Musings on Photography

Just this past week, Apple released a new version of Aperture, which now comes complete with a plugin that gives dodging and burning control. Today, Adobe releases into beta the next version of Adobe Lightroom, complete with (wait for it…) local dodging and burning.

And I’m here to tell you that while dodging and burning were the ‘de facto’ standard local controls in a wet darkroom, they’re not the right choice in the digital world.

In the wet darkroom, dodging and burning were strangely convoluted with the characteristic curve of the gelatin-silver paper. In the wet darkroom, the familiar S shaped curve of the characteristic curve (aka the H&D curve, or the Hurter-Driffield curve) had profound implications when we burned (increased exposure locally) or dodged (reduced exposure locally). If you burned down a shadow, you were forcing the tones in that region up onto the shoulder (highest density) portion of the curve, and so contrast would be reduced as you burned, and the more you burned, the lower the contrast got. Likewise, as you dodged the shadows, the tones would move onto the straighter portion of the curve, and contrast would increase as the tones in question moved off the shoulder.

Same thing in the highlights, but the other direction. As you dodged, things moved down onto the toe of the paper, and contrast fell. As you burned, things moved off the low contrast toe and onto the higher contrast middle portion, and contrast increased.

Sometimes those contrast changes worked to your advantage. Sometimes they didn’t, and you were forced to resort to other forms of prestidigitation to get the result you wanted. Things got easier with variable contrast paper, because you could dodge an area back during the main exposure, and then burn it in afterwards with a different contrast. In a very limited sense, using multiple contrast settings on a single print in the wet darkroom (something I did often) was equivalent to using a curve layer with a mask in Photoshop.

Every other technique (e.g. flashing, bleaching, or pouring hot developer on the print, or variable development) you might use in the wet darkroom means that you’ve started to employ tools that are much harder to control than dodging and burning. As a result, the vast majority of prints were made using the techniques of dodging and burning, and nothing else.

But it’s a mistake to think that as we move into the digital world, what we want is dodging and burning. We don’t, because dodging and burning have weak expressive power, and there’s an easy to use tool that can express every possible dodge and burn, plus a whole lot more.

That tool is called ‘curves’, and if we’re to be reduced to just one tool to do localized editing, we should run (not walk) away from dodging and burning, and instead rush to embrace curves with masks.

Let me demonstrate. When we burn an area down, we increase the ‘exposure’ and move all the affected tones down the tonal scale. This can be expressed with the following curve:

Likewise, a dodge moves all the tones UP the tonal scale, like this:

Once we have a way to express the action of burning and dodging, all we need is a way to restrict the action of the curve to a local region - and we do that by editing the mask for the curve layer.

That’s not the imporant point, because if that was all there was to it, we be better off with the simpler interface presented by the burn/dodge concept. The important point is that we can express a lot of things with curves that we can’t easily express using burning and dodging. In particular, we can limit the effect of burning and dodging not just spatial (by using a mask) but also tonally (by putting bends in the curve).

So, for instance, if we want to lighten the shadows, but leave the highlights and mid-tones alone, we might use a curve like this:

and if you want the mid-tones to increase in contrast, the shadows to get darker and lose contrast, and the highlights to get lighter and lose contrast (aka trade highlight and shadow contrast for mid-tone contrast), all without shifting the white point or black point, you use a curve like this:

The bottom line, here, is that by having curves and some way to control where on the image the curve is applied (and where it isn’t) you have the expressive power of burning and dodging, and then a whole lot more besides. There isn’t single tool I could deploy in my wet B&W darkroom that I can’t express simply and easily with curves and masks. Not a single one. Bleaching, flashing, variable contrast gradients, I can say it all with curves. And there are lots and lots of things I can express with curves and masks that were essentially impossible in the wet darkroom.

If you only get one tool, I’d suggest choosing the one that can do it all. It’s a shame that the developers of image editing software don’t see it this way.

[side note: Hurter and Driffield, the fellows who first graphically expressed the exposure/density relationship of photosensitive materials are two of my photographic heroes. Let me just close with a quote from them]

The photographer who combines scientific method with artistic skill is in the best possible position to do the good work

-Ferdinand Hurter and Vero Charles Driffield

Apple have released a new version of Aperture. It has what they’re calling a plug-in architecture, which allows you to buy third party software and it just fits right into Aperture. One of my favorite tools, Noise Ninja, has announced it will be available as a Aperture plugin sometime in May. The developers of other successful imaging tools seem queued up to offer their tools as Aperture plugins as well.

To borrow a line from Theodor Geisel, “This may not seem very important, I know. But it is, so I’m bothering telling you so.”

There are a couple of reasons.

The first big reason is that it seems that a lot of photographers are moving to tools like Aperture (or Lightroom, the competing product from Adobe). It’s a sort of one stop shopping framework for everything from ingesting the images off your memory cards (or camera) to making prints.

The big problem with such products is that it’s awkward to use tools that are outside this integrated environment. That is, it’s awkward if your noise reduction tool (say, Noise Ninja, the really great product with the really silly name) must be run standalone, because you have to save a version of the image, run Noise Ninja on it, then import the result of Noise Ninja back into the integrated environment.

The same problems occur if you want to use some other raw converter instead of the one directly supported by your image processing workflow. That’s why so many people use Adobe Camera Raw - it’s not that it does such a great job as much as it’s there and it fits into the workflow so well. Click on the raw file in Bridge, and ACR runs, and the output appears directly in Photoshop.

“But wait!” I hear you saying, “Photoshop has plugins! This is nothing new!” And indeed, Photoshop does have plugins. In fact, that’s exactly how I use Noise Ninja - it’s a photoshop plugin that appears as a filter. But plugins in Photoshop aren’t really first class citizens. Plugins, for instance, can’t be the basis for layers, the way curves can. Every plugin must , if needed, duplicate the effect of having masks.

But the fact that Apple have developed a significant part of the image workflow as a plugin (they’ve got dodge/burn/contrast/saturation/sharpen/blur done this way) makes me suspect that plugins in Aperture are more first class in the workflow. Plugins in Aperture 2.0 can work on raw files. So your favorite raw converter can be an Aperture plugin. Plugins in Aperture can start from more than one file, so HDR tools can be plugins, and be first class. I saw a really cool tool that takes a bunch of frames, does sub-pixel alignment, and extracts a result that has higher resolution than any of the original frames does, and that tool could be a plugin.

Now, from a strict computability argument, there’s nothing that can’t be done the old way that can be done in the new way. Photoshop has plugins, scripting, and so on, and strictly speaking it’s probably possible to integrate these new tools into Photoshop. But developers don’t do it, and I’m guessing that’s because Adobe have made it hard to do. Apple, on the other hand, seem to view this as the strategic goal for Aperture - and that tells me that they’re going to make it pretty easy.

The big question, really, is whether the local editing workflow in Aperture will be as versatile and workable as the layers model embedded in Photoshop. If so, it makes Aperture a big contender in the imaging world. It’s entirely possible that a really good, structured model like layers could be built as a plugin, in fact. Hard to tell at this point, but it’s an interesting idea.

Another reason why this is important is that Apple have apparently lined up some of the big names to do plugin versions of their tools for Aperture. If you’re a developer and your product competes against Noise Ninja, the pressure is on to do an Aperture plugin so you can compete. This isn’t a big chink in the armor of Photoshop dominance, but it might be the thin edge of the wedge.

Back when Aperture and Lightroom were introduced, I was still a Windows person. Now I’m a Mac person, and so I’m looking forward to getting a look at Aperture 2.1 and seeing what the image editing workflow looks like, and whether these plugins are more first class citizens than plugins in Photoshop. If so, I may be giving Aperture a whirl.

When I was printing in the wet darkroom, it was pretty rare that the final print (aka the ‘fine’ print, as opposed to the ‘work’ print) was more or less straight. In the beginning, in fact, each print was a pretty amazing set of adjustments as I sought to get the print to look ‘right’.

Then I developed a way to get really fine control of contrast when printing on VC paper. And it turned out that this one simple change made a major difference in how much work was required for each print. I developed an efficient way to get the base exposure and contrast exactly right, and the amount of work dropped off substantially. I still made a lot of local adjustments to exposure and contrast, but the number of those adjustments really dropped off.

And when I switched to digital printing, it seems like I took a bit of a setback on that score. I look at the photoshop files for my earliest digital printing efforts, and there are a lot of steps in there. I’m amazed, actually, that there were so many. Part of the problem was that I was taking my wet darkroom technique and translating it directly into the digital world. Lots of burning and dodging with soft light layers.

And now, it seems, I’ve hit a stage where much of the work gets done in the earliest phase - setting the overall curve. Each image now gets a curve layer that covers the entire image as a very first step, and I generally spend two or three minutes getting that curve just right for the majority of the image. And again, I’ve noticed that by investing the time in this step up front, I cut the amount of time it takes (and the number of layers needed) to finish the print substantially.

In fact, the curve tool (and masks on the curve layers) are probably my primary way of adjusting images. I have lots of fairly tweaked images that have quite a few curve layers adjusting different areas of the image.

I don’t know if this is common or not. There are lots of ways, in the digital world, to get to the same endpoint. But this setting of the overall curve as the very first step seems to have been the big step forward in my digital printing.

Several people have suggested to me that, if I have a print size preference, why not just sell that one print size?

The answer touches on why I’m getting ready to cut my print prices.

Here’s the skinny. I’ve been saying for some time now that I think that prints are, in general, priced higher than the optimum price point. It’s not an idea that’s new to me - Brooks Jensen has been saying much the same thing for years now. I’m not dependent on profit from print sales (and it’s a damn good thing, too, because if I did I’d be starving), and so I sort of let the issue float around in the back of my mind. But because I’ve started showing my work in the rural valley where I live, and the old print prices were set so high that most of my neighbors would never even consider buying a print, I started pondering exactly what my goals were.

One of the things I’d like is to move away from my prints being viewed as ‘extremely valuable art objects which must be treated with great care and deference’. Back when I was making gelatin silver prints in a wet darkroom, I was just like everyone else - prints were handled with gloves on (literally) and carefully mounted and protected in special boxes. When making a replacement for a print that gets damaged means hours in the darkroom, that’s a sensible view. But when I switched to digital printing, all those attitudes went out the window, because making a replacement print amounted to pressing a few buttons and waiting a few minutes. That attitude really solidified when I sent a print as a gift, just because a ten year old girl liked the photo, and I found myself encouraging the mother to let the ten year old girl do whatever she liked with the print - tape it to the wall, put it up with thumbtacks. I wanted this ten year old girl to be free to enjoy the print without all the ‘oh, this is valuable and fragile’ nonsense being loaded onto it. And about that time I realized that I’d like the same thing for adults, too. I’m less and less convinced that the whole ‘this piece of paper has been invested with the essence of my spirituality and thus you should pay a lot of money for it and henceforth treat it as a holy object’ business is a good thing for art in general.

So the net result of that line of thought is that I’m rethinking print prices, and I’m asking ‘How low can I go?’ We know a lot about what happens when we market art as ‘expensive sacred objects’, but we don’t actually know very much about marketing art as ‘inexpensive objects that delight’. We know a lot about marketing prints in expensive galleries to people who will have them archivally framed with UV blocking glass and hung with spectrally balanced halogen gallery lighting, but we know little about what happens when we sell the same sort of stuff to someone who will go home and put it on the wall with blu-tack or tape it to the refrigerator door.

All that just describes the evolution of my own attitude toward the print as an object. There’s a parallel change in my views about controlling how my work is presented. I started out wanting to rigidly control the presentation of my photographs. I wanted them matted a certain way, I wanted them framed a certain way, and I tried to control those variables when prints left my hands. I wanted to influence how people viewed my work, not only the physical appearance but their frame of mind when they looked. But in the end I realized that you can’t control those things - not really. More importantly, perhaps you don’t want to exercise that much control. Make the photograph, make the print, send it out into the world, and let it go. Once you send it out into the world, it has to sink or swim on its own merits, and you have to let people form their own view of it as good or bad, and you have to let them make their own interpretation of it.

The net result of all this is that I’d like to set the prices of my prints really low (but not lose money) and see what happens. I’m interested in how peoples attitudes about the work change with the change in price, and in how the change in price changes their relationship to the physical object. I’m also increasingly wary of trying to dictate too much detail about how my work is presented. If people want large prints, great. If they want small prints, that’s great too.

At the same time, I do want some constraints. I don’t want to sell lousy looking prints, even if it means the price can be lower. And I don’t want to sell prints that are so small that I think the image no longer works at that size (same thing for prints that are so large the don’t work). I’m just trying to work out the balance between giving people what they want and feeling good about what I sell.

Well, I had pretty much decided that I wasn’t going to do small prints any more. And then I read Oren’s comments, and of course, as Oren’s comments always do, the comments set me thinking about the merits of small prints.

You can hold them in your lap and look at them. You can put them in smaller spots on walls. You can have a bunch of them in a smallish box - a nice little collection you can take out and look at when you please. I’m not a big fan of small prints myself but I can easily see the appeal - especially the appeal of that small boxed collection of prints you take out now and then. I’m also not unaware that most of these small print properties are shared with books, which are sort of permanently organized collections of small prints. Maybe my small print offerings will all be books. Hmm.

So I don’t know. Maybe I’m adding some smaller print size (smaller than 10″x15″)) back into the mix. How small? I don’t know. How many sizes? I don’t know. I’m still thinking.

In part, part of my resistance to small prints has been that when people inquire about ’smaller’ I find that what they’re really asking about is ‘cheaper’. But here’s my twist - I’m no longer going to price by the square foot. Instead, my prices are going to be flat across print size. That is, I’m going to net the same profit from each print, regardless of size. I’m trying to keep print costs down, and I’ve got solid figures on the cost of goods sold. As I’ve said before, I’m curious whether lower print prices will produce larger volumes, and so I’m going to try an experiment and see.

Anyway, the difference in COGS between a 10″x15″ print and a 20″x30″ print is just not that large - about $15. My prices will reflect exactly that difference. There are a few differences between selling a 10″x15″ print and a 20″x30″- one takes longer to print, one costs more to ship. But my goal remains to net the same profit from a sale, regardless of whether it’s a big print or a small print. And given that the price difference between a small print and a large print will be small, I’m wondering “if all prints are the same price, what size will people choose?” The largest, perhaps, because they feel like they’re getting a better deal. Or the size that fits best over their sofa, or the size that matches the refrigerator door with room for the tape holding it up.

It’s all still a confused jumble of thoughts, it seems. Still remaining is deciding what to do about the printing service I offer and what those prices should look like relative to the cost of prints of my own images.

But I do seem to be making some progress on some sort of coherent pricing scheme, with the prices set much much lower than the accepted standards.

Well, after pondering yesterday for a bit on print size, I concluded that before I proceed with turning over my practice and adjusting the web site and so on just to standardize print sizes, it might be a good idea for me to actually make prints in the various sizes, put’em up on the wall, and gaze at them. You never know what sort of reaction theory will have when confronted with reality.

So I cranked out four prints, sized 10″x15, 12″x18″, 14″x21″, and 20″x30″, and I cleared off the work wall in my work room, and I put up the prints side by side, using my highly sophisticated temporary hanging technique (aka blu-tack).

So now, with the prints on the wall, I’ve made a cup of tea, and I’ve stood in front of the prints and pondered for a few minutes several times. This is a most interesting experiment, and given that I’ve got quite a lot of experience with prints of differing sizes and large prints, et al, I have to say that my first reaction each time I step up and look at the array of prints is that print size makes a big difference.

That is, there’s a big subjective difference to standing in front of the 20×30 compared to even the 14×21. I expected that, though, because the relative spacing between those two prints is larger than for the other ‘adjacent’ sizes. But there’s also a big difference between the 12×18 and the 14×21 - much bigger than I expected. And there’s a big difference between the 10×15 and the 12×18, too, and I didn’t expect that at all, to be perfectly honest.

Curiouser and curiouser. Clearly I have some thinking to do. And, if nothing else, I’m going to have to order up a pile of 20×24 frames, matboard, foamcore, and glazing. I had sort of hoped, in a vaguely optimistic way, that this experiment would demonstrate that I could settle on just three sizes, not four. But I’m finding I like the 12×18 print size (which would frame out to 20×24). I like it a lot.

When I was printing in the wet darkroom, and I was really trying to simplify things so that I could focus on stuff that really mattered, I settled on a single print size - roughly 10″x12.5″ on 11″x14″ paper. The aspect ratio changed slightly if I did minor cropping, but it ended up that essentially 100% of the prints I made were on 11″x14″ paper. That made life easy, because the single standard for paper size meant that I also had a single standard for mat board size, frame size, storage box size, and I only needed to stock those sizes.

Then I started printing digitally, and it suddenly became trivially easy for me to print pretty much any size I wanted. I had a 44″ wide printer, so I could (and did) print really big prints. That was an interesting exercise, but it turns out that there are very few places in the world where you can hang really large prints, so I didn’t make a lot. The next printer I got was only 24″ wide, and it seems to be plenty.

So I now stock paper for the printer in rolls, in two widths: 17″ and 24″. I don’t find myself making small prints very often. The most common print size, far and away, is a 10″x15″ print on 14″x17″ paper. I make larger prints, too - 15″x22″ prints, and 20″x30″, and very occasionally 22″x33″. So those two roll widths really cover things. I can print virtually any size I want, but the reality is that if the print is going to be framed, you’re right back to either the inefficiency of framing in a non-standard size, or else you’re framing the print out to one of the standardized photo sizes: 11×14, 16×20, 20×24, 22×28, 32×40.

As I go through revising my website, I’m trying hard to really simplify and cut things back to the essentials. Rather than sell prints at a lot of different sizes, I think I’ll just sell them in a few, standardized sizes. If I never sell anything smaller than 10×15 (which frames out to 16×20), that limits me to stocking foamcore and matboard and frames and glazing in just those four standard sizes. I don’t like selling smaller prints, because I think the smaller prints always lack something.

That pretty much reduces things to selling prints in those four sizes: say, 10×15 (which frames out to 16×20), 12×18 (frames out to 20×24), 14×21 (frames out to 22×2 and 20×30 (frames out to 32×40). 12×18 is an interesting size to me, primarily because I haven’t really framed things out to 20×24 very often, so it’s a new size to me.

Anyway, as I was pondering on all this, it occurred to me that all of these print sizes except the largest (20×30) could be printed on a printer that has a 17″ wide carriage and handles roll paper. Printing 14×21 (or even 15×22 if you frame a little tighter) on a 17″ wide roll still leaves room for acceptably wide margins - at least one inch all the way ’round.

It’s a shame that in order to get the great features that come with the larger printers (like the auto-profiling of the z3100, use of cheaper big capacity ink cartridges, and so on) you have to get a carriage that’s wider than you probably need. I’m betting the vast majority of photographers have only occasional need for prints they can’t make on a 17″ printer.

There’s no great insight, here. I’m just amused that it took this long for me to come around to seeing that the whole ’standard size’ issue hasn’t gone away just because I have a printer than can make sheets of arbitrary length and will print images of arbitrary size. In the end the print probably gets put in one of a few standard size frames with standard size mat board, and the push to a few standard size prints is still there.

Two interesting things have arrived here at my house in the past few days:

• A 17″ x 50′ roll of Crane’s Museo Portfolio Rag. This is a heavyweight matte surface paper. The base is about the same color as Crane Museo Max, but the surface finish is much more like hot press watercolor. Not quite as smooth as Epson Ultrasmooth, but very close. It’s very slightly warmer than Ultrasmoooth - you can see the difference when they’re side by side but might have trouble seeing the difference if they were on opposite sides of the room. I’m hoping this will have all the properties (gamut, dmax, and feel) of Crane Museo Max but without the cold press watercolor finish which irks me slightly. I will be evaluating this paper over the next few weeks, assuming that my HP Z3100 woes get worked out (more on this in another post).
• A 2TB Western Digital MyBook Pro Edition II external disk. This is actually two 1TB disk drives in an external cabinet that provides FOUR interfaces: USB2.0, 1394a (aka Firewire 400), 1394b (aka Firewire 800), and eSata. The two disk drives can be configured in a variety of ways, including appearing as one big disk with 2TB capacity and in mirror mode as one redundant disk with 1TB capacity. My eventual plan is that this disk and a Mac Mini will replace my aging and ailing 1TB raid fileserver. It cost $640 from Newegg.com, and it represents what I think is a pretty inexpensive way to get redundant storage in a small cabinet. I’ve read reports that the unit is noisy, which might be a problem. More on this as I get a chance to play with it.

My recent experiences with slideshows on the Mac got me thinking. The ongoing discussion about the resolution/Pixel density of the Nikon D3, along with the news about the pixel density of the newly announced Apple iPod - that got me thinking even more.

The pixel density for displays, back in the good old days, was 72 pixels/inch. Oh, if you had a really high resolution display adaptor and a really good CRT display, you could get it higher, but 72ppi was pretty much the norm. Nowadays, LCD displays seem to have a pixel density more like 100 ppi. That’s the density on the MacBook Pro I’m typing this on, for instance.

The pixel density on the recently revamped iPod Nano is, according to Apple, the highest pixel density they’ve ever shipped in a product. It’s apparently a QVGA (320×240) 2″ display, which works out to about 200 pixels per inch. Call it double the resolution of the screen I’m looking at. And the display of the newly announced Nikon D3 is 640×480 (after we sort out all the nonsense stuff about the difference between dots and pixels) in a 3″ display, which works out to 240 ppi.

Naturally, as the pixel density increases, the maximum resolution you can display rises as well. One of the main arguments against viewing photos on a computer display has always been that the resolution of the computer display was hopelessly inadequate. At 72ppi, that’s pretty much true. You look at a 72ppi screen, and the phrase ‘high resolution’ doesn’t exactly spring to mind with the speed of summer lightning. At 100 ppi, things are looking better. At 200 ppi, things are looking good; at 240 ppi, they’re really looking good. At 300 or 360 ppi, we start to encounter arguments that adding resolution won’t help much because at normal viewing distances our unaided eye can no longer see the difference.

I will here wave my hands about and make funny faces and strange noises to distract you, and while you are thus distracted ignore the fact that similar claims of “so good it can’t get better” have been made before, and then disproven (think digital audio). The point is not that some fixed pixel density is sufficient for all needs. The point is that lately, the higher resolution is becoming available, the costs are falling, and the computing power needed to drive displays with much higher resolution is everywhere. There’s a world of difference between fabricating a 3″ diagonal 240 ppi display, and fabricating a 30″ 240 ppi display. But I expect that in the end, I’ll be able to drive to the Apple store and buy a replacement for my 30″ Cinema HD that instead of being 100ppi will be more like 300ppi. Not next week, but within my actuarial lifetime as a productive photographer.

Now, viewing a photograph on a display and viewing a print are not the same. The display emits light, the print reflects it. So the display is (ignoring second order effects) more or less independent of ambient lighting, and to look really good, a print needs to be generously lit. (Here’s the formula for adjusting the lighting to the optimum intensity for displaying prints: hang the print on the wall. Increase the brightness of the lights shining on the print until the print starts to smoke. Back the lights off until the print no longer smokes. Stop.)

And, although the furor over dMax of inks, papers, and printing technology seems to have died down of late, it’s still important. A good printing technology will give you a usable dMax of, say, somewhere between 1.8 logD and 2.4 logD. That corresponds to between 6 and 8 stops between dMax and dMin. But the display I’m looking at right now has a contrast ratio of 1000:1 - 10 stops between the darkest and lightest. 10 stops. Ten stops. I’m not going to claim that a wider range is the holy grail of photo display, but I’m pretty sure that 2 to four stop difference is part of why I look at stuff on my screen and think “Holy Cats, that looks good” and then look at the print and think “Um, not so much.”

Color gamut is another story. There are colors I can print but can’t display on my LCD monitors. There are colors I can display on the monitor but can’t print - interestingly, they seem to be mostly very light colors and very dark ones, and those are often the colors I struggle with when printing. All told I’d say I’d call the color gamut issue a win for the monitor, but the fact is that they are mostly *different* and not better or worse.

And so my question is this: when displays offer similar size and resolution to the prints we make on our printers, and the displays offer better options for color, better dynamic range, and so on, what properties of the print will remain that will mean that photographers continue to make prints? Will prints become a thing of the past, or will the object properties of print (the surface finish, the weight and hand of the paper, no need for a power source) mean that despite their limitations, prints are still what we think of as the natural end point of the photographic process?

My plans for this winter include a renewed focus on printing (especially color), both older images and newer work. I’d like to spend some of the dark dreary months playing with new papers. I have a lot of plans for keeping my spirits up during the Great Darkness that is winter in the PNW by filling huge trashcans with duffer prints.

My Epson 9600 is now two generations back from the leading edge, and dealing with new papers means sending test prints out for profiles, one week turnaround, etc. And I’ve been impressed by the print quality I’ve seen from the HP z3100.

So, just five minutes ago, I ordered a 24″ z3100. John at JVH Technical tells me I should have it real darn quick. I’ve been pondering this particular move for months now - basically, ever since I went over and helped my friend Rob set his up and saw the prints that came off it.

I’m looking forward to having it arrive.