As I write this my wife and I have just cancelled our annual vacation trip to Mexico due to the outbreak of Swine Flu (better safe than sorry). We have decide to re-route to Las Vegas which will give me the opportunity of taking a helicopter trip over the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon. I am greatly looking forward to that and I will hopefully publish some of the resulting images in my upcoming Blurb self-published book of photographs taken from airplane windows or, in this case, from a helicopter!
In March I traveled to England to complete work on the second half of my pair of books titled “Pathways of Childhood” (sub-titled “Manchester”). Like my trip the previous year the weather was fairly good – especially for photography with a mixture of cloudy skies, brilliant sunshine, wind and one day of torrential rain that allowed me to take a break from shooting. I have no definite date for the publication of “Manchester” but I am hoping I can get it done during 2009. From Manchester I traveled to the Lancashire coast and southern Cumbria and I now have some interesting negatives to print. When time allows I will upload some of the images under ‘New Work’ so check back from time to time.
I have been spending five days each month for the last few months printing in the traditional wet darkroom. I have printed many of the images from the “Pathways of Childhood – The White Peak” book and am considering offering images in a limited edition set of portfolios. Each portfolio would have eight images archivally printed to 7” by 7” size, then dry mounted and over-matted to 14” by 18” size, signed and presented in a black 16” by 20” portfolio box with an aluminum title plate on the front. I have not yet finalized the pricing or the edition number but I would guess that the edition number would be 20 and the price for the first five would likely start at only $1200 to give collectors a chance to own my work at a realistic price. Prices would rise incrementally as the edition sells out. Of course, images will also be sold individually. My current price for a 7” by 7” silver gelatin image in an open edition is $250. Let me know via e-mail if you are interested in the portfolio idea.
Newly printed images, other than those from the “Pathways” portfolio will be uploaded to my ‘New Work’ portfolio on a regular basis starting now.
I have also commenced a new portfolio of images titled “Sun and Moon”. This series of images will explore the similarities of the sun and full moon to each other when exposed and developed in certain ways. There will be element of the Zone System at work in the portfolio. There may be multiple ways to present the results and I am thinking of producing a small silver gelatin series (my trusty old 7” by 7” standard size) as well as a large-scale archival inkjet series (25” by 25” size) and even a color series. I have no idea how long the project will take – it’s dependent on the cycles of the sun and moon and weather conditions. Again I hope to be a lot closer to the final product by year-end.
As always, have fun with your photography and thanks for reading this.
