While showing dinner guests around my place last week, I noticed that all the 8×12″ photos that I have up in the kitchen and bathroom had taken on a distinctly aqua/turquoise tint, meaning they had lost a fair amount of their original red component in the years since I printed them – around 2003, I think.
I took all of the originals with the first digital camera I owned, a Kodak DC280 with a measly 2 megapixel picture size, so they’re not ideal for enlarging, but they still look pretty good from a foot or two away. These days, I have some good quality coated 11×14″ presentation paper from Epson that I can trim down to the 8×12″ clip frame size, not to mention a better printer with hardier ink, so I reprinted them all yesterday and brought out the big paper slicer to make quick and accurate work of the trimming. I also added to the bathroom the panorama I stitched together with Hugin from a series of three photos I took of the Golden Gate Bridge with the DC280. You can click on the galleries below to see the original photos and the newly-printed copies in situ.
For those with enquiring minds, dinner was my fortified version of Comfort Diner meatloaf, Julia Child’s Purée de pommes de terre a l’ail from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1, and carrot coins slowly braised in butter, glazed with a touch of brown sugar, then garnished with their close cousin parsley. I hadn’t tried braising carrots in butter before, but I certainly will again. They retained good texture long after the same time simmering in water would have turned them to mush, and they were decadently rich.
For some reason, the thumbnail of the first shot here looks normal on my Galaxy Tab A but appears fuzzy in Firefox on my desktop, as if WordPress is using an inappropriate resize for the mosaic. In any case, the image looks okay if you click on it.
Freshly reprinted and back up on the walls:
