This is about the longest dry spell I've had on this blog. Like the duck in the water, it appears as if nothing is happening but I've been paddling furiously seemingly not getting anywhere but I did have one breakthrough. I've been trying to print on my HP B9180 from my Dell Mini 9. I was getting bands in dark areas. This was cause for despair. The printer would pause several times during the printing (it was a 55mb file) and that is where the banding was occuring. I tried a number of things suggested on various forums but it was all for naught. The little Dell was just not up to the task. (It sure does a lot of other things well. I love it!) However, wirelessly networking my desktop and little laptop gave me some more options. I moved the desktop into the basement, next to the printer, and am keeping the little laptop upstairs. The opposite of my original plan. I loaded the printing software on the desktop and printed my troublesome print and all went well. My despair evaporated. Now that I had a working printer and my scanner in one place I grabbed a couple of negatives, scanned them raw in VueScan, converted them in Photoshop with ColorNeg, and printed.

Whidbey Coffee Cafe
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Taken with an Olympus Pen EE-S. It's a half-frame 35mm camera.

Couch
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Taken with my newly cleaned Summitar 50/2 mounted on my Leica IIIc.

While it's nice to be able to put up photos on the web it's, as I suspected, so much better holding a print in your hand. The image is shown off so much better as a print. So much better! Did I say it was better? I keep picking up the prints and looking at them. These were test scans and prints. I have a better negative holder I need to set up and rescan with and then I need to start sorting through years of negatives and slides. Happy days are here again! The rescanning will have to wait for a couple of days. I need to get some camera straps out this morning (business has been good). We are going down to visit Zoe's mom this afternoon and are seeing my mom tomorrow for Thanksgiving. Hopefully things will get back to normal here. Whatever normal is.