Igor Menaker Fine Art Photography Blog

150 New Images

Igor Menaker — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:47:27 +0000

The small project to organize my photo archives suddenly became an all time consuming obsession: for the last month and a half every day from 7am till 10pm I have been working on images from my photo archives. And the result ? over 150 new images have been added to my website. I felt like a gold prospector: I had to pan through the tons of dirt ? terabytes of my photo archives ? to find some gold flakes and occasionally a nugget or two ? images worth showing to you. Some days produced no results at all despite all that hard work, but the lucky days gave me real gems when all hope had been already lost.

150 new images and they are only form the last three years. In front of me is another mountain of dirt: six more years of digital images archives and 30,000 transparences from film days. I wish I have more time…

My New Printmaking Studio

Igor Menaker — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 22:29:15 +0000

Most of the last month I spent building desks, stands, shelves, etc for my new printmaking studio. After cutting and joining 11 4×8 plywood sheets, a bunch of 2×4 studs and 1×4 lumber the result is here.

It has three main areas: desk for scanning and printing, printmaking desk and canvas stretching table.

My new “small” printer is 17″ Epson 4900 sits on a stand built just for “him” alone. Old Epson 2400 is hiding below, I’m planning to convert it to use with Piezography Carbon inks. Epson 4990 scanner to scan 4×5 and 8×10 negatives and Nikon 4000ED for 35mm slides. The monitor is quite small but this just a “satellite” digital darkroom station, my main 12TB-24GB-i7-3 monitors computer muscle is in my upstairs office.

From left to right: canvas and paper rolls storage, dry mounting press, UV light source for contact printing, light box, print drying rack, print coating table, prints storage and a fridge full of film.

UV light source with all 16 black lights in action.

My workhourse 44″ HP Z3100 printer with built-in spectrophotomer. And canvas stretching machine with air compressor on a table which is folded for now. Usually it sits in a center of the room.

Well, the construction phase is over. It is time to produce some new images and prints.

Weasel Tail by Edward Curtis

Igor Menaker — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 01:22:27 +0000

Library of Congress has and extensive collection of photographic prints and transparencies and some of them are even digitized. It means that you can download a hefty TIF file and examine image in all details. Like this image of Weasel Tail made by famous Edward Curtis in 1900, 112 year ago. You can truly appreciate how Edward Curtis skillfully played with only available light, use of background, quality of lens and large format camera hundred years ago.

But looking at the original image I can’t help but see it in through Photoshop lens: I see it as a RAW file which needs to be processed, I see it as a negative which needs to be printed. It is the same feeling when try to look outside through the dirty window: you do want to clean it to sparkle and enjoy the view. I could not resist to make some quick adjustments to the original file – see before and after below.

This and other images you can find in Library of Congress are in public domain and there no restrictions on publication and other forms of distribution.

After:

Before: