|~dayblog~| Antigua, Guatemala photo shoot on November 16th [www.chrisengholm.com]

In just two weeks I will be in Antigua, Guatemala once again shooting for the “Legends of Guatemala” project.  After three days there, my guide and assistant Manuel Barrios and I plan to leave for Huehuetanengo in the north to visit Todos Santos and Nebaj in the Mayan Highlands.  That’s the plan, anyway.  A few years back, Todos was the town in which a Japanese tourist was killed after aiming a camera at Mayan children, described on this blog in detail under “Photo Journeys.” 

I’m planning studio shoots inside the Hotel San Sebastian in Antigua (a great setting) and for that I’m preparing to schlepp down a 5-light battery-powered studio lighting system with stands and modifiers.  This is a Lumedyne system including two 200-watt units and a 400 watt unit, with five lights, two of them with the modeling light.  I’ll use the 14N digital camera as a polaroid test camera to set up the lighting, and them use the Pentax 67 system to make the final image.  The look I want is Saudek, so I’m shooting B/W film and intend on hand painting with Marshall inks.  Of course, we’ll shoot color neg too, but the hand painting is the ticket for this project. 

After the studio work, it will be off to the mountains around Nebaj.  For this the 67 will be “old reliable,” but my intention here will also be to grab panoramics using a Fuji 6×17 I purchased at a camera swap meet two weeks ago at Profoto in Irvine.  Cornell Schorle (a well-known panoramicist) used the same camera for much of his beautiful aerial work…and now I have it!  It has the fixed 105mm lens and takes a fabulous negative, four on a 120 roll.  The Noblex produces 6 shots, but alas, I dropped this camera on a cement floor and it has been delivered to Cornell to fix…which I have learned could take months.

Incidentally, our annual Guatemala photography workshop has been rescheduled for March, 2007.  Please see our website for more info.  www.chrisengholm.com.  Thanks.

|~dayblog~| Reschedule of “Eternal Esperanza” (Fire) Photo show

Due to the fires in SoCal, we have rescheduled the Eternal Esperanza photo exhibit for November 9-11th. The prints are done and mounted, captions written, and the invitations re-sent for the new date.

Think before you buy the Epson 3800 printer…

If you are a MAC user and want to print large custom-sized prints with the Epson 3800 printer, you may be disappointed. We sure are. It turns out that there is a bug between MAC OSX and the printer driver when you try to set your own custom print sizes, like we are trying to do to print panoramic images at 17×37″. The symptom is that the printer prints about 6″ of the ‘bottom’ of the image and nothing else. The problem is supposedly solvable by setting the International Measurement setting in the OS to match the printer driver, meaning have them both be “inches” rather than metric. This did not fix the problem on either our G5 or G4, however, and we’re livid. SO BE WARNED. (and if you have another fix we should try, please please please let us know) Thanks.

|~dayblog~| Shoot at Bullfights in Tijuana yesterday

Hopped over the border to shoot for “Border Color” and a bullfight in Tijuana. The light was gorgeous and the sky clearer than I’d seen there. The skyline of San Diego appeared close enough to reach out and touch. The Coronado Islands loomed offshore like cruise ships. I shot from the cramped second row using the Nikon F5 and an 80-400mm. Two of the matadors were familiar. I post a review below in case you’re interested. Grabbed a nice shot of a flamenco dancer at Senor Frogs for “Border Color” and some others inside the ring with the Hasselblad using my new (used) 40mm that I nabbed off Ebay last week for $598. Incredible lens.