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Friday, 26 April 2002 |
There is a new Leica rangefinder camera out: the M7. My Leicas are both M4-Ps, and they badly need renovation and repairs in the case of one of them. I have not found anyone to do it yet. I tried the guy who was appointed by Leica to be their official repairer, but was not impressed by the quality of the service.
A brand new camera would be a better solution, really. There is a new hotshoe-mounted viewfinder for 21, 24 and 28mm lenses. I have been praying for one of these! The 28mm lens is the one I use most, followed by the 35mm. I borrowed a 21-35mm zoom lens once, and found the wider end of the lens, 21mm to 24mm, rather intriguing.
Without a separate viewfinder like this the visual field that corresponds in the built-in viewfinder to the 28mm lens is blocked by the lens barrel in lower right of frame. You can get around that to some extent by keeping both eyes open all the time. but that is a kludge. Better to have a special viewfinder like this.
The Leica M6 still looks pretty good too, compared to the M4-P, but the M7’s highspeed flash synchronization with Metz flash units is a real plus, as the 60th-second synch in the M4-P is useless for outdoor photography. The M7’s automatic exposure I could care less about.
12:08:32 PM 
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I was doing a Google search on the name Huger Foote while writing the previous post, and came across this printing company in the States. They have a list of photographers and digital artists who use their services, and that is some list!
AutumnColor is not the New York digital color printer Huggie told me about, but they look pretty good.
11:47:01 AM
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Although it has not yet appeared on the Epson website, the Stylus Photo 2200 has been written about by MacCentral and from the specs it looks exactly like the photo colour printer I have been waiting for all this time. Finally! Yay!
I have been needing a printer that will produce the highest quality prints so I can make beautiful images for exhibition, and that use archival pigment inks so I can sell them to collectors while knowing that they will last for a few decades at least without starting to fade.
I have made colour photographs as an art photographer for years, but have been hamstrung in that career by the complete lack of decent and affordable archival colour printing services in this part of the planet. I have had traditional colour prints made by many printers in Oz and they have all been pretty mediocre. And the processes used were always badly compromised by being non-archival.
When I lived in Europe I encountered a handful of printers—one each in England, Germany and America—who used their own variations on archival printing processes variously named PermaPrint, UltraStable and EverColor. I met a photographer named Huger Foote, whose mentor is William Eggleston, and he has his exhibition prints made by the printer in New York. But they are so expensive you can only afford them if you already have an established career as a fine art photographer.
Other fine art photographers use printers who are masters of the Dye Transfer, but the supplies are no longer made commercially and I have no idea where such a printer can be found. And even when Dye Transfer was a commercial product, certain of its dyes were known to be unstable.
Apparently Epson’s new UltraChrome Ink, that this printer uses, retains the advantages of high resistance to water and light, plus they have the largest color range for pigment inks. Longevity of the pigments is estimated at 80 to 100 years.
The Stylus Photo 2200 could be a great printer for making exhibition prints and lower priced images for sale, and when a collector wants to pay a premium for a far more permanent print, then I can have a print made by one of those three top-end printers, preferably the one in New York, because, as Huggie told me, he is the only one who really understands photographs made in intense sunlight! The other two are great if you usually make images under the grey northern skies of England and Germany.
10:29:58 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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