One of those flat light afternoons on the Potomac river yesterday. The morning was glorious, but I alas was not able to get outside until later.

I set forth, fearing the worst but strapping on the 5D anyway.

And there you are, white balance and some lens correction to the rescue, and some very nice images.

It's always fun to get out and shoot.

[Canon 5DMKII, ISO 400, 85mm f1.8, 1/3000th at f4]

Great article recently on the Literate Lens blog here: http://wp.me/p25Qfq-4D

One of Magnum's premier darkroom printers is backed up with traditional fibre paper printing orders from archives of the likes of Cartier-Bresson and Capa.

Boy does this take me back. I was printing black and white in my parent's basement in Junior High, and color a couple of years later. Of course, I ended up starting a commercial color lab years later in which we did every process except Kodachrome [K-14] because it was so cost prohibitive...for instance, Kodak required a certified Kodachrome engineer be on-site 24x7 before they'd even sell you the chemistry, or so the story went.

Anyway, we did C-22 and E-6 film processing from 16mm Minox up to 8x10 sheet film, and RA-4, CibaChrome, and B/W enlargements up to 30x40 inches.

All of the custom printing was done using fairly traditional enlargers and easels, except we did add in some 'smart' enlarger heads over the years. The Durst AC800 was an amazing machine, and sped up testing from an average of 3 tests before final, to often times just one test. Given around 15 mins through the paper processor this was a huge time saver. We seldom created repeatable 'recipes' for prints as the Magnum printer did, but this was because most of our print jobs were one-off for a customer, and we moved on to the next job. For my own prints of course I would make notes.

Add in dry mounting, matting, lamination, and One-Hour processing capabilities and we were a busy lab. Out front we had glass counters full of cameras, bags, tripods, frames, and all the traditional gear.

Fast-forward to today, and it's just amazing to me how one-of-a-kind our film images were. I heard of artists burning their negs after so many prints had been made, in order to make existing copies rare and more valuable. Heck, after a dozen moves in as many years I'd be hard-pressed to put my hands on more than 1% of the images I've made on film, and many of those in scratched or bent condition. However, with proper backup and archiving techniques images made today should be available in original condition for years to come.

It's a great time to be making images!