Paul Grossmann Photography

Nothing new to see here just yet. But I wanted to let you all know that I am moving moved this blog. Blogger is a swell piece of software to use but I have seen one too many dudes freak out over the licensing rights that must be given to google in order to display your content. I’ll admit I am one of those dudes. I know that almost every blogging software has the same stipulation but still. That and the fact that I seem to really enjoy doing way more work than necessary to accomplish even the simplest of tasks.

I am reading all about self hosting, transferring domains and installing wordpress. I have a decent enough grasp of it all and now I am just waiting for my domain to transfer from one provider to the other and then I should be all set. In the meantime I get to decide between www.paulgrossmann.com and www.paulgrossmann.com/blog. Of course if i go with /blog that means I have to come up with some sort of static webpage for paulgrossmann.com. See what I mean about doing too much work? I may at some point have a legit website so I would have to move the blog to its own directory anyway and that may be a real pain if I have to rewire a bunch of links from older posts. Would it look cheap to have a splash page that just had one big fat button that said “blog” on it? Probably. What do you think? Anyone have any experience switching domains and directories and basically making a mess of things where no mess existed before? Is it that big a deal to do?

Luckily enough I decided to move early into this blog and shouldn’t loose too much google juice, which I have discovered is an actual term. It’s like mojo for websites and apparently its primo. Would hate to waste it.

Whatever I decide there will be loads of new stuff to show when its all done. On top of the landscapes I mentioned earlier, I am going to be shooting more portraits and also posting some street photography I did a while back. Out of five years work and literally hundreds of exposures I have a grand total of 15 images from the street that are any good and about 5 that I really like. They were hanging out at the old paulgrossmann.com, but I blew that up yesterday.

Be back soon with a hot new address and RSS links and the whole nine!

This particular Howtek 8000 that I made my scans on was not the one I received my training on. I used to work at a camera store in Manhattan that sold high end gear such as the Howtek. A technician from the manufacturer in Maryland came to our store for two days to train me on it. Apart from using software that is not very user friendly you had to load the drum with film, a task that takes some practice.

The drum itself is a large acrylic cylinder. It is huge. At a rough guess I think you could mount 4 8×10 pieces of film to it. Or any number of 35mm, 2 1/4 or 4×5 pieces of film. The drum is placed in a mounting station that allows you to rotate the drum as you load film onto it. It is loaded by taping the film to it, then taping a piece of acetate over the film. You only tape one side of the film and one side of the acetate, making hinges out of the tape. Then you squirt oil under the film, then on top of the film, then you close the acetate down on top of the film and seal the whole thing up with tape. A film and oil sandwich of sorts. Of course you squeeze all the air bubbles out before you seal it up. And you make damn sure the tape is on tight.

The reason for making sure the tape is on tight, and that the drum was completely free of oil before you began this whole process is that once the drum is loaded it is put back into the scanner where it spins. At very high RPM. An RPM that could totally destroy a piece of film.

One day a guy came into the camera store I worked in. This was immediately after I received my training on the Howtek. He was interested in the scanner and wanted a demo of it, which included me scanning one of his images so he could take it home and test the image. Most people just bring any old neg or chrome and test it out. Well this guy tried to smoke one past us and it sort of blew up right in his face.

A drum scan would cost you about 60 dollars, at least in 2001. But we did not charge anything for a demo scan, because we were trying to sell the scanner itself, not the scan. So a photographer came in and wanted us to scan this chrome for him, a 645 piece of color transparency film. Since it was a demo I did not feel the need to go through the oil mounting process described earlier and opted instead for a dry mount, which is a totally legit mounting procedure, provided of course that the drum was clean before hand. Which ours was not. It still had light traces of oil on it. I admit this was my fault. I didn’t clean the drum well enough from the last use. Nor did I notice that the drum was still a touch slippery in places.

So I load the drum with his one chrome, which was an image of a model wearing a red sweater against a white background. Not a great image, but obviously professional. I load the drum and begin scanning. The drum spins, the salesman is giving his talk and after the preview of the image comes up, I make some edits and hit “Scan”. Everyone is still smiling at this point as the drum begins to spin at over 240 RPM.

Then the very normal whirring sound of drum scanning abruptly changed into a sound that could best be described as the sound you get if you threw a CD into a paper shredder. At this point the smiles all went away. Since I loaded the piece of film without acetate and with only two pieces of tape on to a drum that still had traces of oil on it, the tape never fully adhered to the drum. At the high speed it was only a matter of time before the tape failed and the film collided with the inside of the scanner and got chopped into confetti. And when I opened the scanner that is exactly what this poor guys chrome looked like, little tiny pieces of emulsion except for the small jagged piece still attached to the drum that read “Fuji RDP”.

The salesman and I both wore expressions that said “you know thats too bad, but it was still kinda cool” while the poor guy who commissioned this demo had turned stark white and looked like he needed to sit down. He basically saw what happened, fought the urge to vomit and then walked out.

We couldn’t figure out why he reacted the way he did. After all it was just a test piece of film that he wanted scanned, some outtake from one of his shoots, right? Well no. My friend the salesman and I rather quickly realized that this guy had tried to get a pro quality scan on the cheap, and that this particular piece of film was the keeper from a live job he had yet to deliver. So all of his work in producing this picture of a girl in a nice red sweater evaporated in a cloud of film dust right before his very eyes. He then had to somehow tell his client that basically, the dog ate his homework.

I suppose this could be an argument in favor of digital, or at least in favor of paying for a scan. But what it really wound up being was hilarious. Maybe its cruel to laugh at someone’s utterly catastrophic turn of bad luck, but when you are trying to smoke one past us in such a sneaky and cheap matter, laughing doesn’t feel so bad.

And you can bet that when it came time to scan my own negatives on the same scanner, I taped the HELL out them first.

Some landscapes I took in Chile. Well technically I’m not sure if the inclusion of a dog and a group of people still allows for a photograph to be called a landscape, but that is what I am going with.

One morning I got up early and headed out on my own before we loaded up the van and got on the road. I came across this empty lot and saw a stray dog, one of many in Chile. He saw me too and headed my way. I was thankful for the focal point for the photograph, and I like dogs well enough but for a second he looked as if he might chase me and bite me and ruin the impending trip south towards the farm and Puerto Montt. Luckily he just stopped, looked at me, and walked on.

The second photo is from the top of a hill in Viña del Mar where a friend of ours had a condo, and the last two are from the farm and the river we had to cross to get to it.

I will be posting more landscapes that I have been taking, actual recent work as opposed to the several years old pictures I have put up so far. Some medium format images which scan really well on the 4490 and some 35mm which I think makes for a good grainy landscape. Of course there are still more images from Chile to post as well.

These images were made in a Jazz club more than a few years ago. Tri-X pushed one stop, maybe two. The club was near my apartment and I had started going there with my camera and photographing who ever was playing. Small and friendly club, with stage lights. That makes everything easier. Not much light to work with, but just enough to expose. I think most of these were at f/2 and 1/50th of a second. I stopped metering because the stage lights were always on, always consistent and thats the most exposure you can get while hand holding. You can fix some degree of exposure error in the darkroom, but you can’t fix camera shake.

I got along well with the owner and the players did not even notice me while they were playing and I was mere feet away from them, taking pictures. The audience never seemed to mind either, even though I must have blocked a good part of their view, a view which they paid for.

These I have to say were not scanned on the 4490, but rather a Howtek 8000. That is a drum scanner that I had access to years ago. The unique thing about a drum scanner, besides the drum itself, is the use of what is called a Photo Multiplier Tube. I did not know exactly what this was at the time, but knew it was a part of all drum scanners. The PMT is a vacuum tube, much like you would find in a guitar amplifier or stereo except instead of amplifying sound signal it actually amplifies light. I found that to be fascinating. You can see why it would be the scanner of choice for negatives as these, with lots of deep shadows. The PMT magnifies the detail in the shadows without adding noise, in a way no other scanner can match.

Of course it is horribly expensive and dreadfully difficult to load the drum. It requires training and if it is not done right, it can lead to disastrous yet hilarious consequences, which I will detail in a later post.

More pictures from the farm in Chile. The day on the farm was HOT. We spent the whole afternoon roasting lamb on two heavy, heat conducting iron spits. The fire was in a semi enclosed area that had no roof so the sun got to you but the breeze did not. It was about 100 degrees out, and must have been way more than that in this fire hut. We all took several turns turning the spits by hand, for as long as we could stand it, which averaged about 10 minutes. Ice cold beer could extend your stay in the fire pit by up to two whole minutes. It took hours to cook the meat, but it was totally worth it.

The other day, I received an email from an NGO, a Non-Governmental Organization. They had come across some of my pictures on socialdocumentary.net and thought they would illustrate their latest project quite well and wanted to know if I would be willing to authorize them to use one or more of the photographs.

It is great to be recognized and all but NGOs have become notorious lately for asking photographers to donate their work to them, for free of course. In exchange for the free use I would be credited where ever the pictures were used and thus gain exposure for myself and my pictures.

In theory the exposure would lead to paying jobs, and maybe it would, but in the meantime what giving work away really means is that other photographers would be expected to do the same. NGOs would also expect this, probably to the point where it does not even occur to them that a photographer would want to be paid for his or her work. I have a day job and I do not rely on these particular photographs for income at all. But many people do take these kinds of pictures for a living and they are much more difficult and expensive to produce than many people realize. Yes they are doing humanitarian work, but that does not make it wrong for them to ask to be paid for it. They need the income to continue to do this work, much the same way the NGO needs funding to do theirs.

I think it would behoove NGOs to pay a fair price for the images. They would gain a higher quality set of photographs and a working relationship with some great photographers. Perhaps they need a new business model. As funding comes into the project, the photographer gets a small percentage of it the same way an actor would receive points on a films total gross. We know there is money changing hands and we know not everyone on your staff is working for free.

I politely declined their offer to use my images. I wished them the best and kept it amicable and mentioned that by donating my images it ruins it for the next photographer.

The images they wanted to use can be found here.

I have a lot of negatives. Pieces of film semi organized and resting quietly in archival envelopes in archival boxes, on a shelf in a closet at my parents house. Most of them have never been seen before, and haven’t even been seen by me in years. On top of this I am making new negatives. To add to the boxes of course.

Well recently I decided to rescue some of them from their darkness and obscurity and bring them into the light of the internet for all to see. And to that end I have purchased a film scanner, an Epson 4490. This flatbed, along with two aftermarket film holders and anti-newton glass, cost less than a few hours renting the Imacon scanner at a lab. Now I am not going to tell you that a $15,000 scanner can be out done by a sub $200 scanner, but for the web it’s really good enough, even for 35mm. To be fair though, I did scan two of these on the Imacon along with a few others from this series, but I’m not really going to get into the whole pixel peeping thing here. I mention it solely for accuracy.

So here on my first post are four of my pictures, scanned and ready to view. They are from a trip to Chile several years ago. We traveled all over the country and stayed on this farm for one day. I will be adding more pictures from the trip as I scan them, along with all the other pictures I have taken and will take in the future.

Thanks for looking and check back!