The siren song of the scanner called again. I climbed up to my storage loft and liberated the boxes and shopping bags full of prints and negatives. I just did a quick survey and found *many* lost friends. I need to catalog them and get them stored properly. I've been a bad boy. But I grabbed a few to scan.

I'm still learning this scanner and software (Epson Perfection 2450 and SilverFast) and I'm discovering how dirty some of my negatives are. When you scan at 2400 dpi you see a lot. Oh my god!

But my mind has been totally boggled. I look at my prints of these images and am amazed how much better the scanned image is. There is just so much control over the tonal range and contrast when you are manipulating images in Photoshop.

This image is part of a series of doors and windows in a couple of early 20th century school buildings in Seattle. The were shot on 4x5 sheet film.

The plan is to eventually print these images using Piezography on an Epson 1200 inkjet printer. Hextone printing. There seems to be a movement among large format photographers to print digitally. There is still no substitute for 4x5 sheet film in the digital world. At least for those whose income is in the real world. But scanning 4x5 sheet film at 2400 dpi gives some amazing results. The image below is the doorknob in the above picture.

The school pictures were the last images I printed. I was never satisfied with my prints and I couldn't afford the darkroom that was needed to print these right. With the Epson scanner, Photoshop, and inkjet printing I can do better that I could possibly have done in the darkroom. Any darkroom. I'm jazzed! I only had to wait 28 years! I'm completely rethinking my thinking about photography.

I wasn't always into prints with an actual tonal range. I had a brief fling with gimmick photography. I call it my Kodalith Phase. (Kodalith film is used to create offset printing plates. It is *extremely* high contrast.) A self-portrait from 1972:

I think every photographer goes through a gimmick phase. More of my images.