September 23, 2018

Weekend Photo Wonkery

Here’s my latest project:

We’ve lived in this house for 25 years, and I’ve wanted something on that wall for that entire time. Now I’ve got it! The idea behind the grid is that it makes it easy to move things around. I can remove one or two pictures and replace them with new ones in just a few minutes, so the hallway becomes a rotating gallery of photos and a good way to learn more about printing photos.

Aside from the obvious pleasure of showing off my own work, the main point of this is to learn more about printing. I haven’t printed a photo in more than 40 years, and even then I printed only in black and white. So I know very little about color printing, and it shows here: of these, I’d say I was one for six:

  • The Yosemite photo on the far right is fine. Hooray!
  • The sunset picture next to it contains a lot of artifacts that I didn’t notice on the screen. I need to be more careful about introducing artifacts in Photoshop and more observant about seeing them before I commit to a final version.
  • The two small photos at the top were an experiment: shooting at my highest ISO, can a small-sensor camera produce a decent 11×17 enlargement? The answer, roughly, is no, though neither one of them is really all that bad. But there’s no question that the noise is pretty visible if you get within a few feet.
  • The purple moonrise at the bottom left was a disaster. I had to do a lot of Photoshop work on it, and I did it badly. I’m not sure if I’ll take another crack at it. It’s a tough nut.
  • The yellow house is fine except for one thing: it’s the only print of the bunch where the color is way off. I’m doing the color correction myself and embedding the color space in the image, and that worked out fine for the others, which are very close to what they looked like on the monitor. However, the yellow house should be a much brighter yellow. I don’t know what happened here.

I’d like a good print of the yellow house, but I’m not quite sure how to get it. Since I’m not printing the photos myself, I’d need to provide some additional instructions to the commercial printer I’m using, and I don’t know what those would be. But I figure I can learn. There are bound to be some good books or tutorials on color workflow and how to ensure you get the color you want. I just need to find them and get more practice.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate