You have to kinda steel yourself for a task as repetitive as that; you have to make sure your mindset is right and you have to be prepared to stay at it.
It took me around five hours to complete the series and, although I wept silently as I replaced empty ink cartridges one – one after another after another, or so it seemed – I did enjoy seeing the images transposed from electronic imagery to hard-copy prints. It’s a cathartic process that reminds me of developing my prints back in the good old back ‘n white days of yore; the cyclopic blinking of my Dad’s ‘Gnome’ enlarger with its excellent ‘Star’ lens, the rattle of the negative tray, the smell of the chemicals and, of course, watching the images materialise from out of the white paper. It’s not so different now … well, OK, I guess it is.
Things are a lot quicker now though, are they not? Or are they? The fact is, those images I spent all of yesterday printing were first consigned to digital ones n’ zero’s in the camera’s CF card way back in October of last year; a wedding I had originally been commissioned to cover at around this time last year!
As well as being a lovely couple, the bride and groom are also a busy pair and they only finally produced their list of wants just last week. In fact, yesterday marked four months to the day since I did the shoot. I have also to say that the full sum of the invoice was paid just a few weeks after the shoot, and that I have had further orders for reprints.
Isn’t it ironic though, how for all the ease of workload and speed of turnover in the digital age, we humans can still draw things out :)
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