What's New -- June 17, 2008

*** Here's my upcoming travel schedule:

*** If you'd like to make an appointment to see my work, either when I'm home or during my travels, please email me.

Dec 3, 2006

*** My most recent blog columns

Here are links to the most recent columns I've written for Mike Johnston's highly successful blog, The Online Photographer. Nominal publication dates are the 1st, 11th and 21st of each month. Check them out!

Column 6: The Seductive Tyranny Of Digital Printing
Column 7: Color Management- The Musical (Analogy)
Column 8: A Brief History of Electronic Photography
Column 9: Every Picture Tells a Story


*** My new book is almost here! Order it now!

An advance copy of DIGITAL RESTORATION from Start to Finish: How to Repair Old and Damaged Photographs showed up on my doorstep the day after Thanksgiving. Wow, it's real! The rest of the press run is coming on a slow boat from China (literally), but the order department says they'll arrive at the publisher's warehouse this week. I can't wait!

*** Website Redecorating Continues

As promised, I've put up new 'Featured Photographs' on the opening page. I'll update those regularly, showcasing five different works each month. This time, in honor of the holidays, it's a second installment from Christmas in California.

*** Here's my upcoming travel schedule:

If you'd like to make an appointment to see my work, please email me.

October 14, 2006

*** My most recent blog columns

Here are links to the first five columns I've written for Mike Johnston's highly successful blog, The Online Photographer. Nominal publication dates are the 1st, 11th and 21st of each month. Check them out!

Column 1: Tee Corinne, Superstar of Lesbian Erotica
Column 2: Pentax 67 100mm Macro Lens: Review
Column 3: All the World's a Stage
Column 4: Pentax 67 300mm EDIF Lens: Review
Column 5: Who's in Charge? You or the Camera?

*** Website Redecorating Continues

As promised, I've put up new 'Featured Photographs' on the opening page. I'll update those regularly, showcasing five different works each month. This time it's 'atmospherics.' Next month, the holiday season begins; be afraid.

*** Here's my upcoming travel schedule:

If you'd like to make an appointment to see my work when I'm in one of these locations, please email me in advance.

*** I'm a blogger (and I'm OK)

Mike Johnston has commissioned me to write three pieces a month for his highly successful blog, The Online Photographer. Nominal publication dates are the 1st, 11th and 21st of each month. Check it out! Here's a link to my first piece.

Future pieces will include commentaries on the state of photography, short reviews of products that didn't make it into the mags, and nifty little photo tricks. In short, my usual offerings, now conveniently packaged in bite-sized, bloggy nuggets. Yum!

*** I Am Represented (and my prices have gone up!)

I now have a representative in upstate New York.! Louis Perticone of Artisanworks, Rochester NY is handling my prints and books

In order to avoid undercutting Louis' prices (which would be a clear case of biting the hand that is trying to feed me) it is necessary for me to raise my general prices to match his.

But...

Those of you who in the past have bought prints or monographs directly from me (note: the PHOTO Techniques magazine sales do not qualify) will be able to continue to buy those items at special 'patron prices.' This is my way of saying thanks for your support.

Folks qualifying for patron prices for either the monographs or prints got emails from me within a week informing them of their status. If you think you qualify and didn't hear from me, please email me.

*** My email address has changed!
My new email address is ctein@pobox.com

*** Ctein makes book!
I have now produced five lovely hand-printed and hand-bound collections of my work:

(1)Scotland - 1995, a 27-plate tour of northern Scotland, rich green and teeming with lush life.

(2)The Collaborations, the complete series of 18 pieces created by me and Laurie Toby Edison.

(3) Christmas in California, with 24 color plates, an essay in photographs on holiday displays.

4) The Final Frontier, with 26 color plates, containing my collection of photographs made at Cape Canaveral and of the Apollo 17, Apollo Soyuz, and first Space Shuttle (Columbia) launches.

5) Chasing the Sun -- Baja, Mexico, with 28 color plates, chronicling my trip down the length of the Baja Mexico peninsula to photograph the 1991 solar eclipse.

These are 17.5" by 13.5" hand-printed and hand-bound, signed-and-numbered books. These sumptuous volumes are limited to numbered editions of 100 copies, and I am offering them at $895 plus shipping.

Each book plate is individually printed by me on 17" by 13" Epson Enhanced Matte paper with Epson pigmented inks. The image size on each page is up to 14" by 11" (depending upon the format of the photograph).

For a complete description of these most special works, accompanied by many detailed photographs of the actual books, click on the header. Because of the very limited numbers, prices and availability are subject to change with no notice, so order now before all copies are committed.

*** I've put 27 new works online

"Scotland - 1995" is a portfolio of my travels through the Highlands, and it is the first one I'm offering as individual dye transfer prints, as inkjet prints, and as a luxurious, hand-bound volume of the complete portfolio.

( Note that the link above takes you to the standard text-based Gallery Listing page. If you have a high-speed connection, you may prefer the Gallery Listings page with automatic-loading thumbnails. As usual, new postings appear at the tops of the lists and menus and are flagged with "**" so you can pick them out easily.)

*** Ctein offers digital photo restoration service

I am going into the digital photo restoration business! After years of doing this for myself and my friends just for the pleasure of it, I've decided to turn this into a business and offer my skills to the world at large. I've built a new web site for this business:

That's where you can find the particulars about my services and a number of examples of restorations I've already done for people. Check those out; a lot of people assume that their photograph is a hopeless loss, not realizing what a skilled digital restorer can do these days. I can handle color or B&W, positive or negative, film or print or glass plate, in almost any size and format.

Note: I am not offering to do physical restoration of photographs. Digital restoration recovers and restores a photograph to its proper glory while leaving the original object unaffected. It usually produces much greater improvements in image quality than conventional physical photo restoration.

Digital restoration does not involve physical alteration of the original photograph. All the restorative work takes place in the computer. There's much less risk of damage to the original than with conventional physical photo restoration.

If restoring the image, not the physical object, is what's important to you, then digital restoration is the safest and the best way to resurrect a photograph.

*** Ctein's Online Gallery has moved

Chuq von Rospach has been a wonderful host and a superb service provider for my Online Gallery since it opened seven years ago, but he would now like to focus on other things, and so I have moved the Gallery.

The new URL for Ctein's Online Gallery is: http://ctein.com

Chuq will provide a redirect indefinitely from my old URL to this new one, but for the sake of efficiency folks should change their Favorites list to reflect the new URL.

Thank you very much, Chuq, for all your years of support and help. You've been wonderful. And thanks to DD-B for providing me a new home on his server.

*** I've put up 38 new works!

That's a 50% increase in the number of pieces online. This is by far the largest addition I've made to the gallery (even more photographs than I put up initially). Accompanying this major addition are three new pages of thumbnails, for quick access to the new photographs.

Featured are my very newest pieces from Hawai'i-- hot, flowing lava from the current eruption at Kilauea! This is extraordinary stuff. In addition, I've posted many of my previous photographs of volcanoes and craters.

The majority of the new pieces comes from my photographs of the US space program. I've put up almost all the dye transfer prints I've done from the Apollo 17 (the last moon launch), Apollo-Soyuz and the first Space Shuttle missions.

Just to round things out, you'll also see photographs of Comet Hyakutake, Meteor Crater, and a most fine moonbow.

As usual, new postings appear at the tops of the lists and menus and are flagged with "**" so you can pick them out easily.

(Old News -- February, 2002)

*** I've put up 18 new works: the collaboration pieces created with Laurie Toby Edison

This project represents a significant departure for both Laurie and me from our usual art. It's the first time either of us has worked with another photographer. Further (unlike our solo photographs) these collaborations are produced in very limited numbers. Editions run from 11 to 24, at prices from $750 to $1600. These prices will rise substantially as we sell into an edition.

*** I've posted three more pages of thumbnails, covering the 30 most recent works I've put up.

They cover the lava photographs from Hawai'i (posted last year) and the collaboration works, so everything's now up-to-date.

***I've added a Gallery Listings page with automatic-loading thumbnails.

This page duplicates the information in the original Gallery Listings page, except that all the thumbnails load automatically. This speeds up browsing my site if you're in the habit of viewing lots of thumbnails before downloading the full-screen images. This is primarily for the benefit of folks with a high-speed connection: the new Gallery Listings page is almost a megabyte in size, with some 70-odd JPEGs to be loaded, so it'll be a slow download over a phone line.

I'm not eliminating the original text-only page, just providing an alternative for the speed demons out there.

*** POST EXPOSURE -- Advanced Techniques for Photographic Printers, 2nd Edition" is out

You can read a description of the second edition further down this page. That's also where you'll find the instructions for ordering a signed copy from me. If you've got a favorite local, independent bookstore, please order from them; it's important to support independent bookstores (Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com are not local, independent bookstores).

Continuing my "free samples" policy, I've put a full chapter from the first edition of POST EXPOSURE on-line along with supporting material, such as the Table of Contents and the Index.

Here are excerpts of what Arthur Kramer and Mike Johnston said about the first edition:

"This book will be the key reference text in just about every darkroom dedicated to quality work. It is truly a masterpiece..." -- Arthur Kramer, author of "Kramer's Korner" for Camera 35, "View from Kramer" for Modern Photography, and "Pro View" for Popular Photography

"More intelligent and scientifically literate by far than the standard fare, it is the best such synopsis [of information for printers] to be found in any current book directed at a lay audience." -- Mike Johnston, editor, PHOTO Techniques

(Read their complete reviews, plus those from the photography magazines.)

Here's what I said:

I've written this book to provide photographers with the underlying principles as well as practices needed to produce truly excellent photography prints. Addressing both black and white and color, POST EXPOSURE's purpose is to teach photographers the refinements of photographic printmaking, taking them from making merely competent prints to making excellent ones. This book will provide clear explanations of principles and theory, but the focus will be on practical techniques.

This book is built upon my 30 years of experience as a printer and 20 years writing over half a million words for photographic magazines. Some of what's in this book is pretty fundamental stuff, but it's stuff that most photographers and printers don't know and that you won't find in the average photography book.

Even novice printers will benefit a lot from this book. But, this is not a primary textbook. It assumes you have a basic working knowledge of photography and that you don't need me to tell you how to develop a roll of film or a sheet of print paper. I hope it will be indispensable to anyone having this minimal knowledge.

What's New in the Second Edition?

The second edition is not only revised and updated but expanded. Physically, there are 16 more pages; the book now runs 178 numbered pages, plus the front matter and color signature.

But...

Through careful redesign of the layout and consolidating some chapters, I managed to add almost 24 pages of new material including about 10,000 words, two dozen photographs and 10 diagrams.

I did this without removing anything from the first edition except references to some products that are no longer available (like the digi-thermo). Two short chapters were eliminated and their sections incorporated into other chapters, and I rearranged chapters for better logical flow, but nothing's missing from the content.

Half of the new material consists of my extensive and definitive tests on the differences in B&W and color print quality produced by condenser and diffusion enlargers. I've expanded the sections how to do split-filter printing and how to use Sistan. I've added to "Tricks of the Trade" with a section on dodging and burning masks, a section called "Gotchas" describing some common (and frequently overlooked) pitfalls, and I've provided more complete information on how to keep good records and how to make masks.

Those are the big changes. There are lots of minor ones-- a corrected explanation of color crossover, an update on the RC permanence problem, more complete explanations of metering and exposure errors, and literally hundreds of minor changes and error corrections (there's nothing worse for an author's ego than to go through a book line by line and see just how many mistakes got into print the first time).

Here's a partial list of the contents of the book:

1. How We See
2. How The Film Sees
3. Calibrating Films And Exposure Meters For Light And For Color
4. How Printing Materials See
5. Photographing For Reproduction In Color
6. Choosing The Tonal Characteristics Of The Film And The Print Material To Insure A Good Match
7. The Effects of Condenser And Diffusion Enlargers On Print Quality
8. The Best Enlarging Lenses In The World
9. Prints From Slides vs. Prints From Negatives
10. Changing Color Films' Contrast
11. Fogging To Reduce Contrast
12. Color Film Masking
13. Controlling Ilfochrome Contrast With Processing
14. Focusing Problems Specific To B&W Papers.
15. Making B & W Prints From Color Negs & Slides And B&W Prints In RA-4 Chemistry)
16. How To Process B&W Prints In Color Processors
17. Control Strips
18. Room Temperature RA-4 And R-3000
19. Removing Black Spots From B&W And Color Prints
20. Effect Of Drying Methods On Prints
21. Useful Tools For The Darkroom
22. Are RC Papers As Permanent As Fiber Papers?
23. Presentation Factors That Affect Print Permanence

This softcover book has 208 8.5" x 11" pages containing some 90,000 words of text and over 140 illustrations, 34 in color.

I've put a full chapter from the first edition of POST EXPOSURE on-line along with supporting material, such as the Table of Contents and the Index. You can read the sample in HTML on-line with your browser or download it as an Acrobat PDF file that preserves the fonts and layout of the actual book.

You can order POST-EXPOSURE directly from me and get a signed copy for $39.95 plus first class postage and handling costs. If you want to order six or more copies at a time, I'll give you a discounted price.

You'll save making a trip to your bookstore and get an autographed copy for your trouble! In turn I'll earn a lot more on each book sale. We call this a win-win situation.

Here's how to order:

Send a check or money order in U.S. funds made out to "Ctein" for:

• $39.95 + $6.00 shipping and handling for US and Canadian orders
• Overseas orders -- please inquire about S&H before sending any money (in most cases, it will be about $10.00, but it depends upon the destination). I will accept credit cards for overseas orders.

Ctein
42 Skyline Drive
Daly City CA 94015

Along with the check or money order include a sheet of paper with your name, address, phone number and email address, and the name you want the book made out to if it's different from the addressee.

(Old News -- April, 2001)

***There are twelve new photographs are in my Gallery!

I know; it's about time. These were worth the wait.

Eleven of the photographs are from a brand new series with the working title "Jewels of Kilauea." This new project has me very excited. I spent some time hiking around Kilauea last summer and was astonished to discover these brilliantly-colored lava formations. I had not been aware lava like this even existed. The photographs presented here are the beginnings of a major project that I hope will become a book. I'll be going back next summer for two weeks of serious photography that should yield the 50-70 additional images that will make this possible.

I haven't yet created a page of thumbnails for the twelve new photographs. To view them, go to the Gallery List; the new works are at the top of the listings. There you'll find the links to individual thumbnails and the full-screen images, as well as the usual complete descriptions, including print sizes and prices.

***I've set up a new price list

I've added a new page that gives just the titles of works (linked to the full-screen JPEG images) and their prices. This is in response to a frequent request that I provide an easy way for people to find prices without having to wade through all the information in the Gallery List. This is the good news.

The bad news is that my prices have gone up. It's been four years since my last price increase, so it's overdue.

(Old News -- August, 1999)

*** New, smaller JPEG files

I've re-optimized the larger JPEG files using better software, and I've been able to shrink them down considerably without sacrificing quality. The largest image file ("Vehicle Assembly Bay...") has shrunk from 500K to 300K. The dozen largest files are on average a third smaller than they used to be. Even the pages of thumbnails are 15% smaller. Enjoy!

*** New Images in the Gallery

I've mounted seven new works in the Gallery. These are the long-awaited images that have been listed-but-not-displayed since my Online Gallery opened. I've moved them to the head of the Gallery List and marked them with a "**" for easy identification. They also have their own thumbnail page. Check them out!

*** I've raised my prices

Effective immediately, my print prices are about 15% higher than they were previously. Sorry about that, but I hadn't raised them in four years, and it was time. The new prices for each work are in the Gallery List.

Yes, I've written a book on fine printing. Now you know what's been keeping me from mounting new images in the Gallery, as I promised. In the future, I'll be mounting new images regularly, I swear. Meanwhile, at the end of November, 1997 Focal Press issued ...

POST EXPOSURE -- Advanced Techniques for Photographic Printers, 2nd Edition by Ctein

*** I've greatly improved the speed and convenience of thumbnail browsing:

First, I've replaced the full-page thumbnail composite GIF's with JPEG's. They're only 40% of the size of GIF's so they'll download faster and be less prone to getting caught in Net traffic jams.

Second, I've added individual thumbnail GIF's to each work described in the Gallery List. Those thumbnails do not load automatically, so it won't take any longer to open that page. You grab a particular thumbnail by clicking on the "get thumbnail" text displayed right under the title of the work.

*** I've added a "What to do if you're having trouble" page:

If you encounter a problem downloading any of the images, look here for advice. You can get to the Help page from the Welcome, Gallery, and Gallery List pages. If the tips there don't solve your problem (they have in every case so far), you can email Chuq von Rospach (the sitemaster) from that page.

Sorry, but the final seven images aren't ready for display, yet. I know I promised 'em, but Kodak's been slow on shipping me software (it's a long story...).

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