 2013. Get em while they're cheap!