Crane's Museo Silver Rag

I asked David at Crane papers for an eta for the Museo Silver Rag paper which I guess I've been raving about. Here is the happy (for me) reply:

Hi Dave,

Thanks for all the kind words. We are having the official launch of this product at the PMA show Feb 26-Mar 1 in Orlando. The paper will start shipping immediately following the show...only 4 weeks to go!

Best regards,

David

Here are some more specs from the PDF that David sent me:

SPECIFICATIONS
Museo® Silver Rag™ is made to archival standards:
• gloss finish
• 100% cotton
• internally buffered
• no optical brighteners
• pH: 7.9-8.5
• weight: 300 gsm
• thickness: 0.015” (380 μm)
• designed for pigmented inkjet inks (bold is mine)
• brightness: 90
• robust, damage-free packaging for
large sheets

I'm trying to time my paper buying now so that there's not much of the old RC type papers left and when this paper comes to market. I suppose it seems strange to get that excited about a paper - but this ink / printer / paper combination is as close to air-dried fiber darkroom print as I've seen. I can't claim to have seen every possible ink / printer / paper combination - nor can anyone, so I think it's fair for me to make this extremely positive appraisal. In other words, I'm using photo black K3 inks with the 4800. Who knows what the results will be with dye-based inks, or other ink formulations.

View from Pont Neuf

Maybe this was Pont Neuf. I'm sure a Parisian could tell for sure.

Crowning

Paris - A while back.

Wall Street

Wall Street, 2000

day 28

Took today off. I joined a gym yesterday and today went on the old stationary bike for the first time in years. After that I returned home and took a nice long nap.

Soup du Jour Montage

Soup du Jour, Montage

Hotel du Rocher

Hotel du Rocher, France

I always think of this image as having the best resolution of any medium format negative I have. Taken with TMX 100 with the Rollei TLR 3.5, and with the camera sitting on a ledge, and with a cable release. You can easily read the name of the hotel on the far left; and the sign in the center talks about "camping rules" and you see the white van at the bottom of the far right crevice? Well in the negative you can make out climbers moving up in the darkness and stretching at the bottom. The resolution is so good that even though the climber may be composed of only a couple of grains - they are three-dimensional.

The shot was taken with a deep orange filter. The mountain was the color of clay - so the resulting negative gave it an extra white "pop" and darkened the sky as well.

Trees, Yosemite

I hate to ruin the illusion but this is not some morning mist, but smoke from a small fire at Yosemite. It was a weird week there. Flooding, and this campfire that got out of hand. I got very excited and setup the TLR on the tripod for this before someone yelled at me to get out of the way. Seems like wherever I go someone is always yelling at me to get out of the way. This was done with the dreaded Delta 400 (my arch enemy as far as film goes).

Day 27

Dave, "On Your Mark" arrived in perfect shape. I've been under the weather for 8 days and only today got glass for mounting.

The tone quality is marvelous. It's a beautiful print and will hang with my other three Beckermans.

Thank you.

K.R.


When it was time to reprint On Your Mark, I saw that I only had an old negative scan that wasn't as good as what I can do now, but that the negative was going to need serious Photoshop spotting and it was going to be a big job to clean this one up. Just a tremendous amount of dust had gotten onto it.

I was tempted to just go with the old scan but I remind myself that every piece that goes out has to be as good as I can get it. That doesn't mean that every piece is great, just that I gave it what I had at the time. So I spent I'd say about three hours touching up this negative and re-working the print.

This sort of thing happens alot as my scanning and photoshop skills improve. Same thing happened yesterday. There was an order for Benches. I had my old scan, but not a new one from the 4990. So I went back to the drawing board - re-scanned it, and then worked on it with the new paper.

I'm just giving myself a pat on the back for the effort.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

One more surprising tidbit about sales. I was curious to see what the ratio was of men to women in terms of print sales. Over the last six months, the ratio is about 3 to 1 in favor of women. I had a feeling that more sales were from women, but I had no idea it was a three to one ratio.

On the other hand the e-mails that come in about technical issues and whatever back-and-forth there is in the blog: 100% male. My theory being that men may not enjoy talking about their feelings, and processing emotions - but put some new widget in front of them and stand back. I admit to being guilty of same (and I've gotten a lot of new widgets lately).

shoes and wheels

Far from Yosemite, Mr. Beckerman was carrying on odd experiments with the new writing tablet. Eeek. The pen skids across the plastic like a bad skater. Eek, my hand has some shake to it. I guess I'll get to used to it. Ouch, hit that built-in button by accident. Let's try this on a picture. Oh, this is a good one, the guy pulling the bottles to the reclaim center.

Oh man, no one wants to see another homeless picture. Okay, let's see what's interesting -- the wheels; the shoe.

Actually it was Park Avenue. You know how it has that slightly uphill curve to it (East to West) around 79th street.
And then the clone stamp was brushed around until an appealing pattern showed itself.

Appealing, I say. No, it's appalling. I probably shouldn't even post this stuff - though what's the harm... You just see the twists and turns of a blindman driving an oldsmobile down a dirt road, at night -- with the headlights out and no brakes. But then that's the only way to get anywhere in this world.

Yosemite Valley

Yosemite Valley, 1993

(Rollei TLR, T-Max 100)

more silver rag

On Luminous Landscape there is a better description of the Silver Rag paper than I can write. Here it is: Silver Rag write-up. The only caveat is, who knows what it will give you with ink from other manufacturers. Most of what I've read and tested has been with K3 inks.