“Moving to Puerto Rico & running a travel blog marked a new chapter in my career. Making and selling a few prints will be the icing on the cake”
Background: I worked in off-set printing doing pre-press lithography, typesetting and layout most of my life.
I received my journeyman lithographer’s certificate by my 22nd birthday. In the early ’80’s I ran my own pre-press trade shop producing ‘camera-ready’ ads, composited CMYK litho films with proofs and loose color seps from a Hell 299L drum scanner. We also did a little photo-typesetting too. We catered to local Ad agencies, PR firms and a few oil companies.
This was well before the arrival of desktop publishing
The prepress trade shop came to an end by 1985. Imagesetters were becoming popular and I just didn’t want to do that. There is no craft or skill to outputting digital files to film. Prepress was relegated to the status of a photo-finishing service. Not a bad thing, but not something I was interested in.
I posted up my first webpage in 1996. I even worked briefly as a webpage designer for Internet Alaska before they were absorbed by AT&T.
I like to think my background in the commercial arts gives me a stronger sense of composition than the average photographer. I’m always thinking ahead as to who might like this and why. What’s its appeal? I like it, but will someone else? Will it sell? Well, that often comes down to marketing. Plain and simple.
Experimenting in the darkroom is what attracted me to Lithography.
It was during those early years, fresh out of school,
I taught myself to ‘see’ by shooting strictly 35mm B&W.
I would buy Plus-X or Tri-X by the 100 ft. roll and load my own 35mm cartridges.
I would ‘soup’ the film, then study the negatives for exposure and composition without ever making any prints. Most of that 1st year went directly into the garbage. I knew I could do better.
Since I was working a regular job, I took out a small loan in 1973 and bought a brand new Nikon F2 Photomic with 24mm, 35mm and 85mm lenses. That 3 lens kit went everywhere I did. That was followed by a 6x7cm rollfilm camera several years later and eventually, a couple of 4×5’s.
I still have a strong interest in B&W photography.
Shooting with my Fuji GSW690 roll-film camera is an absolute pleasure.
Today, I shoot a mix of digital SLR, SL mirrorless and medium format film depending on the application. Even if I shoot film, I scan it and do all my ‘darkroom’ work in Photoshop or in Affinity Photo. I think that’s part of the reason my work stands out… I do my own post-processing. I always have.
Here is a link to- the Scurvy Dog’s Puerto Rican Blog
Robert