The subtitle comes from a punny old joke, back when newspapers were a) widely read, and b) were printed only in black ink. I'm actually old enough to have earned pocket money delivering them: I remember when they first started printing photographs on the front page in colour, which I thought garish; often the registration was bad, which certainly didn't help. Now that's done deliberately, to evoke an old-timey look.

I thought I did a reasonable job of decorating these gifts—including the paper, which I jazzed up with a 3/4" flat brush dipped in India ink; some of the ribbons are triple layered, and I even made some black wax seals, decorated with pixie dust.

Giftwrap: printed tissue paper, hand-inked blank newsprint, velvet, wire-edged, curling, mylar, and paper ribbon, black yarn, silver pipecleaners, mylar bow, foam block, decorative apples, silk rose petals, wax seals, hot glue; made & photographed 5jun2021, ilce7c, tamron 70–180mm 1/4000s, f/2.8 ev-0.7, iso800 112mm

The photography, though...! Never mind the iso (how the dickens did it get set to 800?!?)^[1] the framing was terrible—really crooked. I had to swish some cloning & smudging in the backgrounds.

sony ilce7c 1/4000s, f/2.8, ev-1.3, iso 640, 170mm shutter priority...?

Basically, after spending two plus hours decorating, I ran out of gas for the photography. Whoops.

1/80s f/2.8 e.v.0, iso1600 70mm. Back in aperture priority, whew! I futzed around with a bit of masking to lighten up the lower right corner, alas, not enough.

Final attempt. This one fails to show my favourite giftwrap at all, let alone badly posed. C'est la vie!

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.