I have a photo show coming up February 8, 2008 – April 2, 2008 at the Chapel Hill Public Library, with an opening reception, Sunday February 10 from 2:30 to 4. Stop by if you are in the area. I will be showing black and white photos that I took on my trip to Spain several years ago.
This show has been scheduled for nearly a year, although it was originally going to be in October. I have procrastinated on printing my pictures for so long that I no longer had time to do it myself, so I took them to a photo store, University Photo in Chapel Hill. They are photos that I shot on film, so I needed to find a place that still prints black and white in the way I needed them (fiber base paper, matte finish, full frame with clean black bars). This is the same way I print them. All my other prints are done full frame, which I started as a bit of an artist’s conceit (here is the photo as I saw it in the camera and it was not cropped in the darkroom), but I stayed with it because I like the way the black border frames the images. This has probably lost some of its relevance in the digital realm because you can re-size, crop an image and still put a black border around it.
Since shooting these pictures, and getting accepted for this juried show, I have moved to digital shooting. The film shots in Spain was an excuse to get back to film, and I enjoyed shooting with my heavy, metal, manual camera. I haven’t really stuck with it, and probably won’t go back. I can shoot many more digital photos without the concern for cost of film and processing. I don’t have a process for printing digital images yet, but that’s mainly because I haven’t had a need yet.
Yesterday I picked up the prints for my show and I was blown away. Since I have never seen these photos on anything other than a contact sheet or a computer monitor, it was fantastic to see them printed on matte paper. There are subtleties in the photos that are perfect for the medium. I am really looking forward to seeing them hanging together. It almost makes me want to stick to black and white film. It may be a bit of a struggle moving forward in the digital shooting world, but I think I just need a means of high end output and I will be fine.
And today I dropped off all the prints (3 – 11×14’s and 12 – 8×10’s) at the frame store to get them framed. We came up with a fairly economic solution with a simple black metal frame, white matte and regular glass, since I was getting so many framed. I considered buying materials and framing them myself, but the stress just didn’t seem worth it. I would definitely be pushing the deadline by doing that. They will be ready next Wednesday, so I will have week to spare before they are due at the show.
