Printing the Image - Swedish Sunset
I’m a big fan of excuses. Not the kind of excuse that you try to use to get yourself out of responsibility for something stupid you’ve said or done, rather excuses to do things. Particularly things you should be doing and that you enjoy doing. Like printing an image that has been bugging you that you really need to print it (becuase you kept stopping to look at the image as part of updating the website, which you needed to do because the website really needed an update), or you’re going to be away for a couple of months and it’s not good to leave the printer unused for too, too long, so you really should run a good print through the machine to get some fresh ink in the heads while you’re away (though, I guess with that excuse I’d better find an image that has a lot of greens and maybe some yellow in it as well . . . . ). I guess you could say there are good excuses and bad excuses, and I like the kind of excuse that pushes you towards doing something rewarding (now if I could only find a convincing weight loss excuse . . . none have worked so far).
Anyway, I’ve done a lot of work going through images for the website updates (yes, that isn’t nearly done yet) and one image has kept reappearing that has caused me to pause every time it does. It’s one of the images from the series of sunset images I did during our overnight stays near Tivedens NP in Sweden. Initially, I was very captivated by the more abstract images from the series, ones that were almost entirely tonal values, particularly the ones where I slowed the shutter speed down so much that any real texture in the water was lost so that they became color fields. This one is not one of those, though. It’s more of a landscape image. So why has it held my attention for so long?
Often minimalism (an in vogue term now with photography, so one I hate to use (making images “pop” is even worse), but does best describe some of my images and the intention behind those images (going back to 2013, long before the term became popular)) is what I am looking for in an image. That’s perhaps why I dismissed this one previously. But the image was made with intention, obvious from the fact that I can recall raising the tripod as high as it would go to try and visually lower the grasses below the shoreline, and even below the bluish cloud shadow in the water. There was something magical about the texture of the waves in the water as they flowed through the grass reeds, the reflections and the fields of color that I hoped to capture. There’s a complexity in the simplicity of the image that keeps grabbing my eye and that was worth trying to photograph.
There was a reason I made the image, and the same reason compelled me to print it.
Printing the image was not easy. The subtle gradations in color tones, combined with the ICC profile for the paper I’d chosen, and the fact that paper does not have the dynamic range of an illuminated computer screen meant the image looked a bit dull (read: a lot) and lifeless. It took quite a bit of work to get a soft proof image on the computer that was similar (though not exact) in color and brilliance in the bright water areas as displayed on the monitor.
The print, on a fairly glossy pearl surface, stands on its own and is lovely to study, but it’s not quite what’s on the screen. It does have it’s own qualities - the reeds and their reflections come across as razor sharp in the print as on a monitor, and the striped waves within the reeds are more distinctly blue-rose-blue-rose in the print in a way that does not come out on the monitor. Just lovely. But I’m not sure what can be done, if anything, to bridge the differences that seem less in the print. And maybe that’s the lesson to take from this session. That images do have a life of their own. And that life is different based on how it is presented, and at each stage I have to decide what I want it to be within the limits of what it can be. And that may evolve over time, much as an early print of Ansel Adam’s Moonrise Hernandez is very different than a print he made from the same negative decades later. Though, of course, I’m no Ansel Adams. Food for thought.
Not bad for a print session just to get some ink flowing through the printer before we go on vacation.
Postscript - I took my own advice and ran an image with lots of greens and some yellows through the printer. The paper profile didn’t require significant adjustments and the print turned out great.
Really, you don’t want those print heads drying up while you’re away on vacation.