my first pure white portraits. the subject is about a foot (well, one of my feet) in length. as silly as the print is, it’s a learning experience for me.

speaking of learning experiences, i was looking around at the stacks of bum prints. wrong development, maladjusted contrast, wrong framing, holes or dents in the paper. i must have thousands of bad prints laying around.

i was wondering if other wet-photographers do the same. i keep mine around. i guess the reason why is to remember the mistakes i made.

i pushed the contrast on this print too hard, now that i think about it.

and something else, i just realized i should probably overexpose a shot like this. let the extreme highlights exceed the lattitude of the film. then i can slightly underexpose on the enlarger to bring in the subject but forget any detail in the white area.

and find a slightly more interesting subject.

i am clearly having avedon-inspired ideas. and my lust for 8×10 is respawned. yesterday i did a 55 p/n of a red chili pepper on pure white. it’s addicting.

i’ve also decided: keep film holders empty/put away until i need them. i’ve also found that i have to trip down the 55 negs for the omega’s carrier. that or i need to get a glass carrier. hrmm.

should i go for a 4×5 portrait? i’m seriously thinking about picking up a roll of paper.

things i’ve done so far today:

this is the new lobby at work. after a second tiring weekend in a row, i decided to spend a little time at work doing something i enjoy — photography. i also shot this on film, looking forward to doing a print.

yesterday i woke up at 4:30am. got into work by 6am. worked until 1am sunday. came in again today at 9am.

i dont fully comprehend why we decided to let cablers unplug/replug/move cables today. we had a few systems to be off-limits for them so we could keep our financial system running. we didn’t take into account the non-production systems we depend on to do our work. so that was delayed several hours.

now i’m trying to bring up the rest of my systems and half the machines i worked on have lost power due to loose cables being jostled. the last power drop took out three drives.

meanwhile, we are all getting sick from the constant dry/cold air.

my nerves are wrecked.. i’m writing this from the far corner of the data center so i can cool off. some how, we will get everything back online before monday morning.

tonight i had dinner with my secret jasmine tea brother

this weekend was rough. we moved a lot of machines to our new data center at work. a long, 18 hour day. i came back on sunday to help out with other fallout and it turned into a 13 hour day. per my manager’s suggestion, i did some clean up at work this morning then went home.

there’s a lot of work to do this week, then more moving this weekend. after all this move business is over, we get to deal with all the work that’s been waiting for the move to be over. and then we get to walk to the new building often to work, since all the machines are there.

hrm.. i think there’s a movie night brewing at my place next week.