Adam Monk Photo Tours & Images Gallery

Today i printed a 2.5m print of one of the Hasselblad XPan images that featured in a previous post, A Garota de Ipanema-The Girl From Ipanema.  It was quite a stressful event, as 2.5m of image allows a lot of room for things to go wrong.  Nothing went wrong, it looks awesome.

The Epson 9900, a formidable beast

I have an Epson 9900 printer, a formidable beast indeed, it can print 110cm, or 44 inches wide and this 2.5m print is the biggest image i’ve ever printed in one go.  The 4m canvas previously mentioned was printed by Paul Parin, from Studio Red Dust on a bigger printer, an Epson 11880, which is 152cm, or 60 inches wide.  There will be a blog post about that 4m image once it is installed in its proper place.

As you look through these photos (click to enlarge) you can see the progress of the print.  Its difficult to imagine scale from a small photo, but just remember that the canvas this image is being printed on is 1.1m wide…

Half way there

I’ve printed many 2.2m images before, there are usually 2 or 3 hanging in the gallery at any one time, and 2.5m is only 30cm bigger after all… so whats the big deal?  Well, the software driver of the Epson 9900, as with all past models, is supposed to be limited to a total print length of 2.28m, unless you are using a RIP (Raster Image Processing), which is an expensive bit of additional software.  If you try printing an image longer than this through Photoshop, which uses the Epson printer driver software to run the printer, you get some bizarre and annoying results, including wasting a lot of canvas.

I dont have a RIP, at a starting cost of $2000 for a reasonable one that would do the job i never saw the need for it when the vast majority of my printing is well below the 2.28m limit.  So how did i print this image?

Three quarters of the way there…

Well, i rang Paul from Studio Red Dust, who also doesn’t use a RIP, and he told me a little trick he’s discovered for getting around the limit. Save the image as a high resolution printing pdf from Photoshop, then print it out of Adobe Acrobat…  It works perfectly.  It shouldn’t, Acrobat should still be using the Epson driver software to run the printer, but it works anyway.  Go figure…

Ah, Safe and sound.

Another image from Brasil shot on the Hasselblad XPan (which i didn’t sell on the weekend), This is Santos Beach, the same beach as this previous post of the soccer players.  I lived in Santos for about 3 months back in 2003, as you can see from the buildings on the waterfront, its quite a big city, certainly by Australian standards.  Big and densely populated, with a big wide flat beach that is always packed with people running, playing football (soccer), swimming surfing reading or walking.  Brasilians love their beaches.

This shot was taken just after sunset after a long hot day of tropical humidity.  Up the other end of the beach is a popular surf break and these guys had probably spent most of the afternoon catching a few waves before walking back along the shore to home.  The sky shows the typical colours of the classic tropical sunset with lots of moisture in the air really bring out the colours.

The city of Santos is built on an island in the middle of the river mouth of the busiest harbour in the southern Hemisphere, one of the 2 or 3 busiest harbours in the world, Santos is an island that is actually a sandbar… it’s made of sand.  What you can’t see in this image is that most of the high rise buildings along the waterfront are leaning at crazy and precarious angles.  They weren’t  built that way, they have sagged over time, like the famous tower of Pizza, as the foundations sank into the soft shifting sand they were built on.

Most all of them have been stabilised now, but fixed on the crazy angles they were leaning at, as it’s very difficult to straighten a high rise building.  So if you go up into some of the apartments, especially the upper ones, you can spend your day walking up and down hills.  A pen dropped onto the floor will roll all the way across the room, and falling out of bed becomes an everyday occurrence.  I think with time it would do some strange things to your sense of balance and perspective or perhaps your neck… as every time you gaze out the window the horizon is a diagonal line across your outlook.

I’m sure i have some images in the vast 5000 strong catalogue i shot in Brasil of those building from the waters edge where the angles are visible, i’ll have to make a concerted effort to find them, in the mean time enjoy the tropical sunset.

This shot was taken on the Hasselblad XPan with the 45mm f4 lens, i wish it had been shot on Fuji velvia, or even Provia 400, but it was taken on Fuji reporter pro, an ISO 800 neg film.  This film is great at what it was designed for, quick press work, but it’s not ideal for landscape, Negative colour film is not much fun to scan and requires a lot of dusting.  Still, it works, and i won a silver at the APPAs a couple of years back for this image.

A bit of  last minute notice here for the Camera Swapmeet on at the Leederville Town Hall tomorrow morning from 8.30am (Sunday 20th February).  Its a great social event and if you’ve never been to one its also a bit of a photographic cultural event too, with all sorts of gear being traded from digital to large format studio cameras, slide projectors and enlargers.  You can get a cup of tea and a home made cake Read the rest of this entry »

Literally the girl from Ipanema, which is of course the title of the famous song by Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes of Brasil.  It was the song that really created the whole musical genre of Bosa Nova, a mellow mix of Brasilian samba and jazz that embodied the  the feel and emotion of the Brasilian culture.

That song was written about this beach in Rio de Janeiro, or rather about a girl walking along this beach, rather like the girl in this image, which is why this image, that i shot in Brasil a few years back, shares the same name.  It could well have been a scene like this that inspired Tom Jobim to write that famous song as he sat on the bench overlooking Ipanema beach all those years ago.

This image was shot on fuji Velvia 50 with the Hasselblad XPan camera, and i’ve just recieved an order for a 2.5m print of it!  I can’t wait to see this one really big.  I did a 1.8m print of it a couple of years back and it looked great, i think 2.5m will look stunning.  See this image as a 2.5m wall print.

The 4m print i mentioned a couple of entries back is now stretched.  It was quite an exercise, that i of course photographed and will put up here in the next entry.