Monday 12 September 2011

Uzbekistan - Print Day at the Tashkent Workshop

The final day of the workshop concluded with a print day at the Epson distributor in Tashkent. For many of the participants, seeing their work in print is an impossible dream as the costs of an ink jet printer are simply out of reach. Taking the workshop to this step gave many of them a chance to really see their work in the physical form on fine art papers that most European photographers take for granted.

Happy faces at the end of Print Day - Tashkent, Uzbekistan 9.9.2011
We started at 14.00 and with the great translation help of Alex Ulko who also worked wonders with words on the first day of the event, I gave a brief introduction to color management, profiling and workflow necessary to get the best from the digital files. Unfortunately, and by strange limitations of time and resources we were unable to locate a suitable profile for the Somerset Velvet matte fine art paper we chose to print on - so some compromise was necessary to move forward.

For the Black and White images we needed to switch to the Advanced Black and White print dialogue settings from the Epson driver because of a color cast using the nearest selected profile to match the media. In any case the printing went pretty well, and thanks to Swiss cameraman Ruedi Schorno and my iPhone we got a great overview of the day before the iPhone ran out of power and space. The atmosphere was wonderful; prints coming off the Epson Stylus Pro 9900 thick and fast.

To finish, the group wanted me to print on some prepared aluminum I had with me, and having set up the template and run the registration test, the print went through without a hiccup!

Umida Akhmedova was also at the workshop with some of her students who had been participants during the 3 day event and Rene and Hasan turned up towards the end to see the results.

It was just great for me to have this opportunity during my stay in Uzbekistan. We did a lot of traveling around the country but traveling through the creative process with enthusiastic artist photographers has been the most rewarding of all.

Many thanks to Rene for his invitation, Jamol and Timur for organization, Alex Ulko for his seamless translation, Brackit for their facilities, anyone at The Matter who was involved, and from Epson - Kenneth Hilapieli here in Finland, Andreas Oehlert, Sergey Glebov, Evgeniy Vaylov, Elena Rudnevskaya, and others who names escape me. Without all of you this just would not have happened.

So here then is a rough cut video of the last day - just a few hours before I caught the flight home to Finland.


Wishing all the participants a great future with their work and hope to see you all again before too long!

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