What I Bought With My $200

I'm not primarily known as a photographer, and I know that. I'm comfortable with it. We choose our own roads in life and those roads choose us. My role has been testing stuff and talking about gear and teaching and drumming up enthusiasm and writing about various aspects of the art and craft and tech and so forth. An honorable sidelight in photography; has been since the beginning. I'm like the entrepreneur who supplied the '49ers, rather than the prospectors who mined the gold.

All the same, I've been returning to my roots, so to speak, and concentrating more on simply being a photographer lately. I got "liberated" when I finally bought a B&W-only digital camera, which I'd wanted for years. Immediately after I bought my custom conversion, Pentax came out with the K-3 III Monochrome, the first reasonably-priced B&W-only mainstream DSLR, which is the way those things go—the umbrella rule, and all that. I should have waited, except I had already been waiting for 16 years. I have a custom-converted FF camera. I'm okay with that too.

Print sale plans
This is not a print sale announcement; I'm just sharing with you where we are in the planning phase. I had to put all this on the back burner when whatever happened to me happened to me in early November. However, my plan is to offer four black-and-white images this year as fine prints, hoping to sell five or ten or thirty or whatever. The first one will be the "Mennonite Boys Watching Dirt Track Racing" picture. The prints are by Bob Rosinsky, a TOP reader and master printmaker who lives in Colorado. Bob has completed the Photoshop prep of the Mennonite Boys picture and made multiple samples for me on various types of paper, and we've picked the final papers and are currently finalizing the image sizes and prices and other details. The second image offered, by the way, will be "Bar of Soap" because Bob loves how it looks large, and the third will be the graveyard silhouette. I'll do this four-prints-a-year thing for 2024 and then reassess if need be. As I say, I'm not primarily known as a photographer. It might go well, or it might not.

The other idea that I really want to try is to offer prints by readers. One such sale is in the planning stage. But that's another post.

I'll be offering three sizes of prints:

—> The "Cabinet Print" (just a name I invented, so no need to go Googling it—after "cabinet collection" from book collecting) is a small 11.5-inch wide image on 11x14-inch paper, printed on Lasal Exhibition Lustre paper. This size will be as affordably priced as possible—still to be determined, but not much.

—> The full-sized print on 17x22" Epson Hot Press Natural priced at $900. This will be my standard size for the B&W work I'm doing with the Sigma fp-M going forward. I hope to collect a portfolio's worth of prints eventually. Buyers can have the inkjet printed signature on the front or not, at their choice, and the print will be signed by me in pencil on the back. With any luck this will remain an open edition for a while, and can be printed when purchased. We're working on it.

—> A jumbo-sized print limited to six numbered copies and three A/P (artist's proofs), also on Epson Hot Press Natural, will be offered on a print-on-demand basis for $2,600. We have a good idea of the size it will be, but aren't ready to say just yet. These prints will have the original signature and editioning information affixed to the back on a separate plate of paper (on the back of the white border, not the image area), in order to reduce the handling and thus the risk of damage in shipment. These will be shipped directly from the printmaker.

With the inexpensive cabinet prints we'll be doing something different with the signature. A representation of my signature will be inkjet-printed outside the image area on the front of the print at the lower right. The image of the signature will look almost exactly like it was made with graphite pencil. The reason I'm doing it this way is because I don't write by hand, so my handwriting is insecure, and I don't want to run the risk of ruining good prints with a muffed signature! Something different. In traditional printmaking, of course, the artist is always doing drawing by hand and so hand control is very well developed and there are no issues. Not so with me.

That's kinda the plan at this stage. It will all have to happen post-pacemaker, because I'm feeling so rotten now. Actually Thursday and Friday were miserable, but I'm feeling a lot better today, for whatever reason. I don't even know what impacts the symptoms so I can't do any symptom management.

So here's what I spent the gift certificate on: I put it toward an Archival Methods 17x22" solander museum case. That's for the B.A.T. (Bon à Tirer)* of "Mennonite Boys," which is just such a lovely print. Bob did a fantastic job on it.

I need to find a home for the box—there's not an obvious place to put it in the house—but I can work on that. Hopefully the B.A.T. of "Mennonite Boys Watching Dirt Track Racing" will be the first of many prints to go into the box.

Mike

*Translation: "good to pull," meaning the first excellent print that will serve to calibrate the rest. Called the "guide print" in traditional custom darkroom work.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

WILLIAM DEAN COWAN: "The back of your brain probably came up with the idea for a 'Cabinet Print' From the National Portrait Gallery: 'Cabinet print: Cabinet prints were mounted on cards of about 6 1/4 x 4 1/4 inches (15.9 x 10.8 cm). They replaced the carte-de-visite as the standard portrait studio format in the 1870s.' Along the same lines automobile makers also forget, sometimes, to google their car names in all languages, sometimes to their embarrassment."

Mike replies: Maybe I need a new name for those.

Comments

[hugh crawford]

Like the old joke:
What do you get for the person who has everything?
Boxes to keep it in.
What do you get for someone with too many boxes?
A warehouse.
Someone I know used to own an airplane because airplane hangers at the local airport were the cheapest rental spaces in the area but you had to keep an airplane in your hanger. Apparently there is a market for junk airplanes that fulfill the minimum requirement for renting hangers.
Space for six cars and a trashed Piper for $100 a month.

[Dan Khong]

That archival case is a good choice for using the $200. That encourages one to make real prints from our best and memorable shots instead of just showing them on screen.

Eventually those stored in mobile phones and laptops and external hard drives will all disappear after we die. Just ask the question, "Do you give your passwords to your children?"

But hard copies will somehow survive. I don't think my prints are archival quality but having a faded print is better than having nothing to show the next generation.

[Bill Duncan]

I've been a fan of Pentax for years, currently shooting with a pair of K-3 (classic) and a new K-3 III. While I shoot raw+jpeg (B&W) and invariably convert to B&W, I'll be looking forward to your thoughts on the monochrome body.

Happy New Year!

[Bear.]

Please review the box when it arrives - I’ve been just using leftover paper boxes but not very secure or archival….

I’m also very interested in how your print sales go - at my last exhibition, 90% of my sales were A3 sized (11 x 14 and. 17 x 22 paper is hard to get in Melbourne Oz - but not 13 x 19, for some reason, so I’ve taken to printing in ratio size to “A” series paper) and I didn’t even have any that size at the gallery until I realised and rushed a bunch of prints….

I’m not keen on the inkjet signature, which seems rather naff to me. Just put your initials and the year in pencil (or one of those special pens for writing on photo paper) in the bottom right of the margin. You definitely won’t stuff that up! Or get an embossing stamp.

Hope you get your pacemaker soon!

[Matt O'Brien]

Great idea on so many levels and super use of voucher.

[jp41]

I don't like the idea of an inkjet signature.

Isn't the Sigma fp L model needed to do jumbo prints? (fp L: 9520 / 300 = 31.8" vs. fp: 6000 / 300 = 20")

[No to the question. The monochrome conversion increases the effective resolution of the sensor; my seat-o'-the-pants estimate is that it makes the 24-MP sensor look like a 36-MP one. And calculated resolutions aren't really indicative of the visual effects in prints. People have a much harder time seeing differences in resolution than you might think. It's Bob's call as to how much enlargement a given file can stand, and I follow his suggestions. He's the expert. --Mike]

[Dave]

$270.40 for a box??

I found what looks to be the same box for $85.95 at this website: https://www.thevenussshop.com/product/archival-methods-solander-museum-case-17-5-x-22-5-x-2-5-black-with-white-lining/

And it's in stock.

I have my doubts that, according to the video, "artisans" construct the boxes. You would have to construct the boxes with care, but I doubt you'd have to be an artist to do so.

Well, at least it was "free money".

Call me a "Debbie Downer" if you wish. Do you really need "thick, fine-quality low-resin basswood" to make a sturdy, long-lasting box?

Well, what's done is done. I hope the box offers a century of service.

[Bryan Hansel]

If you do a reader's print sale and start with the Baker's Dozens, I'd be open to selling my infrared black and white photo that made it into one of the dozens.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Yeah, I've worried about spoiling prints when signing. I've seen so many autographs in books (at autographings, when friends get 1000 (or 5000) copies to sign for a signed edition) that are illegible or somewhat variant that I told myself I didn't really care. And I didn't actually muff any to the point I considered them spoiled.

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Good idea (probably). I love Hugh’s comment…never heard it before!

These cases have become -crazy- expensive! Just a decade ago I think they were nearly half that price. Now picture large cold vaults filled with steel shelf towers, filled with these cases. Hundreds of them. That’s what most major art museums’ storage vaults for photography look like! These cases are quite heavy and extremely durable.