More Birds

Kelly Apgar is a good friend and an outstanding painter. She dabbles in photography and sometimes mixes her photographs, painting, and other media into interesting collages. She's been very generous with both her advice and her art. One of her paintings inspired a photo I spent weeks last winter attempting to capture. The result was worth the effort. When I displayed it in a  local gallery I included a small plaque crediting Kelly with the inspiration for the photo.

Blackbilled Magpie, inspired by a Kelly Apgar painting

Kelly loved the photo, and a few weeks later gave me a small painting very similar to her 24" wide X 12" high original.

I've wanted to give her a print of my photo, but have simply not gotten around to making it. No time like the present. I prep'd the file in the usual way, and sized it 15 inches wide for an 11x17 inch sheet of Canson Infinity Platine  Fiber Rag. To attempt to center the image on the sheet, I set the left margin to 0.9", the top margin to 1.5". The nozzle check print I ran prior to printing the magpie showed missing nozzles in O and VM. I ran a cleaning on the O/G pair. Six minutes later the 7900's LCD reported cleaning had failed. I printed another nozzle check and found a single missing dot in the C channel. Once again, cleaning a pair seems to have unclogged some nozzles not related to that pair (VM), while a new clog appeared in another channel (C).

I printed the magpie anyway; I can find no problems with the print. It looks fine. The left margin is 1/16" narrower than the right, while the top and bottom margins are identical.

While I was running the machine I printed a couple of additional raven prints, including the best-seller shown in yesterday's posting. These were printed on Ilford's GGFS. On a whim, to print these I sent the printer a file I'd made some time ago, optimized for the Canon iPF 5000. This was upsampled to 600ppi rather than the 360 or 720 the Epson prefers. I expected I was wasting a sheet of paper, but the result is excellent (a little off-center on the sheet, of course). The driver worked whatever magic it does, resulting in a print with the usual good properties the Epson produces, and it's perfectly sharpened despite that having been done for a very different printer.

Today was also the day the remains of the iPF 5000 were hauled away. I felt a little sad about that. I learned a great deal while using that printer, and made many very nice prints. RIP, old friend.

  --Jay