I mentioned some time ago that I’d got myself an Epson R2400 stylus printer which uses the 8 point Ultrachrome cartridge system and will reportedly produce outstanding quality monochrome prints up to A3 in size on high quality acid free fibre paper. I could get great results on the standard Epson Matt Fibre paper, but it was a tad flimsy for my liking and I heard great reports about the Harman Matt Fibre which is 320gsm.

Some time later, having wasted nearly an entire box of this expensive paper getting rubbish to mediocre results slavishly following the detailed instructions that came with the paper and on Epson’s website, I decided to throw Harman’s instructions on set up and configuration away, and apply a little intuitiveness, and lo’ and behold I’ve managed to make 2 outstanding black and white prints on my last 2 sheets of paper! I’ll definitely be getting some more of this paper for prints as I’m really quite impressed by the result, though it ain’t cheap!

Back to the printer, the downside is it’s ink usage. I’ve made maybe 50 prints and I’m nearly out of ink. Also when you change the different blacks in order to print on gloss or matt paper, the printer seems to go through a particularly lengthy routine which seems to waste undue quantities of ink. A full set of cartridges retails with Epson for about £100! I think I’ll be investigating one of those bottle feed systems….

Well hello there blogosphere. It’s been a while! I’m just back from a 2 week family vacation to Mallorca. As roaming data charges are so prohibitively expensive in Europe, and I wanted to spend some quality time with my kids, there was no blogging to be done.

I also currently have VERY restricted internet access at the site I’m currently working at and I’m out of the house for 12 hours a day, spending 2 hours a day in the car, so I need to find a alternate method of blogging. Those 2 hours a day spend tearing up and down the motorway are the valuable hours that I would have spent blogging and twittering. I’ve bought myself a Freedom bluetooth keyboard to use with my HTC Touch Cruise, and I had planned on using Darren Johnstone’s Travelling Blogger. However after lots of configuration, tweaking and head scratching it looks like the DasBlog system that I use needed a third party component (costing $400!) to work, so I canned that idea off. I’ve now managed to get MailToBlog working with DasBlog and can send emails to my blog straight from my phone, and it’ll parse them and whack them straight into the blog!

So I can now sit outside, have a fag and blog away… I’m happy and back on it!

And instead of tearing up the motorway at 100mph every day, I can slow down a bit and use an old dictaphone to compose posts whilst I’m driving and type them up at a later date.

So back to the holidays… As I was saying, I’ve just spent 2 weeks staying in a villa just outside the old town of Pollenca in Mallorca. The town consists of 2-3 storey buildings carved up by a maze of extremely narrow streets. The problem I found shooting in this environment is that making photographs during the traditional morning “golden hour” is pretty much a non-starter as its long after the sun has broken the horizon that it starts to filter down these narrow streets and any kind of shadows start to appear.

Towards the end of the holiday we visited the town of Soller which is very similar to Pollenca in its make up. The weather on the day we visited was fine, but unfortunately as the entire family was in tow, there weren’t many opportunities to shoot. So I made the decision to return early the next morning only for it to rain pretty much non-stop. As I’d travelled for an hour to get there, I decided to shoot anyway. I figured that most photographers who shoot this island probably only get to see it when the sun is shining and there were a few interesting options presented by the wet streets, brickwork, umbrellas etc.

I’ve yet to process the results, and as usual I still have a backlog of stuff to process, but rest assured the results will appear as and when.