Adam Monk Photo Tours & Images Gallery

A Garota de Ipanema in its new home

Just a quick one to show the final result of the 2.5m canvas print of “A Garota de Ipanema” (the Girl from Ipanema) from previous posts.  I rented a truck and delivered this image and the 4m vertical (next post) to their final destinations on Saturday, and Rob, from Master Art Displays installed them both.

Click HERE>> To read the story of how this photograph was taken.

I got curious last night after writing the last post on the Brasilian town of Tiradentes, seemed like i should know why it was thus named, and it seemed like i would have asked at the time.  Sometimes my memory is a little unreliable about stuff like that, so its lucky we have Wikipedia!

So, the town of Tiradentes is named after Joaquim José da Silva Xavier,  also known as Tiradentes (tooth puller) due to his one time profession as an impromptu dentist.  He was also a leading member of the Inconfidência Mineira, a revolutionary group formed in 1788 dedicated to the political independence of Brasil from Portuguese colonial rule.

The group, including Tiradentes was betrayed by one of their own members, and he was captured and eventually hanged in 1792 for treason, after a trial lasting nearly 3 years.  Imagine 3 years in a Brasilian/Portuguese prison in the 18th Century, i think the eventual hanging would have been a relief.

The Human irony  is that a man can be considered a villain by society one day, and for the very same reasons a hero the next.  The place in Rio de Janeiro where Tiradentes was hanged (and quartered…) is named in his honour (Praça Tiradentes), there is a town in the inland state of Mina Gereis that bears his name, while his likeness is on the Brasilian 5 cent coin.  He has been considered a revolutionary hero of the people of Brasil since the late 19th Century.

Another irony is that the town of Tiradentes, along with most of the state of Minas Gereis (which translates literally to General Mines), was built entirely by slaves (see previous post), and while the Inconfidência Mineira was agitating to lift the colonial yoke of Portuguese oppression from Brasil, they were still happy for the disenfranchised African slaves to be worked to death pulling the gold they so desired out of the ground.  In fact the driving force for the proposed rebellion was to stop the gold  that was being dug by the African slaves from the Brasilian soil being sent as tribute to the King of Portugal.

So really what it all came down to was greed, thus the coin is flipped again, was Tiradentes hero or villain?.  Very little changes in the world it seems.

Both these images were taken on the Hasselblad XPan at dusk, and shot with Fuji Velvia 100.

Another one from Brasil shot on the Hasselblad XPan.  This time from a small town in Inland Brasil called Tiradentes, literally “pulling teeth”… can’t say i know why the town is called that, seems like an odd name for a beautiful place.  Perhaps it describes the difficulty in building it, its all built on hills of stone, and of course the whole town is made of stone, including the window lintels and the door frames.

The title of the image is Os Amigos Velhos, the old friends, and thats exactly as they appeared to me.  I had seen these two wander across to this spot and sit watching the sunset the night before, they hardly said a word to each other just sat in that comfortable silence that you only see with people who really know each other well.  It seemed like a regular ritual, so the next night i was there  photographing the street when they arrived.

This is not a posed shot, i’m afraid i didn’t ask permission, i just went about shooting the paving stones of the street as i had been doing when they arrived.  The thing i find profound about this image  is perhaps not immediately obvious.  We have two old men of very different heritage, one being European probably Portuguese and the other obviously African, living in a 15th Century Slave built town where one man’s ancestors would have been wielding the whip and the others would have been the back it was striking.  Now, 500 years later they are friends watching the sunset together.  I wonder if they ever talk about these very different yet entwined beginnings?

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.