I recently received the first proofs from the printers in Italy (we’ll be printing the book at EBS in Verona) and they’re looking great. It’s wonderful to get a glimpse of what the photographs are going to look like on the printed page, especially at this scale – the book’s going to be more of an ‘album’ than Motherland, sized at 36x29cm.

Checking reproduction quality of the book prints (left) with my colour match prints (right)-

The printing presses have now been booked for the end of June so deadlines are looming to finish the text and produce the CMYK scans and remaining match prints.

Accordingly, I spent the past week holed up in the darkroom of the colour printer, Rob Sara, tucked away in a Lakeland stone building near Burton-in-Kendal. Rob is a master printer, and I don’t say that lightly. He ran Rapid Eye’s printing service in Shoreditch for years, before making the jump and starting out on his own, opening the Studio One Darkroom in the beautiful surroundings of the southern Lake District. He’s produced prints for the likes of Hannah Starkey, Stephen Gill, Johnathon de Villiers and Cedric Buchet that have been exhibited in public and private collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Modern and Rencontre d`Arles

Having exclusively produced digital C-type prints for the past few years, I decided this time around, I wanted to get a set of traditional C-type hand prints made for the We English book production.

It was a wonderful experience working alongside Rob, who was able to get the most out of each negative-

And produce some luminous prints-

However, the week left me totally exhausted!

It’s now back to Brighton to do the CMYK conversions and finish the text. More of that later.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 3:00 pm and is filed under POST PRODUCTION. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.