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After we already had a lot of fun going out on Friday night, the main ‘objective’ of the weekend was a friend’s birthday party. A fun thing there was that we decided to buy her a huge (ca 1 sqare metre) printed canvas as a present. Shops which have printers that can print on canvas start popping up everywhere and it’s quite a cool present to give. Particularly if you can pick your own image. Our idea was to suggest one of my very own favourite black and white photos as the poster’s image as the photo both looks great and is Berlin related.
But I wasn’t quite sure how well it would work when blown up to such an enormous size and how black and white would come out when printed on what presumably is a colour printer. Particularly when taking into account that they are probably using bright white canvas for this which could leave the image feeling a little ‘cold’ (particularly when compared to the photochemical on screen print I did myself which is on a warmly coloured canvas). So I dropped in at the shop doing the printing and looked at some of their images which included black and white prints and picked up a nice looking gift voucher while I was there. Luckily the black and white prints didn’t look too cold and quite possibly the colour printing makes things feels a little bit ‘richer’. And both the blurriness of the photo and the high quality negative scan I have will make this perfect for printing.
To show off the present we also had a 1:1 paper printout of the image, which went down rather well and I seems that our preliminary image choice went down rather well. Great. Now I’ll have one of my photos decorating a living room in Berlin. Aiming for Rio, New York, Tokyo next…
Also: record shopping – always so hard to resist when away from home, and always such a curse when having to carry LPs back there – and finding in the record store, almost next to one another records, mentioning Marmoset and a band called Spokane Little Hours, which in a strange way connected my analogue record store visit to my digital subscription list – another thing they had was a 1-LP version of the Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka album (what would the point of that be?); later on: visiting friends and their brand-new daughter, cake, a walk in the park.
And, finally, the party.