All I can say is wow! Amazing synergy between Michael and Henry. Even has a plot: will Henry manage to enumerate all five of his enemies of permanence before the progress slider reaches the right edge or will he not?
Henry: you obviously need to record your memoirs. With all those anecdotes bursting out at every seam, it would seem a genuine loss to the photographic community if they were one day to be lost. Spend an hour going back over your life, starting with the Ansel period, jotting down a prompt for every anecdote that comes to mind. Then sit down with a digital voice recorder and simply tell each story to the mike. (If it doesn't flow, you'll need to co-opt someone to act as a silent audience.) I don't know that this would be salable - the audience is probably only a few thousand photography and printing freaks like myself - but based on the interview that audience would love every minute of it. And the beauty is that anyone who listens would learn lots about printing and permanence without being aware it was happening.
Todd wrote:
if I no longer used "archival" quality matboard and foamboard
My take is that using the more common PH neutralized matte boards, such as are used in local framing shops everywhere, would at least not take the print with them as they gradually go off to la-la land.
Another point that came to mind during the interview concerns OBAs breaking down over time. I think of the natural white of a non-OBA material (which is actually a cream colour) as being the colour an OBA paper would eventually "fade" to. It may be that the only consequence of that happening to a B&W print is that the image would go from neutral to warm. But for a colour image, the yellowing is effectively a colour cast that becomes more pronounced the lighter (more pastel) the colour. A blue sky with a slight yellow cast is a greenish sky. I can print the same image using my Epson 3800 on both Premium Luster and Ilford Gold Fibre Silk, using the supplied Premium Lustre profile. While the Ilford is clearly a warmer paper than PL, the colours in both images will look fine in the shadows and pretty much so in the mid-tones, but in the highlights the image on the Ilford will have a yellow cast.
