Red Row Studio - Photography blog and gallery

June 5, 2009 9:08 AM

Red Row Studio - Photography blog and gallery
A project I've been meaning to finish for ages - a home for my photography on the net. Thanks to some fellow mefies for advice. This didn't end up quite how I thought it was going to, but I'm pretty pleased with it. Any comments/suggestions welcome.
posted by primer_dimer (7 comments total)

Nice site and great images. I went through the same process and finally just threw a dart and hit Smugmug. I paid for the "professional" account and they will sell images there for me--I'm not sure how that works what with no sales yet. I know I missed having one of my photos in in Rick Persstein's Nixonland by not getting his request on Flickr until after the book had been out for a month. Anyway, I like your site and enjoyed reading about your quest to get in online. You should be proud of the result.
posted by BillyElmore at 7:13 AM on June 6, 2009

Thanks. I used to have a smugmug account, and their galleries really are great. I just wanted blog+galleries all under one site. I suppose online photo albums is a classic example of the phenomenon where everybody wants a simple one, but we all consider different features to be "simple" :)
posted by primer_dimer at 8:59 AM on June 6, 2009

I like your Dundee and Seafront at night shots—the tonal range, especially in Dundee, is sweet. I’ll bet those images print nicely. Speaking of printing, I have an old Canon i9100 large format printer, but I’ve had lots of trouble with it. I’m looking for another way to print. I still have a darkroom but haven’t printed in years. Once on the Web and digital, I became jpeg lazy. I like your method of shooting fixed lens to film and scanning. I think that might be a way to check out of the mega-pixel camera race. I’ve found Web posting of images enormously satisfying, but the site-search process has been quite a quest. I more or less unintentionally paid a year’s use on Mobile Me over at Apple when I went iPhone and Mac Book. Do you know anything about that? It’s my cloudy understanding that I can do some great photo work, posting and such there, but I haven’t used it yet. The iWeb application that came with my Mac is the easiest Web-building software I’ve ever seen. It’s even easier than ZYWorld where I post a site of photos and feature articles about old desert rats and gold miners. Zy has a free version and all you do is plug copy, photos, and art into existing templates. I like iWeb better as it’s the closest to actual cut and paste on a blank page I’ve seen. I talked to the Apple genius folk when I bought Mobil Me and the guy was amazingly helpful. I did discover they have some issues with operating a commercial site where one sells photos at Mobil Me. That’s another reason I put my Navy Tour project up on Smugmug. By the way, isn’t Metafilter a rich rewarding way to suck up time and life force. I guess we’re sort of blogging here, hope the photo chitchat is okay with the Metafilter Overlords.
posted by BillyElmore at 8:37 AM on June 7, 2009

BillyElmore, I hope so too :). Those night shots are from a camera I don't have any more (Ricoh GRD), and sadly miss; for all its flaws it had an amazing lens. I don't actually shoot film - I just use prime lenses on a DSLR - but hopefully I have checked out of the megapixel race. I'm afraid I don't know anything about mobileMe, but it looks cool from the website - a short camera-to-web workflow would certainly help us to keep up to date with posting our photos!
posted by primer_dimer at 2:56 AM on June 8, 2009

I don't know how I got the idea you were shooting film--seems I read something about grain at your site. Maybe Mobil Me will help me get current stuff posted--hell, I'm way behind. My backlog seems to come from my bad habit of passing great spans of time before I work with negatives. For example, I taught photography in Brazil for five years and spent a sixth year there just shooting on the streets of Rio. I fed my acquired Brazilian family (wife and two adopted children) by teaching private English lessons. This gave me time for several rolls of film a day. The tap water in Rio covered my bath room developed negs with black specks and I dread working of them in Photoshop. I've been back from Brazil since 1995 and still haven't printed much. I teach young criminals so I'm currently doing lots of street photography in Long Beach, CA among the gangs. I'm shooting all digital though and that's what I want to post on Mobil Me. I have this massive image collection I need to get to work on but I'm still playing with my Navy Tour images from 40 years back. But this seems mostly because the old stuff now has some historical value, and those are the images people ask for lately. By the way, I haven't visited Metafilter for a couple of years. I came here quite by accident in or around 2006 when an old story from my desert rat story collection generated some interest here. Someone posted my site and I got zillions of hits. A woman I had written about and photographed seems to have turned out to be a Carlos Casteneda Witch named Blue Scout. Her bones were found in Death Valley. Quitting this site was like kicking Red Man chewing tobacco--a must, but very hard to do. Then I did this Navy project and I wanted to see what the Metafilterites had to say about it all. Not much it seems, but it's great chatting with you. Later, Bill Gann
posted by BillyElmore at 6:46 PM on June 8, 2009

I think I mention grain when talking about black-only pigment ink printing. Your Navy Tour images are amazing - so much history - I have bookmarked them to enjoy later on a decent monitor.
posted by primer_dimer at 3:43 AM on June 9, 2009

Pigmented ink & acid-free paper--I think that's the way I'm going to print my Brazil project which I I'm about ready to start. I have maybe 100 prints done on silver with an enlarger, but scanning negatives into Photoshop and then printing to the desktop is just too sweet to smell chemicals in the dark.
posted by BillyElmore at 12:50 PM on June 9, 2009