I have the good (and bad) fortune to live on a hilltop halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It’s a great place to live if you like to mindlessly stare out at vineyards and oak-studded hills. It’s a lousy place to live if the Light Magenta cartridge on your Epson 3800 runs dry on a Saturday morning when you are printing for a client. I know from past experience that the nearest replacement cartridge is exactly 132 miles to the south at Samy’s Camera in Santa Barbara.

Let’s see. I don’t have to deliver the prints until Monday afternoon… At $4.65/gallon for gas, the round trip down to Samy’s would cost almost $80 bucks in fuel and waste the better part of my day. My other option, fingers crossed, is that Amazon has one in stock and can still get it out the door. I check online and see that it’s in stock and I have 50 minutes to get it ordered. Here’s the part I love the most… Amazon’s shipping charge for getting it out the door on Saturday and to my studio on Monday morning is $3.99. Just $3.99? [Read more →]

In the world of fine art photography, it’s often hard to figure out where the image capture ends and the printmaking begins. Many photographers begin visualizing the final print before their finger hits the shutter button. Others won’t begin to see the potential of their images until they’ve spent several hours in front of a computer monitor. The important point here is to understand that the process of creating a well-crafted, fine art photograph is a continuum and not a series of disconnected steps.

I attended The Fine Art of Digital Printing workshop in Santa Barbara last fall. So, I can personally attest to the fact that investing a week in FADP is an amazing way to catapult your printmaking skills forward. It’s a total immersion program — like Berlitz for photographers. [Read more →]

Let’s embrace the obvious. Many photographers feel that investing time and effort into learning color management is the digital equivalent of going to the dentist. Unless you are an uber-geek, I bet that you would rather study DIY acupuncture, medieval French literature or the genome of the common fruit fly than cuddle up with a long piece on the theory of color management. Fear not. Color management is built upon simple truths. Many of which are close at hand.

Let’s start with the following. I think you’ll recognize it as irrefutable proof about why it’s important to know at least the basics of color management.

Huh? O.K. Stick with me and I’ll lay it out for you. [Read more →]