Episode 41 – August 15, 2011

It’s a jam-packed Dog Days of Summer Show! There’s so much to talk about that hosts Mike Raso, Mat Marrash, and John Fedele kick off with the giveaways—our film giveaways and, later, our summer-long Polaroid Pack-Tastic giveaway.

Listener Letters! No, really, we go through a lot of them! Learn how to shop for cameras like an Olympus Trip 35 so you don’t get “effed.”  The discussion leads to everything from shutters to CLA’s and even film retrievers. Find out more as we revisit the sometimes strange topic of various light meters and metering techniques.  Reflected metering, incident metering, spot metering… it’s all there!

Get Out and Shoot—that’s Mat Marrash’s advice, at least. Mat discusses the potential problem of your photography getting stale and how giving yourself a project can get the creative juices flowing.  Not only that, but more photo outings you take, the more practice you’ll get.

Join us for the suspense of a live fire inspection – is FPP headquarters up to spec?  And can Mike and the gang invoke the spirit of Brian Wilson to persuade the watchful eye of the fire chief?

Mike discusses the Pentax K1000, which he got from the brother of none other than the Trackman.  In a segmen that features a hit song by none other than Wesley Willis, find out what went awry with the camera’s journey to FPP studios from sand-blasted shores of Hawai’i. Mike Raso says everyone needs an SLR camera!

In our darkroom segment, Mat Marrash discusses all the ins and outs of black and white silver gelatin papers.  Fiber versus resin-coated, graded versus variable contrast, and more—virtually everything you could ask for when learning about photographic papers.  Yes, kids, you can make photographic prints without a computer!

Finally, if silver gelatin papers ain’t your thing, we go over the Book of the Month,  Coming Into Focus: A Step-by-Step Guide to Alternative Photographic Printing Processes, edited by John Barnier.  For everything from platinum-palladium (cha-ching) to wet plate collodion and kallitypes, this book has all the wacky printing processes in one book.

And of course, despite our cramming so much into this little bundle of ninety minutes of pure audio goodness, we’ll be back in just two weeks!