No School Like the Old School, Again?

Someday I'm going to learn to stop unlearning things.

Many a year back I used to use test strips, many test strips, during many hours in the darkroom. The test strip, for those of you who never hung out in the darkroom, which is the high school equivalent of the college bar. (Well, maybe not, but it's sounds like I was more fun when I say that.) The test strip is a thin strip of paper, that you made a print on, a small portion of the final print, to figure out your exposure and contrast and test to make sure things were coming out alright before dropping the dough on the full sheet.

I took my darkroom down about 5 years back. The "digital darkroom," which sounds downright sexy compared to "home office," took it's place. I haven't done a test strip in that time, till tonight. See a few weeks back I got a new toy, unless you're the IRS, in which case it's a tool to expand my clientèle and avenues of distribution for more imagery and increase my name recognition to generate sales of fine art prints and increase my speaking revenues. Also known as, a really cool toy. It's a 24inch wide printer. I got it for "Summer Love". Those images are going to look so sexy when I'm done and they're 23x31 inches. Oh, they're going to be hot. Like my hair.

Anyhow, I haven't calculated out the cost per square foot of print yet. I'm to scared too. Suffice it to say, "not cheap", will be part of the answer. (replacing all 12 ink cartridges will run roughly $700-$800. Add paper on top of that. Ouch time. And if you want to know why I'm too broke to go out for drinks. Yep. Why I'm working every day, this year. Yep.) So I'm back to doing test prints.

I find it hilarious how the longer I do this, the more I go back to what I did when I first learned how to do this.